What is the appropriate response to those who think the apocalypse is nigh? In Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, Alison McQueen explores how some of the greatest thinkers in the realist tradition—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—grappled with this question. The principal argument of the book is that all three thinkers “respond to apocalypticism in ways that are far more complex than an easy and reflexive opposition” (p. 13). While Machiavelli and early Morgenthau endorsed a tragic worldview that rejects apocalypticism, Hobbes and late Morgenthau redirected the rhetoric and imagery of apocalyptic thinking to develop “an approach that fights apocalypse with apocalypse” (p. 14 and passim, emphasis in the original). There are strengths and weaknesses to both strategies, McQueen argues, but in a world overshadowed by potential cataclysmic events such as nuclear war and climate change, revisiting earlier engagements with apocalyptic thought can help us to find our bearings when reflecting on the crises that confront us today.
One of the chief accomplishments of the book is to reveal the prominence of what McQueen calls the “apocalyptic imaginary” (drawing on Charles Taylor’s work on social imaginaries) in the history of Western thought. She uncovers the Judeo-Christian origins of apocalypticism in the biblical books of Daniel and Revelations before focusing on the responses of Saints Paul and Augustine, the “two foundational figures of a Christian strand of political realism” (p. 23). McQueen carefully distills and conceptualizes the apocalyptic imaginary from this encounter, which appeals not only to a vision of the imminent end of the world as we now know it but also to a promise of redemption that gives meaning to both the past and future. Its origins may be sacred, yet apocalypticism still has the power to captivate the secular imagination today.
The chapters on Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Morgenthau follow a common structure. In each case, McQueen offers a rich contextualization of the apocalyptic moments each thinker confronted, before charting the different strategies they deployed to neutralize or redirect the apocalyptic imaginary. In doing so, she shows that all three thinkers were not as straightforwardly “realist” as might be expected. Machiavelli flirted with utopianism and apocalypticism in the final chapter of The Prince, and even the later realism of the Discourses did not give up completely on some “hope for a world without politics” (p. 104). In attempting to fight apocalypse with apocalypse, Hobbes was led to endorse the utopian hope of transforming human nature by reorienting our passions to secure peace. The secular apocalyptic imagery of the state of nature aims to displace the religious imagery that led many of his contemporaries to sedition, for only with our fears appropriately rechanneled could the conflict between civil and religious allegiances ever be overcome. Similarly, by the 1960s, Morgenthau appealed to the utopian hope that fear of a nuclear devastation could unite humankind in developing a world government capable of ensuring international peace. His strategy thus took the form of “a self-defeating prophecy” (p. 187), which aimed to depict the apocalypse so vividly that his readers would be moved to prevent it from ever transpiring.
In the conclusion, McQueen turns more directly to evaluating the different strategies for responding to apocalyptic thought and considers their contemporary relevance. Indeed, she maintains that studying Machiavelli’s, Hobbes’s, and Morgenthau’s “encounters with apocalypticism give us an instruction ‘in the art of living through an age of catastrophe’ that is as relevant today, as it was in the unique circumstances of their own respective times” (p. 192). This chapter is admirably balanced in its assessment of both the “rejection” and “redirection” strategies canvassed throughout the book, and McQueen seems more concerned with sketching out precisely what is at stake in deciding how to respond to the apocalyptic rhetoric of our own time than with advocating any given response. Nonetheless, she does suggest that global climate change and nuclear war are cases where adopting the strategy of apocalyptic redirection—exemplified by Hobbes and late Morgenthau—could be morally appropriate.
This is a book of many virtues. The central chapters combine the intellectual historian’s deep sensitivity to context with the political theorist’s sharp eye for conceptualizing different theoretical positions that can then be abstracted from their particular historical origins. Indeed, it is rare to read a book that combines these attributes so successfully and that answers potential objections to such an approach less by abstract methodological discussion and more by handling the texts with the care, detail, and circumspection they deserve. McQueen has produced an erudite, thought-provoking, and enjoyable study, which challenges us to reconsider familiar passages from canonical texts (e.g., the final chapter of The Prince) while enriching our understanding of other texts’ understudied depths (e.g., the last two books of Leviathan).
The main place where I found myself disagreeing with McQueen regards the contemporary implications of her study, and I thus conclude with a couple of critical reflections. One worry is that although I agree that there is much to learn from revisiting some of the great thinkers in the realist tradition, we should also be careful not to assume that they exhausted the theoretical possibilities of the positions they are taken to represent. For example, McQueen claims that the “tragic worldview insists on a cyclical conception of political time” (p. 198.) This may well have been true of Machiavelli and early Morgenthau, but must it be so? We might think that the human condition is characterized by inescapable conflict and disagreement (a tragic worldview) without further holding that all of our problems necessarily have historical precedents (a cyclical worldview). Implicitly, at least, McQueen invites us to choose between cyclical and apocalyptic conceptions of political time when confronting crises today, but perhaps a thoroughgoing realist should be even more skeptical about any attempts to conceptualize political time in ways that impose too much narrative coherence on contemporary politics. Such a (noncyclical) tragic worldview might be even more burdensome than McQueen suggests, but it would allow us to take seriously the radical novelty of crises like global climate change without resorting to the apocalyptic imaginary.
Indeed, without denying the urgency of taking measures to mitigate the effects of climate change, a political realist may still question whether those effects should be portrayed in apocalyptic terms. The concern here is not just down to skepticism regarding the hopes for a postapocalyptic utopia, but also, and more importantly, because the decision to present any potential crisis in apocalyptic terms implies that all of our efforts and energy should be invested in averting it, rather than seeing it as one of many competing problems that deserve our attention. There are difficult questions of political judgment involved here, first among which is whether we do actually live in apocalyptic times or whether recent invocations of apocalypse are disproportionate rhetorical flourishes.
Whatever one makes of McQueen’s own answers to such questions, however, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times remains a deeply impressive study of the ways that some of the finest thinkers in the realist tradition struggled with apocalypticism in their own times, which proves to be a rewarding place to start when thinking through how we might respond to similar problems today.
