Description
Power is the cornerstone concept of international relations realism. However, the realist conception of power is under constant challenges. For scholars like David A. Baldwin and J. Ann Tickner, realism views power as material assets a country commands, which neglects the non-material and relational dimensions of political power. This article refutes this criticism by showing that a realist tradition shared by Niccolò Machiavelli and E. H. Carr conceives political power as both relational and emotional. Following Hans Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics, this article defines tradition as a story about continuity and discontinuity in beliefs shared by thinkers of different historical periods. It will engage Carr and Machiavelli in a Gadamerian dialogue over what power is. Assessing Carr and Machiavelli’s agreements and disagreements over power will generate a comprehensive story about how Machiavelli’s conception of power continued and evolved in Carr’s IR realism.
The key finding of this article is that, for the realist tradition under analysis, political power is an emotional relationship underpinned by four passions: hatred, love, ambition, and fear. For both Machiavelli and Carr, power is fundamentally derived from these passions instead of material factors like armies or wealth. For both thinkers, power is a relationship in that political agents do not own this emotional relationship as an asset but participate in it as agents. In other words, for Machiavelli and Carr, political agents are driven by their passions to interact with each other. For them, power is an affective relationship, an irrational realm fundamentally motivated by passions. As the 50th anniversary of BISA is approaching, power remains one of the most challenging issues in IR. I sincerely hope this article can help IR scholarship address this timeless challenge with timeless wisdom from the realist tradition.
