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Existentialism and International Relations: In it up to our necks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2023

Andrew R. Hom Open the ORCID record for Andrew R. Hom [Opens in a new window]  and
Cian O’Driscoll Open the ORCID record for Cian O’Driscoll [Opens in a new window]
Andrew R. Hom
Affiliation:
Department of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Cian O’Driscoll*
Affiliation:
Coral Bell School of Asia Pacific Affairs, Australia National University, Canberra, ACT, Australia
*
Corresponding author: Cian O’Driscoll; Email: cian.odriscoll@anu.edu.au
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Abstract

What, this essay asks, is the relation between contemporary IR scholarship and the existentialist intellectual and cultural tradition? How is our discipline informed and animated by existentialist thinking? Is existentialism a heritage to be recovered, claimed, and embraced by IR scholars, or a shadow to be escaped? And what resources does it furnish us for thinking through the kind of issues that IR scholars are called upon to grapple with today? These questions are not purely theoretical. There are practical and political reasons, not only for considering them, but for considering them now. Living through what has been termed an unfolding ‘Age of Anxiety’, we find ourselves confronted by existential questions and existentialist ideas at almost every turn. It is, however, unclear how substantive or meaningful this apparently existentialist moment truly is. Does existentialism have something to say to contemporary IR, or does it flatter to deceive? We think the time is ripe to take stock of existentialism as it relates to IR and global politics. This is the purpose of this article and of the collection of essays it introduces.

Video Abstract

Keywords

crisisdisciplinary historyexistentialismIR theory
Type
Introduction
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 49 , Special Issue 5: Existentialism and International Politics , December 2023 , pp. 783 - 794
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the British International Studies Association.

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References

1 Jane Ellen Harrison, ‘Reminiscences of a student’s life’, Arion: A Journal of the Humanities and Classics, 4:2 (1965), (pp. 312–346).

2 Bahar Rumelili, ‘[Our] age of anxiety: Existentialism and the current state of International Relations’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 24 (2021), pp. 1020–36. For example, Nasir Abbas Nayyar, ‘War and existentialism’, The News on Sunday (9 October 2016), available at: {https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/561876-war-existentialism}; Robert Zaretsky, ‘Make America existentialist again’, Foreign Policy (20 August 2019), available at: {https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/20/make-america-existentialist-again/}; Carmen Lea Dege, ‘2020’s Existentialist turn’, Boston Review (24 August 2020), available at: {https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/carmen-dege-existentialism-redux/}; Jessica F. Green, ‘The existential politics of climate change’, Boston Review (21 January 2021), available at: {https://www.bostonreview.net/forum_response/jessica-f-green-existential-politics-climate-change/}; Sarb Johal, ‘Covid is an existential crisis that comes from an awareness of your own freedoms’, The Guardian (30 January 2021), available at: {https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/30/covid-is-an-existential-crisis-that-comes-from-an-awareness-of-your-own-freedoms}.

3 Rens van Munster, ‘Nuclear weapons, existentialism, and international relations: Anders, Ballard, and the human condition in the age of extinction’, Review of International Studies, forthcoming (2023), p. 1, available at: {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210522000638}.

4 Jelena Subotic and Filip Ejdus, ‘Towards the existentialist turn in IR: Introduction to the symposium on anxiety’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 24 (2021), pp. 1014–19.

5 Albert Camus, Between Hell and Reason (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan Press, 1991), p. 183.

6 Mary Warnock, Existentialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 1.

7 The scholars who have contributed to this special issue define existentialism in different ways. One aim of this special issue is to put these different understandings of existentialism in IR in dialogue with one another.

8 David E. Cooper, Existentialism: A Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1999), p. 1.

9 Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails (London: Vintage, 2016).

10 William Barrett, Irrational Man: A Study in Existential Philosophy (London: Heinemann, 1961), p. 8.

11 Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, p. 28. Stella Sandford describes it as ‘that philosophical tradition and orientation concerned with the analysis of “existence”, where “existence” is the term reserved for the being of the human: its nature, its meaning, its possibilities, and its afflictions. This does not mean that existentialism engages in an attempt to isolate a property unique to humanity, the possession of which would qualify one for the ascription “human”; rather, it undertakes to describe the fundamental characteristics of existing as a human in the midst of the world of humans and others.’ Stella Sandford, How to Read Beauvoir (London: Granta, 2006), p. 4.

