How love orders: an engagement with disciplinary International Relations

Abstract

Love plays an important role in the normative production and sustenance of order. Historically implicated in imaginaries of order, it has been evoked to constitute community, legitimate coercion and (dis)empower. Put differently, love provides the affective glue that binds groups, frames feelings to enable and constrain action and is integral to the workings of power. Love can be evoked and governed for various political ends. Complicating accounts of love as a positive emotion, this article uncovers love’s neglected history in disciplinary International Relations (IR) as an ideological mask that conceals its implication in violent worldmaking projects of empire, war and domination. To illustrate this, it identifies three ideal-typical – or Hegelian, Augustinian and Nietzschean – logics that exemplify love’s ordering work and examines how they find expression in the work of three leading figures of disciplinary IR, namely Alfred Zimmern (1859–1957), Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971) and Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980).

Love has long animated visions of international order. A close engagement with the international thought of leading, historical figures of disciplinary or canonical International Relations (IR) and their underlying logics bears witness to this. Indeed, the liberal international architect of international institutions, Alfred Zimmern (1879–1957), mobilised a Hegelian logic of familial love to envision the Commonwealth and the League of Nations. The Christian realist commonly invoked to justify US wars, Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), appealed to an Augustinian logic of sacrificial love – agape or caritas – to legitimate US involvement in the Second World War. And the classical realist and foremost theorist of power, Hans Morgenthau (1904–1980), evoked a Nietzschean logic of love as yearning or eros to conceive of an existential ethic for a nuclear age. Taken together, their diverse accounts of love lend credence to three claims. First, along with the first wave of literature on love (Hartnett, 2022; Krystalli and Schulz, 2022; Pin-Fat, 2019) and political emotions (Bleiker and Hutchison, 2008; Crawford, 2000; Mercer, 2006), they unequivocally affirm that love and emotions matter to IR. ¹ Second, they gesture towards intellectual history, in general, and disciplinary IR, in particular, as important and largely untapped resources for theorising love. Third, in their disparity, they assert that while love may well be a polymorphous, polysemous, political phenomenon that derives meaning-in-use (Hartnett, 2022), in its varied meanings and forms, it nonetheless performs the work of order. ²

That love performs the work of order – or to build on Hedley Bull’s (2012) parsimonious formulation – supplies meaning or purpose to international political arrangements is evident in its normative work. Love’s ordering work is normative in two senses (Hartnett, 2022). In a rather anodyne sense, the act of caring for a subject or object entails the work of valuing, ordering, assessing and adjudicating. In a more overt, prescriptive sense – and owing to the importance afforded to love as a moral emotion in Western religious and humanist thought at least since modernity (May, 2012) – love has served as an ideal and has been evoked as a standard to prescribe how to think and act. Put differently, love orders because it performs constitutive work and is a form of productive power. This is because it both structures circles of concern and the hierarchies that pervade them and shapes subjectivities. Love’s work can be evoked and governed for various political ends and consequently forms part of what Andrew Phillips (2010) describes as the ‘normative complex’ that shapes and sustains international order. Seeking to shed light on love’s implication in this ‘normative complex’, this article engages with disciplinary IR and asks: how does love order?

Love is under-theorised in the IR literature on emotion and order. In asking how love orders this article makes three contributions to this scholarship. First, it offers a theoretical schema for understanding and explaining love’s normative ordering work and its implication in the international. In sum, it claims that love ‘constitutes community’, ‘legitimates coercion’ and ‘(dis)empowers’. Given love’s work, in practice, entails a range of other emotions – whether this is loyalty to a community, contrition for coercion or loneliness that animates a desire to dominate – it also offers insight into the broader affective-normative dynamics of order. Second, via an engagement with intellectual history and disciplinary IR, this article uncovers love’s historical implication in visions of international order. Treating disciplinary IR as a repository of insights into ‘imaginaries of order’, ³ it identifies three ideal-typical – or Hegelian, Augustinian and Nietzschean – logics that permeate IR and examines how they find expression in the international thought of three leading, historical figures of disciplinary IR, namely Alfred Zimmern, Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Morgenthau. These logics and evocations do not provide an exhaustive account of love’s plurality and polyvalence. Instead, they point to a long and neglected history of emotion in IR theorising and offer insights into disciplinary IR’s uses of love. Third, and to this end, this article reveals how love has served as an ideological mask for power. Complicating important accounts of love’s significance as a ‘practice of peace’ (Hartnett, 2020), a soteriological space amid violence (Krystalli and Schulz, 2022) and a decolonial emotion (Poopuu, 2022), this article illuminates how love has also been evoked to advance violent worldmaking projects of empire, war and domination. Revealing the latent ideological content of disciplinary IR (Persaud, 2022), this engagement with what love is used to evoke and govern equips us with a better understanding of how the ideas we inherit, the emotions we evoke and the imaginaries we inhabit can be as racialised, gendered and classed as the canons that bequeath them. ⁴

This article proceeds in three sections. The section ‘Love “constitutes” community’ offers an engagement with the Hegelian logics that animate Zimmern’s thought on imperialism and internationalism, illustrating how love constitutes community and supplies the affective glue which enables groups to cohere. The section ‘Love “legitimates” coercion’ offers an exposition of the Augustinian logics that form Niebuhr’s international thought, and in so doing demonstrates how love legitimates coercion or operates as a framing rule (Hochschild, 1979) that enables and constrains action. The section ‘Love “(dis)empowers”’ analyses the Nietzschean logics that shape Morgenthau’s thought on how love ‘(dis)empowers’, highlighting love’s integral role in the workings of power and its uses to dominate and emancipate. The article concludes that an engagement with love’s work is integral to understanding and explaining the affective-normative dynamics of order.

Love ‘constitutes’ community

Love – whether understood as an affect, orientation or relation – ‘constitutes’ community because it generates geographies and their concomitant circles of concern. Love generates geographies because agents love in space, place and time. Similarly, because loving a subject or object entails the work of judgement – of valuing, ordering, assessing and adjudicating – it demarcates ethical circles of concern and the hierarchies which pervade them (Hartnett, 2022). Love, in sum, makes worlds by producing a sense of ‘we-ness’. As an affective glue, it forms group identity. As Jonathan Mercer (2014: 522) claims: ‘who we are is what we feel’. ‘We-ness’, of course, can be mobilised to mediate and enable estrangement and to construct communities of insiders or outsiders (Berlant, 1998). In this section, I posit that Hegelian logics serve as an ideal-typical expression of love’s constitutive work. In disciplinary IR, these logics are exemplified in the scholarship of Alfred Eckhard Zimmern and his vision of the Commonwealth, nation and the League of Nations. Examining love’s ordering work in Zimmern’s thought promises to make at least two offerings to the study of IR: it demonstrates how Hegelian logics enliven love’s constitution of community in a liberal international imaginary, and it reveals how love can be mobilised to naturalise hierarchy and empire.

