The International Thought of Martin Wight (Palgrave MacMillan History of International Thought)

The International Thought of Martin Wight The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series seeks to pub...

Author: Ian Hall

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The International Thought of Martin Wight

The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought Series seeks to publish the best work in this growing and increasingly important field of academic inquiry. Its scholarly monographs cover three types of work: (i) exploration of the intellectual impact of individual thinkers, from key disciplinary figures to neglected ones; (ii) examination of the origin, evolution, and contemporary relevance of specific schools or traditions of international thought; and (iii) analysis of the evolution of particular ideas and concepts in the field. Both classical (pre-1919) and modern (post1919) thought are covered. Its books are written to be accessible to audiences in International Relations, International History, Political Theory, and Sociology. Series Editor Peter Wilson, London School of Economics and Political Science Advisory Board Jack Donnelly, University of Denver Fred Halliday, London School of Economics and Political Science David Long, Carleton University Hidemi Suganami, University of Keele Also in the Series Internationalism and Nationalism in European Political Thought by Carsten Holbraad The International Theory of Leonard Woolf: A Study in Twentieth-Century Idealism by Peter Wilson Tocqueville, Lieber, and Bagehot: Liberalism Confronts the World by David Clinton Harold Laski: Problems of Democracy, the Sovereign State, and International Society by Peter Lamb The War over Perpetual Peace: An Exploration into the History of a Foundational International Relations Text by Eric S. Easley Liberal Internationalism and the Decline of the State: The Thought of Richard Cobden, David Mitrany, and Kenichi Ohmae by Per Hammarlund Classical and Modern Thought on International Relations: From Anarchy to Cosmopolis by Robert Jackson The Hidden History of Realism: A Genealogy of Power Politics by Seán Molloy Hugo Grotius in International Thought by Renée Jeffery The International Thought of Martin Wight by Ian Hall


Ian Hall

THE INTERNATIONAL THOUGHT OF MARTIN WIGHT

© Ian Hall, 2006. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. First published in 2006 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™ 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 and Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, England RG21 6XS Companies and representatives throughout the world. PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN-13: 978–1–4039–6927–9 ISBN-10: 1–4039–6927–2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hall, Ian, 1975– The international thought of Martin Wight / Ian Hall. p. cm.––(Palgrave Macmillan history of international thought series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–6927–2 1. Wight, Martin. 2. International relations—Philosophy. 3. International relations—History, I. Title. II. Palgrave Macmillan series on the history of international thought. JZ1305.H35 2006 327.1092—dc22

2006041577

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: September 2006 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

For Paddy

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Chapter 1

The Enigmatic Martin Wight

1

Chapter 2

The Christian in a Secular Age

21

Chapter 3

The Historian’s Purpose

43

Chapter 4

The Crisis of Modern Politics

65

Chapter 5

Systems of States

87

Chapter 6

International Society

111

Chapter 7

International Theory

133

Epilogue:

The Legacy of Martin Wight

157

Notes

161

Bibliography

201

Index

213


Acknowledgments

M

any debts have been incurred during the writing of this book and the thesis from which it is derived. The Student Awards Agency for Scotland supported my doctoral research. Nick Rengger, in his genial way, supervised it. James Mayall and Michael Bentley were generous and perceptive examiners. For their conversation about the ideas explored in this book, I am grateful to Kirsten Ainley, Duncan Bell, Chris Brown, John Burrow, Mick Cox, Tim Dunne, Mark Imber, Charles Jones, Torsten Michel, Seán Molloy, Brian Porter, Oliver Richmond, Mitchell Rologas, Gabriella Slomp, Christopher Smith, Chandra Sriram, Hidemi Suganami, Luke Swaine, Casper Sylvest, Jo Waters, and the editor of this series, Peter Wilson. The aid of Tony Lang was invaluable in the latter stages of writing, and without that of Renée Jeffery it would never have been finished. I owe a great debt of gratitude to Professor Matthew Melko for his kind donation of copies of his correspondence with Wight and to Dr. Daniel Young for copies of other papers until recently unavailable. Parts of the argument that follow were presented at University of Sussex at the behest of Seán Molloy and at the Centre for the Study of Religion and Politics at St Andrews at that of Mario Aguilar. I am grateful to all who attended. I would like to thank the librarians of the Bodleian Library, Cambridge University, the Royal Institute of International Affairs, the British Library Newspaper Archive and the University of St Andrews. The peerless archivists of the British Library of Political and Economic Sciences deserve a separate mention for their efforts. I am grateful to all these libraries for permission to quote from materials held in their archives. During my time at St Andrews I taught more students than I could possibly remember, let alone list, and that experience taught me, in turn, a great deal. I am particularly grateful to those brave souls who plucked up the

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courage to join the MLitt programme in International Political Thought and to listen to my meandering disquisitions on aspects of Wight’s work. My parents and my brother Michael are owed more than I can repay with a mere dedication. So this book is for Paddy, because although he will never read it, he endured countless hours of tedium while it was written and displayed through them all good humour and stoicism.

CHAPTER 1


Enigma riddle in verse XVI; puzzling problem XVII . . . Gr. aínigma, f. base of ainíssesthai speak allusively or obscurely. Oxford Concise Dictionary of English Etymology

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artin Wight was one of the most influential twentieth-century scholars of international relations.1 He was the author of a seminal study of the nature of Power Politics (1946/1978), a historian of Western international theory and a teacher of renown. His few books and many essays continue to fascinate and to provoke. He has attracted admirers—though few have sought to emulate his style—and no lack of critics. He has been portrayed as the intellectual “godfather” of a whole school of thought about international relations, an inventor of the notion of “international society.”2 But doubts persist about his intellectual legacy, about the approach to the subject that he pursued and about the doctrine that he advanced. To many Wight remains, as he appeared to Michael Nicholson over two decades ago, an “enigma.”3 Wight was an unconventional thinker. He held strong religious convictions—he was an Anglican Christian, albeit of a highly unorthodox kind—that shaped his approach to intellectual life. His deepest concern was with the relationship between politics and morality; he sought, indeed, what he called “a richer conception of politics” than that which he thought prevailed during his lifetime, one “which made power an instrument and not an end, and subordinated national interest to public justice.”4 Wight was conscious, however, that such notions were out of kilter with the “power politics” of the age, in a world in which states “will continue to seek security without reference to justice, and to pursue their vital interests irrespective of common interests . . . .”5

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The leitmotif of Wight’s thought—like that of so many of his contemporaries and like that, perhaps, of the “short” twentieth-century as a whole— was that of “crisis.” The “world crisis” of World War I, to their minds, marked the end of old certainties and the advent of a new world of a insecurity; it was, as George Kennan called it, the “great seminal catastrophe” of modern history, sowing the seeds of horrors to come.6 The twenty years of interwar crisis culminated in a war for nothing less than “Christian civilization” itself.7 Its epilogue was an “age of terror,” that “hard and bitter peace” of the Cold War.8 As Denis Brogan observed of the twentieth century, “no age has ever been better off for problems to keep it on its toes.”9 Wight was disturbed by this predicament and was sometimes unsure as to how to respond, as a Christian, as a scholar, or as a citizen. His international thought—his account of the nature of international relations and of the various modes in which they have been interpreted by scholars and by practitioners—reflected both his consternation and his uncertainty. At times, his faith would come to the fore; at others his arguments were opaque. Throughout all his work, however, it is possible to detect the voice of a thinker deeply troubled by the modern world. In one of Wight’s best-known essays, “Western Values in International Relations” (1966), he alluded to two passages in Plato’s Republic. The first was Glaucon’s explanation, in book I, of the nature and origins of justice.10 The second Wight thought the “most profound and piercing . . . for the ordinary man.”11 The passage concerns the plight of the “very small group” in a corrupt city “which remains to keep company with philosophy.” In Allan Bloom’s translation, Socrates described their situation thus: Now the men who have become members of this small band have tasted how sweet and blessed a possession it is. At the same time, they have seen sufficiently the madness of the many, and that no one who minds the business of the cities does virtually anything sound, and that there is no ally with whom one could go to the aid of justice and be preserved. Rather—just like a human being who has fallen in with wild beasts and is neither willing to join them in doing injustice nor sufficient as one man to resist all the savage animals—one would perish before he has been of any use to city or friends and be of profit to himself or others. Taking all this into calculation, he keeps quiet and minds his own business—as a man in a storm, when dust and rain are blown about by the wind, stands aside under a little wall. Seeing others filled full of lawlessness, he is content if somehow he himself can live his life here pure of injustice and unholy deeds, and take his leave from it graciously and cheerfully with fair hope.12


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In certain moods, acutely conscious of moral and political crisis, Wight was tempted to follow this path, avoiding overt commitment to any cause and expressing himself elusively or obscurely.13 Wight was enigmatic, at times, because he wanted to be. He thought that his ideas, informed as they were by his faith, would not be well received in a secular world of “power politics.” Although clear in his explanations of others’ arguments, in his published works on international relations, and indeed in his lectures, he rarely provided explicit outlines of his own position. There were hints, of course, half-concealed behind a veil of scholarly objectivity. Witness one of the closing sentences of one of his best essays: It is tempting to answer the question with which this paper begins by saying that there is no international theory except the kind of rumination about human destiny to which we give the unsatisfactory name of philosophy of history.14 Wight was not just “tempted” to answer the question thus: this is exactly what he thought, as this book will try to show. In other writings, notably those on religion and in some of his unpublished papers, this quasi-pretence of authorial distance was dropped, and he said what he thought. By examining both, this book tries to make clear what all too often is not—to decode, in other words, the enigma. One objective of this book is thus to provide an answer to Michael Nicholson’s challenge, made to those—like myself—who find themselves intellectually sympathetic to Wight, to explain what appears to be “a lack of coherence about his thought and some important but curiously unanswered questions.”15 It does so by providing, in the first half of what follows, an examination of Wight’s treatment of religion, history, and the crisis of modern politics, and in the second half, a reappraisal of his work on international relations. Wight did not recognize disciplinary boundaries and nor does this book; the underlying premise is that to understand what he thought about international relations, a sense of his whole intellectual endeavour is required. This book provides an interpretation of Wight’s thought for those required to study it, for those perplexed as to its nature, and, above all, for those concerned, as he was, with what Kenneth Thompson has called the “normative foundation of politics.”16 Some of what follows, therefore, is straightforward exegesis and some of it critique. Two developments within International Relations (IR) have made this a worthwhile enterprise: first, the revival, since the 1980s, of normative approaches to that field, and second, the more recent upsurge of interest in its intellectual history. In the past decade