12 Jean-Paul Sartre, ‘Existentialism is a humanism’, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Plume, 1975), pp. 345–368 (p. 349). The gendered language is Sartre’s, as it is Morgenthau’s in the next section.

13 José Ortega y Gasset offers a useful alternative formulation: ‘Man is the entity that makes itself’, he writes. ‘Man, in a word, has no nature; what he has is – history’; José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Man has no nature’, in Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Plume, 1975), pp. 155–7.

14 Sartre, ‘Existentialism is a humanism’, p. 349–50.

15 Ibid.

16 Ibid., p. 351.

17 Kevin Aho, Existentialism: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Polity, 2020), p. ix.

18 George Cotkin, Existential America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), p. 3.

19 Sean Molloy, The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics (New York: Palgrave, 2006), p. 36.

20 On the IR side of the aisle, John H. Herz and Hans Morgenthau fled Germany in the 1930s to escape Nazi prosecution. Turning to existentialist thinkers, Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir all either contributed to the French Resistance or served time in incarceration at the hands of the occupying force. The interested reader can consult their life stories for more detail.

21 On Dostoevsky’s place in existentialist thought, see Walter Kaufmann (ed.), Existentialism: From Dostoevsky to Sartre (New York: Plume, 1975), pp. 12–14.

22 Quoted in Molloy, The Hidden History of Realism, p. 73.

23 See Ben Zala, ‘“No one around to shut the dead eyes of the human race”: Sartre, Aron, and the limits of existentialism in the nuclear age’, Review of International Studies, forthcoming (2023), pp. 1–18, available at: {https://doi.org/10.1017/S0260210523000086}.

24 On Niebuhr, see the excellent recent symposium, Liane Hartnett and Lucian Ashworth (eds), ‘Reinhold Niebuhr in our times’, Journal of International Political Theory, 17:2 (2021), pp. 118–220.

25 Samantha Rose Hill, Hannah Arendt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2021).

26 For example, Patricia Owen, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

27 Barry Gewen, ‘Hans Morgenthau and Hannah Arendt: An intellectual passion’, National Interest (25 August 2015), available at: {https://nationalinterest.org/feature/hans-morgenthau-hannah-arendt-intellectual-passion-13682}.

28 Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among Nations (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1948), p. 402; we thank Liane Hartnett for pointing out this link.

29 Christoph Frei, Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellectual Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001), pp. 94, 99, 102; Michael Laurence, ‘Nietzsche, Morgenthau, and the roots of realism’, E-International Relations (24 June 2015), available at: {https://www.e-ir.info/2015/06/24/nietszche-morgenthau-and-the-roots-of-realism/}; see also Ulrik Enemark Petersen, ‘Breathing Nietzsche’s air: New reflections on Morgenthau’s concepts of power and human nature’, Alternatives, 24:1 (1999), pp. 83–118; Ty Solomon, ‘Human nature and the limits of the self: Hans Morgenthau on love and power’, International Studies Review, 14:2 (2012), pp. 201–24. Frei and others make the additional case that Morgenthau was also influenced by Heidegger.

30 Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘The twilight of international morality’, Ethics, 58:2 (1948), pp. 79–99 (p. 99).

31 Hans J. Morgenthau, ‘Thought and action in politics’, Social Research, 38:4 (1971), pp. 611–632 (p. 626).

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., p. 627.

34 Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (London: Latimer House, 1947), p. 177.

35 Morgenthau, Scientific Man, p. 189.

36 Tellingly, Albert William Levi considered this possibility in ‘The meaning of existentialism for contemporary international relations’, Ethics, 72:4 (1962), pp. 233–51.

37 For a discussion of the processes that muted explicit philosophical reflection early IR realism, see Andrew R. Hom, ‘Truth and power, uncertainty and catastrophe: Ethics in IR realism’, in Brent J. Steele and Eric A. Heinze (eds), Routledge Handbook on Ethics in International Relations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), pp. 130–45.

38 Nicolas Guilhot, After the Enlightenment: Political Realism and International Relations in the Mid-Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 22; Molloy, The Hidden History of Realism, p. 81.

39 For example, it became common during this period to refer to ‘existential threats’ without elaborating or explicating what made them specifically existential.