Hegelian logics serve as an ideal-typical expression of how love ‘constitutes’ community. This hinges on the vital role familial love plays in the Hegelian conception of sittlichkeit or his theory of state or ethical community. Hegel’s ethical community is a socially integrated ethical whole. It marks the culmination of the ethical ideal. For Hegel, this community is the state and is organised around the concentric communities of family and civil society. The experience of familial love is the condition of this community’s existence. This is because familial love in allowing for the dual possibility of individuation and relation, particularity and universality, informs an understanding of the human and their normative goal as social. It inspires – and insists upon – loyalty and sacrifice, which is foundational to the flourishing not just of the family unit but also civil society and the state. Indeed, in some readings of Hegel, the experience of familial love is what animates the quest for wholeness or the movement of the Spirit or Geist (Ormiston, 2004; Taylor, 1975). However construed, love constitutes the ethical community. It can be summed up in the aphorism: ‘We love, therefore we are’.

Owing to the fact that he was ‘held responsible in varying degrees for everything reactionary and antidemocratic’ (Boucher, 1994: 671), Hegel fell into disrepute for much of the 20th century (Molloy, 2022). Nonetheless, even when Hegel is not directly evoked, his imprint can be found on much of 20th-century international political thought. If his influence on American pragmatists such as William James, John Dewey and Richard Rorty was somewhat equivocal, his embrace by British idealists such as T.H. Green, Bernard Bosanquet and Gilbert Murray was more manifest (Brown, 1991; Morefield, 2004). As normative international theorists (Erskine, 2008; Brown, 1991; Frost, 1986) acknowledge, Hegel’s influence on the field is vast. Perhaps, most pertinently for disciplinary IR, this is evident in his influence on the liberal international and imperial thought of Zimmern, which a growing body of historiography understands as integral to the origins of IR (e.g. Long and Schmidt, 2005; Anievas et al., 2014; Davis et al., 2020; Vitalis, 2015).

Alfred Eckhard Zimmern was ‘the pre-eminent theorist of internationalism between the two wars’ (Mazower, 2009: 67) and ‘the leading academic practitioner in British-turn-of-the-century-IR’ (Buzan and Lawson, 2015: 45). As Hans Morgenthau (Morefield, 2004: Loc 309) noted, he exerted considerable influence on the birth of IR as a discipline. Born in Surrey, England, in 1878 to German parents of Huguenot and Jewish descent, Zimmern was a classicist, a geographer, a civil servant, an educator and an architect of international institutions. He was the first Woodrow Wilson chair of international politics at the University College of Wales (later: Aberystwyth University), the Montague Burton professor of IR at the University of Oxford; an active member of the Round Table movement, co-founder of the (later Royal) Institute of International Affairs and involved in the founding of (its US parallel) Council of Foreign Affairs and one of the main architects of the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organisation. He also taught some of the leading figures in British IR. Evident in E.H. Carr’s (2001) association of Zimmern with the doctrine of ‘the harmony of interests’, what cemented Zimmern’s place in the disciplinary IR is his liberal international legacy. As others have observed (Mazower, 2009; Morefield, 2004, 2005), Zimmern’s international thought has a Hegelian quality common to British idealism. Perhaps this is unsurprising. Despite his reticence to evoke Hegel, at Oxford, Zimmern was taught and mentored by British idealists who embraced a Hegelian conception of community. Zimmern’s thought on the Commonwealth and his understanding of nationalism and internationalism bear the imprint of these influences. In fact, any engagement with Zimmern’s liberal international and imperial thought is rather bereft without some account of these Hegelian logics of love.

Zimmern reconceived the British Empire as the Commonwealth. His vision was popularised by Lionel Curtis and Jan Smuts (Davis et al., 2020) and supplied the conceptual architecture of the formidable Roundtable’s vision of the imperial international. Crucially, for Zimmern, the Commonwealth did not connote the British empire from its inception. Rather, the third British Empire or the Commonwealth was superior to its antecedents, the first vision of empire which ended with American independence and the second vision which culminated in the Great War (Zimmern, 1927). It is hard to overstate the role love played in Zimmern’s conception of the Commonwealth (Hartnett, 2018). Love constituted the Commonwealth. In part, this was because love supplied the moral purpose for it. As Zimmern affirmed (1918: 356), ‘the Commonwealth is an organisation designed with the ruling motive of love and brotherhood’. In part, however, this was because familial love played a key role in the sentimental education (or socialisation) of the citizen. Like Hegel, Zimmern understood the experience of familial love as central to the realisation of the ethical community. Although Zimmern distinguished himself from Hegel by casting the Commonwealth rather than the state as the culmination of the ethical community, he nonetheless envisaged the concentric communities of the Commonwealth as converging around the primordial community of the family. ⁵ Family mattered, for Zimmern, because it was where an agent learned to love. Entwining love and order, the family, in Zimmern’s (1911: 67) own admission, laid the foundation for the ‘patriarchal system’. Evoking Burke – rather than the more controversial visionary of sittlichkeit – Zimmern claimed that familial love

is the germ as it were of public affections. It is the first link in the series by which we proceed toward a love of country and mankind . . . We begin our public affections in our families (Zimmern, 1918: 13-4).

As the site of ‘the first training in citizenship’ (Zimmern, 1911: 67), the experience of familial love allowed ‘for the Commonwealth like the citizen of Periclean Athens to distinguish between a primordial love for a family and the rational, civic, love for community’ (Morefield, 2005: 74). In sum, fraternity flourishes because the family provides a sentimental education which reifies the public–private divide, naturalises hierarchy and enables service and sacrifice. There is much in Zimmern’s work which supports this interpretation. Writing about the sentimental education provided by the family in The Greek Commonwealth, Zimmern claims it enabled the ‘civilized man’ to ‘not merely in the hour of danger but in the work and leisure of everyday, to set country before wife and family, or lifelong companions, or fellow-craftsmen and fellow-worshippers’, ‘to bring the dispositions that are lovely in private life into the service and conduct of the commonwealth’, to ‘spend their bodies, as mere external tools, in the city’s service, and count their minds as most truly their own when employed on her behalf’(Zimmern, 1911: 77).

