Description
Traditional ‘objectivist’ approaches to the subjective feeling of safety have given way to the study of security as the metaphysics of international politics. But the ‘discovery’ of security as the summum bonum of international order, as well as of ‘insecurity’ as a fundamental feature of the human condition, is hardly of recent vintage. Given today’s concern of security theorists with angst, it is surprising how little attention they have paid to the ubiquity of anxiety narratives in interwar political thought.
In this paper, I argue that anxiety, as a descriptive concept of the human predicament of standing face to face with the uncertainty of existence and the fear of death, was present in several portrayals of ‘human nature’ as existentially insecure in interwar IR – broadly understood. While I focus mostly on the existential realism of Reinhold Niebuhr, I demonstrate how the concept of anxiety was central to a wider transatlantic intellectual community that shared the same fears and hopes regarding human destiny. Like many others, Niebuhr’s laying out of the Heideggerian take on the Aristotelian tension between ‘potentiality’ and ‘actuality’ led to the acknowledgement that while ultimate security was a historical impossibility, its materialization in limited and precarious forms of political community made it a reachable end that could be more desirable than overambitious world order proposals.
