Rough Waters and Other Stories is a collection of original stories addressing different ethical questions and dilemmas. An introduction makes connections among the stories, puts them in personal and political perspective, and anchors them in a tragic understanding of life and ethics. The characters in Rough Waters and Other Stories - some based on real historical people - must make or finesse ethical choices, some of them straight-forward, others tragic in nature. Tragic choices involve trade-offs between seemingly irreconcilable but important goals. Alternatively, they entail committing ourselves to decisions or policies whose outcomes are uncertain. We are desperate to avoid tragic choices and prone to convince ourselves - often in the face of good evidence - that we can satisfy all of our desires or needs instead of making difficult choices between or among them. We also tend to convince ourselves that our decisions or policies well succeed in proportion to the degree that we feel compelled to commit to them. A standard trope of Greek tragedy - think here of Oedipus - is that our choices sometimes lead directly to the outcomes we are trying desperately to avoid.

Self-interest is an important human motive and this book explores its evolution in the United States and its consequences for politics, business, and personal relationships. In the postwar era American understandings of self-interest have moved away from Alexis de Tocqueville's concept of "self-interest well-understood" - in which people recognize that their interests are served by the success of the community of which they are part - towards "individualism" - by which he meant narrow framing that often leads people to pursue their interests at the expense of the community. The book documents this evolution through qualitative and quantitative content analysis of presidential speeches, television sitcoms and popular music, before exploring its negative consequences for democracy.

This third out of four volumes by Richard Ned Lebow in this book series includes texts on psychology and international relations, causation, counterfactual analysis. The political psychology contributions draw on richer, ancient Greek understandings of the psyche and offer novel insights into strategies of conflict management, the role of emotions in international relations, and the modern fixation on identity.

This is the first of four volumes to be published as part of this book series, on the life and work of Richard Ned Lebow. In a career spanning six decades, Richard Ned Lebow has made important contributions to the study of international relations, political and intellectual history, motivational and social psychology, philosophy of science, and classics. He has authored, coauthored or edited 30 books and almost 250 peer-reviewed articles. These four volumes are excerpts from this corpus. The first volume includes an intellectual autobiography, bibliography, and assessments of Lebow's contributions to diverse fields by respected authorities. It shows how a scholar's agenda evolves in response to world events and his efforts to grapple with them theoretically and substantively. It elaborates pathways for addressing these events and their consequences in an interdisciplinary manner, and offers new concepts and methods for doing so. Richard Lebow's research bridges international relations, psychology, history, classics, political theory and philosophy of science. He is author, coauthor, or editor of 34 books and almost 250 peer reviewed articles. Contributors to the book are: Simon Reich - Mervyn Frost - Janice Gross Stein - Stefano Guzzini - Markus Kornprobst - Harald Muller - Christian Wendt - Robert English.

Contemporary International Relations is as much a conversation between the living and the dead as it is among the living. Its debates are thoroughly rooted in and shaped by the thought of many bygone minds, both ancient and modern. With this in mind, The Return of the Theorists presents forty imagined dialogues with foundational theorists. They run the gamut from Homer and Confucius to Hedley Bull and Jean Bethke Elshtain, and span almost three millennia of human history, comprising representatives of a variety of cultures. The interviewers consist of more than forty international relations scholars and political theorists. They too cut across cultures, continents and almost three generations, and each is an expert on the work of the thinker invited. The Return of the Theorists will be of interest to anyone who has tried to enter the mind of bygone thinkers in political thought and International Relations.

This book about the philosophy of science is the second out of four volumes by Richard Ned Lebow in this book series. It not only provides a useful overview of this broad topic, but also provides deeper insight into specific topics like the philosophy of science causation, epistemology and methods, and especially on counter factual analysis.

This last one out of four volumes by Richard Ned Lebow in this book series focuses on various fields of social sciences and their connection to international politics. The author writes about topics in psychology, tragedy, and ethics. All of these fields are being put into relation with political aspects, especially international relations.