If love was the moral purpose of the Commonwealth and the family the main site for the sentimental education of the citizen, the nation constituted the metaphoric family in Zimmern’s rendering of the ethical community. By following in the footsteps of his British idealist forbears, Zimmern cast ‘nation’ as ‘family’ in the Hegelian schema of sittlichkeit and in so doing decoupled nation from state. This manoeuvre allowed him to envision the nation neither as ‘state nor church nor race nor a geographical or linguistic unity’ but rather a ‘body of people unified by a corporate sentiment of peculiar intensity, intimacy and dignity, related to a definite home country’ (Zimmern 1923: 120). Put differently, the nation was an affective community. The affect that bound this community – the metaphoric family – was familial love. Zimmern mobilised his vision of the nation to both critique the European (and British) conception of nationalism and legitimate the Commonwealth. His anti-racist critique centred on the claim that, in an increasingly interconnected world, a homogeneous nation-state was not only ‘unsound’ and ‘unworkable’, but it was also manifestly ‘unjust’ (Zimmern, 1927: 141). This was because it effectively relegated to inferiority the non-national in the state’s midst (Zimmern, 1927: 141). Conceiving the nation as an affective community that shunned the strictures of state, race, language or religiosity resisted the assimilatory ‘German doctrine of Kultur’ that was gaining appeal in the Anglosphere (Zimmern, 1927: 152). More so, it served to legitimate the Commonwealth as a model for a multi-agency polity (Baji, 2016). In sum, decoupling nation from state and stripping the nation of all markers of identity but for an affect that could be inculcated rendered it hospitable to a harmonious pluralism. However, this exercise was predicated on the depoliticisation and dehistoricisation of the nation. To be clear, Zimmern was explicit that this was the object of his endeavour. Casting the nation as feminised family, governed by what is often deemed the private emotion of love allowed him to construct a ‘frontier’ between ‘nation’ and ‘government’ (Zimmern, 1927: 157). This ‘depoliticized’ nationalism called for the rendering ‘unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’ and ‘unto the spiritual and intimate side of life the things which belong there’ (Zimmern, 1927: 157).

This vision of nation and Commonwealth were integral to Zimmern’s internationalism. As he put it, ‘the idea of the Commonwealth of Nations is not a European principle: it is a world-principle’ (Zimmern, 1918: 29). It enlivened his conception of institutionalism and internationalism, and the imperialism which underpinned it. Zimmern’s vision of the Commonwealth shaped his contributions to the League. As Mark Mazower (2009) notes, Zimmern was one of the main drafters of the Whitehall blueprint for the League of Nations, which Jan Smuts popularised. That the Commonwealth should offer the template for the League was straightforward for Zimmern (1927: 5,6): it was not only ‘the single largest community in the world; but it was also the “most diversified”’. Indeed, it was multi-racial, multi-religious and multi-cultural and encompassed a range of governments (Zimmern, 1927). What distinguished Zimmern’s vision of the League from those of his counterparts was that it was grounded in an internationalism – neither of materiality nor of law – but of communitarian sentiment (Mazower, 2009). This communitarian sentiment was familial love. Its logics find expression in Zimmern’s repeated allusion to kinship – in his description of the ‘tie between Great Britain and Greater Britain as originally one of kinship and common ideas and institutions based on kinship’, or indeed his understanding of membership of nations as both voluntary and hereditary, governed by both marriage and natality (Zimmern, 1923, 1927 Also, Morefield, 2004). It forms the premise of his claim that ‘the bond between London and Nigeria is closer than the bond between London and Dusseldorf’ (Cited in Morefield, 2005:67).

Zimmern’s privileging of national sentiment over sovereignty allowed him to present the Commonwealth as a model for less powerful nations – with or without a state – to benefit from association with larger powers (Mazower, 2009). However, his vision of institutionalism and internationalism – and the harmony of interests it presupposed – grew out of a commitment to empire. It is implicit in Zimmern’s evasion of imperial violence as the condition or the existence of an empire. This finds expression in his romantic flight to Ancient Athens – shorn of its history of imperialism and slavery – as the model for the ideal ethical community. More pertinently, it is facilitated, first, by the decoupling of nation and state, and the subsequent dehistoricising, depoliticising move of casting nation as family (McClintock, 1993) constituted by love. Effectively, as Jeanne Morefield (2004) notes, this elides that families are sites of violence and that the relationships between nations in the Commonwealth were neither voluntary nor hereditary but acquired often by colonial – and genocidal – violence. Zimmern’s imperial commitments, in fact, are explicit when he conceives the League as the ‘deux ex machina’ of the Commonwealth:

The Commonwealth, if it is to survive, must survive as a league within a larger League, a society within that larger society. Only in and through the League can the Commonwealth solve its problems of to-day and take up the tasks reserved for it to-morrow (Zimmern, 1927: 70-71).

The task reserved for it was nothing short of preserving ‘the peace of the world’ (1927: 76). In this belief, the convergence between the two narratives of the origins of IR becomes apparent. If there is truth to the Aberystwyth narrative that IR was born as a quest for peace, ⁶ this peace was imperial.

Laying bare love’s work in Zimmern’s conception of community makes a number of offerings to the study of IR today. To the extent that Zimmern is both a key figure of disciplinary IR and an important forebear of liberal internationalism, his work empirically illustrates how an ideal-typical Hegelian conception of love as constitutive of community enlivens a liberal internationalist imaginary and offers the affective architecture for its institutions. Zimmern mobilises love to conceive and constitute an international community. However, at the heart of this exercise was his elevation of a gendered conception of family and a depoliticised discourse of love that masked a normative programme that naturalised hierarchy, enabled service and sacrifice and erased violence. Given allusions to kinship in IR abound, we may be served well by interrogating what normative programmes and affective architectures these evocations of family and love more typically conceal. For institutions like the League, and its successor, the United Nations, the commonly evoked trope of ‘family of nations’ obscures the imperial and hegemonic anxieties that birthed an international order (Mazower, 2009). In relation to a liberal internationalist imaginary predicated on these communitarian logics, the harmony of interests emerges as a myth that obscures material hierarchies, presumes violence and manufactures consent. All of this is rendered possible by the pretext that love is apolitical. Love, it would seem, is most potently political when it ‘pretends’ to be least so. An engagement with Zimmern’s Hegelian evocations reveals how anodyne, apolitical love serves to naturalise a hierarchical community – or empire – that his liberal internationalism presupposes, conceals the complex interplay of affects and relations that animate it and renders both invisible and ordinary the violence it entails. In the next ideal-typical frame, the violence that sustains orders is neither erased nor eschewed but rather embraced as an inevitable part of politics. In fact, love serves to legitimate it.

