rethinking the logic of security: liberal realism and the recovery of american political thought

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It is a misapprehension that liberalism is a source of state weakness because it is centrally concerned with individual liberty. The core prin-ciples of liberalism . . . provide not only a theory of freedom, equality, and the public good, but also a discipline of power—the means of cre-ating power as well as controlling it. . . . Liberal constitutions serve to protect the state itself from capricious, impulsive, or overreaching deci-sions . . . constitutional liberalism imposes a further discipline by dividing power within the state and society, and requiring public disclosure and discussion of state decisions.

—Paul Starr, “War and Liberalism”1

IntroductionIt is often said that security is the dominant logic of our time, and even a cursory glance at today’s political landscape gives credence to the claim. Security seems to pervade modern politics, whether in the high politics of drones, satellites, and national diplomacy, the myriad structures of global governance with their complex modes and models of risk and catastro-phe, or the order of the household, where nanny-cams now watch over the domains of domesticity. The political concerns raised by this pervasive-ness are legion, but among the most significant are its implications for liberalism. Security is necessary for the protection of liberalism, but risks the erosion or destruction of the very values and institutions that it claims

1. Paul Starr, “War and Liberalism: Why Power is Not the Enemy of Freedom,” The New Republic, March 5, 2007, pp. 21–24.

Vibeke Schou Tjalve and Michael C. Williams

Rethinking the Logic of Security: Liberal Realism and the Recovery of

American Political Thought

Telos 170 (Spring 2015): 46–66.doi:10.3817/0315170046www.telospress.com

RETHINKING THE LOGIC OF SECURITY 47

to protect. The language of emergency powers versus rule of law, of trade-offs or elusive balances, and of necessary or foolhardy sacrifices follows.2

So far, so familiar. Yet in contemporary critical thought, this conven-tional notion of liberalism and security as opposites has been dramatically reframed and replaced instead by a narrative of fundamental—indeed, inseparable—affinities. In this view, security is the modern liberal project, and the logics and languages of exceptionalism a consequence of liberal-ism itself. To much of contemporary critical thought—whether driven by Schmitt-inspired declarations of necessary points of decision with their attendant of zones of indeterminacy and exception, or Foucauldian analy-ses of biopolitics and security—liberalism cannot shield or save us from the dangerous temptations of fear: it is itself the very source of fear, the wellspring of modernity’s most destructive and dangerous obsession with security.3

Early versions of this argument emerged with the linguistic turn in social theory, the introduction of the idea of security as a discursive prac-tice, and the intense concern with identity, subjectivity, and self-narration that it evoked in the immediate post–Cold War era.4 As the poles of East and West, socialism and liberalism, that had so long given life and meaning to each other fell away, critical investigations of the inherently “empty” nature of national identity, on the one hand, and the construction of danger or crises, on the other, flourished. Unsurprisingly, the United States—a country self-consciously created by a break with the past and

2. For an overview of these concerns and literatures, see Jef Huysmans, “Minding Exceptions: The Politics of Insecurity and Liberal Democracy,” Contemporary Political Theory 3, no. 3 (2004): 321–41; William Scheuerman, “Review Essay: Emergency Powers and the Rule of Law After 9/11,” Journal of Political Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006): 61–84.

3. For an early and influential version of this argument see Jutta Weldes, Mark Laffey, Hugh Gusterson, and Raymond Duvall, Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999). For a more recent reconfiguration of it, see Jodi Dean, Democracy and Other Neo-Liberal Fantasies: Communicative Capitalism and Left Politics (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2009); Mark Salter, “The Global Visa Regime and the Political Technologies of the International Self: Borders, Bodies and Biopolitics,” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 31, no. 2 (2006): 167–89; Jan-Werner Müller, “Fear and Freedom: On ‘Cold War’ Liberalism,” European Journal of Political Theory 7 (2008): 45–64.

4. For an authoritative introduction to and overview of this literature, see Lene Han-sen, Security as Practice: Discourse Analysis and the Bosnian War (London: Routledge, 2006); and Iver B. Neumann, Uses of the Other: The East in European Identity Formation (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1999).

48 VIBEKE SCHOU TJALVE AND MICHAEL C. WILLIAMS

purportedly lacking substance of its own—stood at the very center of such analyses, a prime example of how the construction and maintenance of national selfhood is ultimately a ceaseless quest for fixity through enmity: a constant temptation—even drive—to stabilize the Self through perpetual production of dangerous Others.5 Liberal America, from this vantage point, appears nothing but a(n inevitably) crusading nation, ceaselessly engaged in that very search for “monsters to destroy” against which its Founding Fathers warned, a kind of Hegelian bad infinity where overcoming one enemy leads only to the search for another. As David Campbell, a lead-ing figure in this type of argument, put it, ignoring the constant need for enmity “would result in death via stasis” for American national identity.6

In the wake of 9/11, the skyrocketing popularity of Carl Schmitt’s analysis of the relationship between liberalism and security has given this basic theme further impetus, as has an increased inspiration from Foucault’s notion of a biopolitical governmentality.7 Standing right at the intersection of this intellectual meeting is Hardt and Negri’s hugely influential Empire (2000), and its analysis of how “the Other that might delimit a modern sovereign Self has become fractured and indistinct” and why there is thus “no longer an outside that can bound the place of sover-eignty. . . . Today, it is increasingly difficult for the ideologues of the United States to name a single unified enemy; instead, there seem to be minor and elusive enemies everywhere.”8 As this more recent critical literature warns us, we now live in the age of neoliberalism, concerned not only with securing the subject (individual or collective), but with a security dispotif

5. For a standard and long dominant version of this argument, see David Campbell, Writing Security: United States Foreign Policy and the Politics of Identity (Manchester: Manchester UP 1992); for another version, as well as an early critique, see Vibeke Schou Pedersen (now Tjalve), “The Liberal American Security Paradox and Republican Way Out,” International Relations 17, no. 2 (2003): 213–32.

