Tragedy, World Politics and Ethical Community

Abstract

In the preceding chapters of this book, an engaging debate has been conducted that concerns the place of tragedy and the tragic in world politics and its theorization. The question has been whether tragedy brings specific insight to our understanding of the relation between international politics and ethics. Since much of the discipline of International Relations (IR) hinges on how this relation is theoretically and empirically conceived, the debate is important. Does tragedy have something to say to international relations, its future conceptualization and practice? To provide the theoretical context for my own thoughts on this issue, I wish to first summarize the three fundamental positions underpinning the preceding arguments made by Richard Ned Lebow, Mervyn Frost, James Mayall, Nicholas Rengger, Chris Brown and Peter Euben. I will then argue that the tragic reveals the immanence of the ethical to the political in a specific, but irreducible, manner. This immanence undermines any theoretical distinction between the normative and the positive in social scientific thinking of international political reality.