Love ‘legitimates’ coercion

Love ‘legitimates’ by conferring value and operating as an action-guiding ideal (Velleman, 1999). Whether understood as a desire or a relation, love confers value on a subject or object rendering it desirable; a good; an end-in-itself. Similarly, owing to the importance afforded to love in both religious and humanist thought (Jeanrond, 2010; May, 2012), love assumes the status of a standard of judgement, or an action-guiding ideal. In sum, it can be co-opted as a framing rule ‘to ascribe definitions or meanings to situations’ (Hochschild, 1979: 566). Love ‘legitimates’ coercion, then, in part, because to love a subject or object is to effectively deem it worthy of defence, and in part, because the sacred status afforded to love serves to sanctify what is done in its name. History is littered with examples of killing and saving, punishing and enforcing, avenging and defending and rebelling and revolting in the name of love. In this section, I argue that Augustinian logics of sacrificial or self-giving love – agape or caritas – serve as an ideal-typical expression of how love ‘legitimates’ coercion. In disciplinary IR, they are exemplified in the work of Reinhold Niebuhr and his writings in the lead-up to the US involvement in the Second World War. A close engagement with Niebuhr’s international thought highlights how Augustinian logics shape a realist and just war imaginary and demonstrates how love and violence can be co-implicated rather than counterposed.

Augustine understood humans to be constituted and ‘moved’ by their loves, which he understood to be kind of appetite or craving. Whether a love is fundamentally ‘good’ or ‘bad’, in Augustinian thought, hinges on the orientation or direction of the craving. For Augustine, there are two orientations of love: the enjoyment of something for its own sake (frui) and the use of something as a means (uti). Stated simply, God was an end to be enjoyed, the world was a means to be used. Augustine’s Two Cities, then, were created by two modes of loving. Self-serving love or cupiditas finds expression in self-interest, pride or superbia and constitutes the City of Man. Sacrificial love or caritas – epitomised in the self-giving love of Christ on his Cross – finds expression in disinterested concern for the Other and constitutes the City of God. These two Cities co-mingle not simply because the inhabitants of both Cities dwell together on earth – in the saeculum – but also because each person is divided by inclinations of self-love and sacrificial love. Traversing the saeculum well requires our loves to be rightly ordered. Rightly ordered love ‘legitimates. As Augustine proclaimed in his sermon on the First Letter of John: ‘love and do what you will’.

Augustine’s thought enjoyed a resurgence in the 20th century. His influence extended to realists and just war thinkers, such as Paul Ramsey, Herbert Butterfield and Jean Bethke Elshtain, on the one hand, and continental philosophers and existentialists, such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and Albert Camus, on the other. Within disciplinary IR, however, his most prominent proselytiser was Reinhold Niebuhr.

Reinhold Niebuhr was foundational to the emergence of IR theory (Lynch, 2020). Born in 1892 in Missouri, United States, to German immigrant parents, this Yale-educated theologian served as a pastor, a professor, a public intellectual and a political commentator. Once deemed the most important figure in American realism, he remains one of the most prominent North American public theologians of the 20th century (Epp, 1991). So vast was Niebuhr’s influence, that George Kennan is remembered to have proclaimed him ‘the father of us all’ (Thompson, 2009). Perhaps Niebuhr’s renown simply bears testament to a public figure who spoke his mind and changed it often. As Gary Dorrien (2010: 47) reminds us, Niebuhr was a leading advocate of pacifist social gospel liberalism in the 1920s, a militant socialist in the 1930s, a leader of the Democratic Party’s ‘Vital Center’ establishment in the 1940s, a critic of the ideological hijacking of communism in the 1950s and of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. There was, then, a Niebuhr, for ‘all reasons’ (Elie, 2007). These shifting positions, however, were anchored to an Augustinian theology of love. Niebuhr acknowledged this when he claimed that Augustine ‘was a more reliable guide than any known thinker’ (Niebuhr, 1986: 140–141). Niebuhr’s own distinct articulation of realism, his disavowal of (his earlier) pacifism and his revival and critique of the just war tradition attest to this.

In Niebuhr’s political theology, love legitimated coercion. This belief was predicated on an Augustinian understanding of the right relationship between love, justice, order and coercion. Echoing Augustine, Niebuhr claimed ‘love must take the place as the final norm’ (Niebuhr, 1986: 140) and serve as ‘the end term of any system of morals’ (Niebuhr, 1996a: 295). Rather than sanction sentimentalism, it entailed the exercise of contextual judgements in a world constituted by both self-love and sacrificial love. Niebuhr believed that Christ on his Cross was agape exemplified. He revealed love’s limits and possibilities in politics (Niebuhr, 1996b). In sum, the sacrificial love of Christ recommended no limits to universalism (Niebuhr, 1996a). It enunciated agape as the ideal. However, to the extent that agape appeared in history ‘only to be Crucified’ (Niebuhr, 1996a: 147), it pointed to the limits of sacrificial love in a world characterised by the presence of ‘power and the persistence of self-love’ (Niebuhr, 1986: 131). The contrast between these two loves not only brought into focus ‘the false pretensions of virtue’ (Niebuhr, 1996b: 89), but it also highlighted the risks of recommending sacrificial love as a political virtue in the saeculum. Making sacrifice a political virtue in this world, Niebuhr claimed, irresponsibly impacted the vulnerable, recklessly prescribing for violence to be borne by those who did not consent to it (Niebuhr, 1967). Instead, he opted for another norm for politics – agape’s earthly approximation – justice.

Justice, unlike agape, was not a disinterested norm. It admitted the claims of the self, arbitrating ‘not merely between the self and the other; but between claims upon the self by various “others”’ (Niebuhr, 1967: 28). Reconciled to human finitude and a fallen world, it entailed adjudicating between difficult, often tragic choices in the interests of a life in common. The possibility of justice, however, was predicated upon order (Niebuhr, 1967).

Order, which Niebuhr (and his Augustine) uses interchangeably for (earthly) peace refers to the point where the interests of the Two Cities coalesced. An end-in-itself of the City of Man, and a temporal necessity for the pilgrims of the City of God, order formed the precondition of cohabiting the world together. However, to the extent that the world was necessarily populated by ‘tensions, frictions, competitions of interest and overt conflicts’ (Niebuhr, 1986: 127), and humans had a propensity for self-interest, order necessitated coercion. ⁷

Coercion, in Niebuhr’s thought, could be violent or non-violent. Because coercion curtailed liberty and could impact life or property, Niebuhr claimed any differences between violence and non-violence were extrinsic (Davis and Good, 1960). A necessity for the world of politics, coercion was essential for order and justice but ought not to be mistaken for agape. In the Heavenly City where agape reigned, justice, order and coercion would be redundant (Niebuhr, 1967). Nevertheless, in this world, agape retained value and meaning. This is because as a normative ideal, it served as a motivation for action, a form of judgement: a source of creativity, and a leaven for justice, order and coercion. Without agape, the entire Augustinian edifice crumbles, and justice, order and coercion engage in their own self-defeat. Simply, agape rendered coercion and the order it sought to sustain a moral pursuit.

