John Mearsheimer: evaluation

Transcript context

…So there’s a lot of interesting things there. First you said nations in relation to each other is essentially in a state of anarchism. Yeah, well, anarchy basically means the opposite of hierarchy. Sometimes people think when you’re talking about anarchy, you’re talking about murder and mayhem, but that’s not what anarchy means in the realist context. Anarchy simply means that you don’t have hierarchy. There’s no higher authority that sits above states. States are like pool balls on a table. And in an anarchic world, there’s no higher authority that you can turn to if you get into trouble. And of course the political philosopher who laid this all out was Thomas Hobbes. And Hobbes talked about life in the state of nature, and in the state of nature you have individuals and those individuals compete with each other for power. And the reason that they do is because in the state of nature, by definition, you have no higher authority. And Hobbes’s view is that the way to get out of this terrible situation where individuals are competing with each other and even killing each other is to create a state. It’s what he calls the Leviathan, and that of course is the title of his famous book. So the idea is to escape anarchy, you create a state, and that means you go from anarchy to hierarchy. The problem in international politics is that there is no world state, there is no hierarchy. And if you have no hierarchy and you’re in an anarchic system, you have no choice but to try to maximize your relative power to make sure you are, as we used to say when I was a kid on New York City playgrounds, the biggest and baddest dude on the block. Not because you necessarily want to beat up on other kids or on other states, but because again, that’s the best way to survive. And as I like to point out to people, the best example of what happens when you’re weak in international politics is what the Chinese call the century of national humiliation. From the late 1840s to the late 1940s the Chinese were remarkably weak, and the great powers in the system preyed upon them. And that sends a very important message to not only the Chinese, but to other states in the system. Don’t be weak, be as powerful as you can. And we’ll talk about it, but humiliation can lead to resentment or resentment leads to something you’ve also studied, which is Nazi Germany in the 1930s. We’ll talk about it, but staying to the psychology and philosophy picture, what’s the connection between the will to power in the individual, as you mentioned, and the will to power in a nation?…

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