6. Campbell, Writing Security, p. 97.7. Important contributions in this vein include Louise Amoore and Marieke de Goede,

eds., Risk and the War on Terror (London: Routledge, 2008); Claudia Aradau and Rens van Munster, “Insuring Terrorism, Assuring Subjects, Ensuring Normality: The Politics of Risk after 9/11,” Alternatives 33, no. 2 (2008): 191–210; Didier Bigo, “Globalized (In)security: The Field and the Ban-opticon,” in Terror, Insecurity and Liberty: Illiberal Practices of Liberal Regimes after 9/11, ed. Didier Bigo and Anastassia Tsoukala (London: Routledge, 2008); Rens Van Munster, “The War on Terrorism: When the Exception Becomes the Rule,” Journal for the Semiotics of War 17 (2004): 141–53.

8. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000), p. 189.


that has life itself as its referent object.9 In an interconnected world, whose flows of risk are literally everywhere, the always pervasive logic of secu-rity has thus exploded, overlaying traditional geopolitical maneuverings with the less overt and yet altogether more pervasive and insidious logic of neoliberal governmentality.10 Clearly, this now dominant critical narrative of neoliberal empire thinks of power in largely despatialized, and hence denationalized, terms. Its main referent, however, generally remains the United States, the world’s leading liberal power, and hence the ideological locus of biopolitical practices. In the words of one proponent of this view, the “primary vulnerable subject today is the United States, whose violence comes from its own biopoliticized self-understanding as an entity whose survival and capacity to care for life globally is at stake in a war with an enemy dedicated to the destruction of life-promoting conditions.”11

In this essay, we want to suggest that a very different America, a very different liberalism, and hence a very different security logic may be identified historically, developed theoretically, and—possibly, poten-tially—cultivated politically. We, too, find a key articulation of the relationship between liberalism and security to lie in the political history of the United States, but unlike most current readings, we believe that history to define a very broad imaginary horizon. It is tempting to say that like so many before them, critical thinkers on security and liberalism have rather uncritically tended to take at face value Louis Hartz’s claim12 that

9. Didier Bigo, “Security, Exception, Ban and Surveillance,” in Theorizing Sur-veillance, ed. David Lyon (Devon: Willan Publishing, 2006); Salter, “The Global Visa Regime.”

10. For a central reference in the biopolitical risk literature, see Patrick O’Malley, Risk, Uncertainty and Government (London: Glasshouse Press, 2004); for an overview and part critique of this literature, see Karen Lund Petersen and Vibeke Schou Tjalve, “(Neo) Republican Security Governance? U.S. Homeland Security and the Politics of Shared Responsibility,” International Political Sociology 7, no. 1 (2013): 1–18.

11. Julian Reid, “The Vulnerable Subject of Liberal War,” South Atlantic Quarterly 110, no. 3 (2011): 777. The solution, he suggests, is a leftist political subject that disavows such vulnerabilities, a “political hubris” whereby “they resist those conditions and at times overcome them and transform them into what they were not, thereby establishing new conditions for life. Hubris is the constitutive power through which political subjects come into existence, amid the fantasy of the possibility of another life, another existence. This is not to deny the illusional quality of fantasy but to underline the claim that illusion is the fundamentally human capacity” (p. 778). The postmodern subject of security, it seems, has witnessed the return of the modern with a vengeance, including its darker potentialities.

12. Louis Hartz, The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1955).


the United States was “blinded by birth” and that it has been simply liberal (and simplemindedly “Lockean”) since its beginnings.13 In response to this flattened discourse, we want to suggest a more multi-dimensional and historically richer account. Messier and less pristine than the “logics” of liberal security surveyed above, this account stresses the protean insta-bilities of liberalism in American political discourse, instabilities that give the politics of security much of its distinctive character and that account to some degree for its specific political dynamics. These dynamics are often dangerous, and recognizing them helps account for some of the most worrisome tendencies in U.S. foreign relations. However, they also contain crucial resources for countering destructive aspects of the politics of security, resources that lie not outside the liberal tradition in America, but within it. Less a rebuttal of recent critical analyses of liberalism and security, our ambition is to explore an alternative legacy and potential that the current critical consensus risks effacing.

We go about this task by tracing the trajectory of an American “skep-tical liberalism”: a perspective present throughout American history, even during the existential struggles surrounding the Civil War, but only explicitly theorized and politically advanced in the mid-twentieth century by such prominent postwar figures as the émigré legal and international affairs scholar Hans J. Morgenthau (1904–80), the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892–1971), and the historian Arthur C. Schlesinger (1917–2007). This period (and this group of thinkers) is generally understood as marking the rise to dominance of liberalism’s implacable intellectual adversary—realism—and the liberal/realist dichotomy has structured much of academic and public political discourse surrounding international politics ever since. In the textbook version of Niebuhr’s and above all Morgenthau’s “realism,” it has almost always been read as the conserva-tive voice of Machiavellian cynicism, obsessed with Hobbesian themes of fear, strife, and interest, and as such tied to the enormous U.S. military buildup during the Cold War.14 By contrast, and in line with more recent lit-erature, we trace a realism fundamentally at odds with classical European

13. For broad and, to our purposes here, very relevant treatments of the legacy of Hartz, see Judith Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought, ed. Stanley Hoffman and Dennis F. Thompson (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1998).