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or so, scholars have begun again to explore past thought on international relations, re-examining what Wight portrayed as the “scattered, unsystematic, and mostly inaccessible” insights to be found in the classics of political thought as well as the more coherent writings of the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.17 This is, in part, a contribution to that effort. The remainder of this chapter has two aims: to provide a brief account of Wight’s professional life and to offer an equally succinct survey of the various ways in which his thought has been interpreted. It concludes with an overview of the approach adopted in the rest of the book. Some readers may already be familiar with the outline of Wight’s career, thanks largely to the efforts of Hedley Bull, who provided a detailed sketch in his introductory essay to Systems of States, a collection of Wight’s essays published in 1977.18 Kenneth Thompson, in Masters of International Thought (1980), Tim Dunne, in his Inventing International Society (1998), and the late Harry Pitt, in the new edition of the Dictionary of National Biography (2004), have added more to the story.19 What follows owes much to the work of all four, but corrects the odd slip and addresses the occasional omission. A Life Robert James Martin Wight was born in Brighton on the November 26, 1913, the second son of a doctor, Edward Wight, and his wife, Margaretta, née Scott.20 He attended Bradfield College in Berkshire, and won an Open Scholarship to go up to Hertford College, Oxford, in 1931 to read Modern History. One of the smaller and less fashionable colleges in the University, Hertford had two History Fellows of distinction: T. S. R. Boase (1898–1974), later of the Courtauld Institute and later still President of Magdalen College, and C. R. M. F. Cruttwell (1887–1941), Principal of Hertford between 1930 and 1940. Boase was a medievalist and art historian, who during Wight’s time at Hertford published a biography of Pope Boniface VIII, and later contributed two volumes to the Oxford History of Art series.21 Cruttwell’s area of expertise was rather different. His two major published works were A History of the Great War (1934) and a volume produced under the auspices of Chatham House, A History of Peaceful Change in the Modern World (1937).22 A former soldier and intelligence officer, and failed Conservative candidate for the now-defunct parliamentary seat for Oxford University in 1935, Cruttwell was one of the leading university administrators of the interwar period.23 Reputed to be a good teacher, Cruttwell’s personality—said to be forceful—was not to the liking of all undergraduates. One former student, the novelist Evelyn Waugh, “waged unremitting literary war” on Cruttwell in revenge for slights now forgotten, naming in his stories a series of “shady or


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absurd” characters after him.24 Wight, for his part, felt more affection for the man and once almost wrote to remonstrate with Waugh after reading one such slur in the Sunday Times.25 Wight did well at Oxford. He impressed his examiners—among them the Cambridge historian Herbert Butterfield, who was later to invite him to join his British Committee on the Theory of International Politics—and earned a First Class degree. What is less clear is whether he enjoyed his historical studies. He found the constitutional history of England—at that time and for many years after the core of the Oxford Modern History degree—somewhat dull, and later wrote of his “inarticulate dissatisfaction” with the syllabus, “which seemed to leave all the big questions unanswered.”26 Perhaps because of Cruttwell, he became interested instead in international relations, and after a brief period of postgraduate research in History at Oxford, he applied—unsuccessfully—for a lectureship in the Department of International Politics at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.27 At Oxford or perhaps earlier at Bradfield, Wight had become involved with the cause of the League of Nations and was known to be, according to Hedley Bull, a “passionate supporter.”28 Soon after leaving Oxford, however, he changed his position. The sad course and unjust resolution of the Abyssinian crisis of 1935–1936 convinced Wight, as it did for so many others, of the League’s impotence in the absence of the Great Powers’ support.29 But unlike E. H. Carr, who abandoned the League to embrace appeasement, Wight instead turned to pacifism, having come under the influence of the charismatic founder of the Peace Pledge Union (PPU), the Reverend Dick Sheppard.30 In 1936 he published his first article: a combative and typically erudite defence of Christian pacifism in the journal Theology.31 His commitment to this cause was intense, as the tone of the piece revealed, and Wight, for a time, played a significant part in its promotion as the manager of the PPU’s famous bookshop on Ludgate Hill.32 In the spring of 1937, Wight found more regular employment, joining, presumably on Cruttwell’s recommendation, the staff of the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London.33 At Chatham House, Wight came into contact for the first time with Arnold Toynbee, holder of the Stevenson Chair in International History at the University of London and the Institute’s Director of Studies, the first three volumes of whose A Study of History he had read during the previous winter.34 He was immediately captivated, as he recalled to its author some twenty years later: At once all my previous reading and experience fell into perspective and pattern, and I saw clearly, instead of in a glass darkly, what historical study was about and the heights that it might scale.35

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After the war, Wight contributed extensive comments on volume VII of the Study, many of which Toynbee simply reproduced verbatim in footnotes and appendices.36 In 1937 and 1938, however, his duties at Chatham House were more mundane. He made some—mostly uncredited—contributions to a number of projects as the secretary to the Study Groups on South Africa and on the political and strategic interests of the United Kingdom,37 and carried out surveys of British imperial policy and “Ocean routes: bases and ports,” the latter still deposited in the Chatham House archives.38 In 1938, having explored to no avail the prospects of a position at the London School of Economics (LSE),39 Wight left Chatham House to take up the post of Senior History Master at Haileybury, the former Imperial Service College. His teaching had no little effect: two of his pupils, Harry Pitt and Denis Mack-Smith, later became prominent academic historians.40 The position, however, was eventually made untenable by the war and by his pacifism. In May 1940, toward the end of his second year at the school, he received his call-up papers. Despite the fact that teaching, at that time, was still a “reserved occupation” and that Wight’s chronic asthma would have meant that he would have failed the medical examination for military service,41 he decided to apply to be officially registered as a conscientious objector. Wight justified this stand on the grounds outlined four years previously in his article on “Christian Pacifism.” In his application, reprinted in part by Bull and by Dunne, he condemned the war as a “divine judgment on European civilization for corporate sin,” and advocated a return to the methods of “Calvary and the catacombs” to defeat the Nazis.42 Wight’s reasoning, however, did not convince the authorities. His application was initially unsuccessful, and this brought the threat of imprisonment. It was finally accepted, in 1941, on the condition that he gave up teaching.43 He was “rescued” from this predicament by Margary Perham, Fellow of St Hugh’s College, Oxford, and Reader in Colonial Administration, who offered him a job on a project examining colonial constitutions.44 Wight’s tenure of this research position at Nuffield College, from 1941 until early 1946, resulted in no less than three volumes: The Development of the Legislative Council 1606–1945 (1946), The Gold Coast Legislative Council (1947) and a collection of British Colonial Constitutions (1952), which includes a substantial introduction by the editor.45 In parallel, during the war years, Wight composed a series of essays on what he considered a neglected but important aspect of the Christian tradition: the idea of Antichrist. A draft of one was submitted to Theology, but though it does not seem to have been rejected by the editors, the essay was never published.46 In 1946, after an extended row with Perham over his “low salary and uncertain prospects” at Oxford,47 Wight returned to Chatham House.48


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There he wrote perhaps his best-known work, Power Politics.49 Slight though it was in length, the pamphlet was well received, not least by the émigré journalist Sebastien Haffner, who suggested to his editor, David Astor, that Wight be employed as The Observer’s special correspondent at the inaugural session of the United Nations at Lake Success from September 1946 to January 1947.50 Astor—who was already aware of his wartime work on African colonial constitutions—agreed. Wight’s contributions to The Observer from the UN further enhanced his reputation: so much so indeed, that upon his return from the United States, Astor offered “his own editorial chair as an inducement to tempt [Wight] away from academe.”51 Wight, however, refused, and again went back to Chatham House,52 though he did not break his link with Astor or with The Observer. He continued to review for the paper until the late 1960s, and contributed to a book entitled Attitude to Africa (1951),53 which one historian has called, “the manifesto of the liberal Africanist in England in general but also for the Observer in particular.”54 At Chatham House, Wight’s work was also appreciated, and by 1947 he had come to be seen as a possible successor to Toynbee as the Institute’s Director of Studies. In preparation, the latter proposed to Ivison Macadam that Wight be promoted to a Deputy Directorship with overall responsibility for the Survey of International Affairs, an annual study of contemporary international history hitherto the preserve of the uncannily prolific Toynbee.55 This did not come to pass, but for the next two years they continued to work closely together. Wight produced, during this time, four substantial essays for one of the Survey volumes on the prewar and war years, The World in March 1939,56 as well as making his comments on volume VII of Toynbee’s Study. In these scattered notes, Wight revealed his theological disagreements with Toynbee—differences that ultimately contributed to his revised appraisal of his Study—and outlined the basic tenets of his faith. In the late 1940s, Wight was deeply involved with a number of Christian organizations, including the Student Christian Movement, and with ecumenical efforts in particular. He went as a delegate to the World Council of Churches Round Table Meeting of Christian Politicians, held near Geneva in June 1948, and gave an address on “Our Christian Position in the Face of the Conflict between Russia and the West.”57 Redrafted for publication, this paper, which provides one of the best insights into Wight’s beliefs and theological position, later appeared in the Ecumenical Review under the more succinct title of “The Church, Russia and the West.”58 He was also present, as a consultant on “The Church and International Disorder” at the first meeting of the World Council of Churches (WCC) in Amsterdam later that year.59 He returned to Geneva in 1949 to attend the World Student Christian Federation Conference on the Meaning of History and to offer the