Drawing on political theory, comparative politics, international relations, psychology and classics, Ned Lebow offers insights into why social and political orders form, how they evolve, and why and how they decline. Following The Tragic Vision of Politics and A Cultural Theory of International Relations, this book thus completes Lebow's trilogy with an original theory of political order. He identifies long- and short-term threats to political order that are associated respectively with shifts in the relative appeal of principles of justice and lack of self-restraint by elites. Two chapters explore the consequences of late-modernity for democracy in the United States, and another chapter, co-authored with Martin Dimitrov, the consequences for authoritarianism in China. The Rise and Fall of Political Orders forges new links between political theory and political science via the explicit connection it makes between normative goals and empirical research.

What do we mean by theory in international relations? What kinds of knowledge do theories seek? How do they stipulate it is found? How should we evaluate any resulting knowledge claims? What do answers to these questions tell us about the theory project in IR, and in the social sciences more generally? Lebow explores these questions in a critical evaluation of the positivist and interpretivist epistemologies. He identifies tensions and problems specific to each epistemology, and some shared by both, and suggests possible responses. By exploring the relationship between the foundations of theories and the empirical assumptions they encode, Lebow's analysis enables readers to examine in greater depth the different approaches to theory and their related research strategies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations theory and philosophy of social science.

We are multiple, fragmented, and changing selves who, nevertheless, believe we have unique and consistent identities. What accounts for this illusion? Why has the problem of identity become so central in post-war scholarship, fiction, and the media? Following Hegel, Richard Ned Lebow contends that the defining psychological feature of modernity is the tension between our reflexive and social selves. To address this problem Westerners have developed four generic strategies of identity construction that are associated with four distinct political orientations. Lebow develops his arguments through comparative analysis of ancient and modern literary, philosophical, religious, and musical texts. He asks how we might come to terms with the fragmented and illusionary nature of our identities and explores some political and ethical implications of doing so.

Max Weber explored the political, epistemological and ethical problems of modernity, and understood how closely connected they were. His efforts are imaginative, sophisticated, even inspiring, but also flawed. Weber's epistemological successes and failures highlight unresolvable tensions that are just as pronounced today and from which we have much to learn. This edited collection of essays offers novel readings of Weber's politics, approach to knowledge, rationality, counterfactuals, ideal types, power, bureaucracy, the state, history, and the non-Western world. The conclusions look at how some of his prominent successors have addressed or finessed the tensions of the epistemological between subjective values and subjective knowledge; the sociological between social rationalization and irrational myths; the personal among conflicting values; the political between the kinds of leaders democracies select and the national tasks that should be performed; and the tragic between human conscience and worldly affairs.

Identity is the master variable for many constructivist scholars of international politics. In this comparative study, Richard Ned Lebow shows that states do not have identities any more than people do. Leaders, peoples, and foreign actors seek to impose national identifications consistent with their political projects and psychological needs. These identifications are multiple, fluid and rise in importance as a function of priming and context. Leaders are at least as likely to invoke national identifications as rationalizations for policies pursued for other reasons as they are to be influenced by them. National identifications are nevertheless important because they invariably stress the alleged uniqueness of a people and its country, and are a principal means of seeking status and building self-esteem. Lebow tracks the relative appeal of these principles, the ways in which they are constructed, how they influence national identifications, and how they in turn affect regional and international practices.

Is it possible to advocate ethical policies to preserve national security? Contrary to some beliefs, Richard Ned Lebow demonstrates that ethics are conducive to the pursuit of national interests. Reinterpreting the writings of key figures in the history of "realpolitik", he argues that national interests are framed in the language of justice, and indicates the dangers arising from the unilateral exercise of American power in the post-Cold War world.