14. Up until ten years ago, this remained the standard image in most textbook pre-sentations of the realist creed: see for instance Ken Booth and Steve Smith, International Relations Today (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Andrew Linklater, The Transformation of International Community (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998); and Thorbjørn Knutsen, A History of International Relations Theory (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1992).


cynicism, opposed to knee-jerk fear-mongering and concerned with the construction of critical mechanisms for national self-reflection and self-restraint.15 This realism, we argue, while fiercely critical of the various sterile, rationalist, and parliamentary forms of liberalism that defined the period, was in fact itself an attempt to delineate and defend a particular kind of liberalism by giving it a new name—realism—to distinguish it from both Wilsonian internationalism and inter-war European liberalism, and fighting on this turf. Although akin in many ways to what is often still disparagingly referred to as Cold War liberalism, this “skeptical liberalism” was not simply about the mobilization of a more muscular (militaristic) defense of liberal values and institutions.16 Its project was much more complex than that, seeking both to mobilize and to restrain. These realists understood that liberalism all too quickly becomes an empty and sterile narrative, dependent on the rhetoric of fear to formulate and integrate the national self. They also understood, however, that liberal political culture can be many things, and that parts of the liberal tradition that were about vibrant political contestation might be turned into vehicles for mobilizing and restraining national will. It was this liberalism—radical, reflexive, and in some ways republican—that they sought to revive, renaming it realism. Undoubtedly, such renaming was a gambit. Yet if we do not want to lose out to the destructive logics of total security, understanding the stakes and odds involved remains of crucial importance.17

15. The literature recontextualizing realism is now extensive, and, while not of one mind, almost all of the recent reinterpretations point in a decidedly more critical and reflexive direction. See, for instance, Oliver Jutersonke, Morgenthau, Law, and Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010); William Scheuerman, Hans J. Morgenthau: Realism and Beyond (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009); Robbie Shilliam, German Thought and International Relations (London: Palgrave, 2009); Vibeke Schou Tjalve, Realist Strategies of Republican Peace: Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and the Politics of Patriotic Dissent (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008); Michael C. Williams, “Why Ideas Matter in International Relations: Hans Morgenthau, Classical Realism, and the Moral Construction of Power Politics,” International Organization 58, no. 4 (2004): 633–65; Williams, Realism Recon-sidered: The Legacy of Hans Morgenthau in International Relations (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2007).

16. And hence not to be confused with the neoconservative invention of “democratic realism” by Charles Krauthammer, “Democratic Realism: An American Foreign Policy for a Unipolar World,” 2004 Irving Kristol Lecture (AEI Annual Dinner, Washington, 2004). A sophisticated call to rethink Cold War liberalism is Müller, “Fear and Freedom”; the term “liberal realism” was used systematically (and, to our knowledge, only) by John Herz, Political Realism and Political Idealism (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1959).

17. For an important effort at reorientation with a number of affinities to our own, see William Scheuerman, The Realist Case for Global Reform (Cambridge: Polity Press,


Realism, Liberalism, and American Political ThoughtRealism is often seen as an implacable adversary of liberalism, and its emergence in the 1930s and 1940s has often been traced to this source. Similarly, it has been portrayed as hostile to American social and politi-cal science, which it saw as little more than a naïve liberal rationalism incapable of even comprehending the challenges it faced, let alone of mas-tering them. To tell the tale of realism as a particular form of liberalism, it is necessary to understand that it was only a very narrow and distinct expression of the liberal creed that it attacked and rejected. What the post-war realists that we want to examine here were hostile to was the facile forms of pluralism, parliamentarism, and liberal theory (and their practical expressions) that they believed were at work in Europe in the 1930s, and which they held at least in part to blame for the collapse of Weimar and the rise of fascism. The lessons taught by figures such as Schmitt were not lost on them.

Whether framed in the legal and sociological language of the German milieu in which thinkers like Morgenthau came of age, or couched in the more theological language of “native” American realists like Niebuhr and Schlesinger, this deep critique of liberalism questioned the ability of the contemporary secular, parliamentary democracies to negotiate questions of meaning—a critique that Morgenthau aired most extensively in The Purpose of American Politics (1960), Niebuhr developed in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1945), and Schlesinger presented in his politically influential The Vital Center (1949). The emergence of mass politics in twentieth-century life, Schlesinger argued in a passage symptomatic of all three of these works,

finds the democratic faith lacking in profounder emotional resources. Democracy has no in-depth defense against the neuroses of industrial-ism. When philosophies of blood and violence arise to take up the slack between democracy’s thin optimism and the bitter agonies of experience, democracy by comparison appears pale and feeble.18

According to this analysis, liberal parliamentary politics was unable to gen-erate collective notions of self or purpose, and thus often reduced liberal

2011). See also Joel Rosenthal, Righteous Realists: Political Realism, Responsible Power and American Culture in the Nuclear Age (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1991).

18. Arthur Schlesinger, The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom (Boston: Hough-ton Mifflin, 1949), p. 246.


political leadership to a vacillating pursuit of whatever interests were able to present themselves as expressing “public opinion” or “national will” at a given moment. In many ways, that analysis looked very much like that of contemporary critical theory: absent a substantial language of identity or meaning, liberal polities must recurrently resort to populism and extremity, forced to rely on heightened declarations of insecurity—of radical dangers and the dire need for grand and global campaigns.19 Dependent on narra-tives of fear or destiny in order to achieve even modest political agendas, liberal polities—the American polity in particular—risked becoming yet another expression and casualty of the destructive relationship between liberalism and security.