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representatives of the Young Women’s Christian Association some notes “Towards an Understanding of our Present Crisis.”60 These links with the ecumenical movement lasted well into the 1950s, during which time Wight was involved in the WCC’s attempts to promote European cooperation.61 In 1949, after two years at Chatham House, Wight left to take up a Readership in Charles Manning’s Department of International Relations at the LSE.62 There, as he had done at Haileybury before the war, he swiftly established a reputation as an inspirational teacher, albeit one whose approach placed him outside the intellectual mainstream in the department. Bull later noted that Intellectually, [Wight’s] . . . commitment to history, and more especially to the search for pattern and design in the grand sweep of universal history, tended to isolate him in a department which was concerned, however tentatively, with the development of International Relations as a social science.63 It has become commonplace to suggest that, in terms of publications, Wight’s time at the LSE was unproductive. He did, in fact, write a great deal. Although the revised and extended version of Power Politics desired by Chatham House was never completed,64 Wight produced over thirty reviews for The Observer, The Manchester Guardian, The Economist, and International Affairs.65 A substantial essay examining Butterfield’s Christianity and History and Reinhold Niebuhr’s Faith and History appeared in The Frontier in 1950 and his revised version of the late Harold Laski’s An Introduction to Politics a year later.66 He gave many talks—two of which “War and International Politics” and “What Makes a Good Historian?” were published in The Listener in 1955.67 The following year “The Power Struggle within the United Nations” appeared, and in 1960, “Why is there no International Theory?” and “Brutus in Foreign Policy” saw the light of day.68 In the 1950s, Wight did not, admittedly, succeed in producing a book. But his involvement in other activities was extensive. He lectured widely, often on religious issues—on “Christianity and Power Politics,” for example, written sometime in the 1950s—and on historiography.69 He attended meetings of the “Liberal Foreign Affairs Group,” which brought together politicians like Jo Grimond with journalists, officials, and academics.70 Wight’s close intellectual and personal association with Toynbee and Chatham House also continued; he was a member of the Institute’s council from 1952 until 1972, and was asked, in 1954, to edit a Festschrift to mark Toynbee’s 70th birthday in 1959.71 The project, sadly, never came to fruition. A year later the idea was mooted by the historian Alan Bullock that Wight succeed


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Toynbee in the Stevenson chair.72 Preferring teaching at the LSE to administration at Chatham House, he declined to put forward his name.73 In the academic year 1956–1957, Wight took up a long-standing invitation to spend time as a visiting scholar at the University of Chicago, where he assumed the absent Hans Morgenthau’s teaching responsibilities.74 What this entailed was a series of lectures on international theory to replace those on diplomacy usually given by Morgenthau.75 These evolved, during the course of that year, into the now famous lectures delivered at the LSE between 1957 and 1960, later reconstructed and published as International Theory: The Three Traditions (1991), a text central to the revived “English School of International Relations.”76 At Chicago, the lectures—and Wight himself— were as well appreciated as they were later at the LSE; indeed, they earned him the offer of a full Professorship at the University in May 1957.77 After some consideration, this offer was rejected—as was, at about the same time, a chair at the Australian National University.78 Shortly after his return from the United States, Wight was invited by Herbert Butterfield—his former examiner and now Professor of Modern History at Cambridge—to join his Rockefeller-funded British Committee on the Theory of International Politics. At the first meeting, in January 1959, Wight presented, doubtless by way of provocation, the paper “Why is there no International Theory?” published in the journal International Relations the following year. Over the course of the next twelve years, he gave nine further papers to the Committee, three of which, “Have Scientific Developments transformed International Relations?” (1960), “The Communist Theory of International Relations” (1962) and “Interests of States” (1970) remain unpublished.79 The remainder appeared in Diplomatic Investigations (1966),80 the collection of early Committee papers Wight edited, nominally with Butterfield’s help,81 and in Systems of States, published posthumously in 1977. Wight left the LSE in 1961 to take up a Chair of History in the School of European Studies at the newly created University of Sussex. The decision to leave London and to move back to the study of history was clearly a difficult one. Wight’s handwritten list of the “pros” and “cons” may be found in his papers. On the former were the usual considerations—a “new experience” and “professional status and salary”—but there were others too: he wished to “avoid” the “Manning succession crisis” and to “[g]et out of a subject I don’t believe in into [a] subject I do believe in.” Wight acknowledged that IR might give him “more freedom to do what I want,” but in the end the “pros” were too strong.82 Perhaps the greatest attraction of the new post was the chance to contrive an entirely new curriculum as the Dean of the School of European Studies, arguably the centrepiece of the new university.83

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The courses taught in the School were modelled, in part, on a proposal for a degree course in “European Greats” that had been rejected by Oxford in 1947.84 That plan had sought to unite within one syllabus the study of modern history and philosophy with that of literature and language, just as Classical “Greats” unites the study of ancient history with Greek and Latin. This idea was revived and extended at Sussex, which caused much concern amongst those at Oxford who had regretted its rejection twenty-odd years earlier.85 History, philosophy, economics, politics, sociology, geography, and international relations, as well as modern languages, could all be studied within the framework of the School of European Studies. The aim was both to illustrate the “unity of European history” and to “combine historical and contemporary interest.”86 The common thread was the history of ideas. Wight outlined the philosophy underlying the curriculum that he helped to create at Sussex in two pieces published in the 1960s: “The Place of Classics in a New University” (1963) and “European Studies” (1964).87 Wight published little else in the remaining years of his life. The final two pieces of work that he himself wished to make public were an essay, again in International Relations, on “International Legitimacy” (1972), and a chapter in the Festschrift for Charles Manning, “The Balance of Power and International Order” (1973).88 Since his sudden and early death, on the July 15, 1972, however, a great deal more of his work has emerged. Some of his British Committee papers were collected by Hedley Bull in Systems of States (1977), with a revised version of Power Politics coming out a year later.89 Two talks, “Is the Commonwealth a Non-Hobbesian Institution?” and “An Anatomy of International Thought” have since appeared in British journals and some comments on pacifism were recently included in a history of the LSE Department.90 In 1991, a reconstructed version of some of his LSE lectures under the title International Theory: The Three Traditions, was published, and more lectures have recently emerged in Four Seminal Thinkers (2005).91 Interpretations Martin Wight’s thought has been subject to three distinct interpretations. The first is that of his contemporaries, friends and former colleagues from Chatham House, the LSE, Sussex and elsewhere who knew both the man and his work. This group have tended to emphasize the centrality of his religious beliefs to his wider thought and what might best be described as his moral vision. The second belongs to his former students at the LSE, that remarkable group that attended Wight’s lectures during the 1950s and came later to form the nucleus of the British “discipline” of IR as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s. Though not unaware of his faith, these men—among them Carsten


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Holbraad, Alan James, James Mayall, and Brian Porter—have been concerned with Wight the international thinker, with locating his ideas in terms of what might best be called “discourse” of IR, and with developing elements of his approach to the subject. By far the most influential view of his thought, however, came from the Australian Hedley Bull, a former colleague from LSE and fellow member of the British Committee, who did most to bring Wight’s unpublished writings into the public eye. Bull’s view now predominates in IR: it is Bull’s Wight, indeed, that is the “high priest” of the latter-day “English school.”92 The few contemporary treatments of Wight’s work that can be found ranged, as one might expect, from the appreciative to the hostile. The books that derived from his wartime work at Oxford were received well: Kenneth Wheare, for instance, called his British Colonial Constitutions the most illuminating and original study of Colonial constitutional law since Sir Henry Jenkyns published his British Rule and Jurisdiction Beyond the Seas in 1902. Mr Wight’s achievement is even greater for the subject with which he deals is vastly more complicated than it was in Jenkyns’ time.93 Power Politics was not met with such effusive praise, but sold well, and it is clear from the numerous letters from Chatham House asking for a revised and extended version that this “lucid account of the basic problems of the politics of the Powers,” as R. R. Oglesby called it, found a considerable readership.94 The chapters Wight contributed to the Survey of International Affairs: The World in March 1939 met a more extensive and varied response. The historian Max Beloff was impressed: “no-one in this country,” he declared, “who has written on the pre-history of the Second World War since the documents and memoirs began to appear has shown comparable ability and judgement.”95 G. M. Gathorne-Hardy agreed: “if [Wight’s] contribution stood by itself, expanded to an independent book, it would surely attain general recognition as a leading work on the subject.” Particularly impressive, he thought, were the “brilliant analyses of National Socialism and the complex personality of the Führer.”96 In the Times Literary Supplement, Elizabeth Wiskemann waxed lyrical over Wight’s scholarship and range, noting that at times, he “out-Toynbees Toynbee in the vastness of the canvasses he chooses.”97 Others were less admiring, among them Richard Crossman and A. K. Chesterton. The former labelled Wight a “theological realist” and someone who believed, quite wrongly in Crossman’s view, “demonic totalitarianism” to be “the normal political expression of popular emancipation.”

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He complained too of what he thought of as Wight’s “modish over-estimate of Hitler.”98 Chesterton was even more condemnatory: the chapter on Germany, he noted acidly, “might have passed muster as a propaganda tract in the late 30s, but is simply not good enough as a serious record of events.”99 Critical judgements of Wight’s essays on international relations were equally varied. Much praise came from America. In 1959 Kenneth Waltz wrote to him as an intellectual ally, having become ever “more aware of the paucity of people here who take seriously the proposition that political theory in the old style can help me to understand the international politics of the present.”100 Hans Morgenthau was also sympathetic. He judged “Why is there no International Theory?” first published in International Relations in 1960, as “a most illuminating and penetrating discussion of the problem.”101 He dissented from Wight only in taking “a more sanguine view of the possibility of international theory,” but conceded that his position coincided in “large measure” with that which Wight had put forward.102 Morgenthau’s later review of Diplomatic Investigations was even more laudatory: he called it “an outstanding success” and “a healthy corrective for our present academic priorities.”103 Only after Wight’s death, however, was his international thought subjected to extensive examination. In the 1970s and early 1980s, two groups featured prominently in this exercise: contemporaries and friends, on the one hand, and former students, on the other. Their respective interpretations, though they had many affinities, were nevertheless quite distinct. Those who had worked with Wight tended to emphasize the importance of his faith and what Asa Briggs—a colleague at Sussex—called his “strong moral convictions.”104 Charles Manning described him as a “scholar, an internationalist . . . and before all else, a practising Christian,” as well as “[a]n ardent historian steeped in the traditions of theological and political thought.”105 Michael Howard confirmed this view a decade later. Wight had been, he wrote A deeply committed Christian pacifist . . . supremely concerned with the nature and significance of power in international relations, and brought to his study of the subject a spirit anguished over the tragedy of the human predicament and a mind richly stocked with historical learning.106 This image of Wight was sharpened in four of the first five lectures dedicated to his memory. Three of these came from former members of the British Committee: Herbert Butterfield, Michael Howard, and Donald MacKinnon; the other from Elie Kedourie, who had come to know him as a graduate student at the LSE and later as a fellow academic, albeit in the Department of


