Today I am honored to present a written interview with Professor Alison McQueen, an outstanding commentator on political realism. Her insightful analyses and thoughtful reflections bring clarity and depth to a field that is both complex and profoundly relevant.
AM: Thank you so much for inviting me! It’s a pleasure to get to talk to you about my work.
JM1: What were the main intellectual impulses that led you to dedicate yourself to the field of the history of political thought?
AM1: I came to the history of political thought rather late in graduate school. I’d planned to focus on International Relations (IR), but a longstanding fascination with Machiavelli kept tugging. The more I read, the more I found myself asking the questions historians of political thought ask: Why this argument rather than that one? Was it conventional at the time or a rupture? What was happening that made it persuasive or dangerous? How did contemporaries respond? And how might those answers let us read Machiavelli in a way that better reflects what he took himself to be doing? These are deeply historical questions, but they also unsettle our settled pictures opening paths from the archive to contemporary concerns.
JM2; What are the most influential intellectual sources in shaping your approach to political realism? Could you share some of your favorite works within this tradition, particularly those you consider essential for understanding the central issues of power, morality, and political order?
AM2: When I began the dissertation that became Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, political theory and philosophy were rediscovering “realism.” To someone trained in IR, it often looked like an attempt to reinvent the wheel—only with more footnotes and slightly squarer edges. Realist voices in IR, especially the mid-twentieth-century “classical realists,” had already developed normatively rich positions worth recovering while also being candid about realism’s limits.
For instance, E.H. Carr famously worries that the realist who punctures moral pretension “falls easily into a determinism…[where] theory…is a pure excrescence and impotent to alter the course of events” (The Twenty Years’ Crisis).
Hans J. Morgenthau thought Carr had slid into just this trap. In his review of The Twenty Years’ Crisis, he calls Carr a “utopian of power” whose theory risks treating the powerful as “the repository of superior morality,” and faults him for lacking a “transcendent point of view” from which to appraise power something he suggests Carr shares with “political romantics” like Adam Müller and Carl Schmitt. Those are strong words.
So, for readers curious about political realism, I always recommend starting with Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis and Morgenthau’s Scientific Man vs. Power Politics before moving to Bernard Williams’s In the Beginning Was the Deed and its contemporary offshoots. Classical realists valued the realist sensibility and were remarkably clear-eyed about where it can go wrong.
Questions on Political Realism:
JM3: What exactly constitutes political realism as an intellectual tradition? Thucydides is often regarded as one of its earliest major exponents. However, Thucydides himself, in his account of the Peloponnesian War, observed how the concept of logos transformed over time. Given that political concepts are historically contingent and subject to interpretative reformulations, how can we outline a coherent conception of political realism throughout history without falling into anachronisms, while also respecting the conceptual transformations inherent to each era?
AM3: I treat realism as a tradition bound by family resemblances rather than a fixed doctrine. Across periods, realists typically: (i) treat politics as a distinctive realm; (ii) assume conflict and disagreement are ineradicable; (iii) give qualified priority to order and stability as preconditions for other goods; and (iv) worry about utopian or moralizing schemes that wish away limits.
Methodologically, appeals to a continuous tradition “from Thucydides onward” need rethinking so we don’t violate contextualist scruples. In my article “Political Realism and the Realist Tradition,” I propose a discovery-oriented and recognition-based approach: use “tradition” as an analytic tool to discover recurring realist moves across languages and crises; and treat “membership” as the recurring recognition, by self-described realists, that certain arguments are realist.
This preserves the classificatory value of “tradition” while honoring conceptual change (including Thucydides’ shifting logos) and reducing selection bias—say, reading him only through the Melian Dialogue, as if it were the entire album rather than one unforgettable track.
JM4: What are the criteria for defining substantive political commitments? If political realism rejects such commitments and is grounded in historical contingency, in what sense can the construction of a realist tradition be justified without falling into the reification it critiques in other approaches?
AM4: By “substantive commitments,” I mean action-guiding stances about which institutions to build, which values get lexical priority, and how power and obligations should be distributed—liberal, socialist, republican blueprints, for instance. I don’t treat political realism as one more blueprint (some realists will disagree). I treat it as a family of constraints on judgment that discipline such projects: respect the distinctiveness of the political, take conflict and fragility seriously, and be sober about feasibility—often granting order a qualified priority.
This distinction does two things. First, it explains why realists can reject certain prescriptions (those that ignore conflict, feasibility, or institutional fragility) while still partnering with many others once they accept realist constraints. Second, it addresses the reification worry: we can talk about a realist “tradition” if we treat it as a context-sensitive map of arguments, not a timeless creed.
