Abstract
Is the notion of tragedy one that students of international ethics ought to take seriously? I pose the question against the following background: Some time ago James Mayall, now Emeritus Professor of International Relations (IR) at Cambridge University, challenged my general approach to international ethics as being too progressive, optimistic and teleological. He claimed that constitutive theory, a position within normative IR theory on which I have been working for some years now, failed to take account of the tragic dimensions of international relations and that this was a weakness of the theory. I took him to be making a point about normative IR theory more generally. In this chapter I wish to evaluate these charges. What I wish to explore in this chapter is not merely the narrow charge against constitutive theory, but the wider question about the pertinence of tragedy for those concerned with ethics in international relations.
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Notes
H. F. Gutbrod (2001) ‘Irony, Conflict, Dilemma: Three Tragic Situations in International Relations’, Unpublished Dissertation, London School of Economics.
H. Butterfield (1931) The Whig Interpretation of History ( London: Bell);
R. Niebuhr (1938) Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History ( London: Nisbet and Company);
H. J. Morgenthau (1958) Dilemmas of Politics ( Chicago: Chicago University Press).
E. H. Carr (1946) The Twenty Years Crisis, 2nd edn ( London: Macmillan ), p. 12.
H. J. Morgenthau (1948) Politics among Nations ( New York: Alfred Knopff ), p. 341.
H. J. Morgenthau (1948) ‘The Political Science of E. H. Carr’, World Politics, 1 (127), 127–34.
H. J. Morgenthau (1946) Scientific Man Versus Power Politics ( Chicago: Chicago University Press ), p. 203.
To mention but a few books in this area: K. Booth, T. Dunne and M. Cox (eds) (2001) How Might We Live? Global Ethics in the New Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press);
J. H. Rosenthal and C. Barry (eds) (2009) Ethics in International Affairs: A Reader, 3rd edn ( Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press );
M. Lensu and J. -S. Fritz (2000) Value Pluralism, Normative Theory and International Relations (London: Macmillan in Association with Millennium: Journal of International Studies);
K. Hutchings (1999) International Political Theory: Rethinking Ethics in a Global Era ( London: Sage);
C. Brown (1992) International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches ( Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf);
M. Cochran (1999) Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatist Approach ( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
B. Breytenbach (1985) The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist ( London: Faber).
A. Paton (1958) Cry the Beloved Country: A Story of Comfort and Desolation ( Harmondsworth: Penguin).
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© 2012 Mervyn Frost
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Frost, M. (2012). Tragedy, Ethics and International Relations. In: Erskine, T., Lebow, R.N. (eds) Tragedy and International Relations. Palgrave Studies in International Relations. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390331_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230390331_2
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