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Government rather than IR. In these lectures, Wight’s faith and deep concern for political morality—what Butterfield called the “ethical aspects of our subject”107—were very much to the fore. Howard, MacKinnon, and Kedourie all commented upon his rejection of what the first called “liberal humanitarian Christian teaching,” his concern for eschatology, and his conviction that the “focus of Christianity . . . [was] . . . the Passion rather than the Sermon on the Mount.”108 MacKinnon pointed to Wight’s exploration of the moral “sub-structure” of international relations; Kedourie to his “moral delicacy” and “nicety of judgement.”109 Former students, though equally admiring, portrayed a subtly different Wight. This was understandable: as his lecture notes demonstrate, he seldom made clear his personal convictions.110 All were impressed by his learning and erudition. Alan James recalled: Certainly he was enormously impressive. But what impressed one about his lectures and tutorials was the enormous range of his knowledge. It was the detailed content of what he had to say which was striking.111 John Garnett confirmed this view: “no one,” he wrote in 1984, who heard Wight’s “schematic review of the historical literature” on international relations, “will ever forget it.”112 Those who were taught by Wight, however, had difficulties in discerning an approach that they could follow, still less the theoretical perspective that he himself espoused. James thought it hard “to see any broad Wightian imprint in the structure of IR teaching at Britain’s universities” and argued that “[e]ven his famed division of thinkers into realists, rationalists and revolutionists did not take one very far towards an understanding of the international scene.”113 “His style,” James continued, “was unsuitable for assimilation and, to say the least, difficult to copy.”114 Wight’s students sought nevertheless to try to locate his international thought in terms of the “three traditions” of Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism that he himself had set out. Most thought of him as a Realist. James declared him “unambiguously” so and called him a “mini-Morgenthau”; Garnett asserted that he was “best described as a Christian pessimist” who “expressed a typically Realist view when he rejected all ideas of progress toward a more peaceful and just international order.”115 In this portrayal, his concern for moral questions was pushed half into the shadows. Some, like Brian Porter, recognized it was there, and though he reinforced the view that Wight was “a Christian pessimist who had no belief in progress,” at the same time he acknowledged that interest in the “moral dimension.”116 The difference between the views of Wight’s friends and his former students cannot just be attributed to the first having known the man and the

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latter just the teacher. By the 1970s, thinking about international relations in Britain had become “disciplinary.” In the middle of that decade the field acquired the two most obvious signs of its academic coming-of-age: a professional association, the British International Studies Association (BISA), and a dedicated journal, the British Journal (later the Review) of International Studies. This emerging “disciplinary” self-consciousness was bolstered by a re-telling of the intellectual history of IR in Britain in categories thought proper to the field. William Olson and Hedley Bull’s essays in The Aberystwyth Papers (1972) illustrate this tendency: in both the “discipline” progresses from early “idealist” naivety to worldly “realism” and on to the mature “sophistication” of the present day.117 These general developments coloured the manner in which Wight’s thought was interpreted. It became necessary for those in the first generation of academics committed to the discipline of IR, rather than merely to the study of international relations, to locate him in its various “traditions.”118 Hence, the tentative application of the “realist” label to Wight in the recollections of Garnett, James and, to a lesser extent, Porter. In his two essays on Wight’s thought, “Martin Wight and the theory of international relations” and his introduction to Systems of States, Hedley Bull challenged this “realist” interpretation. Unlike Wight’s contemporaries, who based their portrayals largely upon their recollections of the man, and the students, who viewed Wight’s thought through the prism of his lectures on international theory, Bull took a different approach. He too had attended the famed lectures, though as a young lecturer rather than a student, and he had known Wight well. But in preparing his essays, he engaged in some considerable additional research. Bull reread Wight’s published work and had access to his unpublished papers; he wrote to many other friends and colleagues soliciting further information.119 In the end, he succeeded in providing a far fuller account of Wight’s thought and career than those extant at the time. Bull’s story had a certain shape. Wight’s work, at Chatham House, Haileybury and Oxford, in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his involvement with the pacifist movement, were cast as a prelude to his time at the LSE in the 1950s, with his sojourn at Sussex as something of an epilogue.120 The impression was thus conveyed that the international theory lectures and the papers he delivered to the British Committee represented the mature expressions of Wight’s thought. Bull contrasted “the view of International Relations Wight took at the age of 33, when Power Politics was published, and the view he developed in later life”—the mention of Wight’s age giving rhetorical reinforcement to the argument that this “early” writing was immature.121 Bull was keen too to play down the influence of Wight’s Christianity upon his international thought. In his introduction to Systems of States, Bull argued


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that whilst religion had featured prominently in Wight’s writing in the 1930s and 1940s, “[I]n the last twenty years of his life these views were less in the foreground of his thought.” Moreover, he asserted, “[t]hey do not . . . obtrude in the essays in the present volume.” Bull admitted that the “unshakability [sic] of his most fundamental beliefs helps to account for the great solidity of his contributions to IR and other subjects in which he was interested,” but he did not give the impression of being keen to explore this question further.122 Bull himself had little sympathy for religion in any form; it was not surprising, then, that he observed later that he had “often felt uneasy about the extent to which Wight’s views of IR derive[d] from his religious beliefs.”123 Perhaps the most important dimension of Bull’s interpretation of Wight’s thought, however, was the identification of his theoretical orientation as “Rationalist.” In his introduction to Systems of States, he had argued that there was a “difference of emphasis” in Wight’s work of the 1950s and 1960s compared to that of the 1940s: a shift from a concern with “the elements of conflict and anarchy” in international relations toward one with “common interest and common obligation.”124 In “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations” (1976), he stated this case more explicitly. Power Politics, Bull maintained, had presented “in a loose sense, a ‘realist’ view,” but he argued that as Wight “grew older, the Grotian elements in his thinking became stronger.”125 Although Wight would not “commit himself fully” to the Grotians—to that tradition which takes its name from the seventeenthcentury Dutch scholar Hugo Grotius126—his later work nevertheless displayed, to Bull, sympathy for the view that there is an “international society” of binding rules and functioning institutions beyond mere anarchy. Bull’s essays, together with the memorial lectures by Butterfield, Howard, MacKinnon, and Kedourie, the publication of Systems of States (1977) and the revised Power Politics (1978) stimulated renewed interest in Wight’s international thought in the late 1970s and early 1980s and brought a good measure of criticism. Two articles published together in the Review of International Studies in 1981 were especially important: Roy Jones’s “The English School of International Relations: A Case for Closure” and Michael Nicholson’s “The Enigma of Martin Wight.”127 Both asserted that Wight’s ideas had been highly influential in International Relations in Britain. Jones cast Wight and Charles Manning as the intellectual progenitors of an “English school,” while Nicholson observed that his work was the “most revered of British scholars.” It was generally thought, he argued, that Wight “was the scholar who did international relations the way it ought to be done.”128 Jones’s idea of an “English school” has since coloured interpretations of Wight’s thought; indeed, it reified Bull’s account of his position as

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Rationalist. The origins and favoured approach of this “school” have, however, long been the subjects of debate. Jones was not the first to note the differences between British and American approaches to the study of international relations,129 nor was he the first to comment upon the similarities in the work of a number of thinkers associated with the LSE.130 “Family resemblances” were obvious in the names they chose for their literary progeny, from Manning’s The Structure of International Society (1962/1975) to Bull’s The Anarchical Society (1977).131 As Jones rightly argued, the concept of “international society” was the clearest sign of their affinity, though he also thought it the most problematic, arguing that “[t]o speak of a society of a variety of structures or movements or theories would seem to be meaningless . . . .”132 What lent Jones’s article novelty was not so much his description of the similarities in the scholarship of so many LSE writers, but the fact that he elevated Wight to stand alongside Manning as one of the school’s two “seminal thinkers.” This was a significant and in some ways an odd move, for Wight’s influence was hardly acknowledged by these theorists of “international society” in the 1970s. Robert Purnell, for instance, thanked Manning, G. L. Goodwin, and F. S. Northedge in his Society of States (1973) and never mentioned Wight or his publications.133 F. S. Northedge, for his part, thanked no one in his International Political System (1976) and the four references to Wight’s work can hardly be described as admiring.134 Only in Hedley Bull’s Anarchical Society (1977) did his name feature with any prominence. Jones, like many others, was impressed by Wight’s range—and that he was “sober, detailed, historical,” in contrast to the “allegorical, elusive, eclectic” Manning. His portrayal of Wight’s thought, moreover, provided an intriguing counter point to Bull’s, for unlike the latter, he ranged beyond his international thought into his philosophy of history. Jones wondered—as had Wight’s students—whether there was to be found in his work a method to be followed, and thought that only another “erudite historian of strongly Toynbeean persuasion” could pursue his “very peculiar sort of history” with its “transcendental quality.”135 There were problems too with his “categorization of International Theory,” Jones suggested: if Wight had been engaged in limited exercise of classification, then so be it, but was he suggesting that there was some kind of Hegelian dialectic at work in his “three traditions,” with Realism and Revolutionism finally resolved into Rationalism? His greatest objection, however, was to what he thought of as the “cold and lifeless” nature of the “Wightian system.”136 For Jones No passion singes Wight’s pages. Indeed the commitment to international society is so mild (which is not to be wondered at, it being so slight a fabric) that the unmistakable impression is conveyed that what happens to


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us sinners here below matters very little. To be alive is to be mildly depressed. In Wight’s “meta-history,” “the collectivity of states is full of activity but nothing much happens.”137 Michael Nicholson thought much the same. Wight had, he suggested, “made pessimism respectable in British international relations.”138 But Nicholson also broadened the attack and explored again, as Bull had done, Wight’s orientation to practical politics. He questioned whether it was possible to reconcile Wight “the power politician with Wight the [Christian] pacifist,” seeing these stances as, prima facie, inconsistent.139 He asked what Wight thought the study of the subject was for, arguing that, in his view, “the point of studying international relations or any other aspect of human behaviour is to improve the human condition not to stand as passive spectators deploring the standard of play.”140 Nicholson was concerned too with Wight’s rejection of scientific approaches to the field, labelling him the “ ‘Arts man’ par excellence.”141 Only some of these questions and criticisms were answered by Wight’s supporters. Alan James put up the only substantive defence of Wight, but aimed to knock down only some of the points raised; later respondents concentrated their attention less upon Wight himself and more upon the “English school” as a whole. Most of Grader’s reply to Jones was dedicated to arguing that “the evidence for such a ‘school’ does not exist, and that the approach which the scholars in question have taken is intrinsic to the subject.”142 She displayed some discomfort in dealing with Wight’s association with Toynbee and denied that he was, as she put it, “a philosopher of history without his being aware of the fact.”143 Like Grader, the latter-day “English school” has not, in the main, been keen to examine these aspects of Wight’s thought. But whereas the “international society” of the 1970s rarely mentioned him, in the literature of the 1990s and after references to his ideas abound. In no small part, this revival of interest in his work can be ascribed to Bull, who not only accorded Wight fulsome praise and provided the fullest interpretation of his thought, but also set out lines of research which, in the main, have absorbed the energies of later “English school” writers. The publication of a reconstituted version of Wight’s international theory lectures in 1991, however, marked a significant turning point. Hitherto, his account of the “three traditions” had been available only second-hand, described in Bull’s memorial lecture or in Porter’s brief essay in The Reason of States or, indeed, as Nicholson observed, by way of their own “oral tradition.”144 Their appearance in print was thus greeted with something of a clamour; International Theory was widely read and