40 Jelena Subotic and Filip Ejdus, ‘Towards the existentialist turn in IR’, p. 1015, conclude succinctly that existentialism has been ‘mostly ignored by IR’.

41 See footnote 2 above, as well as Malcom Bull, ‘Great again’, London Review of Books, 38:20 (19 October 2016); Skye C. Clearly, ‘Applied existentialism’, Los Angeles Review of Books (23 April 2016); Phil Torres, ‘The dangerous ideas of “longtermism” and “existential risk”’, Current Affairs (28 July 2021); Charles M. Blow, ‘An age of existential uncertainty’, New York Times (7 April 2022).

42 Patrick Hayden, ‘Exploring existentialism and international political theory: Introduction’, Journal of International Political Theory, 9:2 (2013), pp. 155–7.

43 Hayden, ‘Exploring existentialism and international political theory’, p. 155.

44 Brent Steele, ‘The politics and limits of the self: Kierkegaard, neoconservatism, and international political theory’, Journal of International Political Theory, 9:2 (2013), pp. 158–77.

45 Paul Voice, ‘Consuming the world: Hannah Arendt on politics and the environment’, Journal of International Political Theory, 9:2 (2013), pp. 178–93 (p. 178).

46 Patrick Hayden, ‘Albert Camus and rebellious cosmopolitanism in a divided world’, Journal of International Political Theory, 9:2 (2013), pp. 194–219.

47 Rumelili, ‘[Our] age of anxiety’. This article builds on her earlier work, e.g. Bahar Rumelili, ‘Integrating anxiety into International Relations theory: Hobbes, existentialism, and ontological security’, International Theory, 12:2 (2020), pp. 257–72.

48 Rumelili, ‘[Our] age of anxiety’, p. 1021.

49 Ibid., p. 1023.

50 ‘Existentialism provides a necessary deepening for understanding ontological security in contemporary life’, Brent Steele, ‘Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide: Inescapable dread in the 2020s’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 24 (2021), pp. 1037–43 (p. 1037).

51 Ibid., p. 1041.

52 Karl Gustafsson, ‘Why is anxiety’s positive potential so rarely realised? Creativity and change in international politics’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 24 (2021), pp. 1044–9.

53 Andreja Zevnik, ‘Anxiety, subjectivity, and the possibility of emancipatory politics’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 24 (2021), pp. 1050–6.

54 Felix Berenkskötter, ‘Anxiety and the biographical gestalt of political leaders’, Journal of International Relations and Development, 24 (2021), pp. 1057–63.

55 Liane Hartnett, ‘Love as a practice of peace: The political theologies of Tolstoy, Gandhi and King’, in Vassilios Paipais (ed.), Theology and World Politics: Metaphysics, Genealogies, Political Theologies (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), pp. 265–88; Liane Hartnett, ‘Love in a time of empire: An engagement with the political thought of Tolstoy, Tagore and Camus’, PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science, 2018; Liane Hartnett, ‘“The impossibility of love”: Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought on racial justice’, Journal of International Political Theory, 17:2 (2021), pp. 151–68; Liane Hartnett, ‘Love is worldmaking: Reading Rabindrath Tagore’s Gora as international theory’, International Studies Quarterly, 66:3 (2022), pp. 1–12.

56 Maja Touzari Greenwood, ‘When foreign fighters come home: The story of six Danish returnees’, Perspectives on Terrorism, 13:4 (2019), pp. 27–38.

57 Maša Mrovlje, Remaking Political Judgement: Arendt and Existentialism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Maša Mrovlje, ‘Disappointed hope: Reimagining resistance in the wake of the Egyptian Revolution’, The Journal of Politics, forthcoming, available at: {https://doi.org/10.1086/726935}.

58 Nathan Alexander Sears, ‘International politics in the age of existential threats’, Journal of Global Security Studies, 6:3 (2021), pp. 1–21 (p. 3); Nathan Alexander Sears, ‘Existential security: Towards a security framework for the survival of humanity’, Global Policy, 11:2 (2020), pp. 255–66.

59 Kaufmann, Existentialism.

60 Linwood G. Vereen, Lisa A. Wines, Michael D. Hannon, Natasha Howard, and Isaac Burt, ‘Black existentialism: Extending the discourse on meaning and existence’, The Journal of Humanistic Counseling, 56:1 (2017), pp. 72–84.

