Hans Morgenthau: Realist and Moralist

Worldview ◽  
1970 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-12
Author(s):  
Roger L. Shinn
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Short Sentence ◽  
Political World ◽  
Hans Morgenthau ◽  
The Way

In that short sentence Hans Morgenthau describes one role of the intellectual who relates himself to the political world. It is clear, from the way he states it, that he admires this vocation. It is also clear, from his own career, that he has often exercised that vocation.Morgenthau's eminence is such that he needs no praise from me. As an analyst of international affairs he is a brilliant scholar, a shrewd observer of the actions behind the headlines, a puncturer of pomposities, and an irritant to sluggish minds. These qualities are sufficiently well known that I shall not elaborate them.

Something Gleaming

Theoria ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (165) ◽  
pp. 92-117
Author(s):  
Bronwyn Leebaw
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Political Role ◽  
Common Concern ◽  
The Way

What kinds of lessons can be learned from stories of those who resisted past abuses and injustices? How should such stories be recovered, and what do they have to teach us about present day struggles for justice and accountability? This paper investigates how Levi, Broz, and Arendt formulate the political role of storytelling as response to distinctive challenges associated with efforts to resist systematic forms of abuse and injustice. It focuses on how these thinkers reflected on such themes as witnesses, who were personally affected, to varying degrees, by atrocities under investigation. Despite their differences, these thinkers share a common concern with the way that organised atrocities are associated with systemic logics and grey zones that make people feel that it would be meaningless or futile to resist. To confront such challenges, Levi, Arendt and Broz all suggest, it is important to recover stories of resistance that are not usually heard or told in ways that defy the expectations of public audiences. Their distinctive storytelling strategies are not rooted in clashing theories of resistance, but rather reflect different perspectives on what is needed to make resistance meaningful in contexts where the failure of resistance is intolerable.

The Politics of Worldlessness

2020 ◽  
pp. 80-127
Author(s):  
Roland Végső
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
The Political ◽  
Simple Fact ◽  
Political World ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
Life Itself ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way ◽  
The Human Condition

The chapter examines Hannah Arendt’s critique of martin Heidegger and concentrates on the way Arendt tries to subvert the Heideggerian paradigm of worldlessness. While for Heidegger, the ontological paradigm of worldlessness was the lifeless stone, in Arendt’s book biological life itself emerges as the worldless condition of the political world of publicity. The theoretical challenge bequeathed to us by Arendt is to draw the consequences of the simple fact that life is worldless. The worldlessness of life, therefore, becomes a genuine condition of impossibility for politics: it makes politics possible, but at the same time it threatens the very existence of politics. The chapter traces the development of this argument in three of Arendt’s major works: The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and The Life of the Mind.

The (Mixed) Times of Revolution

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jaime Rodríguez Matos
Keyword(s):  
Political Change ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Jose Lezama Lima ◽  
Difficult Question ◽  
Revolutionary Politics ◽  
Political Foundations ◽  
The One ◽  
The Way

This chapter examines the role of Christianity in the work of José Lezama Lima as it relates to his engagement with Revolutionary politics. The chapter shows the multiple temporalities that the State wields, and contrasts this thinking on temporality with the Christian apocalyptic vision held by Lezama. The chapter is concerned with highlighting the manner in which Lezama unworks Christianity from within. Yet its aim is not to prove yet again that there is a Christian matrix at the heart of modern revolutionary politics. Rather, it shows the way in which the mixed temporalities of the Revolution, already a deconstruction of the idea of the One, still poses a challenge for contemporary radical thought: how to think through the idea that political change is possible precisely because no politics is absolutely grounded. That Lezama illuminates the difficult question of the lack of political foundations from within the Christian matrix indicates that the problem at hand cannot be reduced to an ever more elusive and radical purge of the theological from the political.

DICTION and the Study of American Politics

2014 ◽  
pp. 444-461 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher F. Karpowitz
Keyword(s):  
Content Analysis ◽  
Political Communication ◽  
Political Behavior ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Language ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Political World ◽  
Effective Analysis

A powerful tool for content analysis, DICTION allows scholars to illuminate the ideas, perspectives, and linguistic tendencies of a wide variety of political actors. At its best, a tool like DICTION allows scholars not just to describe the features of political language, but also to analyze the causes and the consequences those features in ways that advance our understanding political communication more broadly. Effective analysis involves helping academic audiences understand what the measures being used mean, how the results relate to broader theoretical constructs, and the extent to which findings reveal something important about the political world. This involves exploring both the causes and the consequences of linguistic choices, including by attending closely to how those texts are received by their intended audiences. In this chapter, the authors review ways in which DICTION has been used and might be used to better understand the role of political leadership, the meaning of democracy, and the effects of political language on the political behavior of ordinary citizens.

scholarly journals Realism and reflexivity: Morgenthau, academic freedom and dissent

2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 321-343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Seán Molloy
Keyword(s):  
Academic Freedom ◽  
Vietnam War ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
Government Power ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Effective Use ◽  
Hans Morgenthau

Primarily known as a pioneer of International Relations (IR) theory, Hans Morgenthau also wrote on a series of other political themes. Especially prominent in his later career is a concern with the right and duty of a theorist to exercise academic freedom as a critic of government power and, especially in this particular case, of US foreign policy. For Morgenthau the responsibility to hold governments to account by reference to the ‘higher laws’ that underpin and legitimize democracy in its truest form was a key function of the theorist in society. Dissensus and healthy debate characterize genuine democracy for Morgenthau who was perturbed by what he perceived to be a worrying concern with conformity and consensus among the political and academic elites of Vietnam War era America. This article investigates the theoretical and philosophical commitments that explain why Morgenthau felt compelled to oppose the government of his adopted state and the consequences of his having done so. For all the vicissitudes he endured, Morgenthau ultimately emerged vindicated from his clash with the political elite and his experience serves as an exemplary case of the effective use of academic freedom to oppose government policy by means of balanced, judicious critique. In the final section I argue that Morgenthau’s approach to theory, theorization and the role of the intellectual in society provides valuable insights into the nature of reflexivity in IR that are of relevance to contemporary debates in the discipline.

