This Article Full Text (PDF) Alert me when this article is cited Alert me if a correction is posted Services Email this article to a friend Similar articles in this journal Alert me to new issues of the journal Add to Saved Citations Download to citation manager Request Permissions Request Reprints Add to My Marked Citations Citing Articles Citing Articles via Google Scholar Citing Articles via Scopus Google Scholar Articles by Brown, C. Search for Related Content Social Bookmarking                         What's this?

Tragedy, ‘Tragic Choices’ and Contemporary International Political Theory

London School of Economics

The essence of the tragic vision of the world is that human action sometimes, perhaps often, involves a choice between two radically incompatible but equally undesirable outcomes: that whatever we do in a given situation we will be, from one perspective, acting wrongly. This account of the human condition may be particularly germane to realist thought, but the absence of a sense of the tragic can be employed to critique many other areas of international political theory. Analytical political theory in general rejects the tragic vision, and a great deal of modern writing on humanitarian intervention and global distributive justice similarly refuses to accept that sometimes there are no unambiguously right answers; that to act is, necessarily, to do wrong. The unwillingness to admit the tragic dimension of human existence is not simply intellectually harmful but also politically debilitating.

Key Words: global justice • intervention • tragedy • tragic choices

International Relations, Vol. 21, No. 1, 5-13 (2007)
DOI: 10.1177/0047117807073764


CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter    What's this?