¹ Ashley, Richard K., ‘The geopolitics of geopolitical space: Toward a critical social theory of international politics’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 12:4 (1987), p. 408 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² I refer here to those approaches within IR Marxism that adhere to an exclusively materialistic – and thus fragmentary – reading of Marx’s own work.

³ For reasons of economy, I will refer to these ideational variables as ‘the ideology of humanitarian intervention’.

⁴ The emphasis being on the materialistic critique of humanitarian intervention, this article will not discuss the liberal narrative that reads the historical development of international politics as the progressive development of ‘universal morality’. More often than not, liberalism visualises humanitarianism as an orange that has been gradually peeled until its inside grape is fully revealed. The deep resonance of the revelatory, almost messianic elements of this argument are hard to pass unnoticed, further reinforcing the naturalisation of this process as a gradual self-realisation of ‘humanity’. Paradoxically, this liberal narrative eventually conceals far more than what it promises to reveal. In a way, it is supressing and concealing even more than what the alleged ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ of realism and Marxism has excluded from deliberation. Given the above, and although many ideational criticisms within liberalism emphasise the unilateral, materialistic, and selective scope of interventionist practices on purportedly humanitarian grounds, the liberal narrative on the matter needs separate, detailed examination within the scope herewith proposed.

⁵ This parallel examination of realism and Marxism does not ignore, of course, their notable differences, let alone the individual differences within these rich traditions, which are unavoidably treated here in a rather schematic manner. See Andrew Linklater, Beyond Realism and Marxism: Critical Theory and International Relations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1990).

⁶ Typical is Richard Ashley’s opening quote. See also George, Jim and Campbell, David, ‘Patterns of dissent and the celebration of difference: Critical social theory and International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 34:3 (1990), p. 281 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Shapcott, Richard, Justice, Community, and Dialogue in International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 63 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Kurki, Milja and Wight, Colin, ‘International Relations and social science’, in Tim Dunne, Milja Kurki, and Steve Smith (eds), International Relations Theories: Discipline and Diversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 23 Google Scholar; Devetak, Richard, ‘Postmodernism’, in Scott Burchill et al., Theories of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), p. 166 Google Scholar. Of course, the hermeneutics of suspicion has been used in various contexts and to serve diverse, even conflicting ends. For example, Heikki Patomäki identifies such a hermeneutics with scepticism and Derrida’s deconstruction, whereas Amit Ron uses Ricoeur’s ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ to re-examine the public-elite relation during peace process. On a different strand, Francis Beer and Robert Hariman recognise in what they define as ‘post-realism’ an embrace of a hermeneutics of suspicion, to the extent that it ‘challenges the suspension of disbelief’ and ‘looks behind claims to reason, morality, or legitimacy for fixed motives, alliances of mutual self-interest, and the like. In its most radical form, it presumes strong linkages among forms of domination or authority.’ Patomäki, Heikki, ‘Is a global identity possible? The relevance of big history to Self-Other relations’, Refugee Watch, 36:13 (2010), p. 57 Google Scholar; Ron, Amit, ‘Peace negotiations and peace talks: the peace process in the public sphere’, International Journal of Peace Studies, 14:1 (2009), pp. 1–16 Google Scholar; Beer, Francis A. and Hariman, Robert, ‘Realism and rhetoric in International Relations’, in Francis A. Beer and Robert Hariman (eds), Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996), p. 21 Google Scholar.

⁷ Ricoeur, Paul, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 32 Google Scholar.

⁸ Bell quotes here Brian Leiter’s ‘powerful naturalist reading’ of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, listed as ‘an exemplar of realism in moral and political theory’. Bell, Duncan, ‘Introduction: Under an empty sky: Realism and political theory’, in Duncan Bell (ed.), Political Thought and International Relations: Variations on a Realist Theme (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), pp. 16 Google Scholar, 24, emphasis added; Leiter, Brian, ‘The hermeneutics of suspicion: Recovering Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud’, in Brian Leiter (ed.), The Future of Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2004), p. 76 Google Scholar. See also Leiter, Brian, ‘Classical realism’, Philosophical Issues, 11:1 (2001), pp. 244–267 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Of interest here is also Richard Ned Lebow’s reference to the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ in his reading of the texts of Thucydides, Clausewitz, and Morgenthau in an attempt to ‘discover their intended meanings and their authors’ intentions’. Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 57.

