Tragedy or Scepticism? Defending the Anti-Pelagian Mind in World Politics

Abstract

This article discusses the claims of Mervyn Frost and James Mayall that scholars of politics and international relations should take the notion of tragedy much more seriously than they, generally, have done, at least recently. It does this by also considering the arguments in favour of a tragic vision of politics outlined in Ned Lebow’s influential restatement of the realist tradition, The Tragic Vision of Politics, and traces these concerns back to their locus classicus in twentieth-century realism, Hans Morgenthau. It then considers Michael Oakeshott’s critique of Morgenthau, and argues that to develop an ‘anti-Pelagian’ political theory (as both Morgenthau and Oakeshott sought to do) we would be better to follow Oakeshott’s scepticisms than Morgenthau’s sense of the tragic.