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reviewed within and without the “English school” and the reception, even in America, was generally appreciative. It finally confirmed—in the mind of Robert Keohane and many others—Wight’s place as the “founder” of the “English school.”145 This understanding of Wight’s relationship to the “school” was reinforced by Tim Dunne’s history of its inception, Inventing International Society (1998).146 Although Dunne shifted the school’s institutional locus from the LSE to Butterfield’s British Committee—a move that provoked a tempestuous and as yet still unsettled argument147—Wight remained at its core. With Charles Manning, whom Roy Jones had thought the more important influence, pushed to the sidelines, he was now treated as the school’s sole “high priest” or “godfather.”148 The Wight that Dunne described, moreover, was very much Bull’s Wight, the thinker who had moved “beyond power politics,” “rejected the bifurcation of international thought into realism and idealism,” and established “rationalism” as a via media between the two.149 Not all have agreed with Dunne’s interpretation, though it captures the dominant view of Wight within the “English school.” Hidemi Suganami has drawn attention to earlier incarnations of Rationalism in twentieth-century international thought, and argued that it was Manning, rather than Wight, that propounded this perspective at the LSE after World War II.150 On this account, “English school” Rationalism did not originate with Wight, despite his efforts in the international theory lectures to elucidate the central arguments of that “tradition.” A few have even questioned whether Wight was a Rationalist at all, at least in the terms that Bull and Dunne understand the position. Kenneth Thompson wondered whether Bull “occasionally introduces ideas of his own into interpretations of the master” and reasserted the earlier view that Wight was, at root, a “Christian realist.”151 Cornelia Navari also drew attention to the centrality of Christianity to Wight’s wider thought, but placed him squarely in a Machiavellian rather than, as Roger Epp had it, an Augustinian “moment” in the history of international thought.152 More recently, Seán Molloy sought to uncover what he views as the “realist logic” of his conception of “international society.”153 Conclusion The patent lack of consensus concerning Wight’s international thought, despite the extensive body of scholarship that seeks to make sense of aspects of it, is reason alone for a more substantive examination of his work. There are, this book will try to show, problems with all the interpretations of his thought that have circulated in the past thirty years. Wight was not a straightforward Realist or Rationalist; there were elements of Revolutionism in his


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thought. Indeed, despite Wight’s own best efforts to make the categories work, the problem of locating his position in one or other of these “traditions” only highlights their limited value to the history of ideas. The notion of an “English school” is equally unhelpful in this context. I would not wish to dispense with the label altogether, as Suganami has suggested,154 nor would that be possible given the number of scholars who now identify themselves with what they perceive to be its approach. But the idea does not aid the understanding of the thought of a scholar who worked at least a decade, or even two, before the emergence of self-conscious grouping claiming that moniker. Disentangling Wight from the “English school” involves not just treating what Bull wrote about his thought with a critical eye, it also implies that his work be read, in so far as is possible, on its own terms. This is difficult to achieve. Most scholars in the field, including the present author, came to Wight’s work after Bull, moving from the relatively benign introduction to the study of international relations presented in The Anarchical Society to the more challenging essays of Wight. Such has been Bull’s influence— both in the “English school” and in IR more generally—it is hard to read terms like “international society” without being reminded of Bull’s formulation of the concepts. What Wight meant by a term or what he thought of an idea becomes muddled with Bull’s later interpretation. These difficulties cannot be fully overcome, but this book tries to acknowledge them when they arise. Of late, students of international political thought have become acutely conscious of method and some explanation of the approach taken in what follows is necessary. During most of the postwar period, scholars wrote of “traditions” or even “paradigms” with scant reflection on the precise meanings of the terms. The most common version of the history of international thought casts it as a perpetual clash of “realism” and “idealism” (or “utopanism,” to use the term E. H. Carr borrowed from Karl Mannheim).155 In the past decade, however, this account of the history of international thought has been subjected to sustained criticism from two directions. The first comes from those who favor a more contextual approach, grounded largely, though not exclusively, in the work of the Cambridge history of ideas school.156 The second comes from the advocates of an approach that examines disciplinary “discourses.”157 This book follows neither, but tries to be mindful of the pitfalls both have mapped out. This is not solely a work of history, and as John Burrow—who once worked with Wight at Sussex—once remarked “it is only an obligation to do history if history is what you are doing.”158 Texts from the past can be read as history, but they can also be read to judge their logical coherence, their moral worth or their aesthetic quality.159

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This book has two parts. Both draw upon Wight’s published writings and unpublished material in the archives of the British Library of Political and Economic Sciences and elsewhere. The first half of the book examines the underpinnings of Wight’s thought: his religious views, his understanding of history, and his account of what I have called the “crisis of modern politics.” These three aspects of his thought are, it will be argued, invaluable in grasping the intent of his sometimes ambiguous, even occasionally evasive, treatments of international relations and international theory. Those who seek merely an introduction to Wight’s thinking about international relations could—but are not advised to—read only the second half of what follows. Part two consists of three essays that present and reinterpret his work on systems of states, international society, and international theory. In the epilogue, the enigmatic legacy of Wight’s international thought is reassessed.

CHAPTER 2


The Apostolic Age found it necessary to insist that faith without works is of no avail. Our age shows the contrary phenomenon, unprecedented since the Roman Empire, of works without faith. Martin Wight1

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or Wight, the age in which he lived was “a transparent moment in history,” a time of great peril for Christianity and for all Christians.2 Faith had been abandoned and assailed: for the first time since Constantine’s conversion of the Roman Empire, secularism and “paganism” were dominant. This perception of unparalleled crisis dominated all of Wight’s writings on religion and marked his work on history, politics, and international relations. It prompted him to bear public witness to his faith, to assume the mantle of the Christian intellectual—though, at times, he thought himself unworthy of such a vocation. It did not, however, make him a “pessimist,” as many have charged, for as Wight himself observed, “no Christian can be an ultimate pessimist.”3 Much has been written on Wight’s religious beliefs and the manner in which it may have shaped his international thought, but most authors have professed a lack of comprehension and even a degree of exasperation. Roy Jones was bothered by the “hint of dogma” in Wight’s “intellectual make-up” and Michael Nicholson found it difficult to reconcile the “power politician” with the Christian pacifist.4 Such worries can be found among admirers as well as critics. Hedley Bull’s unease has already been noted; Tim Dunne’s concern with the “intrusion” of religion into the early “English school” more generally is also palpable. “The fusion of the sacred and the secular,” he

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observed in Inventing International Society, “is a constant problem in interpreting Wight’s international theory.”5 That Wight’s faith is thought a “problem” is not so much an issue of the religious convictions of these particular authors, but it is rather a reflection of the deep-seated antipathy to religion in the contemporary Western academy. Most scholars, especially in the social and natural sciences, are either not believers—at least not in any major religion—or seek to insulate their faith from their work. Bull was almost certainly an atheist and Nicholson openly declared that “I am not a Christian.”6 Whether Jones or Dunne would concur is not clear, but it does not matter: both appear to affirm the view that religious belief properly belongs in the private, not the public realm; indeed, that to allow religion to influence an interpretation of history or politics or international relations might render it illegitimate. The religious wine has to be kept out of the secular water—to use a metaphor Wight employed in a review of Butterfield’s Christianity and History7—if the interpretation is to be accorded intellectual credibility. None of this represents a challenge to religion per se: it simply implies the conviction that, whatever a scholar believes in private, those beliefs should not inform his or her academic endeavors and, when they do, it is a cause for concern. There are, however, two caveats to be entered here. The first is that these views do not hold sway in all areas of the academy—in departments of theology, obviously, and in others, such as philosophy, the public profession of religious belief remains acceptable. The other is that it continues to be possible to hold in private and express in public other forms of belief—in moral progress or in the innate goodness of human beings—that are equally difficult to verify by the application of science, however broadly conceived. These beliefs, when located in someone’s thought, are rarely considered “problems” requiring justification or apology, nor do they cause profound anxiety on the part of interpreters. Wight was a Christian and his Christianity bounded and animated his wider thought. He did not consider his faith a private matter, and thought deeply about the duties the Christian owed the world and the rôle of the Christian scholar. This chapter aims to provide an exposition of these and other elements of his writings on religion. The first part examines what can be said about Wight’s relationship with the Church. The second tries to set his religious writings in the broader context of what has been called the “theology of crisis” that emerged during the interwar years. The remainder of the chapter looks in detail at the development of Wight’s theological position: at the underpinnings of his defense of Christian pacifism, at his wartime concern in the doctrine of Antichrist, and at the centrality of eschatology in his postwar thought.