Philosophy and social science assume that reason and cause are objective and universally applicable concepts. Through close readings of ancient and modern philosophy, history and literature, Richard Ned Lebow demonstrates that these concepts are actually specific to time and place. He traces their parallel evolution by focusing on classical Athens, the Enlightenment through Victorian England, and the early twentieth century. This important book shows how and why understandings of reason and cause have developed and evolved, in response to what kind of stimuli, and what this says about the relationship between social science and the social world in which it is conducted. Lebow argues that authors reflecting on their own social context use specific constructions of these categories as central arguments about the human condition. This highly original study will make an immediate impact across a number of fields with its rigorous research and the development of an innovative historicised epistemology.

"Coercion, Cooperation and Ethics in International Relations "brings together the recent essays of, Richard Ned Lebow, one of the leading scholars of international relations and U.S. Foreign Policy. Lebow's work has centered on the instrumental value of ethics in foreign policy decision making and the disastrous consequences which follow when ethical standard are flouted. Unlike most realists who have considered ethical considerations irrelevant in states' calculations of their national interest, Lebow has argued that self interest, and hence, national interest can only be formulated intelligently within a language of justice and morality. The essays here build on this pervasive theme in Lebow's work by presenting his substantive and compelling critique of strategies of deterrence and compellence illustrating empirically and normatively how these strategies often produce results counter to those that are intended. The last section of the book, on counterfactuals, brings together another set of related articles which continue to probe the relationship between ethics and policy. They do so by exploring the contingency of events to suggest the subjective, and often self-fulfilling, nature of the frameworks we use to evaluate policy choices.
With a new substantive introduction that will place the essays in the context of Lebow's comprehensive views on ethics and foreign policy, this book will be a major statement by a major thinker in international relations.

"Coercion, Cooperation and Ethics in International Relations "brings together the recent essays of, Richard Ned Lebow, one of the leading scholars of international relations and U.S. Foreign Policy. Lebow's work has centered on the instrumental value of ethics in foreign policy decision making and the disastrous consequences which follow when ethical standard are flouted. Unlike most realists who have considered ethical considerations irrelevant in states' calculations of their national interest, Lebow has argued that self interest, and hence, national interest can only be formulated intelligently within a language of justice and morality. The essays here build on this pervasive theme in Lebow's work by presenting his substantive and compelling critique of strategies of deterrence and compellence illustrating empirically and normatively how these strategies often produce results counter to those that are intended. The last section of the book, on counterfactuals, brings together another set of related articles which continue to probe the relationship between ethics and policy. They do so by exploring the contingency of events to suggest the subjective, and often self-fulfilling, nature of the frameworks we use to evaluate policy choices.
With a new substantive introduction that will place the essays in the context of Lebow's comprehensive views on ethics and foreign policy, this book will be a major statement by a major thinker in international relations.

A comparative exploration of Western and Chinese understandings of justice and their possible use to reframe Sino-American relations and international governance. The concept of justice is central to politics: it justifies the ordering of society and the distribution of rewards. In Justice and International Order, Richard Ned Lebow and Feng Zhang compare and contrast Western and Chinese conceptions of justice. They argue that justice can almost invariably be reduced to the principles of fairness and equality, although they are developed and expressed differently in the two cultures. Lebow and Zhang show that there has been a noticeable shift in both in favoring equality over fairness in the modern era. They analyze the growing conflict between China and the West in the light of these conceptions of justice and show how they might be deployed to ameliorate it. The authors also offer a critique of what passes for global order and explore ways in which fairness and equality, and trade-offs between them, offer pathways to better and more peaceful worlds.

In this exciting new volume, Richard Ned Lebow introduces his own constructivist theory of political order and international relations based on theories of motives and identity formation drawn from the ancient Greeks. His theory stresses the human need for self-esteem, and shows how it influences political behavior at every level of social aggregation. Lebow develops ideal-type worlds associated with four motives: appetite, spirit, reason and fear, and demonstrates how each generates a different logic concerning cooperation, conflict and risk-taking. Expanding and documenting the utility of his theory in a series of historical case studies, ranging from classical Greece to the war in Iraq, he presents a novel explanation for the rise of the state and the causes of war, and offers a reformulation of prospect theory. This is a novel theory of politics by one of the world's leading scholars of international relations.

