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Value pluralists see themselves as philosophical grown-ups. They profess to face reality as it is and accept resultant pessimism, while criticising their monist rivals for holding on to the naïve idea that the right, the good and the beautiful are ultimately harmonisable with each other. The aim of this essay is to challenge this self-image of value pluralists. Notwithstanding its usefulness as a means of subverting monist dominance, I argue that the self-image has the downside of obscuring various theoretical positions that do not fall into either the pluralist or monist camp. Yet such positions do exist, as shown by my discussion of Albert Camus and Hannah Arendt. Near contemporaries of the pioneering value pluralist Isaiah Berlin, the pair, just like him, sought to be realistic about the lived experiences of political disasters and moral disorientation in the twentieth century. Moreover, they shared with Berlin a keen interest in real-world moral dilemmas, which seemed to them (as well as to Berlin) to have made traditional morality obsolete. But the three thinkers' perspectives on 'reality' hardly converged, and neither Camus nor Arendt became a value pluralist as a result of their reflections on moral dilemmas. This, however, by no means indicates the pair's immaturity. Rather, it shows that there is more than one way of observing fidelity to our actual experience and that value pluralists' commitment to realism and resultant pessimism is not as uniquely mature as they would have us believe.

By any measure, democratization has achieved remarkable advances over the past twenty years. Why, then, have so many of the leading works written on the topic during this period been so full of gloom?

Der Begriff Afropessimismus entstammt dem Wirkungskreis "engagierter" Afrikawissenschaftler als Reaktion auf die Verbreitung übertrieben pessimistischer Informationen durch die Medien. Es war auch eine Reaktion auf die Schlußfolgerungen, die von französischen, europäischen und internationalen Investoren und Finanzgebern angesichts der dramatischen Geschehnisse in Afrika gezogen wurden. Man wollte das Disengagement von Staaten und internationalen Institutionen verhindern und der Infragestellung der Kooperationspolitik entgegentreten. Der Autor sieht hinter den maßlosen Beurteilungen über den aufgegebenen Kontinent eine Reaktion, die aus Enttäuschung der eigenen (westlichen) Erwartungen von Afrika resultiert. Er ruft dazu auf, Afrika in seiner Vielfalt, seiner Geschichte, seinen Gegebenheiten und Widersprüchen und seinen eigenen Dynamiken betrachten zu lernen, um von einem Afropessimismus zu einem Afrorealismus zu gelangen. (DÜI-Ott)

In his classic Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville expressed doubt that this country would be able to conduct a wise foreign policy. He argued that democracies lack the qualities necessary for such a stance in world affairs. In his words, "… a democracy can only with great difficulty regulate the details of an important undertaking, persevere in a fixed design, and work out its execution in spite of serious obstacles." Through the second world war, many students of American foreign policy felt that de Tocqueville's pessimistic expectations had been proven valid. Since 1898, this nation seemed to oscillate between extremes of adventurous activism and sullen isolationism.