61 Mabogo Percy More, Looking through Philosophy in Black: Memoirs (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

62 Lewis R. Gordon, with Rozena Maart and Sayan Dey (eds), Black Existentialism and Decolonizing Knowledge: Writings of Lewis R. Gordon (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023); Lewis R. Gordon, ‘French- and francophone-influenced Africana and Black existentialism’, Yale French Studies, 135–6 (2019), pp. 119–33.

63 Lewis Gordon (ed.), Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997).

64 For example, Robbie Shilliam, ‘What about Marcus Garvey? Race and the transformation of sovereignty debate’, Review of International Studies, 32:3 (2006), pp. 379–400; Robbie Shilliam, ‘Race and revolution at Bwa Kayiman’, Millennium, 45:3 (2017), pp. 269–92.

65 E.g. Zeynep Gülşah Çapan, ‘Writing International Relations from the invisible side of the abyssal line’, Review of International Studies, 43:4 (2017), pp. 602–11; Zeynep Gülşah Çapan, ‘Decolonising International Relations?’, Third World Quarterly, 38:1 (2017), pp. 1–15; Siphamandla Zondi, ‘Decolonising International Relations and its theory: A critical conceptual meditation’, Politikon, 45:1 (2018), pp. 16–31.

66 Benno Teschke, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003); Alexander Anievas and Cristian Gogu, ‘Capitalism and “The international”: A historical approach’, in Benjamin de Carvalho, Julia Costa Lopez, and Halvard Leira (eds), Routledge Handbook of Historical International Relations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2021), pp. 138–52.

67 Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (eds), Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014).

68 Charlotte Epstein, Birth of the State: The Place of the Body in Crafting Modern Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021); Vivien Lowndes, ‘How are political institutions gendered?’, Political Studies, 68:3 (2020), pp. 543–64.

69 Julius Bailey and David J. Leonard, ‘Black Lives Matter: Post-nihilistic freedom dreams’, Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, 5:3–4 (2015), pp. 67–77.

70 Charles F. Peterson, ‘Fear of a Black museum’, in Edwardo Pérez and Timothy E. Brown (eds), Black Panther and Philosophy (London: John Wiley & Sons, 2022), pp. 247–55.

71 Madeline Martin-Seaver, ‘Begin from disappointment: Black existentialism and political solidarity’, Perceptia, 1:1 (2010), pp. 1–7. We want to note here also three PhD theses in philosophy, history, and clinical psychology, respectively, with evident IR relevance: Elizabeth Roosevelt Moore, ‘Being Black: Existentialism in the work of Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, and James Baldwin’, University of Texas, 2001; Joe Street, ‘Liberation culture: African American Culture as a political weapon in the 1960s civil rights movement’, University of Sheffield, 2003; Orlandria A. Smith, ‘Understanding racial trauma from a Black existential perspective’, Point Park University, Pittsburgh, 2022.

72 Yoav Di-Capua, ‘Arab existentialism: What was it?’, Yale French Studies, 135–6 (2019), pp. 171–88; Margaret A. Simons, ‘Beauvoir’s long march’, Yale French Studies, 135–6 (2019), pp. 63–74; Lauren Du Graf, ‘Existentialism’s “white problem”: Richard Wright and Jean-Paul Sartre’s “The Respectful Prostitute”’, Yale French Studies, 135–6 (2019), pp. 134–50.

73 Kimberly Hutchings, ‘Simone de Beauvoir and the ambiguous ethics of political violence’, Hypatia, 22:3 (2007), pp. 111–32.

74 Consider the work being conducted by Toni Erskine, e.g. the ‘AI, Automated Systems, and Future Use-of-Force Decision Making: Anticipating Effects’ project funded by the Commonwealth Department of Defence.

75 Madeleine Fagan, Ethics and Politics after Poststructuralism: Levinas, Derrida, and Nancy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

76 More than any other 20th-century philosophy, existentialism ‘was able to cross the frontier from the Academy to the world at large’. It manifested in art, literature, film, culture, and lifestyle and, for a period, became a marker of generational change. Its leading scholars were public figures, hailed as visionaries by their followers and repudiated as dangerous charlatans by their detractors. See Barrett, Irrational Man, p. 8.

77 Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 123.

78 This is an allusion to the adage – discussed in Ben Zala’s contribution to this Special Issue – that it is better to be wrong with Sartre than right with Raymond Aron.