This volume focuses on the assessments political actors make of the relative fragility and robustness of political orders. The core argument developed and explored throughout its different chapters is that such assessments are subjective and informed by contextually specific historical experiences that have important implications for how leaders respond. Their responses, in turn, feed into processes by which political orders change. The volume's contributions span analyses of political orders at the state, regional and global levels. They demonstrate that assessments of fragility and robustness have important policy implications but that the accuracy of assessments can only be known with certainty ex post facto. The volume will appeal to scholars and advanced students of international relations and comparative politics working on national and international orders.

What do we mean by theory in international relations? What kinds of knowledge do theories seek? How do they stipulate it is found? How should we evaluate any resulting knowledge claims? What do answers to these questions tell us about the theory project in IR, and in the social sciences more generally? Lebow explores these questions in a critical evaluation of the positivist and interpretivist epistemologies. He identifies tensions and problems specific to each epistemology, and some shared by both, and suggests possible responses. By exploring the relationship between the foundations of theories and the empirical assumptions they encode, Lebow's analysis enables readers to examine in greater depth the different approaches to theory and their related research strategies. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of international relations theory and philosophy of social science.

Lebow demonstrates that foreign policies consistent with generally accepted ethical norms are more likely to succeed, and those at odds with them to fail. Constructing original data sets and analyzing multiple case studies, Lebow makes an empirical case for ethics in international relations. His approach looks to create a productive dialogue between those who ask primarily 'ought' questions and those who pose 'is' questions. The former want to establish appropriate criteria for the behaviour of state and non-state actors and the discourses that lead to their policy decisions, whereas scholars who pose 'is' questions are concerned with how political actors behave and the principles and assumptions that might explain their behaviour. Lebow bridges the gap between 'is' and 'ought' questions by making an instrumental argument in favour of ethical foreign policy. He examines policymaking as well as policy, offering ethical guidelines for policymaking that are likely to result in more successful policies.

Lebow demonstrates that foreign policies consistent with generally accepted ethical norms are more likely to succeed, and those at odds with them to fail. Constructing original data sets and analyzing multiple case studies, Lebow makes an empirical case for ethics in international relations. His approach looks to create a productive dialogue between those who ask primarily 'ought' questions and those who pose 'is' questions. The former want to establish appropriate criteria for the behaviour of state and non-state actors and the discourses that lead to their policy decisions, whereas scholars who pose 'is' questions are concerned with how political actors behave and the principles and assumptions that might explain their behaviour. Lebow bridges the gap between 'is' and 'ought' questions by making an instrumental argument in favour of ethical foreign policy. He examines policymaking as well as policy, offering ethical guidelines for policymaking that are likely to result in more successful policies.

Self-interest is an important human motive and this book explores its evolution in the United States and its consequences for politics, business, and personal relationships. In the postwar era American understandings of self-interest have moved away from Alexis de Tocqueville's concept of "self-interest well-understood" - in which people recognize that their interests are served by the success of the community of which they are part - towards "individualism" - by which he meant narrow framing that often leads people to pursue their interests at the expense of the community. The book documents this evolution through qualitative and quantitative content analysis of presidential speeches, television sitcoms and popular music, before exploring its negative consequences for democracy.

This last one out of four volumes by Richard Ned Lebow in this book series focuses on various fields of social sciences and their connection to international politics. The author writes about topics in psychology, tragedy, and ethics. All of these fields are being put into relation with political aspects, especially international relations.

This third out of four volumes by Richard Ned Lebow in this book series includes texts on psychology and international relations, causation, counterfactual analysis. The political psychology contributions draw on richer, ancient Greek understandings of the psyche and offer novel insights into strategies of conflict management, the role of emotions in international relations, and the modern fixation on identity.