Abstract
Not everything is possible in politics. Here, Seneca’s maxim, “will cannot be learned,” is transformed into the final and decisive answer of the book.1 In fact, if “Fortune’s Banter” traces an analytical framework intended to examine the aspects we discussed, Wight, however, does not ignore the human alternatives, constantly open to the possible, in a stream perpetually overwhelmed by the untamable impetus of historical forces. Human beings, however, may oppose those historical forces with their values and capacities, whatever these may be. It is true that, in politics, agents stand in front of an inescapable fate, constantly directed toward points of crisis to massive disruptions affecting the social coexistence. But this is politics, a recurrence of points of crisis. Nonetheless, after all, krisis implies, indeed, “choice, decision.” And this does not annihilate will and it does not occlude the human capacity for self-determination and success, together with the possibility to reverse, albeit tentatively, the imminent adversity.
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Notes
Lucius Annaeus Seneca, Moral Epistles, trans. Richard M. Gummere (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1917–25), 10.81.13. The statement is directed against those who assign the capacity to act virtuously only to the wise men: “Scientia illi potius quam voluntas desit: velle non discitur.”
“Similmente interviene della fortuna, la quale dimostra la sua potenza dove non è ordinata virtù a resisterle”; Niccolò Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. Arthur Burd (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1891), chapter 25, p. 358, emphasis added. “Virtuosity” is Wight’s translation of “virtù” in his International Theory, p. 248.
Edward H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 36.
Martin Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory. Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant & Mazzini, ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 22.
Martin Wight, “Germany,” in Arnold J. Toynbee and Frederick T. Ashton Gwatin, eds., The World in March 1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1952), p. 347. “In one respect Hitler was unique among the great political adventurers of history. It was the fortune of Cesare Borgia to fulfil a pattern of statecraft already conceived by so potent a thinker as Machiavelli. But Hitler, as befitting the Borgia of universal semi-literacy and popular an age of journalism, was both Cesare and Machiavelli in one; and had expressed very early in his career, under a transparent veil of detachment, the consciousness of being the rare combination of practical politician and political thinker”; ibid., p. 320. 11. Ibid., p. 347. These concepts and the historical example recur in Wight’s “Fortune’s Banter” [30], but with direct quotation from primary sources.
In 1962, Morgenthau’s ideas were akin to voluntarism, as defined by Wight, that is, believing that will is, or can be, the ultimate master of events. He wrote, “Historic experience indicates what our course must be. The statesmen who became masters of events—the Washingtons and the Lincolns, the Richelieus and the Bismarcks—had one quality in common: they combined a conscious general conception of foreign policy, of its direction and aim, with the ability to manipulate concrete circumstances in the light of that conception”; Hans J. Morgenthau, “Public Affairs: The Perils of Political Empiricism,” Commentary 34, no. 1 (1962): 63.
Xenophon, Hellenica. trans. Carleton L. Brownson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1918), 2.2.3. The treatment is narrated by Thucydides 5.116.4: “The Athenians thereupon slew all the adult males whom they had taken and made slaves of the children and women”; History of the Peloponnesian War, trans. Charles F. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1921). On the theory that Hellenica should be considered the continuation of Thucydides’s History, see at least Luciano Canfora, Tucidide Continuato (Padua: Antenore, 1970) and his Le Vie del Classicismo (Bari: Dedalo, 2004) where Xenophon is the “‘editor’ of Thucydide’s papers” (p. 221). This theory was originally advanced by Giacomo Leopardi, one of the most challenging of nineteenth-century thinkers, in his Zibaldone, trans. Kathleen Baldwin et al. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), January 2, 1821, §468: “In any case, if Xenophon’s history Hellenica has no introduction, this is because it was intended to continue and to become a single corpus with Thucydides’ history.”
Luciano Canfora, Tucidide: L’Oligarca Imperfetto (Pordenone: Edizioni Studio Tesi, 1991), pp. vii–xi.
See Luciano Canfora, “Tucidide,” in Gennaro Sasso e Giorgio Inglese, eds., Machiavelli: Enciclopedia Machiavelliana (Rome: Treccani, 2014), 2:630.
Giacomo Leopardi, La Strage delle Illusioni (Milan: Adelphi, 2010), p. 64.
Vladimir I. Lenin, Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1965), p. 92.
Antonio Gramsci, “Il Compagno G. M. Serrati e le Generazioni del Socialismo Italiano,” in Paolo Spriano, ed., Scritti Politici, 4 vols. (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 1973), 3:193. See Alessandro Natta, Serrati. Vita e Lettere di un Rivoluzionario (Rome: Editori Riuniti, 2001).
Speech at the 16th Congress of the Italian Socialist Party, Bologna, October 5, 1919; quoted in Norberto Bobbio, Profilo Ideologico del Novecento (Milan: Garzanti, 1990), pp. 140–1.
Karl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 528.
Henry Kissinger, “Foreword,” in Raymond Aron, Memoirs, trans. George Holoch (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1990), p. xi.
Hedley Bull, “International Relations as an Academic Pursuit,” in Kai Alderson and Andrew Hurrell, eds., Hedley Bull on International Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 259. The original version of this position is in Hedley Bull, The Control of the Arms Race. Disarmament and Arms Control in the Nuclear Age (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1961), p. 48, where he also states, “The notion that there is a distinction between rational action and other kind of action, or between reason and the passions, is indefensible.”
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© 2016 Michele Chiaruzzi
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Chiaruzzi, M. (2016). Velle Non Discitur? The Impact of Will in Politics. In: Martin Wight on Fortune and Irony in Politics. Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-52873-5_8
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