A Hegelian realist constructivist account of war, identity, and state formation

MacKay, Joseph; Levin, Jamie

doi:10.1057/jird.2015.24

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…By locating the foundations of liberal rights inside a community, he leverages a liberal order out of a communitarian one'. 111 Perhaps the most impressive attempt to assess Hegel in relation to international political thought is Kim Hutchings' treatment of his work in her book International Political Theory. A careful interpreter of Hegel, Hutchings skilfully reveals the limitations of previous readings such as those of Brown and Frost while highlighting the potential of Hegel's phenomenological approach for re-founding the bases for conducting research in the ethics of international politics.…”

Section: The Normalization Of Hegel In International Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reception, context and canonicity: The demonization, normalization and eventual proliferation of G. W. F. Hegel in international relations

Molloy

2022

Leiden Journal of International Law

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G. W. F. Hegel is one of the most significant philosophers in history yet the reception afforded to him in International Relations (IR) does not compare with his peers, most notably Immanuel Kant. Although by no means absent from IR he cannot be described as a canonical figure. Given his stature in philosophy this comparatively minor interest in Hegel prompts investigation into his failure to enter the pantheon of ‘Great Thinkers’ in IR. The critical-historical investigation of Hegel’s reception in IR undertaken in this article reveals that Hegel, unlike Kant, was cast as an intellectual villain – a blood-soaked Priest of Moloch, whose demonic ideology of state-worship led to the slaughter of the First World War, the rise of the Nazis, and the catastrophe of the Second World War. Condemned by an array of leading intellectuals from John Dewey to Karl Popper, Hegel was side-lined and erased until his work was reconsidered by revisionist scholarship in philosophy and – eventually – in International Relations. From the 1980s, a number of hotly contested, decidedly uncanonical ‘Hegels’ have found expression in IR, from a ‘realist’ Hegel to a postcolonial Hegel. Ultimately, the article argues that the treatment of Hegel reveals that the formation of the IR canons was not an innocent, dispassionate process but rather was imbricated in the great ideological and military conflicts of modernity.

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Section: The Normalization Of Hegel In International Relationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Reception, context and canonicity: The demonization, normalization and eventual proliferation of G. W. F. Hegel in international relations

Molloy

2022

Leiden Journal of International Law

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“…This article focuses on the former. The main debate in IR concerns Hegel’s relation to realism and constructivism: Hegel as realist (Vincent 1983; Williams 1997; Jaeger 2002; Brooks 2004, 2013, 133–47); as constructivist (Epstein, Lindemann and Sending 2018; Gkoutzioulis 2019); and as “realist constructivist” (Mackay and Levin 2018). Constructivists primarily find in Hegel conceptions of recognition (Ringmar 1995; Buchwalter 2013; Parfitt 2016, 585–92; Lindemann 2018; Epstein 2018; Zarakol 2018) and state personhood (Wendt 2003, 504, 511–12; 2004, 311; Jackson 2004).…”

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Hegel, History, Hostility: The Persistence of War in Hegel’s Political Philosophy

Clarkson

2023

Political Research Quarterly

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The return of war in Europe has renewed the urgency of understanding war’s role in the interstate system. Although many theorists take a progressive view in which war is withering away, others argue war remains a recurrent feature of political life. This article contributes to theoretical debates about war’s ongoing significance by systematically reconstructing Hegel’s theory of war and its relevance for understanding war’s persistence. Historically, Hegel thinks war has taken increasingly rational forms over time, though, contrary to optimistic interpretations, this points to enmity’s distillation rather than its elimination. Causally, Hegel suggests war occurs because the lack of a power above states capable of adjudicating conflicting rights and the consequent struggle to enforce one’s formally valid claims against those who could substantively deny them. Ethically, Hegel holds war is a necessary evil which, abstractly, ought to end. However, since war teaches citizens that their good is tied to the good of the community as a whole, thereby restraining civil society’s encroachments on the political, Hegel denies the end of war would be an absolute ethical good. By systematically reconstructing Hegel’s views on war, this article sheds new light on war’s role in the system of European states.

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“… 49 We emphasize Hegel’s theory of history. On his substantive reasoning regarding world politics, see MacKay and Levin (2015b). …”

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confidence: 99%

The conduct of history in International Relations: rethinking philosophy of history in IR theory

MacKay

LaRoche

2017

Int. Theory

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IR scholars have made increasingly sophisticated use of historical analysis in the last two decades. To do so, they have appealed to theories or philosophies of history, tacitly or explicitly. However, the plurality of approaches to these theories has gone largely unsystematized. Nor have their implications been compared. Such historical-theoretic orientations concern the 'problem of history': the theoretical question of how to make the facts of the past coherently intelligible. We aim to make these assumptions explicit, and to contrast them systematically. In so doing, we show theories of history are necessary: IR-theoretic research unavoidably has tacit or overt historical-theoretic commitments. We locate the field's current historical commitments in a typology, along two axes. Theories of history may be either familiar to the observer or unfamiliar. They may also be linear, having a long-term trajectory, nonlinear, lacking such directionality, or multilinear, proceeding along multiple trajectories. This comparative exercise both excavates the field's sometimes-obscured commitments and shows some IR theorists unexpectedly share commitments, while others unexpectedly do not. We argue that better awareness of historical-theoretic reasoning, embedded in all IR uses and invocations of history, may encourage the discipline become more genuinely plural.

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A Hegelian realist constructivist account of war, identity, and state formation

Cited by 5 publications

References 60 publications

Reception, context and canonicity: The demonization, normalization and eventual proliferation of G. W. F. Hegel in international relations

Reception, context and canonicity: The demonization, normalization and eventual proliferation of G. W. F. Hegel in international relations

Hegel, History, Hostility: The Persistence of War in Hegel’s Political Philosophy

The conduct of history in International Relations: rethinking philosophy of history in IR theory

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