Rather than remain in the realm of theological abstraction, these logics animated Niebuhr’s distinct contribution to 20th-century realism. Niebuhr’s realism is often – ahistorically and uncreatively – conflated with Christian realism when, in reality, it informed, inspired and transformed the premises of many of his 20th-century interlocutors. Some of these interlocutors such as Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight were indeed Christian, while others such as Hans Morgenthau and E.H. Carr were not. In fact, as the bands of ‘atheists for Niebuhr’ would attest – prior to the behaviourist revolution of the 1960s – Niebuhr effectively secularised theological concepts. ⁸ At the heart of Niebuhr’s contribution to what is variously termed ‘Augustinian realism’ (Epp, 1991) or ‘righteous realism’ (Rosenthal, 1991) – often distinguished from ‘Weberian realism’ (Epp, 1991) and ‘weltpolitik realism’ (Specter, 2022) – is a certain construal of moral realism.

An Augustinian logic of agape forms Niebuhr’s moral realism in four ways. First, the elevation of agape as ideal served in secular terms to make space for the utopian – as motivation, judgement, inspiration and leaven – to transform the real. E.H. Carr – who happened to cite Niebuhr more than any other thinker except Karl Mannheim in The Twenty Years’ Crisis – conveys this message in secular form: ‘Utopia and reality are . . . the two facets of political science. Sound political thought and sound political life will be found only where both have their place’ (Carr, 2001: 10). Second, a recognition of the limits of agape in history, dictated that a faith in the political promise of agape ought to be tempered by a recognition of the power and pervasiveness of self-love. The egoistic, however, is not an ethic to be exalted, but a reality to be reckoned with. Failing to realise this, for Niebuhr, leads to nihilism (Niebuhr, 1986). Third, to the extent that agape or sacrificial love stood in contrast to eros or self-serving love, Niebuhr reminds us of the false pretensions of virtue. His recommendation that we commit to epistemic humility and a spirit of self-interrogation and critique while remaining constantly attuned to the ironic finds secular expression in what Michael Williams (2005) terms ‘a politics of limits’. Fourth, and finally, Niebuhr’s understanding of love as soteriological imbues his realism with a certain optimism: an acceptance of human frailty, a belief in forgiveness and a yearning for redemption. Albeit a hard sentiment to secularise, it is best exemplified as hope. As Niebuhr put it, ‘despair is the fate of the realists who know something about sin, but nothing about redemption’ (Niebuhr, 1967: 296). In sum, Niebuhr’s theology of love supplied realism with a frame that resonated with secular, humanist audiences. Moral and quasi-cosmopolitan in character, it was sensitive to human frailty and cognisant of the workings of power. Yet to the extent that a pessimistic theology of love legitimated and governed coercion, it concealed an ideological quality.

At the heart of Niebuhr’s contribution to the just war tradition was his acceptance of the inevitability of coercion and his offering of a logic of love to legitimate it. Niebuhr occupies an ambiguous place in the now flourishing tradition of just war. However, as James Turner Johnson (1981) acknowledged, Niebuhr stood ‘at the beginning’ of the tradition’s recovery in the United States and indeed global politics. Whatever their differences in opinion, it is a testament to Niebuhr’s contribution that leading theorists of just war such as Paul Ramsey and Jean Bethke Elshtain consider themselves in his debt. It is difficult to overstate Niebuhr’s contribution to this chapter of just war history or indeed love’s role in the logics of legitimate coercion which now seem commonplace. Indeed, when Niebuhr moved from pacifism to advocating US involvement in the Second World War, he equipped the United States with a moral rhetoric that facilitated the transition from isolationism to intervention. An Augustinian theology of love animated this transition. Effectively, Niebuhr mobilised Augustine – the Christian saint best known for pitting himself against the pacifist impulse in Christianity (Morkevičius, 2018) – to reconceive responsibility. Consequently, he transmuted the logic that was proselytised by popular pacifists like Leo Tolstoy (1987) – from the turn of the 20th century – that the ‘law of love’ was antithetical to the ‘law of violence’. Partially agreeing with Tolstoy, Niebuhr argued that agape was not concomitant with violence, or for that matter, coercion, order or justice (Niebuhr, 2013). However, contra Tolstoy, he argued that a perfectionist ethic could not be sustained if one chose to remain part of an imperfect world.

Niebuhr (Davis and Good, 1960: 77) claimed that ‘a responsible relationship to the political order . . . makes an unqualified disavowal of violence impossible’. To be clear, Niebuhr admired the perfectionist ethic of non-resistance to evil and thought it consistent with ascetism and what he deemed its apt eschewal of the world of politics. However, to choose to partake of the world and benefit from its systemic privileges – material or otherwise – while renouncing violence constituted, for him, an incoherent, inconsistent and irresponsible stance (Childress, 1974). This is because it amounted to a failure to understand human nature or the lessons of history. One failed to understand human nature when he embraced the idolatrous and erroneous possibility of human perfectibility (Niebuhr, 1986: 105). Similarly, one failed to heed the lessons of history when she failed to recognise that she was already implicated in structural violence by virtue of being the beneficiary of any system – be it capitalism or racism – that was predicated upon (the possibility of) coercion. To embrace ‘self-abnegation’ in pursuit of non-resistance to evil at an individual level was a noble sacrifice. However, to pursue a public policy of non-resistance to evil in an unequal, unjust, interconnected world was plainly responsible. More so, it was tantamount to the ‘covert violence’ of privileging the powerful over the disinherited. This privileging of tyranny over war negated justice’s first demand that ‘life should be prevented from exploiting, enslaving, or taking advantage of all other life’ (Niebuhr, 1967: 282). What pacifism in its pursuit of purity failed to conceive was that the world of politics, was always and already, a world of coercion. Traversing this world, required taking responsibility – for our implication in the causes of coercion, on the one hand, and the need to redress it, on the other. For Niebuhr, and his Augustine, this entailed a willingness to use force. As Valerie Morkevičius (2018) notes, Augustine understood love to legitimate this form of political action in the saeculum for two reasons: to punish and protect. Niebuhr, assuming a more restrained stance than Augustine, largely emphasised a responsibility to protect. In so doing, he recast – or rather retrieved – love less as an ideal of non-violence and more as an ethic or framing rule that necessitated the responsibility to resort to coercion, or wield violence, in the service of order and justice.

The Augustinian logics of love that animated Niebuhr’s international thought also formed the basis of his critique of the just war tradition. Niebuhr, then, was very much of the just war tradition but not in it. His critique, itself, hinged on two premises: the tradition mistook legalism as an antidote to injustice and narrowly construed coercion (see, Carlson, 2008; Mcceogh, 1997).

