New Imperialists : Ideologies of Empire

WORKMAN: When Might is Right 139
conclusion about bipolarity could mercifully be ignored except for the
fact that a critique by Robert Cox, in a manner reminiscent of Marx’s
claim in The German Ideology that the social needs of the ruling class will
encourage the ascendancy of validating ideas expressed as “eternal laws,” 6
drew attention to the ideological nature of his conclusions: “There is an
unmistakably Panglossian quality,” Cox wrote, “to a theory published in
the late 1970s which concludes that a bipolar system is the best of all
possible worlds. The historical moment has left its indelible mark upon
this purportedly universalist science.” 7 This one brief remark wisely drew
the academy’s wandering attention about war back to the profound
relationship between intellectual life and the evolving social relations of
power within and across societies.
A similar sensitivity with respect to the relationship between knowledge
claims and the social relations of power inform this assessment of
Straussian ideas about empire. Writers in the Straussian tradition share
the same phenomenological horizons as all late moderns, horizons that
include imperialism centred in the north, especially Washington and
London, and dispiriting wars which exact a heavy toll across the majority
of the world. At its core, however, Straussian thought urges us to relax
our judgement of this very same world – indeed, to accept this world
with all of its blemishes and failings. Straussian writings advise us that
the rise of empires is a natural function of our all-too-human weakness
for power. Empire is an outgrowth of humanity qua humanity; to condemn
either war or empire without discretion is to condemn a natural
part of our selves. In this age of empire, then, Straussian intellectuals
have risen to supply the apologetic “eternal laws” of international life, but
their place at the feet of the emperor is less important than the fact that
they roam the corridors of the academy. As we shall see, their provision
of an ideological subtext to American empire amounts to little more than
a restatement of the realist theory of international politics, an outlook
that dominated the field of international relations for decades, as writers
in the Straussian tradition now acknowledge.
The more involved contribution of Straussian thought regarding war
and empire, however, is their rigorous reshaping of the ancients as
would-be apologists for the course of modern history. Thucydides in
particular has been made to appear as a prototypical thinker in the
Straussian vision of international life. The great historian of antiquity,
they argue, recognized the limitations of humanity as he surveyed the