Tragedy, World Politics and Ethical Community
| DOI | 10.1177/0047117807087246 |
| Published date | 01 March 2008 |
| Date | 01 March 2008 |
| Author | Richard Beardsworth |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
TRAGEDY, WORLD POLITICS AND ETHICAL COMMUNITY 127
Tragedy, World Politics and Ethical Community
Richard Beardsworth, The American University of Paris
Abstract
This article returns to recent debate in this journal on the pertinence or impertinence of
tragedy to international relations theory and world politics. Following post-Kantian meth-
odology, it argues that tragic insight points up the immanence of ethics to politics, cutting
across distinctions between the normative and the positive, the idealist and the realist, that
are particular to the fi eld of international relations. In distinction to Lebow’s same use of
this method it theorizes this immanence in early Hegelian terms of ‘causality of fate’ and
‘equality of life’ in order to gain general purchase on the kind of ethical community that
individualism in international political practice and theory can ignore.
Keywords: ethical community, ethics, G. W. F. Hegel, international relations, political
construction, tragedy, tragic fate
In three recent editions of International Relations an engaging debate has been
conducted that concerns the place of tragedy and the tragic in world politics and its
theorization. The debate has concerned the thought of Mervyn Frost, James Mayall,
Nicholas Rengger, Richard Ned Lebow, and most recently, Chris Brown and Peter
Euben.1 In all three exchanges the question has been whether tragedy brings specifi c
insight to our understanding of the relationship between international politics and
ethics. Since much of the discipline of international relations hinges on how this
relationship 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 will fi rst summarize what I consider to be the three fundamental positions under-
pinning the various arguments made by Frost, Mayall, Rengger, Lebow, Brown
and Euben.
The fi rst position concerns Frost, Lebow and Euben: the tragic dimension to inter-
national political life involves both the irreducible ethical dilemmas within such life
that are negotiated for better or worse (Frost, Euben) and/or the internal development
of hubris among international actors that cuts them off from international society and
leads to tragic consequences (Lebow). For all three, this tragic dimension is trans-
formative. Deepening our sensibility to it leads to greater recognition of the aporias of
world politics and to more searching and wise political practice of them, with Euben
stressing more than the other two how problematic tragedy shows this practice to
be. The second position is shared to a greater or lesser degree by all six authors, but
is privileged by Mayall, Rengger and Brown in their criticisms of idealism (and the
‘idealist’ side to Frost’s and Lebow’s very apology of tragedy). The tragic lies in the
International Relations Copyright © 2008 SAGE Publications
Los Angeles, London, New Delhi and Singapore, Vol 22(1): 127–137
[DOI: 10.1177/0047117807087246]
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