ABSTRACT

Drawing on three of Alker's abiding interests in modeling world politics- dialogics as method, world civilizations as substance, and dramaturgy as form – this chapter arrives at a new understanding of the relationship between “fairy tales” and “science.” Mimesis is a metaphoric or ‘iconic augmentation of the real’, imitating not the effectivity of events, but their logical structure and meaning. Tragic mimesis seeks, as Aristotle said, to represent human action in a magnified way. Thus the world of fiction leads us to the essential heart of the real world of action by playing the unreal, while true histories of the past open up buried potentialities of the present or future. Focusing on narrative scripts and their underlying plots and associated transformational grammars not only helps reconstitute international relations within the dialectical-hermeneutic tradition as a reconstructive but fallible science of human possibilities, it also reasserts that concept of scientific international theory which grounds itself in practical striving toward world community.