LAUSR

approach less by abstract methodological discussion and more by handling the texts with the care, detail, and circumspection they deserve. McQueen has produced an erudite, thought-provoking, and enjoyable study, which challenges us to reconsider familiar passages from canonical texts (e.g., the final chapter of The Prince) while enriching our understanding of other texts’ understudied depths (e.g., the last two books of Leviathan). The main place where I found myself disagreeing with McQueen regards the contemporary implications of her study, and I thus conclude with a couple of critical reflections. One worry is that although I agree that there is much to learn from revisiting some of the great thinkers in the realist tradition, we should also be careful not to assume that they exhausted the theoretical possibilities of the positions they are taken to represent. For example, McQueen claims that the “tragic worldview insists on a cyclical conception of political time” (p. 198.) This may well have been true of Machiavelli and early Morgenthau, but must it be so? We might think that the human condition is characterized by inescapable conflict and disagreement (a tragic worldview) without further holding that all of our problems necessarily have historical precedents (a cyclical worldview). Implicitly, at least, McQueen invites us to choose between cyclical and apocalyptic conceptions of political time when confronting crises today, but perhaps a thoroughgoing realist should be even more skeptical about any attempts to conceptualize political time in ways that impose too much narrative coherence on contemporary politics. Such a (noncyclical) tragic worldview might be even more burdensome than McQueen suggests, but it would allow us to take seriously the radical novelty of crises like global climate change without resorting to the apocalyptic imaginary. Indeed, without denying the urgency of taking measures to mitigate the effects of climate change, a political realist may still question whether those effects should be portrayed in apocalyptic terms. The concern here is not just down to skepticism regarding the hopes for a postapocalyptic utopia, but also, and more importantly, because the decision to present any potential crisis in apocalyptic terms implies that all of our efforts and energy should be invested in averting it, rather than seeing it as one of many competing problems that deserve our attention. There are difficult questions of political judgment involved here, first among which is whether we do actually live in apocalyptic times or whether recent invocations of apocalypse are disproportionate rhetorical flourishes. Whatever one makes of McQueen’s own answers to such questions, however, Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times remains a deeply impressive study of the ways that some of the finest thinkers in the realist tradition struggled with apocalypticism in their own times, which proves to be a rewarding place to start when thinking through how we might respond to similar problems today.