If that was all that there were to our story, there would be little to say. Realism, even in its most sophisticated forms, would be little more than varyingly powerful echoes of conservatism, of Schmitt, or perhaps the more militarized legacy of Leo Strauss still claimed by parts of the neoconservative movement.20 But this is not the whole story, or even the most important part of it. Over time and in different ways, this position changed. Although they never retreated from their critique of liberal ratio-nalism, realists began to suspect that their critique of liberal pluralism might have less universal and all-embracing applicability than they had believed. The source of these doubts was America itself, which seemed to demonstrate that the crisis of Weimar was not the inevitable outcome of pluralist politics in the modern age. Indeed, far from succumbing to the malaise of Weimar, or falling prey to dictatorships of the Right or the Left, the United States had emerged from World War II with its pluralist institutions relatively intact and its geopolitical position greatly enhanced. To our postwar realists, that resilience and its indisputable contradiction of all that Schmitt and Strauss had taught contemporary cynics about liberal weaknesses begged one obvious, overarching question: why?21

To answer that question, to account for liberalism’s apparent resil-ience, and, crucially, to respond to its pervasive degradation into decadent,

19. Hans Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest: A Critical Examination of American Foreign Policy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951), p. 235.

20. For one such reading, see Alfons Söllner, “German Conservatism in America: Morgenthau’s Political Realism,” Telos 72 (1987): 161–72.

21. A vital, wide-ranging attempt to answer this question is Ira Katznelson, Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time (New York: Liveright, 2013). See also Michael C. Williams, “Securitization and the Liberalism of Fear,” Security Dialogue 42, nos. 4–5 (2011): 453–63.


weaker, and ultimately perverted expressions, postwar realists of the Morgenthau-Niebuhr-Schlesinger hue began to engage with older tradi-tions of American political thought. In so doing, they presaged what has arguably been one of the most interesting developments in recent intel-lectual history: the redemption of American political thought. Over the past twenty-five years or so, the long-standing (and still surprisingly widespread) conviction that the United States had no tradition of political theory worthy of the name has come under sustained and often wither-ing assault. In the process, American political thought has moved from a reputation as a “poor thing, but our own” in contrast to the “real thing” produced in Europe,22 to being viewed as an arena in which some of the most complex dilemmas of modernity—between reason and sentiment, between power and law, between faith and fact—have been fought out: a battlefield of debate, with myriad forms of republicanism, liberalism, conservatism, and radicalism represented. Arguably, the postwar real-ists understood this complexity of the American political tradition well before it became a topic of investigation in the sub-disciplines of politi-cal theory, political philosophy, or intellectual history. To them, however, “American political thought” and the question of whether a particularly complex or compelling form of liberalism lay buried in it, was not sim-ply one of academic curiosity: their project was a practical, political one. What they saw in the American political tradition was not just a set of ideas, but a practice, closely tied to the uniquely American philosophical brand of pragmatism, and constituted around what James Kloppenberg has described as an uneasy but recognizable relationship between liberalism, republicanism, and religion.23

Placing American liberalism within this wider tradition of discourse has considerable potential for bringing to light the complex relationship between security and liberalism in the United States. It is also crucial to understanding the nature of realism in America. For it is precisely the path taken by many of the postwar liberal realists, who turned to an under-standing of the American self—both individual and collective—as a set of resources that could be mobilized not only to marginalize the dangers

22. See Shklar, Redeeming American Political Thought.23. James Kloppenberg, The Virtues of Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998). For a

treatment of President Obama as heir to this particular kind of pragmatist, skeptical, civil-religious republican-liberalism, see James Kloppenberg, Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010).


of liberalism, but to realize its promise. To call this project “liberal,” however, would have been disastrous. In postwar American political theory, and particularly in the young discipline of International Rela-tions, “liberalism” had become defined and discredited by its adversaries, in no small part as the result of efforts of conservative émigré political thinkers including Strauss, Voegelin, and others—including many of the realists themselves.24 Associated both with the kind of naïveté that had arguably led to war in the first place, as well as narrow scientism incapable of grasping the richness (or roughness) of history, culture, or diplomacy, “liberalism” did not appear as a viable intellectual, discursive, or rhetorical label. Another name needed to be found—and what could be better than the claim to reality itself? Thus, an American “realist” tradition was born. But it was realism with an American-inflected liberalism at its very core.

The Realist Formulation of a Skepticist LiberalismThe vision of the empty modern liberal self as filled with fear, or with arrogant and crusading self-certainty, doubtlessly captures significant parts of the American experience. But it also clashes jarringly with power-ful counter-narratives throughout American history. Indeed, many of the most interesting and important elements of that intellectual history involve an explicit recognition of the destructive potentialities of modernity and a self-conscious desire to develop intellectual, social, and political resources to counter them. The self of the American enlightenment recognized its propensity toward both fear and mastery—and it feared both. In fact, this concern can be found across all three of the intellectual traditions stressed by Kloppenberg, as well as in the relationships between them and in the specific place of liberalism in this constellation. Beyond doubt, the most influential vision of the self in early America was that linked to a Calvinist, skepticist, and sobering vein in American Protestantism, critically aware of the finitude and fallibility of human ambition, and hence concerned with cultivating an ethics of self-doubt and self-limitation. Early American Protestantism, in other words, was more than millennial fervor: it also con-tained a darker, more demanding or uncompromising theology—a “harsh and unrelenting self-interrogation,” as David Harlan puts it, inducing an

24. For an analysis, see John G. Gunnell, Imagining the American Polity (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2005), esp. ch. 5.


overly self-reliant and self-aggrandizing nation to “think against itself.”25 This redemptive discipline provided a powerful corrective to the pleasing pretensions of American culture as well as a powerful counter-narrative to those who presented the only options as emptiness or completion. In each case, it warned against the seductions of security: against the belief in a secure, national self-righteousness tempted to remake the globe in its own image, or an “empty” self debilitated by fear or given meaning through enmity and declarations of radical dangers. The American self was cer-tainly prey to such temptations, but it also contained a reflexive dimension that the realists attempted to mobilize to combat them.

