In reflecting on the springs of human conflict Mearsheimer concedes that the terms of pure existential security conflict can be transformed by contentions over the good and the just, but he also tends to minimize the significance of this dimension of the struggle as its eruption would undermine the black box abstraction of realism. Offensive realism tells us, however, that it is unwise to rule out such seemingly unlikely events as they can unexpectedly recur. We must always be prepared for the extreme. A fully blown offensive realism might then open up a conception of the political that would conjoin the struggle for power between states to the one within them. Admittedly, the world implied by this dialectical development of offensive realism does not currently exist but it is a possible world and one that speaks to the vital human need for ends and conflicts over ends that liberal hegemony has long suppressed. The prolongation of this hegemony now threatens to cut off the possibility that some people, somewhere might construct new forms of collective existence. Here we must reconsider the role of the subjective, the thymotic drive and the ideas that might inspire it. If today’s so-called great power states can no longer rely upon the mobilizing power of nationalism to neutralize deepening social divides, what passions might the latter inspire, and how will they shape wars of the twenty-first century?