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“Anglican Heretic” Christianity [is] the only religion that holds [the] tension between the real world and [the] ideal. Martin Wight8 Wight was a member of the Church of England. He was an Anglican “sacramentalist and no evangelical,” according to Harry Pitt, traditionalist in worship if not in his theology.9 He was suspicious of the liberal center of the Church of England and had sympathies for ecumenism. When he wrote of the “Church” he rarely meant the Church of England: he referred to a spiritual Church that encompassed all Christians and an earthly Church was temporarily rent by “schism.”10 His concern, as he wrote in 1948, was with that “mystical Church . . . radiating forth her spiritual beams, outshining the feeble and divided institutional Church, like a corona round the sun in eclipse.”11 This understanding of the Church was, he explained, that of the “churches of the Reformation tradition,” whose “most important disagreement with Roman Catholicism is their belief that Roman Catholics identify the empirical with the mystical Church, which is theocratic heresy.”12 Neither that conviction nor his Anglicanism were obstacles to his involvement with a Roman Catholic pacifist group in the early 1940s,13 nor did it temper his admiration for the thought of Cardinal Newman.14 Indeed, Wight seems to have been vaguely apologetic about his Anglicanism: when he addressed the Catholic Newman Society, in 1971, he described himself as an “Anglican heretic—or by the widest stretch of ecumenical euphemism, a schismatic—before [a] body of the Faithful.”15 Wight had, Harry Pitt observed, a “rock-like faith in his fundamental beliefs . . . a tougher faith in the truths of Christianity than anyone I have ever met.”16 He was not swayed by modern challenges to these truths, nor was he convinced that Christians should modify their beliefs to accommodate the prevailing prejudices of the age. Wight’s view was straightforward, as he put it in a radio broadcast in 1953: “the foundational documents of Christianity have been subjected for over a hundred years to the most rigorous and exacting scrutiny that historical science and literary criticism have ever undertaken . . . [and] they have emerged with their important features intact.”17 Christianity rested upon events that simply could not be proved or disproved by the methods of modern scholarship: the Covenant with Abraham, the apostasy of the Israelites, the Redemption of Man in Jesus Christ, and the establishment, by the Petrine commission, of the Church.18 Wight’s rejection of latitudinianism—of belief that the Church must accommodate itself to the prevalent views of society19—was almost certainly

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a function of his interpretation of elements of Scripture on which, in other contexts, he placed great emphasis. Donald MacKinnon, among others, drew attention to his “frequent quotations from the so-called Little Apocalpyse of the Synoptic Gospels,”20 part of the last instructions Jesus is reported to have given to his disciples. Warning of wars, famines, pestilences, earthquakes, persecutions, and false Christs to come, they are told that those that “endure” in their faith “unto the end” will be saved (Matt 24:13). For Wight, it seems, this implied absolute fidelity and no compromise with the world. It did not, however, imply “quietism.” The Christian should “watch . . . and pray always” (Luke 21:36), but sometimes, amidst these tribulations, “it shall turn to you for a testimony” (Luke 21:13), and public defense of the Faith will be needed. Although much of Wight’s “commitment,” Harry Pitt suspected, “went into prayer,” some was devoted to public professions of belief, for he believed that “talking and writing . . . were . . . not just . . . intellectual exercise[s].”21 He was motivated by the belief that there is no effective Christian idiom in this country today between that of T. S. Eloit [sic] at one extreme, who makes all but the highbrow suspicious and contemptuous, and that of the Bishop of London’s Lent Book and the ordinary popular sermon at the other extreme which makes the intelligent person embarrassed . . . . [The need is] . . . [t]o recover a language in which the gospel of love can be preached to one’s neighbour without the mortal [moral?] sentimentality inherited from theological liberalism.22 Throughout his adult life, with varying degrees of intensity, Wight attempted to fulfil this aim, writing for theological journals, addressing church meetings, contributing to radio debates,23 and participating in religious groups for the promotion of pacifism, ecumenism, and the protection of public morals. He began with his publication, at the age of 23, of a defence of Christian pacifism and ended with a lecture on the idea of Antichrist to the Newman Society at Tunbridge Wells in 1971. He was most active in the cause of his faith during the latter half of the 1940s and early 1950s; in the last twenty years of his life public professions became less frequent. Bull suggested that Wight “mellowed,” but this might be taken to imply that his convictions waned.24 The more convincing and more consistent explanation, as Gabriele Wight wrote to Bull, is that he: wrestled for many years with the moral and intellectual implications of being a Christian. And having come to a kind of truce rather than ultimate conclusion . . . his personality was no longer involved every time he


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opened his mouth, he lived a Christian life as best he could but he rewrote and delivered papers on those theological themes with the detachment of one whose spiritual framework is quite secure.25 Wight did continue to lecture and to write—if not to publish—on religion during the 1960s. His papers include talks such as “God in an Age of Nuclear War,” probably delivered in Sussex in early 1963.26 Another important unpublished essay, “Christian Politics,” appears to have been composed in the late 1960s.27 His beliefs, therefore, continued to inform both his wider work and his position on social issues, which surfaced occasionally in letters to The Times,28 and in his decision, in 1971, to become a patron of “The Responsible Society,” a group that campaigned on moral issues such as premarital sex, obscenity, and pornography.29 The Theology of Crisis [We] are to-day living at a moment in history at which perhaps the most terrible and alarming fact that confronts us is the triumph of the forces of nihilism and unreason around us and within. Against these forces the rationalism of our immediate forebears is powerless. Donald MacKinnon30 Wight’s Christian writings did not stand in isolation. He was keenly aware that he lived in an age of crisis manifest in war, totalitarianism, and secularism, and took great interest in the responses made to this challenge by theologians as well as politicians. His work reveals both an impressive understanding of contemporary theology and familiarity with a startlingly wide range of past and modern Christian thinkers, Catholic, Protestant, and Orthodox. He had a particular interest in the so-called theology of crisis and in the thought of its most prominent figures. In the 1942 drafts of an article on “Historic Antichrists” and in “Progress or Eschatology” (1951), Karl Barth, Nicholas Berdyaev, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Jacques Maritain are discussed.31 There are references there and elsewhere to Christopher Dawson, C. H. Dodd, T. S. Eliot, Jacques Ellul, Martin D’Arcy, C. S. Lewis, Reinhold Niebuhr, Albert Schweitzer, and Paul Tillich. Wight’s contributions to volume VII of Toynbee’s Study displayed an even greater range. Aside from the array of Scriptural quotations that Wight bantered with Toynbee,32 there are discussions of the Emperor Julian’s neoplatonist apostasy,33 Justin Martyr,34 Hinduism,35 Buddhism,36 canon law,37 and mysticism,38 amongst many other topics. As Harry Pitt wrote to Hedley Bull, “with Martin, to be devout meant to be intellectual.”39

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Wight had little sympathy—as we have seen and will examine in more detail below—for theological liberalism, predominant in England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The liberals had sought to accommodate Christianity both to the fruits of modern scholarship, historical and scientific, and to the changing nature of society. They emphasized God’s immanence in the World, urged Christians to pursue an earthly kingdom of social justice and exhorted them to emulate Jesus’s example, confident that both might be possible. To their critics, among them Richard Niebuhr, liberal theology taught that: “A God without wrath [had] brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgement through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.”40 In the 1920s and 1930s, the hold of liberal theology over the English mind was shaken. Its comfortable optimism appeared at odds with the experience of the World War I and its aftermath; worst still, it appeared to “have little to say to the agonizing questions that the breakdown of civilisation brought home.”41 Nor could it stem the rising tide of agnosticism—“the common ground of almost all first rank intellectuals” of the time42—or even atheism.43 Interest in unorthodox religious and quasi-religious ideas—in the various occult arts, for instance, or in extra-sensory perception—flourished. Many who dismissed Christianity as superstition or worse, like the fervent atheist Gilbert Murray and his daughter Rosalind, later to be Arnold Toynbee’s wife and a convert to Roman Catholicism, dabbled in such areas as “psychical research.”44 This agnostic moment, however, did not last long. “The central tide of English thought and culture in the 1930s,” Hastings has remarked, “was flowing quite perceptibly in one large direction: from irreligion to religion, from liberal or modernist religion to neo-orthodoxy, and from Protestantism to Catholicism.”45 There had been hints of this shift in the second half of the 1920s: C. S. Lewis had returned to the Church of England in 1926, and T. S. Eliot followed a year later. Roman Catholicism, rather than Anglicanism, claimed the most converts amongst leading intellectuals in the 1930s, amongst them Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Frank Pakenham, and Sir George Clark, and Catholic writers—the historian Christopher Dawson especially—became increasingly influential.46 The conversions, and the growing social acceptability of the work of Catholic scholars, illustrated not only a new sympathy for religion amongst intellectuals, but also a wider ecumenism. This was stimulated in part by academic, ecclesiastical, and cultural contacts fostered by the League of Nations.47 The League’s political failure, moreover, encouraged some to turn to religion in general, and to ecumenism in particular. Religion offered an alternative to politics, but there was little agreement as to what was required.


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While Eliot sought a return to a medieval order dominated by an authoritative and authoritarian Church,48 others embraced “rejectionist” creeds, urging their followers to focus solely upon the other-worldly. This “rejectionism” came in many forms. Perhaps the most important was the neoorthodox “theology of crisis.” The movement, which could trace roots well back into the nineteenth century, to Søren Kierkegaard’s existentialism and to Albert Schweitzer’s assault on liberal accounts of the historical Jesus, found its greatest exponent in the Swiss pastor, Karl Barth. A theological liberal and Christian socialist before the World War I, Barth produced, in its aftermath, a fearsome critique of his former position in his commentary on Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (1919). Rather than treating Scripture as a text to be subjected to historical analysis, as in the mode of the nineteenth-century Biblical hermeneutics that informed the liberals, he reasserted the Reformation view that saw it as the “Word of God” beyond history. God was, he argued, “Wholly Other,” completely apart from “human expectations and desires.” Moreover, it follows that His “revelation to humanity is not the response to humanity’s religious quest for God, but the judgment on it as idolatry.”49 Barth’s ire was turned upon the liberals’ faith in progress and their efforts to create a kingdom of God on earth. In his Church Dogmatics, he argued that Christians are claimed for action in the effort and struggle for human righteousness. At issue is human, not divine righteousness. That the latter should come, intervene, assert itself, reign, and triumph can never be the affair of any human action. Those who know the reality of the kingdom, Christians, can never have anything to do with the arrogant and foolhardy enterprise of trying to bring in and build up by human hands a religious, cultic, moral, or political kingdom of God on earth. God’s righteousness is the affair of God’s own act, which has already been accomplished and is still awaited.50 Limited justice could be done, in other words, within the context of history and the context of the state—seen, as Augustine had done, “as God’s ordinance for an unredeemed world”—but in neither would be found the “perfection of the eschatological community.”51 To place human hope in anything worldly, in anything other than God, was foolish: “[t]here is no point of contact in experience or history with the content of eschatological hope. Experience is the absence of hope. Hope is the contradiction of human history.”52 Barth thus assailed liberal optimism and rescued eschatology, restoring it to what he thought of as its proper place in Christianity—indeed arguing that “[i]f Christianity be not altogether restless eschatology, there remains in

