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Ethics and Interests
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 February 2017
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References
1 Among the founding fathers of modern realism I number Frederick L. Schuman, International Politics: An Introduction to the Western State System (1933); Edward Hallett Carr, the Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919-1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (1958); Hansj. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: the Struggle for power and Peace (1948).
2 Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of International Politics 103-04 (1979); Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy: Understanding the International Economic Order 16 (2001) states that “all realists share a few fundamental ideas such as the anarchic nature of the international system and the primacy of the state in international affairs.”
3 Gilpin, id., at 17; see also Waltz, id., at 113 (offering a more extreme characterization of the differences between domestic and international life: “In international politics force serves, not only as the ultima ratio, but indeed as the first and constant one.”).
4 The term Realpolitik was coined by disillusioned German liberals after the failure of the revolutions of 1848. It was intended to represent the polar opposite to Kant’s idealist noumena and, more generally, a reaction to the universal rationalist criteria of the Enlightenment.
5 Brown, Chris, Ethics, Interests and Foreign Policy, in Ethics and Foreign Policy 15 (Smith, Karen & Light, Margot eds., 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar (pointing out that all sophisticated variants of realism see states as egoists in the last resort, but recognizing that enlightened self-interest is not necessarily incompatible with a concern for principle and the common welfare. It is only what he calls “pop realism” that conceives of interests in terms of narrow Machtpolitik. This is an issue to which I shall return.).
6 Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision: Ethics, Interests and Orders (forthcoming 2003).
7 The core of the book argues for a reformulation of the concept of security but it recognizes that ethics is equally problematic. Alasdair C. MacIntyre, After Virtue 6-12 (1984) (reminding us that there are numerous rival claims about the substance of ethics, and that the controversy is unresolvable because-these competing sets of premises are based on different normative and evaluative concepts). Concepts of ethics are shaped by culture and historical experience and must be considered in context. I shall address this question in more detail later.
8 During the fifth century, the individual achieved an identity in Athenian law, but it remained poorly defined.
9 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan 112 (C. B. Macpherson ed., 1968) at Part I, xvi, notes the derivation of persona, which he compares to an actor on stage. The person—the individual who has become part of the commonwealth and lost some of his will in the process—is such an actor. Nicholas Onuf, The Rise of the Liberal World: Conceptual Developments from Thomas Hobbes to Henry Wheaton, paper presented at the Center of International Studies, University of Southern California, Oct. 17,2001; see also Jean-Christoph Andrew, Worlds Apart: the Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 98-103 (1986) (for Hobbes on persons, the actors, and the stage).
10 Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, (W. D. Halls trans., 1984).
11 Romantics went a step further and rejected obedience to a general moral law in favor of being “true to oneself.” For Hegel, the “authentic” romantic was a “beautiful soul,” pure in its inwardness and uncorrupted by modernity’s divisiveness. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology, (BB) : C: (c); Robert E. Norton, The Beautiful Soul: Aesthetic Morality in the Eighteenth Century (1995).
12 Positivista treat the concept of self as unproblematic, constructivists treat it as a socially created identity, and postmodern and postcolonial scholars treat it as a collective delusion—for them, it can only be achieved by creating the denigrating identity of “otherness” for others. Nicholas Onuf, Parsing Personal Identity: Self, Other, Agent (unpublished paper) (on file with author), observes that despite the centrality of the self for modern scholarship, it remains an “unexamined primitive.” Many concepts of self rely on the idea of interpellation developed by Althusser, Louis, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Toward an Investigation), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays 127-88 (Brewster, Ben trans. 1971)Google Scholar. For commentary and subsequent development of the concept of the relational self, see Shotter, John, Social Accountability and the Social construction of ‘You’, in Texts of Identity 133-51 (Shotter, John & Gergen, Kenneth J. eds., 1989)Google Scholar Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: the Politics of the Performative (1997); Pauljohn Eakin, How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves (1999); Kenneth Gergen, An Invitation to Social Construction (1999).
13 Hobbes, supra note 9, at 86-87, I, xiii. Inhabitants of the state of nature have only limited faculties, consisting of strength, form, and prudence. While some men excel in one or the other faculty, in toto there is little difference among them. Because they are equal and interacting on a bare stage, they are without real identities, which depend on differentiation. Hobbes has created the idea of a state of nature in part to show the social construction of identity.
14 Emile Durkheim, Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Emile Durkheim, the Division of Labor in Society 378-90 (S. A. Solway trans., 1933).
15 Erving Goffman, Behavior in Public Places: Notes on the Social Organization of Gathering (1962); Erving Goffman, Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity (1963).
16 See Hermann Fränkel, Early Greek Poetry and Philosophy 80 (Moses Hadas & James Willis trans., 1975) James M. Redfield, Nature and Culture in the Iliad 20-24 (1975); Jean-Pierre Vernant, L’Individu, La Mort, L’Amour: Soi-Meme et L’Autre En Grece Ancienne 55 (1989); Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama 106-08 (John Osborne trans., 1977); Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity 21-49 (1993) (finding a more complex view of agency where there is no contrast between self and nonself because in the Iliad, “man is completely part of his world.”).