Niebuhr’s critique of legalism turned in large part on his understanding that it emanated from the Catholic natural law tradition, which failed to understand the noetic effects of self-love, on the one hand, and the creative possibilities of sacrificial love, on the other. The noetic effects of self-love were contained, for instance, in epistemic arrogance or the failure to detect in universalistic knowledge claims the basis for the ‘imperial desire for domination over life which did not conform to it’ (Niebuhr, 1996a: 198). Letting legalism masquerade as justice, masked the possibility – to evoke Ken Booth (2000) – that ‘just war was just war’. An optimist at heart, Niebuhr saw the creative possibilities of agape serve as a corrective to this. Understanding that love was ‘not just another law, but a law which transcends all law’ (Niebuhr, 1986: 106), allowed love as it were to sanction action or restraint. ⁹ It sanctioned action to the extent that the recognition of the moral ambiguity of all action in a fallen world allowed no limits to what love could legitimate. It sanctioned restraint to the extent that love served as a form of ‘indiscriminate criticism’ upon all forms of political action. This evocation of love’s legitimating logics served as a double-edged sword. He did not repudiate but simply expressed ‘sorrow over the necessity’ of the Dresden bombings (Niebuhr, 1967: 222), on the one hand, and denounced the war in Vietnam as imperialist, on the other. And yet, this pendulum which oscillated between action and restraint was entirely consonant with an Augustinianism that saw the just war tradition less as entailing criteria to conform with and more as a normative space of judgement (Paipais, 2021).

If Niebuhr’s theology of love led him to admonish the just war tradition for conflating legalism with justice, it also served to expose the tradition’s conception of war as wanting. As previously noted, Niebuhr understood coercion to encompass and transcend the practice of war. Rightly ordered love, for him, prioritised coercion over tyranny, justice over peace. In theory, this offered a framework for both the legitimation of revolutionary violence and non-violent resistance. In practice, Niebuhr mobilised his theology of love to critique isolationism and certain forms of pacifism. In his later years, he was also increasingly committed to gradualism. Nonetheless, his critique equipped the civil rights movement, and its leaders like Martin Luther King Jr., with a moral rhetoric of non-violent resistance (Hartnett, 2020, 2021). In the space he created – but did not always inhabit – Niebuhr drew attention to the ways in which the just war tradition failed to conceive of the creative possibilities of coercion mobilised by other entities and in service of other ends. In so doing, he foreshadowed contemporary critiques of the tradition (Hartnett et al., 2022) and its complicity in the perpetuation of statist, capitalist, imperialist and racialised violence.

To enter Niebuhr’s name in a Google n-gram search reveals an ascendancy in popularity in the periods coinciding with the US involvement in major wars – the Second World War, Korean War, Vietnam War and 2003 Iraq War. That Niebuhr is evoked– often by both sides of these debates – at these moments bears testament to the significance of his thought on legitimate coercion. The question remains whether Niebuhr simply supplies a realist and just war imaginary with a moral veneer for power politics. As Niebuhr’s critics remind us, his political theology is predicated on several sleights of hand which conceal a gendered, militarist rationality. For example, he takes for granted that we inhabit a ‘perpetual state of war’ and that there is no intrinsic difference between violence and non-violence (Childress, 1974). While this logic may legitimate revolutionary violence, it is also dismissive of the diversity which inheres in pacifism. Effectively excising pacifism from its place in the just war tradition, this move serves to weaken – whatever Niebuhr’s intention – the last-resort norm. This rendering of militarism as ordinary and inevitable further betrays a gendered logic. This is because – despite Niebuhr’s stated commitment to contextualist judgements – it exalts the abstraction and autonomy contained in the Augustinian dictum ‘love and do what you will’. The absence of objectively defined limits on what coercion love will legitimate reflects a – long-standing Augustinian – disregard for the horrors war inflicts on human bodies that pervades traditional just war theorising (Peach, 1994). It also fails to contemplate ‘who should practice self-sacrificial love, to whom, and in what context’ as well as how this love impacts those in different power relations (Pae, 2012). Ultimately, however, Niebuhr’s acceptance of the inescapability of coercion and elision of relationality and embodiment derives from a theology that is pessimistic about love’s possibilities (Gentry, 2018). If love is not a transformative relation, but a norm to be autonomously operationalised, it is always, ultimately – and even in Niebuhr’s estimation – vulnerable to the dictates of power. In the next ideal-typical frame, this conclusion is foregone: love and power are intrinsically bound.

Love ‘(dis)empowers’

The claim that the polysemous, polyvalent phenomena of love and power are co-implicated has manifold implications for how we understand and explain international order. Focussing on three commonplace conceptions of love as eros, philia and agape, alone, reveals how a conception of love and power as intrinsically bound effectively renders them explananas (that which explains) and explanandum (those which are explained) in analyses of order. Indeed, when cast as eros or yearning, an amalgam of love and power move a subject or subjects to engage in the work of order. Understood as philia or friendship, love constitutes power-with relations or a holding of power-in-concert. In its Christian rendering of agape or self-giving love, love entails the act of renouncing power in a bid to either eschew power altogether or inhabit it anew. In this section, I claim that Nietzschean logics of love serve as an ideal-typical expression of how love can ‘(dis)empower’ in IR. Nietzschean logics of love are significant for two reasons. First, they offer a thoroughgoing critique of the self-giving or sacrificial love exalted, for example in Hegelian and Augustinian logics. Second, they transvalue the love of self as a normative end. In disciplinary IR, these Nietzschean logics of love as ‘(dis)empowering’ are evident in Hans Morgenthau’s mature thought on power. Not only does an engagement with the Nietzschean logics of love in Morgenthau’s thought lend fresh insights into his incipient existential ethic for a nuclear age, but it also serves to shed light on the affective-normative dynamics of domination and empowerment in international orders.

At the heart of Nietzschean logics of love is the revolutionary reversal of the traditional understanding of the relationship between morality and love of self. ¹⁰ Nietzsche achieved this via a ‘transvaluation of values’. In part, this project was critical and took aim at Christianity and its ‘religion of love’ (which was subsequently secularised in humanist thought). In a flight from reality or in a desire to impose meaning upon it, Nietzsche claimed in Beyond Good and Evil that Christianity ‘gave Eros poison to drink . . . turning it into vice’ (Nietzsche, 1962: 168). In so doing, Christianity gave expression to a ‘will to nothingness’ which really is a hatred of self, life and the world that masquerades as love. In part, however, Nietzsche’s project is a constructive one. Contained in his affirmation of life detailed in Ecce Homo, he endorsed ‘amor fati’ or a love of fate (Nietzsche, 1962). This love of fate finds its highest expression in the doctrine of eternal recurrence which wills everything to repeat indefinitely without alteration. This affirmation is not tantamount to acceptance, however. Embracing the world as it is, Nietzsche explicates a ‘will to power’. This ‘will to power’ is both an existential drive that gives rise to a desire to dominate and also the basis of ethical agency. A love of self that understands and masters rather than eschews and conceals this drive forms the basis of ethical autonomy and the basis of a new morality.

