Modern Age - Summer 2014 - 32

ESSAY

BEYOND NIHILISM
CLASSICAL REALISM AND THE PERILS
OF SCIENTIFIC NATUR ALISM
Reed Davis

I

n an age when the interminable effort to
deconstruct everything human frequently
ends in existential emptiness or just plain silliness, the urge to find something, anything,
true and significant about human behavior
is certainly understandable. This longing
for objectivity and certainty may explain, at
least in part, the recent surge of interest in
Darwinian biology among political scientists. These thinkers argue that Darwinian
biology, with its roots in hard, scientific
data, can provide us with a measure of reliable insight into political behavior and, in
so doing, establish itself as an antidote to
the airy abstractions of constructivism and
continental postmodernism. Moreover, they
insist, Darwinian biology should be readily
embraced by a stolid philosophy like political realism, because realism, after all, like
Darwinianism, takes pride in its stoic ability
to accept the difficult and often unpalatable

facts of human existence. Before traipsing off
to embrace yet another new science of politics, however, we would do well to remember
that an earlier generation of political realists
vigorously resisted efforts to establish naturalism as a foundation for political science.
These thinkers anticipated many of the
foundational principles of a neo-Darwinian
political science and flatly rejected them,
favoring those theories that were grounded
in more philosophically attuned first principles instead.
The case against a Darwinian approach to
political science advanced by three of political realism's chief intellectual architects-
Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, and
Raymond Aron-still resonates. All three
thinkers believed that the various manifestations of scientific naturalism are an affront
to human liberty and individual freedom.
This was not simply a moral issue for them:

Reed Davis is professor of political science at Seattle Pacific University and chair of the Political Science and
Geography Department.
32



Modern Age - Summer 2014

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