Between fear and despair: Human nature in realism

This chapter reveals the emotional dimension of realist views on human nature, which fit firmly into the anthropological camp of approaches to theorizing humanity and world politics. Much of the realist anthropology is well known and need not be rehearsed here. But often overlooked is realist man’s emotional side. This chapter focuses on the centrality of fear and despair as “emotional motifs” in the psychology of International Relations (IR) realism, and on how they relate to more widely discussed realist notions such as rationality and will to power. I show how these emotional motifs link the political-philosophical “tradition of despair” via twentieth-century classical realist views on enduring human features of international politics to structural realism, which sports implicit (but no less fundamental) anthropological foundations. I show how these foundations have affected the realist ontology through the shifting emanations of diverse realist approaches, and how they support two contradictory theoretical postures – fatalism and defense – between which realism is suspended with little hope of escape.