This chapter reflects on the tradition of Western political thought known as realism. Its main purpose is to identify who realists are, and to explain what realism is in the study of international relations. The first part of the chapter introduces students to some important thinkers, both ancient and modern, ascribed to the realist tradition. It also identifies two broad strands of realist thought: ‘classical’ and ‘structural’ or ‘neorealist’. The second part investigates attempts to conceive realism as a unified theory and practice of international relations. It highlights realism’s central concepts of the state and anarchy before reflecting on realism’s normative dimension.

This chapter provides an overview of the importance of utopian theorizing in the twenty-first century. It resituates utopianism, through Blochean theory, as larger than a literary genre and more diverse than representations of perfect societies. Rather, it celebrates an ideal of the utopianism of the everyday, of the here-and-now as much as of the future. It argues for a utopianism that is necessarily decolonial as it seeks to undo the damage of racial capitalism and provide imaginative resources for living differently. It concludes with an overview of the chapters collected in this book, showing that they explore both reactionary or nostalgically inflected visions of America’s settler-colonial utopian foundations, as well as centering new strains of utopian thought emerging from the margins of hegemonic American culture.

Called by P. B. Shelley ‘the master-theme of the epoch’, the French Revolution profoundly affected British literature, giving new energy to the nascent Romantic movement while dissolving the boundary between literature and politics. This chapter examines the polarisation of British public opinion in the aftermath of the Revolution and the contestation of its ideas in the 1790s ‘pamphlet war’. The chapter analyses eye-witness accounts of the Revolution by British expatriates such as H. M. Williams and the dilemmas faced by British radicals when war was declared and the Revolution took an increasingly violent course. Wordsworth’s autobiographical account of these conflicts in The Prelude (1805) is set against later imaginative reconstructions of the Revolution by Shelley, Carlyle and Dickens and the more indirect expression of revolutionary shock in Gothic fiction. The chapter concludes by noting the linguistic legacy of the Revolution experience, which created much of the political vocabulary by which we still discuss ideas of nationhood.

Chapter 4 on Antony and Cleopatra again investigates the dynamics of power, but this time in a dialectic with erotic pleasure as well as with nature. The play’s paradoxically triumphant suicides at the end contain strong utopian resonances affirmative of eros and its links with death and the aesthetic. This play represents the turning point in the development this book is charting, as Shakespeare’s works take on new forms and themes that emphasize the utopian overcoming power in plays that are tragicomic and synthetic of his career. The chapter also analyzes Egypt as containing, along with its political practices, a Shakespearean green world quality, linking the play to earlier green world comedies. Egypt is especially an erotic, feminized, and feminist utopian space housing the play’s counter-political values. Cleopatra emerges as both a political and a utopian character and one who becomes at the very end the play’s dominant figure. Her partner Antony, of course, is essential to the play as well and eventually develops his own utopian qualities after seeming at first a love-sick buffoon, then an instrumental, ruthless politician. The play is formally a tragedy but has a strong tragicomic feeling as well.

“The only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in face of despair,” wrote Theodor Adorno in 1946–47, “is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption … Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.”1

This chapter – the concluding substantive chapter of the book – asks how a concern with ecosystem resilience might ultimately come to inform the way political communities approach the relationship between climate change and security. If ecological security constitutes the most progressive account of climate security, encouraging approaches that emphasize the rights and needs of the most vulnerable in the face of climate change, how might we get there? The chapter draws on the political sociology of Pierre Bourdieu in developing an account of political possibility. It then locates immanent possibilities for movement towards ecological security in existing principles and practices (from the precautionary principle to accounts of geoengineering governance), before acknowledging a role for considering alternative and novel sets of institutional arrangements and practices to advance ecological security. In the process, it makes the case for recognizing and facilitating progressive change, even if such change does not wholly align with the principles of the ecological security discourse. In this context, the perfect should not be the enemy of the good.