The Classical Realist Conservation: From Ancient Greece to Contemporary America: losing Real Man and Abandoning the Tragedy of the Political

This project is motivated by the contemporary decline of old powers and rise of new powers in international politics. This is a dynamic that challenges the Western world order and it is thus in need of handling. The Classical Realists like Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes all faced challenges of conflict and order coming undone in their own time, which was the very reason for their authorships. This project argues, that the contemporary complexity of international politics must look to the Classical Realists for insights, because the structure of the world no longer lends itself to a simple theory of counting capabilities and number of poles.
Therefore, this project examines a number of Classical Realist authors over time to assess whether the contemporary Classical Realists are able and willing to analyse and advise on the challenged Western order. The project introduces the heuristic device of the Classical Realist conversation that uncovers continuities and discontinuities between the authors over time. In order to structure the conversation, three large interpretive frames are presented, based on the Classical Realist author’s understanding of conflict and the political handling of it as something delimited in time and space (the locality frame of Thucydides, Machiavelli and Hobbes) or that it assumes a global character (the globality frame of Carl Schmitt, E. H. Carr and Hans Morgenthau) or that it is characterized by a process of globalization (the globalization frame of Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Fareed Zakaria and Anatol Lieven and John Hulsman).
It is found that the locality frame is characterized by a tension between the political and moral spheres, while the globality frame sees the introduction of the technological sphere, that directs the frame’s normative vision of order to even envision a world state, as Hans Morgenthau does when facing the threat of nuclear omnicide. The globalization frame is found to be dominated by the logic of the economic sphere, which produces the vision of the malleable and reductionist Global Man, who buys into global capitalism. Forgotten is evil and conflict in man. This neglect of empirical Real Man has the consequence of contemporary Classical Realists being constrained in their ability and willingness to analyse and advise on the challenged Western world order. Ultimately, the findings of the Classical Realist conversation provide the necessary insights for contemporary Classical Realists to re-commit to scepticism and tragedy of the political.