Nietzsche, rather like Hegel, fell into disrepute in the mid-20th century owing largely to his (mis)appropriation by the Third Reich. Nonetheless, his influence on the psychoanalytic and post-structural traditions was far-ranging and extended from Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung to Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. Within disciplinary IR, he shaped the thought of arguably one of its best-known figures, Hans Joachim Morgenthau.

Celebrated as a ‘founding father’ of IR (Hoffman, 1987) and post-war realism (Lebow, 2009), Morgenthau was born in 1904 in Coburg, Germany, to a German-Jewish family. He emigrated to the United States via Switzerland in 1937 in the wake of Hitler’s rise to power. His Politics Among Nations (1948) was an instant success. Reissued seven times (twice posthumously), it is one of the most widely taught texts in foreign policy and IR in his time and ours. Morgenthau’s influence, rather like Zimmern and Niebuhr’s, was not confined to the academy. He was a regular at the Council of Foreign Relations, a key participant in the 1954 Rockefeller Conference on Theory, an active member of the Institute of Policy Studies in Washington, DC, and a friend of influential politicians and policymakers (Guilhot, 2011; Specter, 2022). Perhaps owing to the contradictions and obfuscations in his political writings, his commitment (like Niebuhr’s) to contextual judgements or some combination of both, Morgenthau remains a bitterly contested figure. Debates ensue over whether he is, in fact, the ‘Pope of Realism’ (Hoffman, 1987) or an ‘uneasy Realist’ (Scheuermann, 2009), a vociferous defender of the ‘national interest’ (Donnelly, 2000) or a visionary of the world state (Craig, 2007). For all these contestations, one constant remains: Morgenthau was foremost a theorist of power, and his theorising of power forms the cornerstone of his contribution to disciplinary IR. In fact, the ‘concept of interest defined as power’, for him, etched politics out as an autonomous sphere enabling the very possibility of a theory of international politics (Lebow, 2009). As Morgenthau came to claim himself, understanding and explaining the dynamics of international order required some recognition of how love and power were intrinsically bound.

Morgenthau (1984) acknowledged his debt to Nietzsche’s thought in his formative years in his fragment of an intellectual biography. ¹¹ In his biography of Morgenthau, Christoph Frei (2001) argues Morgenthau was more comfortable proclaiming this influence in his mature years when he had acclimated to life as an immigrant in the United States. While there is some debate about whether Morgenthau ought to be properly read as a Schmittian (Specter, 2022), Weberian (Barkawi, 1998) or Freudian (Schuett, 2007), the fact remains that one can detect Nietzschean logics in the work of these three very distinct theorists. These Nietzschean logics of love are perhaps most pronounced in Morgenthau’s (1962a) Commentary essay ‘Love and Power’. Although some deemed the essay an inexplicable aberration, as others have noted, it offers important insights into Morgenthau’s understanding of love, power and their interrelation (Mollov, 1998; Molloy, 2009; Solomon, 2012). Further, as the numerous references to love and emotion in Morgenthau’s Scientific Man Versus Power Politics (1946) or Politics Among Nations (1948) will attest, this was hardly Morgenthau’s first foray into commenting upon the relevance of love and emotion to IR. Taking the Nietzschean logics of love in Morgenthau’s thought seriously, then, promises to shed light on at least three facets of his international thought. First, it offers insight into Morgenthau’s understanding of love and power as foundational political concepts. Second, it reveals what explanatory power Morgenthau deemed eros – self-interested love – to have in the work of order. Third, if we read Morgenthau as providing not simply a descriptive but also a prescriptive account of eros’ ordering work, then, it reveals how the aphorism ‘love (dis)empowers’ extols his ethic for a nuclear age.

In claiming love and power are intrinsically bound and integral to understanding international politics, Morgenthau complicates the conception of love and power as inherently contradictory. Articulating Nietzschean logics, he advocates an understanding of love as eros – acquisitive, and sharing the same existential root as power. Morgenthau (1962a), therefore, notes that although love and power are often cast as antonyms – love is pleasurable; power is painful, love seeks; power imposes, love discovers, power creates, love surrenders; power controls, love is mutual; power is unilateral – both are ultimately ‘psychological relationships’ which derive from the ‘quality of human existence: . . . loneliness’. For Morgenthau (1962a), in ‘existential loneliness man’s insufficiency manifests himself’. Realising he ‘cannot become what he is destined to be, by his own effort, in isolation from other beings’, drives his ‘search of love and power’ (Morgenthau, 1962a). If love leads one in a quest for wholeness to seek – to evoke Aristophanes in The Symposium – the ‘other half’ of one’s soul, power leads the imposition of one’s will; the domination of another. Animated by the same impulse, both love and power always contain an element of each other, are pre-ordained to end in frustration and are ever at risk of becoming the other. As Morgenthau (1962a) puts it,

Power points toward love as its fulfilment, as love starts from power and is always threatened with corruption by it. Power, in its ultimate consummation, is the same as love, albeit love is corrupted by an irreducible residue of power. Love, in its ultimate corruption, is the same as power, albeit power is redeemed by an irreducible residue of love.

Stated simply, eros in its quest for wholeness contains the dual possibility of coercive and collective action. It is coercive – or to draw on Barnett and Duvall’s (2005) formulation is a form of compulsory power – when an agent controls another’s actions and circumstances. It is collective and the antithesis of coercion – to draw on an Arendtian (1979) formulation – when agents act in concert. The will to have power-over and the will to have power-with, then, are intimately linked; variations on a theme; expressions of the same impulse, and emanate from eros. Evocative of Nietzsche and the ancients he drew upon, Morgenthau therefore underscores eros can create and destroy; dominate and empower.

Morgenthau’s conception of eros offers insight into his understanding of the affective-normative dynamics of order. In a variation on Zimmern’s understanding of familial love as constitutive of community, Morgenthau’s conception of eros animates the very quest for community. In fulfilling the ontological security needs of a subject (Solomon, 2012), eros, for Morgenthau, further generates the consent which sustains that community. In sum, eros is integral to political stability. As Morgenthau told his students in 1952: ‘no political society can exist for any length of time in any harmonious and stable way which does not take into consideration both the desire for power and the desire for love’ (Cited in Mollov, 1998: 98). Given Morgenthau’s understanding of eros as creative and destructive, it can birth a diverse array of orders and power dynamics: violent and peaceful, autocratic and democratic and everything in-between (Falkiner, 2015). The fickle nature of eros which Morgenthau conveys when he describes ‘the lust for power, as . . . the twin of despairing love’ explains these dynamics. Whereas power based on domination (macht/pouvoir) is brittle, incomplete and tenuous, power that is sustained by love (kraft/puissance) promises longevity. ¹² This is because rule – and by extension, ideas, ideals and institutions – is sustained not by coercion but ‘spontaneous consent’ (Morgenthau, 1962a). Given this fickle, fragile composition of eros, it follows that the maintenance of order requires the statesperson – the key agent in Morgenthau’s politics – to assume a Haltung; ¹³ a posture ever-responsive to the existential dynamics of eros. This underscores that Morgenthau understood the problem of order as entailing an acceptance of the eternal, insuperable quality of eros. It also betrays his conservative distrust of the masses. ¹⁴ Together, it results in Morgenthau’s rejection of ideologies that understand order otherwise – whether this is Marxism and its hope that in a classless society ‘the domination of man will be replaced by the administration of things’ or liberalism and its dream that power will ‘be superseded by the institutions and practices of liberal democracy’ (Morgenthau, 1962a).