Two methodological guardrails help: (1) discovery over boundary-policing—use the tradition to find recurring realist moves rather than fix a canon in advance; (2) contextual vigilance be explicit about selection and confirmation biases and resist imposing false coherence on historically situated texts.
Questions About Political Realism In Apocalyptic Times:
JM5: Professor Alison McQueen, in a nutshell, could you explain what political realism in apocalyptic times, as discussed in your 2018 book, entails?
AM5: The book asks how three paradigmatic realists Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans J. Morgenthau confront hopes and fears about the end of the world. I trace two recurrent strategies: rejection (a tragic stance that resists redemptive “final solutions”) and redirection (fighting apocalypse with apocalypse harnessing its imagery to prevent catastrophe). The result is an ambivalent realism that neither scorns apocalypticism nor embraces it, and that teaches, as I put it, “the art of living through catastrophe without apocalyptically surrendering to it.” Not exactly cheery but far better than the alternative.
JM6: What are the most significant influences of Paul and Augustine on the central thinkers in your book, namely Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Morgenthau?
AM6: Paul and Augustine offer three durable resources: (i) an anthropology of conflict (sin persists and breeds faction); (ii) a political ethic that prizes order (hence obedience to rulers); and (iii) techniques for containing apocalyptic enthusiasm deferring dates, denying human plots of time, domesticating Revelation so it can’t license immediate upheaval. Paul’s pastoral interventions around Thessalonian disorder and the injunction to be “subject to the governing authorities” (Romans 13:1) become touchstones; Augustine radicalizes both moves, treating events like the sack of Rome as tragic but non-apocalyptic and insisting that God’s chronology defeats human date-setting.
Machiavelli’s Prince culminates in an apocalyptic exhortation that tries to give contingency a redemptive plot. His Discourses on Livy later resist that impulse and embrace a tragic sensibility wary of redemptive finales rhyming with Augustine’s refusal to read catastrophe as a cosmic turning-point.
Hobbes’s scriptural arguments interpret away apocalyptic enthusiasms to safeguard civil peace. Along the way, he echoes Paul’s warnings against trying to anticipate the apocalypse, arguing that it will come as a “thief in the night” (1 Thessalonians 5:2; Leviathan 44.18).
Influenced by the “Christian realist” Reinhold Niebuhr, Morgenthau inherits Paul’s account of the persistence of sin and Augustine’s diagnosis of conflict resources he uses to defend a dark anthropology and a persistent prioritization of political order.
In short, Paul and Augustine supply strategies and sensibilities, not ready-made doctrines: discipline apocalyptic longings, privilege order under ineradicable conflict, and when necessary redeploy apocalyptic rhetoric to defend rather than dissolve political authority.
JM7: What were the apocalyptic circumstances in which Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Morgenthau formulated their political reflections, and in what ways do their insights continue to resonate with the pressing challenges of our time?
AM7:
Machiavelli wrote amid Florentine prophetic politics (symbolized most strongly by Savonarola and his movement) and the Italian Wars. The Prince ends with an apocalyptic exhortation that he later comes to resist in the Discourses, where a tragic sensibility prevails.
Hobbes confronted an English Civil War saturated in apocalyptic prophecy on both sides. Rather than merely condemn it, he redirects apocalyptic imagery both scripturally and through a secular “state of nature” apocalypse to secure obedience to sovereign power.
Morgenthau wrestled with secularized apocalyptic imaginaries: Nazism, the Holocaust, and nuclear annihilation. He also resisted eschatological liberal crusades by turning toward a tragic worldview, then later using apocalyptic rhetoric to cultivate a salutary fear of nuclear war.
Our circumstances differ, but the lessons travel: beware purification and finality; be skeptical of redemptive wars; and learn to reason under duress without fantasizing an end to politics.
JM8: Given that the Hobbesian state of nature can be understood both as a historical metaphor and as a thought experiment particularly in C.B. Macpherson’s reading to justify the necessity of a unitary state to what extent does your approach to apocalypticism incorporate Hobbesian logic of order and sovereignty as a response to chaos and political dissolution?
AM8: I argue that Hobbes repurposes the apocalyptic plot: the terror of the state of nature functions as a secular apocalypse and the narrative prelude to our submission to a “mortal God.” The logic of order and sovereignty against dissolution is central and rhetorically potent, though normatively perilous.
We can recognize this without sharing Hobbes’s enthusiasm for absolutism. The more interesting historical question is why Hobbes became convinced that only a unified, unlimited, unconditional state could solve the problem. As my Stanford colleagues Barry Weingast and Josiah Ober suggest, look at the models available: the Italian republics (divided power) hadn’t fared well; the Glorious Revolution and constitutional monarchy were still in the future; the American constitutional experiment didn’t yet exist. In the late 1640s, it wasn’t unreasonable to conclude that only an absolute sovereign could prevent a return to the carnage Hobbes had just witnessed.
