Tragedy,World Politics and Ethical Community

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 methodology, 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 field 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.