17 One of my favorite Jewish jokes is about an avid golfer whose ambition is to play eighteen uninterrupted holes of golf. He belongs to a largely Jewish golfclub and on Yom Kippur, instead of going to shul, suitably disguised he sneaks on to the course with his bag of clubs. As he approaches the first hole, God and Moses watch from on high and are not pleased. Our golfer tees off and his ball flies 300 yards straight down the fairway. As it comes to a halt, a rabbit grabs the ball in its mouth and starts running towards the woods. The golfer is enraged but then watches in amazement as an eagle swoops down, picks up the rabbit, who disgorges the ball as they fly over the green. It lands within inches from the hole, where a startled chipmunk knocks it in for a hole in one. A baffled Moses turns to God, and asks: “I thought you were going to punish him?” A smiling deity replies, “So who can he tell!”
18 Kant, Immanuel, Ideal Toward a Universal History 1, 8:20-21 (1992) (Cambridge ed., The Writings of Immanuel Kant)Google Scholar.
19 David Riesman, Ruel Denney, & Nathan Glazer, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (1950).
20 Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the Prison Notebooks (Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey Noweli Smith ed. & trans., 1971); Ralph Miliband, the State in Capitalist Society (1969); Louis Althusser, Reading Capital (1970); Frank Parkin, Class, Inequality and the Political Order (1971); Jürgen Habermas, Legitimation Crisis (1975); Anthony Giddens, the Class Structure of the Advanced Societies (1975); Nicos Poulantzas, State, Power, Socialism (1978).
21 Paul Willis, Learning to Labour (1970); Nicholas Abercrombie Et Al., the Dominant Ideology Thesis (1980); James C. Scott, Weaponsof the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (1985); see also Greengrass, Mark, Hidden Transcripts, in The Massacre in History 70 (Levene, Mark & Roberts, Penny eds., 1999)Google Scholar; Will Coster, Massacre & Codes of Conduct in the English Civil War, id. at 89; Barrington Moore, Jr., Injustice: the Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (1978).
22 Jacques Levesque, the Enigma of 1989: the Ussr and the Liberation of Eastern Europe (Keith Martin trans., 1997); Matthew Evangelista, Unarmed Forces: the Transnational Movement to End the Cold War (1999); Robert D. English, Russia and the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals and the End of the Cold War (2000).
23 Henri Tajfel, Human Groups and Social Categories (1981); Tajfel, Henri & Turner, John, The Social Identity Theory oflntergroup Behavior, in Psychology of Intergroup Relations 7-24 (Worchel, Stephen & Austin, William G. eds., 1986)Google Scholar; Brewer, Marilynn, The Social Self: On Being the Same and Different at the Same Time, 17 Personality & Soc. Psych. Bull. 475-82 (1991)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Marilynn Brewer & Norman Miller, Intergroup Relations (1996); Stuart Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: the Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War (2001); Richard Herrmann, Thomas Risse & Marilynn Brewer, Identities in Europe and the Institutions of the European Union, (forthcoming 2003).
24 W. G.Jurgensen, Traffic-cop Cameras Are Solid Idea, Columbus Dispatch, Oct. 9, 2001, at 11A (citing figures from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety).
25 Hobbes, supra note 9, at 117, II, xvii, writes that “Covenants, without the sword, are but Words, of no strength to secure a man at all.”
26 Aristotle, Politics, 1253a30 (contrasting human beings to other gregarious animals). See also id. at 1252b28-53a39 (arguing that the city (politeia) is necessary to allow people to fulfill their purposes as human beings).
27 One of my colleagues insists that I add tennis to the list.
28 MacIntyre, supra note 7, at 38.
29 See generally, MacIntyre, supra note 7.
30 Georgia Warnke, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (1987).
31 Solon’s reforms (c. 594-593) and those of Cleisthenes (510-500) made every Athenian a freeman and citizen. The restriction of the powers of the Areopagus Council in 462 had the effect of vesting political authority in the assembly (ecclesia). By 431, large numbers of citizens took an active role in government through participation in the assembly and the courts (dikastēria), where they served as judge and jury.
32 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action (Christian Lenhardt & Sherry Weber Nicholsen trans., 1990); Moon, J. Donald, Practical Discourse and Communicative Ethics, in The Cambridge Companion to Habermas 143 (White, Stephen K. ed., 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
33 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Reflections on My Philosophical Journey, in The Philosophy of Hans-George Gadamer 33 (Hahn, Lewis Edwin ed., 1997)Google Scholar.
34 On Gadamer and dialogue, see Gadamer, Hans-George, Truth and Method, (Weinsheimer, Joel & Marshall, Donald G. trans., 2d rev. ed., 1989)Google Scholar; Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Plato and the Poets, in Dialogue and Dialectic 39-72 (Smith, P. Christopher trans., 1980)Google Scholar; Robert R. Sullivan, Political Hermeneutics: The Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer (1989); Georgia Warnice, Gadamer: Hermeneutics, Tradition, and Reason (1987); Hans Herbert Kögler, The Power of Dialogue: Critical Hermeneutics After Gadamer and Foucault (Paul Henrickson trans., 1999).
35 Charles Taylor, the Ethics of Authenticity 33 (1991).
36 Mikhail Bahktin, Problems of Dostoevsky’S Poetics (Caryl Emerson trans., 1984); Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark, Michail Bakhtin (1984); James V. Wertsch, Voices of the Mind (1991).