Richard Ned Lebow is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government at Dartmouth College and Centennial Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Besides the books featured in his Rorotoko interviews, Forbidden Fruit and Why Nations Fight, he is also the author of A Cultural Theory of International Relations (Cambridge, 2008), winner of the Jervis-Schoeder Award for the best book in international relations and history and the Susan Strange Award for the best book of the year, and The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge, 2003), winner of the Alexander L. George Award for the best book in political psychology.
Encouraged by therapists, people search for their inner selves. Groups and corporations develop “identities,” to which their members are “invited” to internalize. Political leaders encourage us to distinguish ourselves from others, to who we are superior. All these practices are not only totalizing and harmful to our individuality and well being, they rest on the false premise that there is such a thing as an identity.In practice, we are a jumble of self-identifications, which in turn rest on our affiliations, roles and relationship to our bodies. Stripped of these self-identifications, we are nothing underneath but raw appetites.Multiple affiliations and roles control and channel these appetites in ways that can be beneficial, but also constraining. Attempts by groups and politicians to emphasize single identifications do injustice to our multiplicity and encourage us to deny what we share with members of the “out groups” they create.
Richard Ned Lebow The Politics and Ethics of Identity: In Search of Ourselves Cambridge University Press439 pages, 6 x 9 inches ISBN 978 1107027657
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