For the progenitors of classical realism, whose intellectual maturity dovetailed with the Second World War, the tragedy of international affairs was plain enough. Hans J. Morgenthau, E.H. Carr, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Herbert Butterfield each use the language of tragedy, each to distinct effect. Yet tragedy has hitherto received little systematic attention as a theoretical category in its own right. I argue that the tragic dispositions of Butterfield and his otherwise like-minded near-contemporaries are themselves theoretically load-bearing and that their differences thereof can account for broader theoretical disaffinities between them. I begin with Butterfield, the focus of this review, before drawing him in turn into conversation with Morgenthau, Carr, and Niebuhr. I conclude by mapping a spectrum of opinion, situating Butterfield within an imagined debate of his peers with tragedy as its theme.

In time of war, when all are “in fighting mood,” seldom does one belligerent afford another “imaginative sympathy” (Butterfield, 1950, 147; 150). This, for Butterfield, leaves to later historians the task of reconstructing events as they actually were, a process which replaces a “picture of good men fighting bad” with a “stereoscopic vision of the whole drama” (ibid., 150; 149). This “higher altitude” of historical enquiry reveals a “tragic element” in “the very geometry of human conflict”: War results, not from “special wickedness” on one side or the other, but from misunderstanding between states who authentically incline to peace (ibid., 149; 151; 154). Butterfield’s tragedy is, in this sense, structural and epistemological: “Hobbesian” fear creates such epistemic conditions that peaceable intentions are inevitably obscured and in which even states “anxious” to avoid war are persuaded of its inevitability (ibid., 154; 153). For Butterfield, the tragedy is a “necessary and unavoidable” consequence of “man’s universal sin” (ibid., 160; 155).

“The tragic sense of life,” counters Morgenthau, arises from knowledge that “unresolvable discord” is “inherent in the nature of things” (Morgenthau, 1946, 206). The problems of the social sciences are, so construed, “never solved definitively” but must be taken up “every day anew.” “The problem of world peace,” he notes, “is not closer to solution” than when “first presented […] to the human mind.” Those “human forces” that drive states to war, though occasionally ameliorated by “temporary and precarious” means, recur in history as “new problems […] arise, again threatening peace, requiring similar solutions” (ibid., 215–217). The peace-loving statesperson is “forever condemned to experience the contrast between the longings of his mind and his actual condition as his personal, eminently human tragedy” (ibid., 221). For the “primordial social fact,” for Morgenthau, was “conflict” (ibid., 218).

For Butterfield, the tragedy of international relations is simply that states go to war believing falsehoods. Encountering the other in an atmosphere of Hobbesian fear, a “certain recalcitrancy […] in events as such” drives them to invent conditions for war where none previously existed (Butterfield, 1950, 154). Implicit in this is the suggestion that, were only the intentions of states mutually intelligible, conflict between them might be resolved without resort to war (though, it must be said, Butterfield never credits this as possible (ibid., 161). For Morgenthau, conflict and insecurity are eternal verities of international life, woven into the very nature of humankind’s “spiritual destiny” (Morgenthau, 1946, 221). The modern scholar has, he reminds us, “all the facts concerning war and peace” and is no closer to their solution (ibid., 216). Butterfield, hardly Panglossian, is outdone by Morgenthau in tragic pessimism. Read through Morgenthau’s ontological fatalism, Butterfield’s faith in the peaceful inclinations of states seems strikingly naïve. For, on Morgenthau’s reading, better epistemic access to the intentions of an adversary will make scant difference when a “man is likely to act according to his interests and emotions even [if] his knowledge […] suggests to him a different course” (ibid., 211; emphasis mine).

Though Carr’s realism demands “acceptance of the whole historical process,” he cannot, he writes, find “a resting place in pure realism” alone. For “consistent realism,” though “logically overwhelming,” cannot provide the “springs of action” necessary for a productive political life (Carr, 1946, 91; 89). For this, belief in human agency is required: rejection of which is “scarcely compatible with existence as a human being” (ibid., 92). The realist thus “ends by negating his own postulate and assuming an ultimate reality outside the historical process;” a reality alike “an apocalyptic vision” (ibid., 90). The realist intellectual’s political life is itself fated for tragedy. However, they must destroy, rebuild, and destroy again ad infinitum the “hollow and intolerable sham” of utopia, hoping each time for that which their philosophy precludes. “Here, then,” for Carr, “is the […] the tragedy of all political life”: an “ideal, once it is embodied in an institution, ceases to be an ideal and […] must be destroyed in the name of a new ideal” (ibid., 94).