JM9:: To what extent can fear be conceived as a useful tool, or more specifically, as a rational and effective response to climate change? Furthermore, how might critiques associating this approach with the concept of ‘civic fear’ in Aristotle’s philosophy suggest that such a strategy carries potential antidemocratic risks?
AM9: I gesture to these themes at the end of the book and pursue them in “The Wages of Fear? Toward Fearing Well About Climate Change.” Fear can be rational and effective when it focuses attention on genuine danger while preserving agency and deliberation. The “information-deficit” model more facts hasn’t reliably shifted priorities; well-crafted fear appeals can supply the missing motivational spark. The key is pairing salience with efficacy: communicate severity and proximity, then immediately show that effective responses exist and are within people’s power (“response efficacy” and “self-efficacy”). Raise threat without efficacy and you get resignation; pair them and you get protective action.
Climate makes efficacy especially hard. Action hinges on collective and institutional levers (law, regulation, international cooperation), so ordinary citizens mostly act indirectly via politics. People must judge not only “Can I do something?” but “Will institutions respond?”—a high informational and motivational bar. And there’s some evidence that vivid, even apocalyptic, messaging can heighten perceived threat while lowering perceived efficacy especially for non-decision-makers—thereby encouraging disengagement.
Aristotle’s “civic fear” helps model fearing well about a common threat: “bring distant dangers near” so citizens attend to hard-to-perceive risks, but make them “inclined to deliberation,” turning attention toward how to avert harm. Practically: (1) make risks legible and near with evidence and visible signs; (2) open, rather than foreclose, argument about means; (3) tailor messages to the complacent and the resigned so neither audience is written off.
What about the antidemocratic worry? Fear can be abused to suspend rights, stifle dissent, and centralize power. The remedy is both normative and institutional: tie fear appeals to transparent evidence, present plural policy routes rather than a single salvific program, and embed them in forums that keep contestation open. Hard work, not magic but faithful to the ambivalent realism I defend: guard against resignation and zeal alike, and keep fear answerable to reason and collective choice.
Final Questions:
JM10: Given the current geopolitical landscape marked by ongoing wars such as those between Israel and Hamas, Ukraine and Russia, rising tensions in the Global South, and the intensifying economic rivalry between powers like China and the United States do you think political realism has regained intellectual and strategic prominence in international relations? In your view, has it overshadowed the liberal aspirations for a universal peace that shaped early 20th-century projects like Woodrow Wilson’s vision for a League of Nations, as well as the more optimistic post-Cold War hopes that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union? In short, following the theme of this conversation, what is the relevance of Political Realism in the Modern World?
AM10: Periods of shattered optimism reliably revive realist sensibilities. That’s different from a revival of realism as an IR paradigm: in the United States especially, academic IR is now more problem-driven than paradigm-driven a healthy development. Whether realist strategic thinking has resurged in policy circles is harder to say. And while Wilsonian hopes and 1990s post-Cold-War optimism now look quaint, I wouldn’t blame realism. Our current troubles have many causes, including failures to redistribute gains from globalization and the resulting appeal of authoritarian populism.
Realism still has something to offer: not cynicism, but a disciplined politics of limits take conflict seriously, prize order as a precondition, and beware apocalyptic temptations (including our own). If there’s a single line of relevance: political realism teaches how to act in unwelcome worlds without promising an end to politics an ethic of sustaining order, reducing harm, trudging slowly toward justice, and resisting redemptive finales.
JM11: To conclude, Professor Alison McQueen, would you be willing to share with our readers some insights into your current research interests or any projects in progress that you are particularly excited about?
AM 11: I’m finishing a book on Hobbes’s weird and wonderful religious arguments. Absolving God argues that we can’t understand his political theory without his evolving scriptural project: he wrote Leviathan to “absolve” divine law of legitimating rebellion and, across Elements of Law, De Cive, and Leviathan, he expands, reorients, and complicates that project. I trace three shifts more space for scripture; a strategic turn to the Old Testament (especially Exodus and the Mosaic polity); and a move from simple philosophical “confirmation” to a multi-pronged rhetoric for multiple audiences each keyed to changing religious–political discourses. In the end, I make the case for Hobbes not just as philosopher but as a deeply strategic polemicist responding to—and redirecting—the biblical politics of his day.
I’ve also begun a project on treason in the history of political thought, centered on the 1649 trial of Charles I. In trying their king, Parliament’s prosecutors glimpsed a very modern possibility: a leader can betray the state. Without saying too much about the present, I’ll only note that their intuition remains uncomfortably relevant.