The American SelfAn oft-ignored and puzzling aspect of parts of postwar American real-ism is its insistence on the importance of “the people” for the revival of American politics and the redirection of American foreign policy. Mor-genthau’s In Defense of the National Interest, for instance, underscored the extent to which the shortcomings of American foreign policy were not the result of American leaders’ failure to “realistically” ignore public opinion or to manipulate it effectively. Rather, they reflected “a profound misunderstanding of the nature of public opinion and of the intelligence and moral character of the American people.”26 Likewise, Niebuhr’s political writings consistently defend a particular form of mobilized public contestation. Seducing “the people” into conformity and consent was part of the problem; a public sphere mobilized to vital contestation was part of the solution.27 The very title of Schlesinger’s The Vital Center reflected this point.

Naturally, the shades and shapes of this response varied greatly, often taking its colors from thinkers on the outside, or at the margins, of the realist intellectual environment. John Dewey’s hugely influential work on publicity, democracy, and civic mobilization, as well as the long-standing pragmatist interest in fostering an organic and participatory public was (despite the animosity between realism and pragmatism) of a kindred spirit

25. David Harlan, “A People Blinded by Birth? American History According to Sac-van Bercovitch,” Journal of American History 78, no. 3 (1991): 949–71; here, p. 949.

26. Morgenthau, In Defense of the National Interest, p. 231.27. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness: A Vindi-

cation of Democracy and a Critique of Its Traditional Defenders (London: Nisbet & Co., 1945), p. 133.


to the realist endeavor.28 So too was Walter Lippmann’s extensive engage-ment with the relationship between foreign policy and public opinion. But while Lippmann’s questions and concerns made an impact on the realists, they ultimately rejected his despair about the potential for responsible collective action in the age of the “phantom public” and his turn toward elitism. Autocracy was not the solution. Certainly, they conceded, some “conservative leaders in the aristocratic tradition can briefly and by instinct resolve these anxieties, as Winston Churchill restored to Britain a sense of family solidarity under enemy fire. But take away the enemy fire, and even aristocratic conservatism seems to lack the boldness and the understanding to root out the social sources of anxiety.”29 Only an approach that worked with the reality of pluralism, turning resigned fragmentation into creative conflict, held promise. And to install such vibrancy, a particular form of responsible, self-limiting rhetoric was needed.

The blueprint for this rhetoric was the American founding—the lan-guage not just of a moment but of a perpetual process of speaking the nation into being.30 The realists engaged the American founding as a moment of what George Kateb aptly terms “grand politics”—a pulling back of the political order to its unifying principles and sense of com-mon order and purpose.31 Approaching the constitution and the republican political tradition that grew from it as examples of how to (re)institute responsible political power, the realists deemed America living proof of an idea Weber had considered but quickly given up: that of collective rather than personal charisma. This meant tying the body politic together through a rhetoric of collective purpose rather than the radiance of a single leader or a defining Enemy. As Morgenthau explained in The Purpose of American Politics (1960), “America”—owing “its creation and continuing

28. Indeed, the realist endeavor had numerous connections to pragmatism, as Niebuhr’s biography shows. Sidney Hook in particular provides an example of how closely the pragmatist and realist tempers could be tied. For a closer examination, see Vibeke Schou Tjalve, “Realism, Pragmatism and the Public Sphere: Restraining Foreign Policy in an Age of Mass Politics,” International Politics 50, no. 6 (2013): 784–97.

29. Schlesinger, The Vital Center, p. 34.30. On the American Constitution as a productive rhetorical act, see Bonnie Honig,

“Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on Founding a Republic,” American Political Science Review 85 (1991): 67–103; and Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Forms and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).

31. George Kateb, Hannah Arendt: Politics, Conscience, Evil (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Allenheld, 1983), p. 18.


existence as a nation not to geographic proximity, ethnic identity, monar-chical legitimacy, or a long historic tradition, but to an act of will repeated over and over again by successive waves of immigrants”—had a looseness in its social fabric that made it uniquely dependent on solving the problem of constituent power, of articulating unity, identity, we-ness.32 Although acutely aware of the potential pathologies generated by this lack of unity and identity (and the temptation to create it via what we might today call “othering”),33 the realists believed that this same looseness potentially equipped America with the vibrancy needed to energize and restrain national will through the balancing function of competition. Awakening this potential meant renewing the republic’s skeptical, transformative, and self-limiting language of purpose, and adopting a very particular kind of leadership capable of stirring and shaping vibrant and contestative politi-cal debate.

