The Humanistic Moment in International Studies: Reflections on Machiavelli and Las Casas: 1992 Presidential Address

Abstract

This review seeks to recover the humanist ideals and approaches which sometimes get lost in our modern strivings for scientific rigor. In the Renaissance, human character, state forms, and international institutions were recognized as artistic constructions. There emerged new, complementary conceptions of science and the humanities—the latter seen as critical, interpretive, lesson-drawing disciplines centered around grammar, rhetoric, history, and moral philosophy. Niccolò Machiavelli's republican humanism, his prescriptions for state conduct and imperial glory, and Bartolomé de las Casas' defenses of the Indians against Spanish exploitation were Early Modern achievements, humanistically argued from contrasting practical/normative/ontological positions. More recent history evidences many similar problems with scientifically based efforts to maximize freedom, power, or wealth, discover total truths, and achieve control over Nature. Both the civically humanistic “Machiavellian moment” of attempting to found and sustain competitively pluralistic, glory-seeking, political communities, and the “las Casas moment” of universalistic or multicultural humanism appeared in Early Modern times. They still find contemporary expression: Martin Luther King, Jr.'s criticism of American ethnocentrism during the Vietnam War and Vaclav Havel's views of the collapse of Soviet Communism as the end of Modernity are both expressions of modern, Renaissance humanism. Hence, paradoxically, Modernity, although imperfect and partly self-contradictory in its humanistic (and naturalistic) moments, is not over. But we need more fully to recognize and develop the contributions of the humanities to our interdiscipline of international studies in order to better understand Modernity's successes and excesses, ameliorate its recurring failures, and anticipate subsequent eras of human history.

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