An engagement with Morgenthau’s thought on love and power as co-implicated in the production and sustenance of order foregrounds Morgenthau’s conception of normative power in his ethic for a nuclear age. Although Morgenthau is rightly understood as conceiving of politics as tragic (Lebow, 2009), this disposition does not accurately describe his thought from the 1960s. As Alison McQueen (2017) adumbrates, the threat of the thermonuclear war in the 1960s led to a dramatic transformation of Morgenthau’s thought. Morgenthau (1961) admits as much in his essay, Death in a Nuclear Age: ‘It is obvious that the nuclear age has radically changed man’s relations to nature and to his fellow men’ . . . It has also ‘changed man’s relations to himself’. This realisation culminates in Morgenthau’s embrace of an apocalyptic imaginary and calls ‘to constantly imagine that apocalypse in order to prevent it’ (McQueen, 2017: 148). Ever-imagining nuclear apocalypse simultaneously renders nuclear war ‘absurd’ and a quest for transcendence irresponsible (Morgenthau, 1961). More so, it recommends the urgency of a world state; the monopoly of organised violence (Morgenthau, 1948; Also, Craig, 2007; McQueen, 2017; Scheuermann, 2011). Ever attuned to the forces which animate against this – and betraying, once again, his pessimistic anthropology and perception of the masses, Morgenthau (1948: 402) lamented

in no period of modern history was civilization in more need of permanent peace, and hence, of a world state, and that in no period of modern history were the moral, social, and political conditions of the world less favourable for the establishment of a world state.

Consequently, he calls for a world community. Rather than represent a dissonance in Morgenthau’s thought, this call for a community grows out of Morgenthau’s constructive vision of eros as a form of normative power. As Morgenthau (1962b) argued, ‘(t)o say that a political action has no moral purpose is absurd’ because ‘political action can be defined as an attempt to realize moral values through the medium of politics, that is, power’ (p. 110). Foregrounding a constructive vision of eros as normative power, Morgenthau claims we cannot preserve the world in a nuclear age without an ethic of love. This love constitutes both our ethical disposition towards the world – whether understood as Nietzsche’s amor fati (love of fate) or Arendt’s amor mundi (love of the world) – and animates our will-to-act-in-concert to preserve it.

Centring love in Morgenthau’s conception of power reveals something of its inescapably normative dimension; its dual implication in the dynamics of domination and empowerment. In its quest for wholeness, eros can animate coercive or collective; power-over or power-with dynamics. Yet, love’s political promise remains at best forestalled in Morgenthau’s international thought. A pessimistic anthropology that finds expression in a distrust of the masses, on the one hand, and an elitist theory of democracy, on the other, prevents the possibility of people and power from being imagined otherwise. Ultimately, this impacts Morgenthau’s ethic for a nuclear age. Rather like Zimmern’s attempt to articulate an anti-racist imperial-internationalism or Niebuhr’s attempt to offer a moral framework for coercion, Morgenthau’s vision of love served to shore up the status quo.

Making love; making order

This engagement with love’s logics and uses in disciplinary IR illuminates how a study of love’s work is integral to understanding and explaining the affective-normative dynamics of order. It makes three offerings to the literature on emotions and order.

First, it demonstrates how love orders. Love orders by supplying meaning or purpose to the international. Despite deriving its meaning-in-use, love’s capacity to order stems from its unique and long-held status – in religious and humanist thought – as a moral emotion. Put differently, despite any contestations surrounding what love is or ought to be or do in global politics, it nonetheless performs normative ordering work. This is because it forms part of the ‘normative complex’ (Phillips, 2010) evoked to constitute community, legitimate coercion and (dis)empower. Stated simply, it offers the affective glue that binds groups, frames feelings to enable and constrain action and is integral to the workings of power. While there may be conceptual utility to understanding each of these uses in isolation, in reality, the boundaries between them are far from clear-cut. For instance, the complex interplay of love and power in the form of yearning or eros animates the quest to constitute community. Similarly, the precepts of love evoked to constitute community are often the same precepts evoked to legitimate coercion. These blurred lines between constitution, legitimation and empowerment underscore love’s constitutive work and productive power.

Second, via an engagement with intellectual history, the article underscores how love in its plurality and polyvalence has long animated disparate visions of international order. To this end, it identifies how three uses of love to constitute community, legitimate coercion and (dis)empower are exemplified in three ideal-typical – namely Hegelian, Augustinian and Nietzschean – logics that already permeate IR theorising. An engagement with these logics matters because they play a pivotal role in constructing – and therefore understanding and explaining – the framing rules and feeling rules (Hochschild, 1979) integral to imaginaries of order. These rules comprise the affective apparatus that constitute and sustain orders. To offer a stark illustration, the practice of sacrificial love which reframes moral responsibility to entail killing is enabled by an Augustinian logic that dictates legitimate coercion be accompanied by the feeling of love and contrition. Understanding the affective dynamics of order, and the particular normative vision of order that an evocation of love enfolds, then, requires identifying and explicating these underlying logics and their concomitant conceptions of love.

Third, in offering an exposition of the interplay between love’s uses and logics in disciplinary IR, this article highlights how love has often served as a mask for power. Although Zimmern, Niebuhr and Morgenthau ostensibly evoke love’s creative potential to conceive, in turn, a post-racial multi-agency polity (Baji, 2016), a moral framework for navigating the necessity of coercion and an existential ethic for a nuclear age, their efforts were ultimately undermined by their commitment to the status quo. Perhaps, this was a product of their subject positions as white men proximate to power. ¹⁵ Perhaps, this was a product of their abstract, disembodied conceptions of love which remained hospitable, whatever their intent, to the hierarchies of race, gender and class. Regardless, it bore witness to love’s potential to conserve: to bind, placate and limit harm and disruption but for in service of a hierarchical order.

If this historical engagement with disciplinary IR tells us something about how love is easily co-opted as a sentimental, quasi-cosmopolitan discourse in the service of the violent ordering work of empire, war and domination, love’s plurality and polyvalence serve as an invitation to imagine and enact order otherwise.