A Language of Purpose, Dissensus, and Self-LimitationTurning first to the language of purpose, what the experiment of America provided was an alternative, more open, and (potentially) more reflexive language of “faith” than Weber’s view of religion allowed. Weber thought collective charisma increasingly unlikely in the modern world: as religious motifs were exhausted, the language of transcendent principles would retreat from human affairs, and no source of symbolic power other than the occasional heroic individual would be possible.34 The liberal realists thought otherwise. There was a modern alternative: the rhetoric of Ameri-can civil religion, and especially the reverential and yet reflexive language that Sacvan Bercovitch famously dubbed “the American jeremiad.”35 Modeled on the biblical figure of Jeremiah, this rhetorical model was orig-inally a particular kind of lament, a self-denigrating ceremonial practice, evoked by religious leaders for collective self-critique and self-discipline. In America however, this ceremonial practice was lifted out of its particu-lar religious setting and re-installed in the context of national politics as

32. Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics, p. 36.33. For instance, Campbell, Writing Security. The theme is explored quite extensively

in Hans J. Morgenthau, The Purpose of American Politics (Washington DC: University Press of America, 1960).

34. See Andreas Kalyvas, “Charismatic Politics and the Symbolic Foundations of Power in Max Weber,” New German Critique 85, no. 4 (2002): 67–103.

35. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1978).


a general model of political communication. As such, it has been adopted by politicians, including presidents, as a framework for addressing and re-mobilizing public action: a language for speaking about the ideals of the republic from which the community was straying, and how—through critical self-inspection and humble self-correction—it might re-embrace them. In this function, the American jeremiad remained an instrument of collective lamentation, but one untied from the world of formal religion. Recoupled with the world of American civil religion, it became also a narrative of purpose, hope, and commitment.36 Though often read as secularists, the Founders drew heavily—and far beyond aims of mere seduction—on this Calvinist discourse. Writing, as J. G. A. Pocock puts it, “in the jeremiadic mode, not the liturgical mode,” the Founders clearly saw (and at times abused) the jeremiad as an instrument of national self-aggrandizement and fervor.37 Yet what Pocock identified as the Calvinist track in the jeremiadic rhetorical tradition contained exactly that balance between hope and humility, commitment and restraint, that the realists sought: a shared sense of purposefulness, tamed by collective practices of skeptical self-inquiry, self-limitation, and self-doubt.

In a similar fashion, the liberal realists insisted that a genuine language of the transcendent was possible: that a creed of “pervasive self-doubt,” as Schlesinger put it, was present in that Calvinist part of the national legacy which had always nurtured “an urgent sense of the precariousness of the national existence.”38 Naturally, they were well aware of the dangers of tapping into religion—even civil religion. Most of their like-minded contemporaries viewed any kind of even semi-religious appeals in much the same way as later thinkers would cast them, as “simply a way of mobi-lizing political support through the manipulation of religious-nationalistic symbols,” or as reflecting the “temptation”39 to “fall back upon”40 religious charisma in an attempt to invest political foundings with more authority

36. For a much more extensive treatment of the realist embrace of the jeremiad, see Tjalve, Realist Strategies of Republican Peace. On the continuing potency of this narrative under President Obama, see Kloppenberg, Reading Obama.

37. J. G. A. Pocock, “Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideo-logia Americana,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48, no. 2 (1987): 346.

38. Arthur J. Schlesinger, “America: Experiment or Destiny?” American Historical Review 82, no. 3 (1977): 509.

39. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2005).

40. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking, 1965).


than secular language could provide. Niebuhr, in particular, repeatedly acknowledged that this was perhaps the most common use of religion in politics, and his Irony of American History (1951) provided a full-fledged critique of its abuse by political leaders in mobilizing support for ideas of manifest destiny in American foreign policy discourse. Morgenthau’s analysis of the dangerously “theological” language of modern national-ism in the secular age illustrates his similar appreciation of the mobilizing potential of the rhetoric of religious certitude, along with his belief that purely manipulative appropriations of religious narratives would always ultimately lead to disaster. However immediately effective it might have been, Mussolini’s and Hitler’s highly emotional, political-theological rhetoric was ultimately “unrealistic.”41

Reflecting these cautions, the postwar realists drew a distinction between “religion” and “religiosity.” Echoing the tension between a skep-tical Calvinism and an optimistic and too self-certain eschatology within the Christian and republican heritage of the Founders, they readily admit-ted that building a social order on the language of formal “religion” was to insert exactly those sentiments of certainty, closure, and limitlessness that they hoped to avoid. Constructing a social order on the language of “religiosity,” however, was to attempt a public philosophy around sen-timents of human fallibility, finitude, and limits.42 Even Niebuhr, who considered established religion (and certainly the American churches) a force of either naïveté or cynicism in politics, persistently argued that a properly conceived religiosity was a potentially powerful philosophical and social resource for realist rhetoric and politics.43 Without a language and ethos that transcended the nation, how could one inspire public hope

41. Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man vs. Power Politics (London: Latimer House Limited, 1946), p. 2.

42. For Morgenthau’s own account of Niebuhr’s influence, see Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Influence of Reinhold Niebuhr in American Political Life and Thought,” in Reinhold Niebuhr: A Prophetic Voice in Our Time, ed. Harold R. Landon (Greenwich, CT: Seabury Press, 1962). Morgenthau’s ties to Christian Realism are sometimes portrayed as instru-mental appropriation—a “translation” of ideas conceived in his original, German setting. See for instance Christoph Frei’s (otherwise excellent) Hans J. Morgenthau: An Intellec-tual Biography (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State UP, 2001), p. 112. Recent scholarship shows better their richly mutual influence: Daniel Rice, “Reinhold Niebuhr and Hans Mor-genthau: A Friendship with Constraining Shades of Realism,” Journal of American Studies 42, no. 2 (2008): 255–91.