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it no relationship whatever in Christ.”53 Such ideas found their way into British intellectual circles mainly through Hoskyns’ 1933 translation of his commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.54 The work of Hoskyns himself, C. H. Dodd, and the American Reinhold Niebuhr, as well as the links created by the burgeoning ecumenical movement also played their part in spreading the neoorthodox word.55 Their message was, according to Hastings, quintessentially Barthian: they sought “to fulfil the first duty of the Church and witness in faith and with independence to the world of sin, modern ideology, and secular tyranny when the [national] Churches could, or would, not do it.”56 Unlike World War I, World War II served not to undermine belief, but to stimulate it. It was, after all, the war for “Christian civilisation,”57 and it produced, as one observer noted, a palpable “counter-drift towards religion.”58 There was a greater willingness, during and after the war, “to consider sympathetically, if not embrace, the claims of the Christian religion as a way of life.”59 The religious revival of the 1930s and 1940s bore many signs of neoorthodoxy: a yearning for reformation, for a return to the pre-Constantinian Church, free of ties to the state. There was also, at times, a millenarian, apocalyptic undertone that may be located both in earlier reforming movements and in Barthian neoorthodox theology.60 For many new converts, or for those who had recovered their faith, the “theology of crisis” of Jacques Maritain, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Reinhold Niebuhr held great appeal. The revival of the 1930s and 1940s was not, however, wholly neoorthodox in character. Liberal and modernist theology continued to attract adherents. Though William Temple died in 1944, the ideas he expressed in Christianity and the Social Order and elsewhere inspired many seeking to create a “New Jerusalem” in the postwar years.61 Christian socialism, with its liberal theological core, was the creed of many on the Left now entrusted with the reins of power.62 In the realm of international affairs liberal Christianity continued to be influential, not least through the efforts of Margery Perham and Michael Scott on colonial issues.63 It would be wrong, therefore, to present the postwar “revival” in terms solely of the work of thinkers like Barth or Niebuhr. Indeed, it might be more accurate to suggest that their thought modified and tempered indigenous British theological trends without displacing the dominant liberal and modernist views. Alfred Zimmern’s Spiritual Values and World Affairs (1939) illustrates this tendency well, showing the accommodation that might be made by theological liberals to Barthian or Anglo-Catholic assaults on their supposed Pelagian optimism. Criticizing the “intrusion” of religious language and “pseudoreligious sentiment” into political debate, Zimmern urged Christians to render unto God and Caesar their proper due.64 In so doing, he sought to chart a course between the “extravagant hopes that so many Christians entertained


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a few years ago” and the “mood of almost eschatological despair which is as un-Christian as it is unscholarly.”65 Zimmern’s was not a view for which, as we shall see, Wight had a great deal of sympathy. Christian Pacifism [T]he peace of Christ was not a negative tranquillity. It was a constant and unflinching state of mind and way of life, which challenged and survived any violence or catastrophe. Martin Wight66 Wight’s embrace of pacifism in the mid-1930s and his conscientious objection in World War II have troubled all those who have examined his thought in any detail. Two issues have been at stake: how he reconciled that stance with his supposed political Realism and whether he continued to maintain a pacifist position in the postwar years.67 Both are difficult—indeed, perhaps impossible—to resolve. His “Christian pacifism,” published in Theology in 1936, offers only a partial answer to the question of how he came to espouse it. No correspondence and no papers are to be found in the archive to cast further light on the issue. Donald MacKinnon, who came to know Wight sometime in late 1935 or 1936, thought that the Abyssinian crisis had convinced him of the impotence of the League and thus of a political solution to the modern crisis.68 It was, he wrote to Bull in 1974, “[t]he collapse of this hope among other things drove him to pacifism.”69 What the “other things” were remains unclear. Wight’s time at Oxford coincided with much discussion of the merits of pacifism within the University and outside it. During his second year, in February 1933, the Oxford Union held one of its most infamous debates, asking members to affirm the motion “This House will in no circumstances fight for King and Country.” That they did—by a margin of nearly two-toone—provoked outrage: Churchill, looking back, thought it did much to convince the Axis powers that Britain was decadent and degenerate.70 Whether Wight attended the debate is unknown; in any case, he may not have sympathized with those who spoke in the motion’s defence on secular grounds, including C. E. M. Joad and Beverley Nichols. “Pacifism in England,” he observed later, in 1936, “is mainly organised on a non-religious basis, and though its immediate vitality and influence is admirable, as a secular creed of non-violence it will never maintain its dynamic power.” The problem was that secular pacifists “expect too much from renunciation of violence because they underestimate the wickedness of men.”71 The alternative that Wight described was uncompromising. It had close affinities to the doctrine set out by the leading Christian pacifist of the day,

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the Reverend H. R. L. Sheppard. Whether Wight knew Sheppard personally before he composed his article is unlikely. It is more probable that he learnt of his ideas from Sheppard’s famous letter to the British Press, published on October 16, 1934, asking “men who agreed with him that war was not only a denial of Christianity but a crime against humanity” to write to him stating “I renounce war.”72 Over one hundred thousand replied, prompting Sheppard to hold a mass meeting at the Albert Hall in 1935 and to found first the “Peace Movement” and then the “Peace Pledge Union” (PPU). The organization was ecumenical in the broadest sense, welcoming “agnostics, atheists, socialists, Christians and members of other religions,” and counting among its sponsors Aldous Huxley, George Lansbury, John Middleton Murry, Arthur Ponsonby, and Siegfried Sassoon.73 It is likely that Wight only became friends with Sheppard in the summer of 1936, after having left his research at Oxford to manage the PPU’s bookshop.74 Sheppard too, he would have discovered, “was a life-long sufferer from asthma.” MacKinnon later recalled that he “helped Martin on a very deep level” and that “certainly in last months of Dick’s life”—he died in October 1937—“Martin was very close to him.” Sheppard became, indeed, “an important influence in Martin’s life, at least as important as Arnold Toynbee subsequently became.”75 Although Wight probably composed his essay on the subject before the start of their brief friendship, Sheppard’s account of Christian pacifism does appear to have influenced his own. For Sheppard, war was not to be condemned, as it was by Erasmus,76 as a waste—an argument similar to that of “utilitarian pacifism”—or, as it was by the Quakers, as a breaking of oaths. Rather, Sheppard argued, the waging of war contravened both the letter of God’s Commandments and the spirit of Christ’s teachings. The first was the most important: “thou shalt not kill” represented an “unequivocal” and “absolute” command.77 The latter, as Sheppard admitted, was more difficult to discern: Christ, he noted, “expressed Himself plainly” on “marriage . . . swearing . . . [and] revenge,” but “said nothing about war.”78 But he believed nonetheless that Christians should follow the example of Christ and challenge the injustices of the world. The greatest injustice, he insisted, was war, and this the Christian must confront, rather than making, as he put it, “a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ with the Devil” with a “peace precariously poised upon the points of bayonets.”79 Wight’s own argument followed Sheppard’s lead. His case was clear and penetrating: The core of pacifism is the belief that it is never right to take human life. It is nothing to do with quietism in the sense of immoral apathy and


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passivity. It is not the organisation of mass-cowardice. It does not condemn all use of force. It does not assert that there is nothing worth fighting for. It does not make an unconditional surrender to evil. It does not believe in peace for any price. Its basis is not utilitarian.80 At the “core” was the injunction “Thou shalt not kill.” Violence short of killing, he admitted, could be legitimate, provided that force is directed toward redemption.81 For just as there can be a “consecrated use of sex” for procreation, so too can there be “consecrated force,” which “like surgery, aims at healing and renewing not at destroying its object.”82 But war can never be consecrated or Christian, for it breaks the sixth Commandment and the spirit of the Sermon on the Mount. Wight’s argument, as MacKinnon recognized in his memorial lecture, rested not just upon a reading of Scripture; it embodied too a “radical critique of historical Christianity.”83 Wight was well aware of this. He recognized that pacifism involved the condemnation of “the Roman Church and the tradition of Augustine and Aquinas.” Augustine’s “splendid compromise” in the City of God may well have preserved the “civilisation of Rome” through the identification of the “divine plan” with the “Pax Romana,” but Wight maintained that it “obscured the supra-cultural character of the Church and the perpetual validity of the Sermon on the Mount.” The “standards” of the Gospel were thereby lowered. Augustine’s was “a lawyer’s doctrine,” which “like all legalities . . . is concerned more with particular conditions than with eternal truths,” replacing a Christian duty of universal validity.84 He continued being incompatible with the Sermon on the Mount, [this doctrine] . . . is in the long run unworkable . . . it tries to erect a moral compromise into a law, which is the shortest way to discredit all morality. To demand perfection will always evoke a response from the divine in man, while the demand for a standard that makes concessions to human frailty has already undermined its own authority. Our Lord’s demands were absolute, the Church’s have too often been qualified. This is the essence of pharisaism, the legalisation of the second-best, the low morality that becomes a cloak for the sins it condemns.85 Augustine’s was just one in a long line of failings on the part of Christians. Roman Catholics, Wight wrote, had capitulated to “political necessity” in the Crusades; the Eastern Orthodox and Protestant Churches now merely provide a “religious façade for the state,” justifying the Marxist charge that Christianity is a “middle-class ideology.”86

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The article thus went further than merely a defense of pacifism. It was an attempt to call the Church back to the principles held in the catacombs, prior to the Constantinian settlement—a theme to which Wight would return in his postwar writing. What is absent, however, is any clear indication of the eschatological obsession that dominates some of his later work. While Wight acknowledged that “refusal to fight will not obliterate the doctrines of Mein Kampf nor change the state of mind of its author,” there is no hint that he interpreted, as he did later, the challenge of Nazism in an apocalyptic light.87 Indeed, there are elements of progressivism, even perhaps Christian Socialism, in “Pacifism”; its telos is the “sanctification of the state,” an aim to be achieved simply through the “organised application of the principles of the Sermon on the Mount.”88 Wight called for the abolition of means testing and for the clearance of urban slums, as well as for reform in the Empire, informed by a sub-Marxist critique, probably that of Lenin.89 He argued that “military and political warfare is the result . . . of the continual economic and financial warfare which is the dynamic of bourgeois society . . . .”90 He went on to assert that the Christian “shares the ideals of the Communist,” though is critical of his violent methods.91 Such sympathy for socialist thought or practice is largely absent from his wartime and postwar writings.92 In May of 1940, having become a member of the Roman Catholic group “Pax” as well as the PPU, Wight notified that he was to be called up for military service,93 and he applied to be registered as a conscientious objector. As an asthmatic and a school teacher, as we have seen, he could have avoided service on other grounds, but chose instead, with some difficulty, to make a stand. According to Harry Pitt he had great difficulty in convincing himself that he was worthy to be a Pacifist. He regarded it as a vocation, to which very few Christians are called. He regarded the Allied cause as just, and accepted that most Christians were right to fight.94 Wight was under no illusions as to the nature of Nazism and the danger it posed to Europe and to Christians. In a wartime essay, he observed that The Church has had many adversaries, kings and heretics and radicals, but none has ever planned its complete destruction as Hitler has. Hitler’s hatred of the Church is unique: he has caricatured its disciplined fanaticism, its education, and its organisation in his own political party. The Church can therefore no longer apply the principle of the Lesser Evil, because evil has become concentrated to the point where the search for gradations in it is inadmissible.95


