Alison McQueen on Political Realism and Apocalypse

Alison McQueen is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Stanford University.  Her research focuses on early modern political theory and the history of International Relations thought.  Alison’s recently published book Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, traces the responses of three canonical political realists—Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Hans Morgenthau—to hopes and fears about the end of the world. Her second book project, Absolving God: Hobbes’s Scriptural Politics, tracks and explains changes in Thomas Hobbes’s strategies of Scriptural argument over time. Her other ongoing research projects explore normative and methodological questions within political realism, methods of textual interpretation, and the ethics and politics of catastrophe.