Tragic Vision and Vigilant Realism: Progressivism without an Ideal

Abstract

This chapter examines the relationship between tragedy and international political theory from the perspective of what I will follow others in calling the ‘tragic vision’.¹ The tragic vision, I claim, is a specific kind of inspiration by tragedy, which shapes the very nature of a theory’s ethical and analytical makeup. Two paramount examples of such ‘tragic vision theorizing’ are Hans J. Morgenthau’s Scientific Man versus Power Politics² and Richard Ned Lebow’s The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders³ — the two works this chapter explores in order to identify which aspects of theory are affected by tragedy, in what way, and to what effects. I put forth an argument that the tragic vision brings about particular theoretical outcomes and characterize the resulting theory as ‘vigilant realism’. This kind of realism gives expression to what is shared between the respective variations on (classical) realism of Morgenthau and Lebow.