⁹ Guzzini, Stefano, ‘The enduring dilemmas of realism in International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 10:4 (2004), p. 553 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Guzzini, Stefano, ‘The different worlds of realism in International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 30:1 (2001), pp. 111–121 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See, however, Michael Cox (ed.), E.H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). On this fragmented reading of Carr’s ‘harmony of interests’ I will return below.

¹⁰ Lovin, Robin W., Reinhold Niebuhr and Christian Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 8 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹¹ Layne, Christopher, ‘Kant or cant: the myth of the democratic peace’, International Security, 19:2 (1994), p. 11 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Waltz, Kenneth, ‘Realist thought and neo-realist theory’, in Robert L. Rothstein (ed.), The Evolution of Theory in International Relations: Essays in Honour of William T. R. Fox (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), p. 29 Google Scholar.

¹² To a certain extent, a minor exception to this rule could be traced within neoclassical realism, calling for the examination of the role of ideational variables in the analysis of the systemic constraints placed upon decision-makers. See, for example, Dueck, Colin, ‘Neoclassical realism and the national interest: Presidents, domestic politics, and major military interventions’, in Steven E. Lobell, Norrin M. Ripsman, and Jeffrey W. Taliaferro (eds), Neoclassical Realism, the State, and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), pp. 133–169 Google Scholar; Kitchen, Nicholas, ‘Systemic pressures and domestic ideas: a neoclassical realist model of grand strategy formation’, Review of International Studies, 36:1 (2010), pp. 117–143 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In the context of the present analysis, however, my major complaint with these approaches concerns their treatment of these ideational variables as having a one-way, bottom-up (hence, rather limited) impact on the foreign policy decisions of leaders. As will become more apparent below, this approach is too distant from the one attempted here which implies (against the level-of-analysis approach) that leaders are themselves embedded in the discourses and practices informed by the ideology of humanitarian intervention, in a way not too different from all other agents.

¹³ Welsh, Jennifer M., ‘Taking consequences seriously: Objections to humanitarian intervention’, in Jennifer M. Welsh (ed.), Humanitarian Intervention and International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 62 Google Scholar; Gray, Colin, ‘No good deed shall go unpunished’, International Journal of Human Rights, 4:3–4 (2000), pp. 302–306 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁴ Callinicos, Alex, ‘The ideology of humanitarian intervention’, in Tariq Ali (ed.), Masters of the Universe? NATO’s Balkan Crusade (London: Verso, 2000), p. 176 Google Scholar; Ellen M. Wood, ‘Kosovo and the new imperialism’, in ibid., p. 192; Tyner, James, The Business of War: Workers, Warriors and Hostages in Occupied Iraq (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 32–33 Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Cox, Robert, ‘Social forces, states and world orders: Beyond International Relations theory’, in Robert Keohane (ed.), Neorealism and its Critics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 204–254 Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Rosenberg, Justin, Empire of Civil Society: A Critique of the Realist Theory of International Relations (London: Verso, 1994), p. 14 Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Thompson, Janna, Justice and World Order: A Philosophical Enquiry (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 6 Google Scholar.