43. See Donald B. Meyer, The Protestant Search for Political Realism (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1960).


or restrain national fervor? “We cannot expect even the wisest of nations to escape every peril of moral and spiritual complacency,” Niebuhr argued, “for nations have always been constitutionally self-righteous. But it will make a difference whether the culture in which the policies of nations are formed is only as deep and as high as the nation’s highest ideals; or whether there is a dimension of the culture from the standpoint of which the ele-ment of vanity in all human ambitions and achievements is discerned.”44 A culture capable of speaking a language transcending self and nation, in other words, was a culture capable of rational yet vibrant, contestative yet cohesive, public debate.

Read in this context, it is clear that postwar realists adopted a politi-cal understanding strikingly akin to Hannah Arendt’s conception of the republican tradition in America. Like Arendt, postwar realists such as Morgenthau, Niebuhr, and Schlesinger viewed the American Constitution as a “rare conjunction of intellectuality and power” to which the Ameri-can “nation owes its very existence, its institutions, and its ethos.”45 In this vision, the Federalist Papers represented grand politics at its finest: its powerful language sought repeatedly to reinstitute and remobilize the American national “we,” to activate and restrain its vitality, by deliver-ing a language of political leadership capable of generating substantial and appealing political visions and—through the counterviews ignited by such visions—of submitting political leaders to continuous public scru-tiny and critique.

In the Founders’ understanding of politics, the realists found above all a notion of politics as process: of democracy as the cycle through which political dissensus is transformed into consensus, only to begin yet another cycle of dissensus and contestation.46 True leadership was to be divorced from demagogic manipulation, just as consensus needed to be distinguished from cultural homogeneity or popular submissiveness.

44. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952).

45. Hans J. Morgenthau, Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade 1960–70 (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1970), p. 28.

46. We have addressed this deliberative, republican element in postwar American realism elsewhere, and an increasing body of scholarship on the links between their con-ceptualization of a realist form of democratic governance and the “skeptical vitalism” advocated by the Founders is beginning to emerge. See for instance Douglas B. Klus-meyer, “Hans Morgenthau and Republicanism,” International Relations 24, no. 4 (2010): 398–414.


Accordingly, foreign policy could not be the unquestioned (and unques-tioning) domain of unanimity in the face of danger. Rational political discourse in such a setting would be impossible because, as Morgenthau put it, such a politics would demand that

the opposition should forego what is not only its privilege but also its mission, whose fulfilment is indispensable for the proper functioning of the democratic process: to submit alternative policies for the admin-istration to adopt or else for the people to support by changing the administration. An opposition that does not perform these two functions deprives the people in yet another way of that choice of policies essential to democracy.47

Of course, the republican realists acknowledged, opposition and dissent alone cannot be the foundation of effective foreign policy. Eventually, a consensus must be reached. But this is healthy only once it results from a real and genuinely antagonistic struggle. Constitutional divisions of power are crucial, but the cultivation of cohesive political contestation means more for realist politics.

Here realism sought a strategy of simultaneous mobilization and restraint: mobilization through political leadership; restraint through a transcendent note to such narratives, always installing a note of self-doubt in the public vocabulary. The paradoxical point of that strategy is that by imbuing the presidency with what James Fairbanks has called a “priestly function,”48 Morgenthau actually hoped to forego what he termed “presi-dentialism”: the American version of Weber’s concerns about the descent of leadership into irrational demagogy, whereby a decadent version of democracy, having lost a sense of transcendent purpose, tries (in vain) to hang onto itself by making the president himself the representation and arbiter of the nation, its interests, and its strategy. This vision of lead-ership risked succumbing to a language of itself as final and perfected, and to a view of dissent as “a sacrilege against the spirit of the nation, incarnate as it is in the person of the President,” as well as producing a dangerous and debilitating vacillation between a language of enmity and

47. Hans J. Morgenthau “The Decline of the Democratic Process,” in Politics in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1 (Chicago: Univ of Chicago Press, 1962), p. 382.

48. James David Fairbanks, “The Priestly Functions of the Presidency: A Discus-sion of the Literature on Civil Religion and Its Implications for the Study of Presidential Leadership,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1981): 216.


confrontation or a depoliticized language of “abstentation, conciliation, and pacification.”49

Between these two options lay informed political struggle. Responsible leaders could inject into the public realm a renewed dose of the “Calvin-ist iron” that liberal realists found so central to the American founding, could turn back the tide, renewing national will while retaining a deeper sense of limits, restraint, and critique. Lincoln stood perhaps as the prime example of such “heroic” leadership. Heir to the darker, skeptical vein in the Calvinist trajectory, and open to the idea that self-limitation and public contestation must be a central part of democratic politics, Lincoln still believed that politics, even war, could be a medium in the struggle for justice, however compromised by human fallibility. He also understood the necessity of oratorical leadership in communicating and installing will and purposefulness, doubt and debate. To the republican realists, who come close to placing him on a pedestal, this delicate rhetorical, political, and strategic balance was heroic leadership. It was the responsibility of realism to recover and promote it.

Conclusion: Realism’s Liberal Gambit?In an important and increasingly influential study, Nicolas Guilhot argues that the political project that we have dealt with here as “postwar realism” was much more than simply the establishment of a new theoretical school in the young discipline of International Relations: rather, he argues, post-war realism must be viewed as a political project of immense importance to both American foreign policy in the twentieth century and to Western political thinking on the topic of security.50 Yet whereas Guilhot reads the postwar realist project as primarily conservative—a self-conscious and risky attempt to found a realist theory of international politics to oppose facile Lockean liberalism, crusading Wilsonianism, and the depoliticized liberal-rationalist political science that they saw in America—we believe

49. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics in the Twentieth Century, vol. 1 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1962), pp. 383, 381.

