Beyond Just War: Realism, Republicanism, and the Politics of Patriotic Dissent

Abstract

In 2001, when I first embarked on the study from which this book emerged, I had as a primary ambition to revisit the American classical realists as venues through which to deal with the ethico-political challenges of the present. While raised on the post-structural exposures of moral discourse as potential systems of discipline and repression, and convinced of the relevance of this exposure for pursuing justice in human relations, I was unsatisfied with the sterility of the deconstructive perspective, not least its tendency to reduce human beings to players in the game of language, and human conflict to a struggle over signs and significance. Classical realism I found, particularly the kind of realism that grew out of the Christian humanist tradition, offered a framework equally attentive to the delusions of power, but much richer in its understanding of sources and dilemmas. Moreover, I was unhappy with what I found to be the detachment of deconstructive ethics (what Zygmunt Bauman has called the postmodern ethos of “self-dismantling”), particularly its reduction of moral imagination to the negative activity of divulging hidden assumptions beneath the moral visions of others (Bauman 1993: 2).KeywordsForeign PolicyMoral IdealMoral ImaginationBush AdministrationRealist StrategyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.