¹⁸ Even when the emphasis is on the security considerations serving ‘an already existing system of networked global liberal governance’, Marxists note that representing humanitarian intervention as the ‘virtuous cause’ of the ‘civilized’ (most powerful) states, is but a euphemism for a carrot-and-stick system of punishment and reward directed to all those ‘rogues’ that ‘defy the contour of political/ideological order advantageous to the hegemonic state’. Duffield, Mark R., Global Governance and the New Wars: The Merging of Development and Security (London: Zed Books, 2001), p. 258 Google Scholar; Johnstone, Diana, ‘NATO and the new world order’, in Philip Hammond and Edward S. Herman (eds), Degraded Capability: The Media and the Kosovo Crisis (London: Pluto, 2000), p. 14 Google Scholar; Duffield, Mark R. and Waddell, Nicholas, ‘Securing humans in a dangerous world’, International Politics, 43:1 (2006), p. 3 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

¹⁹ Carr, Edward H., The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), p. 75 Google Scholar, emphasis added.

²⁰ Ibid., p. 80, emphasis added.

²¹ Clark, Ian, The Hierarchy of States: Reform and Resistance in the International Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 155 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Donnelly, Jack, ‘The ethics of realism’, in Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (eds), The Oxford Handbook of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 151 Google Scholar. See, however, Smith, Thomas W., History and International Relations (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 51 Google Scholar; Wilson, Peter, ‘E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis: Appearance and reality in world politics’, Politik, 12:4 (2009), pp. 21–25 Google Scholar.

²² Carr, Edward H., What Is History? (London: Macmillan, 1961), p. 10 Google ScholarPubMed.

²³ Edward H. Carr, ‘The view from the arena’, The Times Literary Supplement (7 March 1975), p. 246.

²⁴ Wheeler, Nicholas J., Saving Strangers: Humanitarian Intervention in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 6 Google Scholar.

²⁵ Wendt, Alex, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 285–290 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁶ Wheeler, Saving Strangers, p. 7.

²⁷ Lévi-Strauss, Claude, The Elementary Structures of Kinship (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), p. 8 Google Scholar.

²⁸ Derrida, Jacques, Writing and Difference (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 278–293 Google Scholar.

²⁹ The intellectual breadth of Ricoeur’s work is almost unparalleled. Still the literature of International Relations has rather failed to fully profit from his work. The reasons are many and diverse, the most important being perhaps his reluctance to overcome metaphysics. John Caputo’s Radical Hermeneutics, for example, a book extensively quoted in the IR literature, only indirectly and symptomatically refers to Ricoeur, while the latter’s ‘critical’ hermeneutics is left out from the radicalisation of hermeneutics. From the very beginning, Ricoeur is closely associated with Gadamer’s conservative hermeneutics and thus suspect of ‘blocking off’ this radicalisation. John D. Caputo, Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 5, 149–50, 289, 302–3, fn. 18. Nevertheless, as Kearney observes, Caputo’s omission of Ricoeur seems rather peculiar, especially since Ricoeur’s later hermeneutic writing ‘surmounts the conservative limits of Gadamerian hermeneutic of recollection’ and represents ‘a significant opening’ to the direction opted for by Caputo: ‘This omission is probably explicable in terms of Caputo’s methodological intention to forge some kind of middle way between the conservative hermeneutics of Gadamer and the radical deconstruction of hermeneutics by Derrida. Ricoeur’s medial position would no doubt have made this opposition less stark and less dramatic.’ Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: From Husserl to Lyotard (London: Harper Collins Academic, 1991), p. 205, fn. 26.

³⁰ In the context of the present analysis, scepticism is referred to here as a philosophical position about truth. Whereas scepticism is doubt of ideas, suspicion is doubt of the motives of people, including one’s own. This conceptual clarification is necessary to avoid confusion, especially when scepticism is often used as a term in different analytical contexts as almost a synonym to suspicion.

³¹ On the misappropriations of the term, see Scott-Baumann, Alison, Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 1 Google Scholar, 7. See also Thiselton, Anthony C., New Horizons in Hermeneutics (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1992), p. 143 Google Scholar; Leiter, ‘The hermeneutics of suspicion’, pp. 74–105; Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 57 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Beck, Ulrich, Giddens, Anthony, and Lash, Scott, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), pp. 145–146 Google Scholar, 166. See however, Clark, Steven H., Paul Ricoeur (London: Routledge, 1990)Google Scholar.

³² Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, p. 32. Although the literature extensively quotes Ricoeur’s Freud and Philosophy (1970) when referring to the hermeneutics of suspicion, the term is expressively first used by Ricoeur a year later in his preface to Don Ihde’s analysis of Ricoeur’s contribution. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Foreword’, in Don Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology: The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1971), pp. xiv, xvii.

³³ Ricoeur, Paul, The Conflict of Interpretations (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1974), p. 18 Google Scholar.

³⁴ ‘I call suspicion the act of dispute exactly proportional to the expressions of false consciousness. The problem of false consciousness is the object, the correlative of the act of suspicion. Out of it is born the quality of doubt, a type of doubt which is totally new and different from Cartesian doubt.’ Ricoeur, Paul, ‘The critique of religion’, in Charles E. Reagan and David Stewart (eds), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur: An Anthology of His Work (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978), pp. 214–215 Google Scholar.

³⁵ Marx, to a lesser extent.

³⁶ Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, pp. 33, 34. See also Ricoeur, The Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 99, 127. Nevertheless, as Ricoeur later correctly insisted, all three assert that we deceive others as well as ourselves about our beliefs, motives and actions through our misperceptions. Ricoeur, Paul, Oneself as Another (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 302 Google Scholar, 341.

³⁷ A period partly coinciding with the postwar dominance of the structuralist emphasis on doubt and suspicion about all aspects of human endeavour. Dosse, François, History of Structuralism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 354 Google Scholar.

³⁸ Kearney, Richard, On Paul Ricoeur: The Owl of Minerva (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 156 Google Scholar.

³⁹ A feature typical of his self-described (following Eric Weil) ‘post-Hegelian Kantian’ philosophy. Dosse, François, Paul Ricoeur: les sens d’une vie (Paris: La Découverte, 1997), pp. 120 Google Scholar, 586.

⁴⁰ Reagan, Charles E., Paul Ricoeur: His Life and Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 104 Google Scholar. See also Ricoeur, Paul, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. 165 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴¹ Ricoeur, Oneself as Another, p. 161; Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, Volume III (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 246–247 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴² Ricoeur, Paul, The Symbolism of Evil (New York: Harper & Row, 1967), p. 351 Google Scholar.

⁴³ Scott-Baumann, Ricoeur and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion, pp. 173–4.

⁴⁴ Ricoeur, Paul, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 254 Google Scholar. Ricoeur’s focus here is on the metaphoric function of language rather than the figure of metaphor per se. He builds his approach slowly and carefully, moving from the semiotic (word) to the semantic (sentence), and finally to the hermeneutic level (textual discourse) of inquiry.

⁴⁵ Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁴⁶ Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Poetry and possibility’, in Mario J. Valdés (ed.), A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination (New York: Harvester Press, 1991), p. 462 Google Scholar, emphases added.

⁴⁷ Against traditional accounts within phenomenology, Ricoeur places great emphasis on the intersubjective concept of discourse, which he identifies as a ‘language-event’, while associating discourse and practice, texts, and actions. For Ricoeur, discourse (spoken or written) is characterised by four fundamental traits: (a) it is always already historically specific; (b) it always refers somehow to the person who speaks or writes; (c) it always has a reference to the world it re-presents (dynamism); and (d) it always addresses an interlocutor in the intersubjective terrain. Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1991), p. 145.

⁴⁸ Ricoeur, Paul, Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1976), pp. 45–69 Google Scholar.

⁴⁹ Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Creativity in language’, in Reagan and Stewart (eds), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, pp. 122–123 Google Scholar, 132–3.

⁵⁰ Wheeler, Saving Strangers, p. 7.

