Alison McQueen

Political Realism In Apocalyptic Times

From climate change to nuclear war to the rise of demagogic populists, our world is shaped by doomsday expectations. In this path-breaking book, Alison McQueen shows why three of historys greatest political realists feared apocalyptic politics. Niccolo Machiavelli in the midst of Italys vicious power struggles, Thomas Hobbes during Englands bloody civil war, and Hans Morgenthau at the dawn of the thermonuclear age all saw the temptation to prophesy the end of days. Each engaged in subtle and surprising strategies to oppose apocalypticism, from using its own rhetoric to neutralize its worst effects to insisting on a clear-eyed, tragic acceptance of the human condition. Scholarly yet accessible, this book is at once an ambitious contribution to the history of political thought and a work that speaks to our times.

Political realism and the realist ‘Tradition’

Abstract Appeals to a ‘tradition’ stretching back to Thucydides have been central to the recent emergence of realism in political theory. This article asks what work these appeals to tradition are doing and whether they are consistent with contemporary political realism’s contextualist commitments. I argue that they are not and that realists also have independent epistemic reasons to attend to contextualist worries. Ultimately, I make the case for an account of the realist tradition that is at once consistent with moderate contextualist commitments and that preserves the classificatory and analytical value of tradition-building.

Mirrors for Princes and Sultans: Advice on the Art of Governance in the Medieval Christian and Islamic Worlds

When did European modes of political thought diverge from those that existed in other world regions? We compare Muslim and Christian political advice texts from the medieval period using automated text analysis to identify four major and 60 granular themes common to Muslim and Christian polities, and examine how emphasis on these topics evolves over time. For Muslim texts, we identify an inflection point in political discourse between the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, a juncture that historians suggest is an ideational watershed brought about by the Turkic and Mongol invaders. For Christian texts, we identify a decline in the relevance of religious appeals from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Our findings also suggest that Machiavelli’s Prince was less a turn away from religious discourse on statecraft than the culmination of centuries-long developments in European advice literature.

Politics in Apocalyptic Times: Machiavelli’s Savonarolan Moment

This article accounts for the surprising final chapter of Niccolò Machiavelli’s Prince by situating it in the context of the apocalyptic fervor that gripped Italy at the turn of the sixteenth century. In Florence, the Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola was at the center of this enthusiastic movement. The final chapter of The Prince, the article suggests, is an apocalyptic exhortation that reiterates Savonarola’s message in secular terms. Machiavelli gravitates toward this apocalyptic solution because he has failed to render the apparent contingency of the political world intelligible by containing it with analytical categories, ordering it with general rules, or analogizing it with metaphors for fortune. Offering evidence of the failure of The Prince to deliver on these epistemological aspirations, the article argues that the work’s concluding chapter amounts to a final attempt to render the variability and contingency of the city’s political situation intelligible by fashioning it into an apocalyptic story with which Florentines would have been intimately familiar.

Political realism and moral corruption

Political realism is frequently criticised as a theoretical tradition that amounts to little more than a rationalisation of the status quo and an apology for power. This paper responds to this criticism by defending three connected claims. First, it acknowledges the moral seriousness of rationalisation, but argues that the problem is hardly particular to political realists. Second, it argues that classical International Relations realists like EH Carr and Hans Morgenthau have a profound awareness of the corrupting effects of rationalisation and see realism as an antidote to this problem. Third, it proposes that Carr and Morgenthau can help us to recognise the particular ways in which realist arguments may nonetheless rationalise existing power relations and affirm the status quo by default, if not by design.

Salutary Fear? Hans Morgenthau and the Politics of Existential Crisis

What role, if any, should fear play in the politics of existential crises like nuclear catastrophe and global climate change? This paper considers why the postwar thinker Hans Morgenthau set aside his principled worries about the politics of fear and began to cast the prospect of nuclear catastrophe in terrifying and apocalyptic terms. I argue that Morgenthau’s resort to existential fear appeals may have seemed like an appropriate strategy in the face of the representational and motivational difficulties of prospective catastrophes like nuclear annihilation and in response to the forms of organized denial and political inertia that these difficulties enable. His aim was to cultivate the salutary fear required to construct new forms of political order as a bulwark against nuclear catastrophe. I suggest that there are lessons from this engagement with Morgenthau for the contemporary question of the place of fear appeals in the climate change debate.

Tocqueville in Jacksonian Context: American Expansionism and Discourses of American Indian Nomadism in Democracy in America

Tocqueville’s discussion of American Indians in Democracy in America is often read as the paradigmatic expression of a conventional story about American political expansion. This narrative holds that westward expansion was easy, in part because American Indians did not offer much resistance. Historians of political thought and scholars of American Political Development tend to affirm this narrative when they read Tocqueville’s text as suggesting merely that Indians are “doomed” to an inevitable extinction. Our interpretation here proceeds along different lines, with a greater focus on the ways in which contending Jacksonian-era discourses of Indian nomadism are represented in Tocqueville’s text. We argue that Democracy reflects complex and often competing descriptions of inherent Indian nomadism, retreat, and removal, with varying attributions of causal responsibility for disappearing Indian populations. This reading of Tocqueville highlights contentions about Indian removal that are often ignored or neglected in current scholarship, and can therefore help us to better appreciate both his text and his time.

On Hans J. Morgenthau’s “The Twilight of International Morality”*

Political realists have long been the favored foes of those seeking to articulate and defend principles of international justice. Classic works often begin by refuting what they take to be a typically realist skepticism about the possibility of effective moral constraints and the potential for international moral progress. On this conventional reading, realists hold that the international system is an anarchic realm governed entirely by power and necessity. In “The Twilight of International Morality,” the canonical political realist and postwar International Relations scholar Hans Morgenthau offers a strong antidote to this too familiar picture. The article deserves to be read today as an example of a morally serious political realist attempting to think soberly and empirically about international moral progress. Morgenthau begins the article by challenging the presumption that the practice of international politics is not subject to effective moral constraint. He observes, for instance, that tactics like assassination and diplomatic poisoning are as effective and feasible now as they were in the early Renaissance and yet they are used far less. The reason for this, argues Morgenthau, is that with the development of the modern state during