In this long and wide-ranging book, Richard Ned Lebow delivers a valuable contribution to the study of international relations and international history. He takes positions on deep questions of social and political theory, charts a long overview of world history and its intellectual context, and massively expands the conceptual foundations of IR theory. His is a response to the generalizing claims of IR realists, the ahistorical economism of IR rationalism, and preference for cognitive rather than emotional content in constructivism. For all of that, his book does not argue against “science” as a method nor does it avoid generalization, and it strives to explain a large-scale understanding of the nature of human and social life and to derive from it a theory of international relations. It is an excellent book, serving many purposes: It is a model for how one might draw on philosophic texts to illuminate international relations; it gives a comprehensive alternative view of world politics to all of those focused on interstate relations and the anarchy problematique; and it identifies one way to “bring emotions back in” to IR. Along the way, it invests itself in many fights and takes on many antagonists, and is therefore sure to elicit much controversy and many rejoinders.

The starting point of the book is a conceptualization of human affairs that puts at the front of things the emotions (or motives) of “appetite,” “spirit,” “reason,” and “fear.” Emotion is a productive new theme in IR theory, and it is treated very differently by different scholars, including Jonathan Mercer and Andrew A. G. Ross. Lebow suggests that these emotions motivate human action and produce its patterns, complexities, and contradictions. For instance, behind the leadership failures that led to World War I lie the pursuit of self-esteem and honor (i.e., spirit) of the individual leaders. Similarly, the differences among the international societies of ancient Greece, medieval Europe, and the twentieth century reflect differences concerning how the societies value and prioritize spirit, appetite, and reason (and, consequently, the place of “fear” in the political life of the society). The book runs along tracks defined by these terms: Lebow says that “[r]eason combined with positive affect in the form of affection builds empathy”; “reason divorced from emotional commitments … can intensify conflict and prevent the emergence of … communities that enable actors to … satisfy their spirit” (p. 514); fear “comes to the fore in proportion to reason's loss of control over spirit and appetite” (p. 113); spirit is the drive for self-esteem, measured according to the prevailing metrics of honors in the society (p. 61). The descriptions and definitions of these motives and emotions are drawn from the writings of ancient Greece, and the book makes an enormous contribution in its long and satisfying discussion of the relevance of these resources for thinking about world politics today.

Having constructed this “framework” with emotions at its center, Lebow turns to extruding it into the shapes and patterns recognizable as international politics. It is this move that presents the book's greatest challenge. Social orders vary based on which of spirit, reason, or appetite is privileged, or in what combination the three are inscribed in society. There are, therefore, several ideal types of (international) order, according to the author, and each has characteristic features: Where reason dominates spirit and appetite, these latter two are constrained and the result is a kind of reign of “self-restraint,” which, he says, is relatively stable and productive; appetite-based worlds tend toward rapacity and selfishness, and these, he says, include the typical models of liberalism, realism, and Marxism; spirit-based societies center on the pursuit of honor, which is by nature hierarchical and competitive, and these are unstable and tend to collapse inward from spiraling, costly competitions for status within the elite.

The scientific ambitions of the book are worth noting, for they contradict some people's assumption that IR informed by humanism and history must refuse to play by the rules of “science.” In talking about the range of combinations of the basic emotions, Lebow maintains that “[b]y identifying roughly where societies reside within [the mixture of motives,] we can infer important things about their politics, including the basis and degree of cooperation, the nature of conflict and the frequency of violence or war, and actors' propensity for risk-taking. With a large number of cases we could determine the distribution of societies across time and cultures to see if certain mixtures of motives were more common and stable than other configurations” (pp. 510–11). Lebow is confident that transhistorical generalizations can make sense, and that there is an underlying sense to be read out of history. The accomplishment of the book is in part that it provides a novel set of generalizations on which to focus, and it suggests that the standard paradigms of IR theory have so far given us but a very narrow slice of a much broader universe of possibilities.

There is much to argue with in the book. Among other issues, why these emotions or motives and not others? What is gained by finding that leaders' relationship to status and honor were important motivations in launching both world wars of the twentieth century if we assume from the start that the need for honor is a universal human drive? In a conceptualization where human emotions are the key forces, what are these things we call “states”? Do they even exist? But even asking these questions is testament to the success of the book: It provokes a rethinking of international relations along entirely new lines, lines about which we will want to know more. Lebow revives classical thinking for IR theory, provides a model for thinking about change rather than stability as the natural condition of international relations, and sketches three ideal-type worlds of international order that are completely different from the standard IR models. This is a book worth reading, and one whose impact will endure.