Carr would recognise Butterfield’s concerns about the “conference method”—the resolution of international conflict through arbitration in multilateral fora. For Butterfield, it promised to change only “the locality and the setting” of the tragedy (Butterfield, 1950, 163). Carr, too, is sceptical that the ideal of multilateral arbitration could endure in institutional form (Carr, 1946, 193–207). His tragic disposition, however, permits a certain ambivalence towards idealism as such. For though he believed exposing “hollow” utopianism to be the “first task of the political thinker,” the exigencies of politics made necessary belief “not only that there is something [we] ought […] do, but that there is something [we] can […] do” (ibid., 89; 93). This “interaction of irreconcilable forces” was, for Carr, the “stuff” and, indeed, the tragedy of “politics” (ibid., 94). Neither Carr nor Butterfield believes a permanent resolution of international conflict is possible. Carr’s tragic aspect, however, holds out hope that one might emerge despite the edicts of his realism. So, while a critique more of attitude than of substance, Carr exposes a lack of political vitality in Butterfield’s vision, of the ironic idealism that, for Carr, is a necessary basis for realist political action.

For Niebuhr, “extending the principle of community” globally was the “most urgent” issue of his time (Niebuhr, 1944, 153). His tragic paradox is that though this is “man’s final necessity and possibility,” it is also “his final impossibility” (ibid., 187). For while he believes that “technical civilisation” is a “powerful impetus” towards “universality,” Niebuhr is too much a Calvinist to put store in the fraternity of nations (ibid., 154; 159). “Christ,” he writes, is the “goodness […] that man ought [to], but does not, achieve in history” (ibid., 188). All the more crucial, then, is politics: not as imagined by “simple universalists” but as practiced by statespersons of tragic, properly “realistic” mind (ibid., 162; 173). They, in the knowledge that the “highest achievements of human life are infected with sinful corruption,” build by tragic struggle an international “order which implicates [a] justice” never realised in this world (ibid., 189; 180).

There is something of Niebuhr in Butterfield’s admonition that states afford their rivals “imaginative sympathy.” “The world community,” for Niebuhr, if built at all, will be done so by nations “humble enough” to abnegate “self, individual, or collective” (ibid., 186). States must learn to see themselves as others do, remembering that viewed externally, “their power might be a peril” (ibid. 180). Butterfield, we have seen, believes that the atmosphere of “terrible fear” existing between states preclude any such common understanding (Butterfield, 1950, 154). Niebuhr, no naïf, nevertheless sees a “concurrence” of “self-interest and the general welfare” that might push states towards accord (Niebuhr, 1944, 186). This, for him, is the work of politics. Butterfield’s tragedy is that politics could never overcome the structural “predicament” that drives states to war (Butterfield, 1950, 150). Niebuhr’s is his tragic hope that “divine power” might “complete what even the highest human striving must leave incomplete” (Niebuhr, 1944, 189). Through Niebuhr, though, we see in Butterfield’s retreat behind epistemological tragedy a nihilistic abdication of political life, of the “striving” that “results in frustration as well as fulfilment,” and the “abyss of cynicism” that was, for Niebuhr, realism’s “harmful” liability (ibid., 173; 186–187).

We have seen a spectrum of opinions emerge, not only on the nature of the tragedy of international politics, but on realism’s proper attitude to it. Butterfield and his peers agree that the life of nations is tragic; however, it is Morgenthau for whom the tragedy is most ontological and, therefore, insuperable. Butterfield, we noted, sees tragedy in structural and epistemological terms. Greater understanding between the nations might therefore ameliorate its force, though of this he is doubtful. Carr is otherwise most aligned with Butterfield, though his tragic disposition compels an ironic embrace of idealism otherwise at odds with realism. Finally, the tragic dictates of Niebuhr’s Christian metaphysics are mitigated by his Weberian belief in politics; Niebuhr most explicitly resists the dire logic of tragedy. In a deeper sense, the debate we have imagined stands in for a broader meta-ethical contest over the normative foundations of realism. Reading Butterfield’s tragedy against his co-idealogues, two conclusive cores of critique emerge: For Morgenthau, Butterfield is unserious about the ontological permeance of conflict. For Carr and Niebuhr, if each for different reasons, his account is insufficient as a basis for political action.

Bibliography

Butterfield, H. (1950). “The Tragic Element in Modern International Conflict.” The Review of Politics 12, no. 2, 147–64.

Carr, E.H. (1945). The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939. London: Macmillan.

Morgenthau, H. J. (1946). Scientific Man vs. Power Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Niebuhr, R. (1944). The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1944

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