Alison McQueen

What role, if any, should appeals to fear play in climate change communication? Moral and practical worries about fear appeals in the climate change debate have caused some to turn toward hope appeals. This chapter argues that fear can be a rational and motivationally powerful response to climate change. While there are good reasons to worry about the use of fear in politics, climate change fear appeals can be protected against the standard criticisms of political fear. Hope appeals, by contrast, seem vulnerable to serious motivational drawbacks in the case of climate change. We should not therefore abandon fear appeals in favor of hope appeals. Instead, we should take our bearings from Aristotle in an effort to cultivate fear more responsibly. Aristotle offers an appealing model of “civic fear” that preserves the best aspects of hope, elicits rather than extinguishes our sense of agency, and invites rather than forecloses deliberation.

This chapter defends three connected claims. First, we can account for Hobbes’s turn towards the Hebrew Bible by understanding the place of biblical Israel in the political and religious debates of seventeenth-century England. Second, Hobbes’s particular focus on the Mosaic polity is harder to explain. This focus is puzzling because, for both contextual and textual reasons, the period of Davidic kingship seems to fit much better with Hobbes’s philosophical account of the basis of sovereign authority. Third, Hobbes’s focus on the Mosaic polity is best seen as a rhetorical and polemical move designed to appropriate the images and narratives of parliamentarians, republicans, and radicals, and to _subversively redirect_ them in the service of absolutism. There is suggestive textual evidence that Hobbes knew that this was both a radical and a risky strategy.

Political realism is frequently criticised as a theoretical tradition that amounts to little more than a rationalisation of the status quo and an apology for power. This paper responds to this criticism by defending three connected claims. First, it acknowledges the moral seriousness of rationalisation, but argues that the problem is hardly particular to political realists. Second, it argues that classical International Relations realists like EH Carr and Hans Morgenthau have a profound awareness of the corrupting effects of rationalisation and see realism as an antidote to this problem. Third, it proposes that Carr and Morgenthau can help us to recognise the particular ways in which realist arguments may nonetheless rationalise existing power relations and affirm the status quo by default, if not by design.

Thomas Hobbes tells us that he wrote Leviathan to “absolve the divine laws” of the charge that they justify rebellion. This article interprets the argumentative strategy of the second half of Leviathan in light of this intention. Over the course of his three major political works, Hobbes develops a convergent argument to absolve God’s laws. This strategy of judicial rhetoric relies on using multiple independent claims in the hope that one’s audience finds at least one of them persuasive. This was a risky strategy for Hobbes that angered his critics. The strategy also reveals something about what sort of philosopher Hobbes was and how we ought to approach his work.

Appeals to a ‘tradition’ stretching back to Thucydides have been central to the recent emergence of realism in political theory. This article asks what work these appeals to tradition are doing and whether they are consistent with contemporary political realism’s contextualist commitments. I argue that they are not and that realists also have independent epistemic reasons to attend to contextualist worries. Ultimately, I make the case for an account of the realist tradition that is at once consistent with moderate contextualist commitments and that preserves the classificatory and analytical value of tradition-building.

Martha Nussbaum’s Political Emotions: Why Love Matters for Justice is a rich and engaging work that brings together her theory of emotions with her own strand of capabilities-inflected political liberalism . The result is an empirically-informed, deeply cross-disciplinary, and engaging argument for the centrality of emotional work to the liberal democratic project. In what follows, I offer an account of the book’s theoretical context and its central argument before engaging along more evaluative and critical lines with its treatment of compassion and tragedy.The overarching theoretical argument of the book is that ensuring the stability of political principles and motivating citizens to make the sacrifices necessary for a common life require emotional work. This is as true in liberal societies as it is in monarchical or totalitarian ones, though the kind of emotional work required will differ in each case. Political liberals who accept this premise are faced wi ..