May and June are red letter months for government professor Richard Ned Lebow, who garnered a slew of notable awards and positions recently. Lebow will receive the Alexander L. George Award for best book in political psychology this July. He was also made an Onassis Fellow in Classics for the summer and received a position at the University of Cambridge in England.
Lebow, the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor of Government whose specialties include international relations and political psychology, will receive the George Award for his book "The Tragic Vision of Politics: Ethics, Interests, and Orders." In the book, Lebow applies the principles of classical realists to show the links between domestic and foreign policy as well as connections between interests and ethics.
"[Classical realists] believed that interests could not be formulated intelligently outside of a language of justice," Lebow told The Dartmouth. "Their tragic understanding of politics provides the basis for a powerful critique of post-Cold War American foreign policy, and an alternate ontology for social science based on Greek tragedy's understanding of life and politics."
Lebow will receive the award at the annual meeting of the International Society of Political Psychology during the first week of July in Toronto. The award is given annually and the winner is selected by a rotating committee of psychologists and political scientists.
The Onassis Foundation in New York made Lebow a fellow and is supporting two lectures that Lebow will give at Dartmouth in July to the summer institute of the Classical Association of New England. The lectures are named, "Past Perfect, Future Conditional: The Concept of the Golden Age from Hesiod to Science Fiction" and "The German Rediscovery of Ancient Greece: A Political Tragedy?" Lebow said that he believed he received the fellowship for his book "Tragic Vision."
Lebow will be a fellow at the Centre for International Studies at Cambridge for the next two Spring terms in addition to being a fellow and a resident of one of the Cambridge colleges. His duties will include giving a few lectures and talking to graduate students, but he will be able to use the rest of his time for researching and writing.
Currently, Lebow is spending his off-term in Italy with his family working on his next book.