⁵¹ Examining how the English merchant class legitimised the accumulation of wealth at the turn of the sixteenth century, Skinner remarks that this particular class did not directly defend a new capitalist ethos. He supports that this capitalist practice kept pace with the principles of Protestantism, the dominant legitimising principles of the then society. Skinner, Quentin, ‘Some problems in the analysis of political thought and action’, Political Theory, 2:3 (1974), pp. 277–303 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁵² Following Ricoeur’s analysis and treatment of ‘distortion’, my references to the term do not imply the pre-existence of a real, correct political structure that becomes ideologically dissimulated. Instead, political ‘reality’ is understood here in the light of Ricoeur’s reading of Marx’s German Ideology, where the real is equated with the actual and the material, as individuals are put together with their material conditions, the way they operate: ‘The social structure and the State are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they may appear [erscheinen] in their own or other people’s imagination [Vorstellung], but as they really are [wirklich]; i.e. as they operate [wirken], produce materially, and hence as they work under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will.’ Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, Part I (New York: International Publishers, 1970), pp. 46–7. Thus, instead of using less charged terms like ‘deception’ or ‘closure’ to describe this ideological function, I adhere to Ricoeur’s reading of distortion, meaning the process in which the established political order is uncritically vindicated and the community’s symbols become ideologically fixed and fetishized. Paul Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action, and Interpretation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 229.

⁵³ The respective memoranda were submitted by Professors Ian Brownlie QC, Christine Chinkin, Christopher Greenwood QC, Vaughan Lowe and Mark Littman QC, and are all included in a special issue of International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 49:4 (2000).

⁵⁴ The ideas of naïveté and ‘second naïveté’ are recurrent themes in the development of Ricoeur’s thought all through the span of his life work, starting even from his 1950 Le volontaire et l’involontaire and not from his 1969 La symbolique du mal, as often noted in the respective literature. See Ricoeur, Paul, Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1966), pp. 18 Google Scholar, 76, 83, 155.

⁵⁵ The conceptual origin of the term as opposed to the hermeneutics of suspicion should be traced in Gabriel Marcel’s differentiation between ‘primary’ and ‘secondary reflection’, whose work has been a constant source of inspiration for Ricoeur. Paul Ricoeur, ‘Intellectual autobiography of Paul Ricoeur’, in Lewis Edwin Hahn (ed.), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur (Chicago: Open Court, 1995), p. 7.

⁵⁶ This conceptual development most notably includes his: Le volontaire et l’involontaire (1950); Idées directrices pour une phénoménologie (1950); La symbolique du mal (1960); De l’interprétation: Essai sur Sigmund Freud (1965); L’homme faillible (1965); La métaphore vive (1975); Interpretation Theory (1976); Essays on Biblical Interpretation (1980); Temps et récit: Tome III (1985); Lectures on Ideology and Utopia (1986); Soi-même comme un autre (1990); and La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli (2000).

⁵⁷ Dauenhauer, Bernard P., Paul Ricoeur: The Promise and the Risk of Politics (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 1998), p. 1 Google Scholar.

⁵⁸ Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p. 143; Wall, John, ‘Moral meaning: Beyond the good and the right’, in John Wall, William Schweiker, and W. David Hall (eds), Paul Ricoeur and Contemporary Moral Thought (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 48 Google Scholar.

⁵⁹ As Dauenhauer notes, ‘it is important to address the issue of the relationship between philosophical and religious, especially biblical, considerations in Ricoeur’s political works. On the one hand, Ricoeur has always been concerned to distinguish carefully and clearly between the biblical and the philosophical domains. Each of these domains, he has consistently recognized, is an autonomous field of investigation. On the other hand, he has always insisted that it is wrongheaded to insist that investigations in either of these fields take no notice whatsoever of considerations arising from the other field.’ Dauenhauer, Paul Ricoeur, p. 20. See also Ricoeur, Paul, Critique and Conviction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), p. 139 Google Scholar.

