Book Review: Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, by Alison McQueen

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591718771055
• Published date: 01 December 2018
• Date: 01 December 2018
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2018, Vol. 46(6) 959 –1008

© The Author(s) 2018

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Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times, by Alison McQueen. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2018. 244 pp. US$ 80.00, ISBN 9781107152397.

Reviewed by: Paul Sagar, King’s College, Cambridge, UK

DOI: 10.1177/0090591718771055

The apocalypse will strike many as an unpromising topic in contemporary

political theory. Surely this is the preserve of religious fanatics, and the politi-

cally unhinged? Not so, shows Alison McQueen. The apocalypse has not

only been with us since the beginnings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, it

remains a permeating feature of our political reality.

On the right, apocalyptic narratives of a looming existential confrontation

between the (Christian) West and the (Muslim) East have been standard for

well over two decades now, becoming turbocharged in the wake of 9/11. In

the run-up to the Iraq War, George W. Bush presented the righteousness of the

American cause in explicitly apocalyptic terms, drawing repeatedly from

Christian cataclysmic imagery, continuing a style in American politics

employed by both Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt (3–5). In his

2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump painted a picture of American

economic and social failure, about to be brought to a spectacular end by radi-

cal Islamic terrorists. “Casting himself in the role of a messiah, Trump prom-

ised to lead the United States away from Armageddon and make the country

‘great again.’ Trump’s rhetoric borrows from the narrative of apocalypticism,

whilst shedding much of its Christian imagery” (5). Apocalypticism is not,

however, under the monopoly of the right. Leftist anti-nuclear campaigners

have long emphasised the cataclysmic consequences of nuclear war so as to

divert political attention towards disarmament, whilst the environmental

movement stresses the almost unimaginably awful consequences of failing to

bring anthropogenic climate change under control. After all, if global tem-

peratures rise at current projected rates, the result may be the end of human

life. Whether campaigners present this vision (as former vice president Al

Gore does) in overtly Biblical language, or in terms of dispassionate secular

science, it is still a prediction of apocalypse (6).

But of what concern is this to political theorists? McQueen’s contribution

is to identify and analyse what she calls the “apocalyptic imaginary.” Drawing

771055PTXXXX10.1177/0090591718771055Political TheoryBook Reviews

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