The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders
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The book The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders by Richard Ned Lebow belongs to the sphere of theoretical literature dealing with the position of ethics, norms and values in the foreign policy of states. The author, an American expert in the field of conflicts and conflict management, tries to show that ethics, norms and values are very important factors in world politics and criticizes how they have been underestimated. Simultaneously, he disproves a deeply rooted conviction that power and external threats play the decisive role in warning against the practical consequences of such thinking, especially in the external relations of the United States of America (US). Lebow develops his perspective by engaging in argument with the poweroriented modern realist school, which he believes is the most influential in current American political practice. Under the term ‘modern realism’ he understands theories ‘derived from the seminal mid-century works of E.H. Carr, Frederick Schumann, John Herz and Hans J. Morgenthau’, that he ranks as classical (p. 14). It could be said that he especially refers to neo-realism and to the most up-to-date forms of realist thinking, but as obvious from the context the term also includes some contemporaries or immediate successors of Morgenthau and Herz. Lebow contrasts ‘modern realism’ with what he sees as a more comprehensive understanding of foreign policy, which can be found in the texts of classical realists, from Thucydides to Morgenthau. It is especially his focus on Thucydides and Clausewitz that makes Lebow’s text different from many other titles presenting modern realism as a kind of misinterpretation of major classical realist’s works and which helps the author view the matter afresh and originally in a book worthy of reading. After an introduction that explains the principal assumptions of the study (the Chapter ‘Tragedy and politics’), Lebow focuses on Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. From the methodological point of view, two chapters devoted to the famous text of the ancient author (‘Thucydides and war’, ‘Thucydides and civilization’) hold the greatest importance. They not only Journal of International Relations and Development, 2005, 8, (318–321) r 2005 Palgrave Macmillan Ltd 1408-6980/05 $30.00
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Book Review
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make the reader familiar with the circumstances of the outbreak and main events of the conflict in late fifth-century BC Greece but also attempt to deconstruct the ancient text and to develop a multidisciplinary approach to how it should be read. At the same time, they show that in accordance with the tradition of Greek tragedians History of the Peloponnesian War cannot be understood as a real explanation of the origins of war but as a multilevel introduction to the matter that leads the reader to a deeper insight into archetypical characters and archetypical situations relating to the phenomenon of the rise and fall of civilizations. The new way of reading, very different from the realist understanding
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