Dead Languages

"The Tragedy of Great Power Politics" is probably one of the key books to understand what's happening in the WARld of international relationships.

Unfortunately, it's translated only in a few languages, so those who can't read English or Chinese have to either learn one of these languages or rely on Google translator.

The author of this book, John Mearsheimer, was marginalized by media quite successfully for the last few decades. The book was published in 2001 and gained hardly any attention until 2014. Althouth it began enlightening some friends of knowledge since then, most of us were busy listening to "the intellectual we deserve".

Following my intuition, I abandoned Kant and Searle, whom I'd been studying recently in depth, and focused on Mearsheimer. It took me a couple of weeks to read "The Tragedy of Great Power Politics," watching many his lectures at the same time.

Insofar as I was not paying attention to politics, it's natural to assume that the theory of offensive realism is a trivial subject and everyone who studies IR understands it well. However, there is certainly one aspect which became clear to me while I was reading the book and which may not be realized even by Mearsheimer himself. His definition of power based on the economy and the size of population of a state which may be converted into military might, completely ignores not ideology, not political regime, but the power of language itself. In fact, there is a competition between languages, none of which wants to share the fate of ancient Greek or Latin.

So here is the question for a philosopher: What turned those mighty UNIversal languages into dead languages?