⁶⁰ Husserl, Edmund, Cartesian Meditations: An Introduction to Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999), p. 4 Google Scholar. See also McCarthy, Joan, Dennett and Ricoeur on the Narrative Self (Amherst: Humanity Books, 2007), p. 92 Google Scholar; Simmons, J. Aaron and Benson, Bruce Ellis, The New Phenomenology: A Philosophical Introduction (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), pp. 339–340 Google Scholar.

⁶¹ Husserl, Edmund, Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1931), pp. 112–114 Google Scholar, 150–5; Pirovolakis, Eftichis, Reading Derrida and Ricoeur: Improbable Encounters between Deconstruction and Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), p. 44 Google Scholar.

⁶² The history of phenomenology discusses the concept of naïveté as a product of Romanticism or the anti-Enlightenment, and of philosophers such as Dilthey or Schleiermacher, who examined the impact of Kantian idealism on the study of the ‘human’ sciences (Geistewissenshaften).

⁶³ Simms, Karl, Paul Ricoeur (London: Routledge, 2003), pp. 37–38 Google Scholar.

⁶⁴ See, for example, Thompson, John B., Critical Hermeneutics: A Study in the Thought of Paul Ricoeur and Jürgen Habermas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gardiner, Michael, The Dialogics of Critique: M. M. Bakhtin and the Theory of Ideology (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 123–136 Google Scholar; Roberge, Jonathan, ‘What is critical hermeneutics?’, Thesis Eleven, 106:1 (2011), pp. 5–22 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶⁵ Richard Kearney, ‘Between oneself and another: Ricoeur’s diacritical hermeneutics’, in Andrzej Wiercinski (ed.), Between Suspicion and Sympathy: Paul Ricoeur’s Unstable Equilibrium (Toronto: The Hermeneutic, 2003), pp. 149–60.

⁶⁶ Habermas, Jürgen, ‘A review of Gadamer’s Truth and Method ’, in Fred R. Dallmayr and Thomas A. McCarthy (eds), Understanding and Social Inquiry (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), p. 358 Google Scholar; Ricoeur, Paul, ‘Ethics and culture: Habermas and Gadamer in dialogue’, Philosophy Today, 17:2 (1973), pp. 153–165 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Dauenhauer, Paul Ricoeur, pp. 224–40.

⁶⁷ Especially in the context of his ideology critique, Ricoeur has been in dialogue with and drawn from various approaches within Marxism and post-Marxism, such as the Frankfurt School and Althusser. By addressing Ricoeur’s hermeneutics as ‘critical’ the article does not propose, of course, a new reading of Ricoeur as a post-Marxist philosopher. It implies instead that although drawing from the hermeneutic tradition, Ricoeur’s hermeneutics seeks to extend its boundaries by addressing the crucial dimensions of power and the ideological deformation of language use.

⁶⁸ This detour is often described by theological studies as an ‘arc’ because, evidently, it has to return and reaffirm the initial conviction of faith in the reading of the biblical text. Boyd Blundell, Paul Ricoeur between Theology and Philosophy: Detour and Return (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), pp. 81, 106. See also the excellent Wallace, Mark I., The Second Naïveté: Barth, Ricoeur, and the New Yale Theology (Macon: Mercer, 1995)Google Scholar.

⁶⁹ Ricoeur, Interpretation Theory, p. 76. Cf. Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), pp. 188–195 Google Scholar. See also Gadamer, Hans-Georg, Truth and Method (New York: Continuum, 1998), pp. 269–270 Google Scholar.

⁷⁰ Ricoeur, From Text to Action, p. 37.

⁷¹ Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy, pp. 28, 496.

⁷² Paul Ricoeur, ‘Philosophy of will and action’, in Reagan and Stewart (eds), The Philosophy of Paul Ricoeur, p. 70. See also Ricoeur, Paul, Husserl: An Analysis of his Phenomenology (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967), p. 214 Google Scholar; Jervolino, Domenico, The Cogito and Hermeneutics: The Question of the Subject in Ricoeur (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1990), p. 12 Google Scholar.