50. Nicolas Guilhot, “The Realist Gambit: Postwar American Political Science and the Birth of IR Theory,” International Political Sociology 2, no. 4 (2008): 281–304. See also Guilhot’s “American Katechon: When Political Theology Became International Rela-tions Theory,” Constellations 17, no. 2 (2010): 224–53; and Guilhot, The Invention of International Relations Theory: Realism, the Rockefeller Foundation and the 1954 Confer-ence on Theory (New York: Columbia UP, 2011).


that their gambit went even further. What we have tried to argue here is that the most important actors and agendas of postwar realism were marked by the desire to revive a realistic liberal politics by drawing on, not rejecting, skeptical intellectual and cultural resources found in American political thought. As we have already argued above, though, “liberalism” at this juncture in American political theory was not as viable an intellectual, discursive, or political position as it had been. And so, realists developed the themes discussed above (linking them also to admired figures such as Lincoln) and cast them as the antecedents of realism, standing in opposi-tion to a naïve liberalism.51

The liberal nature of that gambit is not easily detected, in part because of the persistence of narrow, almost impoverished, understandings of lib-eralism, as well as the almost doctrinaire opposition between liberalism and realism that today dominates both scholarly and popular political dis-course. In contemporary critical assessments, this gambit has been further obscured by the tendency to see liberalism as the primary source, not the antidote, to security’s march across global spaces and its insinuation into myriad social interstices—as problem rather than cure, in a culture of fear run amok.

These latter analyses undoubtedly generate substantial critical insights, helping to dissolve ossified categories and providing correctives to the hid-den assumptions, simplistic reductions, and self-serving logics that often drive liberal humanitarian discourses on human security, intervention, and peace building. Indeed, as both we and others have elsewhere pointed out, this aspect of contemporary critical thought importantly reiterates that part of the classical realist project which sought to unpack the certitudes and self-aggrandizement of Western liberal modernity.52 Despite the merits of

51. And thus avoiding also the conceptual mess that liberalism had become via its extension back to Locke, its identification with natural rights and liberal democracy, and even as the bulwark of Western civilization itself. Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (2014): 682–715.

52. For treatments of classical realism as presaging elements of the “deconstruc-tive turn,” see Muriel Cozette, “Reclaiming the Critical Dimension of Realism: Hans J. Morgenthau and the Ethics of Scholarship,” Review of International Studies 34, no. 1 (2008): 5–27; James Der Derian, International Theory: Critical Investigations (New York: NYU Press, 1994). We too have treated this topic in depth elsewhere: see Vibeke Schou Tjalve, “Realism and the Politics of Disenchantment: Beyond the Decon/Neocon Divide,” in Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme, ed. Duncan Bell (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009); Michael C. Williams, “In the Beginning:


contemporary critical thought, however, it is often difficult to discern its engagement with politics. Admonitions to advocate a politics of differ-ence, or an ethic of resistance that relies on being “unreasonable,” seem unlikely to gain much traction in contemporary political discourse, to put it mildly. They also raise the suspicion that for all the claims to leave the modern behind, its ghost continues to sneak in the back door. In this, of course, contemporary critical theories of the liberal security complex are hardly alone. Critical thinking for much of the last century is the story of a philosophy in search of an agent. Perhaps this is simply the way it is; a new realism in the face of late, post-, or some other hyphenated moder-nity; but perhaps not. At the very least, it is worth asking whether some of these ideas risk becoming straightjackets unnecessarily restricting our understanding of liberalism and its complex relationship to contemporary security politics.

This article has tried to explore such a suspicion by revisiting a mood and moment in which influential currents in American political analysis addressed exactly the question of how to make liberalism, in some form or shape, productive in the moderation of security, the control of fear, and the taming of enmity. Providing that question with an answer—not just theoretically but politically—lay at the heart of what we have here called postwar American political realism; and increasingly, that answer spelled something akin to radical democracy, fueled and integrated by the language of a skepticist, liberal imaginary, and tempered by a paradoxi-cal realist ethic of suspicion and commitment, as well as a concern with power. The purpose of the realist project was thus, in important parts, a critique of the liberal imagination from within: an attempt to re-found and self-correct, not to undo or reject. This project believed that American history contained a form of national selfhood that, steeped in Protestant, pragmatist, and republican forms of hopeful skepticism, was capable of both will and doubt; of both integration and self-limitation. In a period of increased international turmoil, with NATO’s Secretary General declar-ing that “Today, an arc of crisis extends from Central Africa and the Sahel, to Syria, Iraq and the wider Middle East,”53 and when tensions with Rus-sia are prompting talk of a revived Cold War, the power of fear and the

The IR Enlightenment and the Ends of IR Theory,” European Journal of International Relations 19, no. 3 (2013): 647–65.

53. Anders Fogh Rasmussen “America, Europe, and the Pacific,” July 9, 2014, avail-able online at the NATO website, http://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/opinions_111659.htm.


seductions of security risk reaching new levels of intensity. In the face of such events, a politics that refuses to give way to these fears and seduc-tions becomes ever more difficult. It was exactly this capacity that liberal realism attempted to foster. Tracing its fate may well tell us a great deal about the historical relationship between liberalism and security—and about its future.

rethinking the logic of security: liberal realism and the recovery of american political thought

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