Carlos Escudé

Carlos Escudé (born 1948) is an Argentine political scientist and author, who during the 1990s served as special advisor to Foreign Minister Guido di Tella. As such, he advised on Argentine foreign policy strategy vis-à-vis the Western powers.

Escudé graduated in sociology from the Argentine Catholic University in 1973. In 1977 he matriculated in St. Antony’s College, Oxford, transferring to Yale University in 1978 upon receipt of a Fulbright Fellowship. In 1981 he earned his Ph.D. in Political Science from Yale; in 1984 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; in 1986 he was decorated with the Order of Bernardo O’Higgins for promoting peace and friendship between Argentina and Chile; in 1996 he received the Konex Award, and in 2003 he was appointed 2003-2004 Ashley Fellow by Trent University (Canada), nominated as “likely the most distinguished political theorist in Latin America”. His books have been edited in Argentina, the United States and Italy. His academic articles have also been published in the United Kingdom, Germany, Spain, Israel, Poland and Mexico. He has been visiting professor at Harvard University’s Department of Government and at Madrid’s Ortega y Gasset Institute, as well as visiting fellow at St. Antony’s College (Oxford), Augsburg University (Germany), Johns Hopkins (SAIS), UNC (Chapel Hill) and Texas (Austin).

Escudé's academic work is associated with neomodernism and with peripheral realism. These approaches posit an interstate system with two complementary hierarchies that are only partially overlapping.

Peripheral realism is a foreign policy theory that argues that the international system has an incipiently hierarchical structure based on differentiated roles: rule-makers, rule-takers and rogue states. It appraises the costs, for the citizens of weaker states without rule-making capabilities, of defying the order established by the stronger, rule-making actors of the interstate system. This global power hierarchy is complemented by a moral hierarchy that acknowledges that all cultures are not morally equivalent. Here is where neomodernism comes in. If all cultures were morally equivalent, then all human individuals would not be endowed with the same human rights, because some cultures award some men more rights than are allotted to other men and women. Hence, if all men and women are endowed with the same human rights, then all cultures cannot not be morally equivalent, because cultures that acknowledge that ‘all men are created equal’ are superior, in terms of their civil ethics, to those that do not. In the West, the neomodern era is characterized by this inevitable conflict between postmodern relativism and modernity’s assumptions about the essential equality of human individuals. Concomitantly, the neomodern world-system is characterized by the two hierarchies, one related to an ethics of human rights and the other to a logic of power.

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* [http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Congress/4359/ Publications by Carlos Escudé and reviews of his works] (Mainly in Spanish and English, available online.)