Cosmopolitan political thought and human rights discourse fall squarely within Geuss’s rubric of modern ethics: their central organising question is ‘What ought we to do?’, and the
corresponding answer is restricted by its dependence on an instrumental rationality that utilises ‘useful knowledge’ to solve problems of poverty and repression. They are also characterised by an unyielding immanency and a reluctance to look beyond that which can observed, measured, and predicted. Thus the solutions proffered are legal, technical solutions that are profoundly limited and distract attention from the human aspects of suffering. The human rights regime relies on international legislation that abstracts from particularity and enshrines protection for the
47 individual in law. However, for those who are struggling to survive, the existence of legal rights means little; they have no means of accessing these rights and the international community’s obsession with collating records of violations and administering justice overlooks those who suffer the most.86 Furthermore, the human rights regime’s rules-based nature and its abstraction from real-life suffering distracts from actual political situations and focuses attention away from a historical understanding of the present in an attempt to forge a better future. Cosmopolitan political theorists also propose technical solutions with which to alleviate global poverty, including an extension of a Rawlsian difference principle internationally, the adoption of a type of Tobin tax, and donations to charity. All these overlook the sociohistorical and political dimensions of poverty, proposing technical economic solutions to a much more complex and multifaceted problem.
The normative turn in International Relations was, in part, a reply to the perceived inability of political realism to offer ‘useful’ knowledge with which to address global suffering. However, in basing their approaches to human suffering upon a foundation of moral progress, liberal
cosmopolitanism and human rights neglect two of the central ideas of political realism: the notion of tragedy and the inability to escape the logic of the political. A classical realist account of politics is not bereft of normative content as is often assumed, for example, in Beitz’s first essay in PTIR, where he rejects Hobbesian moral scepticism. However, unlike normative approaches to International Relations, a classical realist account rejects the notion of moral learning, maintaining that normative approaches are not sufficiently sensitive to the tragedy and
86 Although, as noted earlier, the human rights movement has also been appropriated by grassroots movements to fight for legal and political change (Jabri, ‘Solidarity and Spheres of Culture’, p. 719).
48 fragility of life and humanity. Thinkers such as Hans Morgenthau perceive liberal thought as naively discounting the messiness of politics, replacing it with an overly optimistic moralism and legalism that disguises the realities of life. He does not discount their aims, but vehemently disagrees with their tidy, abstract approach to politics. In Rengger’s words:
[L]iberals, he believed, had to see the reality of their predicament squarely and that, fundamentally, meant confronting the tragic in all its forms: the ‘tragic sense of life, the tragic presence of evil, the tragic antinomies of human existence’ and so on and so on. This does not mean that there is no sense of the good in politics, but rather ‘there is no progress toward the good, noticeable from year to year, but undecided conflict which sees today good, tomorrow evil prevail’.87
In this sense, Morgenthau’s critique is similar to that of the early Frankfurt School,88 who also perceive moral progress as fragile and reversible; thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Adorno were famously hostile to the notion of progressive historicism.89 Adorno maintained that a strong belief in moral learning was problematic in that it encouraged a discounting of those aspects of life not congruent with that belief. This is certainly borne out with regard to the human rights regime in contemporary politics: the perception of a consensus on human rights
87 Nicholas Rengger, ‘Tragedy or Skepticism?’, p. 324.
88 See Scheuerman, ‘Realism and the Left’, for an exposition of the influence of the Left on the development of Morgenthau’s thought. He spent his early career in Frankfurt, working closely with the great socialist barrister, Hugo Sinzheimer. During those years, he was influenced both by his work in chambers, working for social reform, and by the left-wing intellectual milieu of the city. Scheuerman argues that too little has been made of the common intellectual roots of Morgenthau’s classical realism and the Frankfurt School of critical theory and that recent moves to highlight the critical potential of realism are not as unexpected a shift as they might initially appear. See, for example, Richard K. Ashley, ‘The Poverty of Neorealism’, International Organization, Vol. 38, No. 2 (1984), pp. 225-286, for a discussion of the critical potential of classical realism. See also William E. Scheuerman, ‘A Theoretical Missed Opportunity? Hans J. Morgenthau as Critical Realist?’ in Duncan Bell (ed.), Tragedy, Power, and Justice: Variations on a Realist Theme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); Brent J. Steele, ‘Eavesdropping on Honoured Ghosts: From Classical to Reflexive Realism’, Journal of International Relations and Development, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2007), pp. 272-300; and Michael C. Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
49 amongst the international community and the knowledge that ‘something is being done’
encourages complacency when complacency has no place.
The normative turn also has a tendency to discount the pervasiveness of the political, positing a world in which morality and law govern and where liberal democracies have the right to
intervene on behalf of the powerless in the name of human rights. Here, again, classical realism offers a warning: Schmitt argues that the idea that wars can be fought under the banner of humanity is a delusion; they cannot escape the logic of the political. They often mask self- interest with moral intent— ‘the concept of humanity is an especially useful ideological instrument of imperialist expansion’—and they inevitably require the dehumanisation of the enemy—‘denying the enemy the quality of being human and declaring him to be an outlaw of humanity’.90 Thus, universal categories are wielded on the behalf of some, to the denigration of others. Although I do not advocate a realist perception of world politics, in which self-
preservation is the organising motive and the state is reified, the warning that the realm of world politics cannot be tamed and controlled by the exercise of rationality is prescient.91
I argue that we need an approach to violence and suffering in world politics that goes beyond the mainstream problem-solving approach, which abstracts from and obscures rather than exposes unpleasant reality. Such an approach would recognize the fragility of moral progress and look beyond rational, problem-solving solutions to human suffering. It would take historical and
90 Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, p. 54.
91 For a critique of realist anti-cosmopolitanism, see Devetak, ‘Between Kant and Pufendorf’. Devetak argues the a
priori decision that humanitarian intervention is wrong is in itself a normative judgement, and that this shuts down the political by taking away the exercise of judgement in the moment of decision.
50 cultural factors into account and look beyond the immediate physical and legal ramifications of suffering in order to promote the broader cultural and psychological healing needed to support sustained physical health.
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