The Duck of Minerva

Daniel J. Levine

Daniel J. Levine is the Aaron Aronov Associate Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Alabama, where he divides his time between the Departments of Political Science and Religious Studies. He is the author of Recovering International Relations: The Promise of Sustainable Critique (Oxford UP, 2012), with publications appearing and forthcoming in numerous scholarly journals and volumes. His current research deals with fear and its role in Zionist national security imaginaries in particular; in realist and republican political discourse more generally; and with their relation to aesthetics, collective memory, and public/civic religion.

Recent Posts

An Israeli Civil War: From Public Secret to Shared Illusion

An Israeli Civil War: From Public Secret to Shared Illusion

by Daniel J. Levine & Daniel Bertrand Monk | 17 August, 2023 | , ,

For nearly three decades, a pervasive, unspoken fear of civil war created an "ugly stalemate" in Israel, a 'public secret' that pervaded its electoral politics and foreign relations. Thanks to the government's attempted "judicial overhaul," that fear is now very much in the open, Almost overnight, the Israeli public has developed a shared imaginary in which a civil war is not only thinkable, but familiar. How did this happen? What does it mean for Israeli politics? Statism and Revisionism The recent "stalemate" in Israeli politics reflects longstanding tensions within Zionist ideology. As...

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Not Aufklärers but Dilettantes: Reading Michael C. Williams’s “In the Beginning…”

Not Aufklärers but Dilettantes: Reading Michael C. Williams’s “In the Beginning…”

by Daniel J. Levine | 17 September, 2013 | , , ,

“In the Beginning” joins a growing literature – including my own Recovering International Relations – in which normative claims regarding the vocation of IR theory are tied to an historical account of its disciplinary emergence.* If these arguments vary in their details, they share a common logical-rhetorical tactic. An account of the discipline’s beginnings is mobilized to critique present-day scholarly practices: to spur “reflection on where one is, and where one is going.” On Williams’ account, a basic confusion regarding IR-realism’s relationship to liberalism characterizes “where...

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