⁷³ Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, p. 351. See also Ricoeur, Paul, ‘What is a text? Explanation and interpretation’, in David M. Rasmussen, Mythic-Symbolic Language and Philosophical Anthropology: A Constructive Interpretation of the Thought of Paul Ricoeur (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1971), pp. 148–149 Google Scholar; Bourgeois, Patrick L., Extension of Ricoeur’s Hermeneutic (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975), pp. 138–139 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁴ Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 111.

⁷⁵ Ibid., p. 311.

⁷⁶ Geertz, Clifford, The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973)Google Scholar.

⁷⁷ White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative, Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), p. 50 Google Scholar.

⁷⁸ Ricoeur, Symbolism of Evil, p. 356; Ihde, Hermeneutic Phenomenology, p. 162; Bourgeois, Patrick, ‘Hermeneutics of symbols and philosophical reflection: Paul Ricoeur’, Philosophy Today, 15:4 (1971), pp. 231–241 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷⁹ Similar is the position on this point of normative theory. Molly Cochran, Normative Theory in International Relations: A Pragmatic Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

⁸⁰ Wheeler, Saving Strangers, p. 4, emphasis in original.

⁸¹ Ibid.

⁸² Skinner, ‘Some problems in the analysis of political thought and action’, p. 299.

⁸³ Ricoeur’s approach starts, therefore, from Karl Mannheim’s ‘sociology of knowledge’ as an alternative critique of ideology. However, Ricoeur departs from Mannheim’s claim that ideology constitutes merely a deviation from reality. Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, pp. xiii, 172–3. I concur with Terry Eagleton that the ideological function of Mannheim’s thesis is to ‘to defuse the whole Marxist conception of ideology, replacing it with the less embattled, contentious conception of a “world view”’. Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London: Verso, 1991), p. 109. Indeed, such a reading of ideology may repress the Marxist class-related connotations of the concept. It might be also the case that, as Eagleton again has noted, the drift of Mannheim’s work comes to downplay concepts of mystification, rationalisation, legitimation, and the power-function of ideas ‘in the name of some synoptic survey of the evolution of forms of historical consciousness’, thus returning ideology to its pre-Marxist conceptualisation. Terry Eagleton, ‘Ideology and its vicissitudes’, in Slavoj Žižek (ed.), Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), p. 194. Yet, this could hardly be the case with Ricoeur’s own account due to the centrality not only of the distorting but also of the rationalising, legitimating, power-related, and mystificatory manifestations of ideology in his analysis.

⁸⁴ Ricoeur, Lectures on Ideology and Utopia, p. 136.

⁸⁵ Ibid., p. 10.

⁸⁶ Ibid., p. 266.

⁸⁷ Akrivoulis, Dimitrios E., ‘Metaphors matter: the ideological functions of the Kosovo-Holocaust analogy’, Journal of Balkan and Near Eastern Studies, 17:2 (2015), pp. 222–242 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁸⁸ Ricoeur, Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, p. 229.

⁸⁹ Brown, Wendy, Edgework: Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), pp. 37–59 Google Scholar.

⁹⁰ To put it in Pierre Bourdieu’s terms, the duality of the objective truth of the material and calculating interests and power relations, and the subjectively experienced meaning of humanitarianism is a condition of symbolic economy. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 140–3. See also Michel, Johann, Ricoeur and the Post-Structuralists: Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Castoriadis (London: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), pp. 1–30 Google Scholar.

⁹¹ Rancière, Jacques, ‘Who is the subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic Quarterly, 103:2–3 (2004), pp. 297–310 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁹² Roberts, Anthea, ‘Legality vs. legitimacy: Can uses of force be illegal but justified?’, in Philip Alston and Euan Macdonald (eds), Human Rights, Intervention, and the Use of Force (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 179–214 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Typical is the case of the ‘illegal but legitimate’ NATO’s intervention in Kosovo. Independent International Commission on Kosovo, The Kosovo Report: Conflict, International Response, Lessons Learned (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 4.