The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order

by Charles Edel (Author), Hal Brands (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2019

  $13.04

  The spectacle of Athenian drama argued for a tragic understanding of history: one that sees order as the exception and decline as the norm for human societies. In this timely new book, two distinguished political scientists find in that classical tragic sensibility a call for Americans to uphold values of stability, cooperation, and peace to counteract a new global decline.
  
  Hal Brands and Charles Edel argue that, nearly seventy-five years after the end of World War II, Americans have forgotten that their prosperity is the result of global peace-preserving institutions that were built by leaders with a tragic understanding of history. The multiplicity of actors threatening world stability today make this amnesia problematic and could signal the beginning of a gradual slide back into disorder. To prevent this backslide, the authors prescribe bolstering America's defense budget, warding off protectionism, and emphasizing an obligation to remember the precarity of history.