Plutarch’s Lives

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paolo Desideri
Keyword(s):  
Special Interest ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political World ◽  
History Of ◽  
The One ◽  
Of Greece ◽  
Rule Out

This chapter discusses first the general cosmological principles which lie behind Plutarch’s historiographical work, such as can be recovered through significant passages of his Delphic Dialogues. Second, it investigates the reasons why Plutarch wrote biographies, and more specifically parallel biographies, instead of outright histories: in this way, Plutarch aimed to emphasize, on the one hand, the dominant role of individual personalities in the political world of his own time, and, on the other hand, the mutual and exclusive relevance of Greece and Rome in the history of human culture. Third, the chapter seeks to connect the rise-and-fall pattern, typical of biography, with the general rise-and-fall pattern which Plutarch recognizes both in the Greek and in the Roman civilizations; through that connection one can rule out the idea that Plutarch had any providential view of history. Finally, some reflections are offered on Nietzsche’s special interest in Plutarch’s biographies.

Tragedy, genealogy and theories of International Relations

2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 177-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alister Wedderburn
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Political Subjectivity ◽  
Constituent Part ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Lecture Series ◽  
Political Associations ◽  
Hans Morgenthau ◽  
The Way

This article interrogates the role of tragedy within the work of International Relations theorists including Michael Dillon, Mervyn Frost, Richard Ned Lebow and Hans Morgenthau. It argues that a tragic sensibility is a constituent part of much thinking about politics and the international, and asks what the reasons for this preoccupation might be. Noting that a number of diverse theoretical appeals to tragedy in International Relations invoke analytically similar understandings of tragic-political subjectivity, the article problematises these by building on Michel Foucault’s intermittent concern with the genre in his Collège de France lecture series. It proposes that a genealogical consideration of tragedy enables an alertness to its political associations and implications that asks questions of the way in which it is commonly conceived within the discipline. The article concludes by suggesting that International Relations theorists seeking to invoke tragedy must think carefully about the ontological, epistemological, ethical and political claims associated with such a move.

scholarly journals “Governance” em Tempo de Pandemia: Um Enquadramento Filosófico

2020 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 141-155
Author(s):  
Orlando Coutinho ◽  
◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Health Issues ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
State Of Emergency ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Western Democracies ◽  
The Way

The way in which an unknown virus has moved from a local to a global case, taking on a pandemic outline, has caused significant changes in the lives of all human beings. Firstly, for that reason, it is unknown, then because behind the ignorance comes mistrust and fear. Nowadays, these ingredients are - in the political-social space - substance for the biggest factors of action and decision of the actors of the power. Have we been in a war context, as some have said? Was confinement, global and so prolonged, really necessary? Was decreeing a state of emergency essential? Were the exception measures proportional? And are they reversible? This article aims, in the way of the ideas of several authors that thinking about the political philosophical role of health contexts, of exception state, and of political control of the State, in face of public health issues and not only, understand the “state of the art” in the way of governing western democracies, in the firstly, but flying over other geographies and systems as the virus has assumed global contours. And, by means of the concrete measures, politically adopted, by the different political actors, what real impacts they had on the life and the institutions working, and on the psychology of the persons individually or socially considered.

scholarly journals Role of the Legion of Honour in the Political Life of France

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-161
Author(s):  
Alexey Chistyakov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
Fifth Republic ◽  
Political Processes ◽  
Political Beliefs ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Republic

In the XXI century, the French Republic remains one of the major economic and political partners of the Russian Federation. At the same time, one of the forces contributing to the internal stability of the Fifth Republic is the community of holders of state awards, united by official symbols around the idea of serving for the benefit of France, regardless of their own political beliefs. However, differences in the nature of award systems make it difficult for Russian statesmen to understand the true role of French order-bearers in political processes, the role of the Order itself in the life of France. The intuitive perception of this institution by Russian representatives is often limited or erroneous. Based on the analysis of information resources affiliated with the Order of the Legion of Honor, the author formulates a list of the main activities of its members. Understanding the nature of the participation of this organization in the political and social life of the Republic can have a significant impact on a certain «course correction» when interacting with foreign orderbearers. In addition, the presented conclusions can focus the attention of politicians in international affairs on institutions whose influence on domestic processes, although not obvious due to the difference in thesauri, is significant.

The East

2021 ◽  
pp. 382-398
Author(s):  
Brenda Deen Schildgen
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Political Geography ◽  
Political Islam ◽  
The Political ◽  
Geographical Knowledge ◽  
Political World ◽  
Historical Theory

This chapter addresses four aspects of Dante’s use of the concept of oriens or the East: First, scientific, his geographical knowledge and orientation, that is the orbis terrarum model that underlies the Commedia and the Monarchia and the role of the East in it; second, political geography whereby he renders the theory of a tripartite single-landmass Earth in service to his historical theory that puts Rome in the center of the political world; third, his use of Arabic learning and philosophy; fourth, the fictive ‘orient’ or East, which poses political Islam as a danger and threat (and includes North Africa and the Middle East); imagines India as a revered East; finally, presents the ‘East’ as the source for ‘wonders’ that reveal God’s creative grandeur and incommensurability. Dante, thus, represents many Easts, including a political East and a geographical East, a learned East, as well as an imaginary East.

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