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In abandoning the Pauline and Augustinian principle that even an unjust government is preferable to no government at all, the Christian was left with no choice but to embrace “martyrdom and the catacombs” once more.96 In his application to be registered as a conscientious objector, Wight set the rise of Nazism into context. He argued that the outbreak of war as a “divine judgement” for the “corporate Sin” of apostasy committed by European civilization—an echo of an earlier fear, expressed in “Christian Pacifism,” that “Western civilisation . . . is today about to commit suicide in what the German General Staff . . . have christened in anticipation ‘total war’.”97 Yet despite some of these horrors being realized, Wight seems never to have been entirely convinced that the stand he took was right. Gabriele Wight later wrote to Bull: Only through circumstances beyond Martin’s control did he commit himself to the public statement of a “pure pacifist” in the Tribunal defence and never since was it necessary for him to do so. He was a person who always felt acutely “under judgement,” inadequate, “Be ye perfect therefore . . .” he took much to heart in every respect . . . if questioned he probably would not have known if he dared make such a commitment again, not for fear of exposing himself but for fear of not living up to it.98 In one sense then, whether Wight remained a pacifist after the war is a moot point, for he was never again confronted with a requirement to fight. Wight did address pacifism in general, and Christian pacifism in particular, in his postwar work. He touched on the subject, albeit obliquely, in his contributions to the “Round Table Meeting of Christian Politicians” in June 1948, asking what the Church could do in the face of international crisis: Could the demonic concentrations of power be redeemed, could the organisations of corporate power be redeemed except by an act of corporate humiliation and a sacrifice on the model of the Passion [?]. It was [sic] clear that no organisation of a secular kind would do that, but there was one nation which we all honoured, which would make a partial claim to have done that—Czechoslovakia, at Munich. [Wight]. . . had been struck by the statement of the Minister of Propaganda when he compared the decision of Czechoslovakia to the Passion of our Saviour. It might ultimately be the vocation of the Church to do that.99 Although, characteristically, Wight followed a strong assertion with a modest qualifier, this would suggest, at the very least, residual sympathy with pacifism.

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Wight also dealt briefly with the subject in his later international theory lectures as a manifestation of “inverted Revolutionism,” summarizing, in effect, the case he himself put forward in 1936. Pacifists, he wrote, “assert that there is no double standard of morality”: “the Sermon on the Mount lays down an absolute standard of ethics which is valid in all circumstances.”100 After that, however, his account becomes somewhat confused—it suggests, indeed, that Wight was still struggling to fathom the implications of that assertion. The “perfectionist ethic,” he suggests, “replaces compromise by ‘testimony’, but also replaces the ‘principle of the lesser evil’ with the ‘doctrine of meliorism: the doctrine that the world may be made better by human effort.”101 The problem was, Wight thought, both led “speedily back to the maze of the double standard.”102 He continued The way of testimony, the principle of meliorism, both admit and imply that there is a double standard: for the inverted Revolutionist it obtrudes itself in the distinction between the small minority governed by a perfectionist ethic, and the large majority within which the minority hopes to act like the leaven within the lump.103 There were, he suggested, two paths out of this maze. The first led to “quietism”: the “withdrawal into the sphere of the private ethic, and the repudiation of the political sphere altogether.”104 Wight observed: This has been the position adopted by many religious sects, before and since the Reformation, and it is very attractive to the intelligent and sensitive person today: the political sphere obviously offers nothing but insoluble predicaments; there is inevitably going to be a third world war which will destroy civilization; for political incompetence and buffoonery there is nothing to choose between the political parties so there is no point in exercising one’s vote; all one can do is to retire within the sphere of private life and personal relationships and cultivate one’s garden.105 The second path was quite different: to continue to engage in political action, but “to revise one’s practice upwards to the point where one’s feet lose contact with the earth.” On this path, however, were pitfalls: it “can become the pursuit of the illusory alternative . . . and at this point it loses the moral dignity of the quietist who recognises that the political predicament is insoluble . . . .”106 The language in Wight describes these two paths strongly and implies a preference for the former over the latter, for “quietism” over “the pursuit of


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the illusory alternative.” Indeed, it seems to show a continued—if not entirely firm—commitment to pacifism, but in a slightly different form to that of his 1936 article. There the ultimate object of Christian pacifism was political—the “sanctification of the State.” In his postwar writings, however, Wight was critical of those who understood pacifism as “a mode of political action.”107 This, he argued in “Christianity or Power Politics,” made the pacifist “vulnerable” because it allowed their stance to be challenged on political grounds and dismissed as illegitimate by the state. Only if the pacifist “withdrew out of the political sphere” could this be avoided. When questioned, the pacifist’s answer can only be that they must “cleave to . . . [a] . . . personal vocation.”108 There are clear signs here of an unresolved struggle. Wight wrote a great deal more about the relationship between Christianity and politics, and this will be addressed in chapter 4, but the background does require a little more examination. During and after World War II, Wight turned to broader questions than pacifism: first to the doctrine of Antichrist, and then to eschatology. Antichrist and Eschatology We sometimes forget that in his last talk with the disciples before the Passion, Christ unrolled a very different prospect of the future [to that of progress]. He foretold wars and catastrophes, nations rising against nations, the appearance of false prophets and the falling away of the faithful—he described, in apocalyptic language, something resembling the priod [sic] we have lived through since 1914. The picture of human history this suggests is of mankind, not marching steadily up out of the shadow into broad sunshine, but always going on through the murk and obscurity produced by man’s misuse of his moral freedom. Martin Wight109 In the early years of World War II, Wight began to reflect upon an unfashionable and quixotic aspect of Christian thought: the idea of Antichrist. Perhaps at Haileybury, and certainly at Nuffield, he began to research the idea. During 1942 and 1943, he wrote several versions of an article on the subject, initially hoping for it to be published, like his defense of Christian pacifism, in Theology.110 The essays are notable in part because of their reliance upon themes and categories drawn from Toynbee’s A Study of History, which he first read in the winter of 1936–1937. In one manuscript Wight proceeds with a distinctly Toynbeean analysis of the “rhythm of the Church’s history” to

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identify the points at which antichrists have come to the fore.111 He drew up tables of Hellenic, Western, and Orthodox antichrists, their intellectual forebears and their nemeses.112 Wight’s contention was that “antichrists” appeared at the times of historic crises of civilization that Toynbee had identified: in certain historic crises in which the existence of the Church seemed at stake, there was equally an indication and a foretaste of the Antichrist, the final onslaught in whom God would permit the evil of history to work itself out in a last crisis of triumphant self-destruction.113 The contemporary crisis, he suggested, was just such a moment, prompted by the Church’s quiescence in the destruction of the political unity of Christendom that led to the rise of a plurality of sovereign states. The rise first of Napoleon, and latterly of Hitler, both antichrists and precursors of the final Antichrist, demonstrated the validity of the argument.114 These were not merely scourges in secular history, like Gengis Khan or Hannibal, but also judgments “on the living generation,” offering “the positive temptation of an alternative to the Church.”115 The present crisis, moreover, was of a different order from those that had gone before. The Roman Catholic Church might be content to wait— “tenacious, aloof, omniscient, unhurried”—until the threat of Hitler had passed, but the wider threat that his rise had brought to light was too great.116 Early in the war, Wight had come to a conclusion: I take it for granted that the wars and violence that began early in this century, and which I imagine will go on for the greater part of the natural lifetime of our generation, are tending inexorably in one direction (which most people do not want)—that is towards the political unity of the world— establishment of world unity, world order, a world state—whether Fascist, or Anglo-Saxon democrat, or Russian Communist, or something else we are fighting about at the moment.117 The defeat of the Nazis therefore did little to diminish Wight’s conviction that a world state was coming and that when it did, it would be a “more frightful concentration of tyrannical power than any we have yet experienced.”118 Indeed, it posed the problem of Antichrist. In a rhetorical question addressed to J. H. Oldham, Wight described the problem as he viewed it from the vantage point of the United States, where he was acting as the Observer’s correspondent: Are these appalling judgements of war and atomic energy which hang over us an expression of the fact that for these years past we have been faced


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once more with the problem of Antichrist in history, and have been blind to it?119 This “problem” is central—but not explicitly so—to his analysis of the relationship between “The Church, Russia and the West” (1948). Wight did not mention the Antichrist (or antichrists) by name, but he did hint at the “seductive charm” and “magic and miracles” of modern politics,120 collective apostasy, and the “demonic concentrations of power”—all of which he had earlier identified as characteristic of antichrists’ reigns.121 He warned that although we moderns “have not really believed in the epilogue-theory at all,” Scripture tells of a “final concentration of Satanic evil within history” before the Second Coming.122 In Wight’s postwar writings, however, there is a perceptible move away from a concentration upon the problem of Antichrist toward a concern with the wider issue of eschatology. The former preoccupation did surface occasionally, as in the sermon he delivered in Cambridge, in 1951, in which he talked of those “men of demonic personality and charismatic powers, who exalted themselves above the moral law, and offered a godless solution of human ills for their generation.”123 There, Nero, Julian the Apostate, Constantine V, Frederick II, Peter the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler all figured as paradigmatic “antichrists.” But Wight’s surviving papers suggest that he did not address the subject again at any length for the next twenty years and when he did, in a talk given to the Newman Society in 1971, the tone was “very different.” The lecture, as Gabriele Wight wrote to Bull, merely “acquaints his audience with the doctrine and legend just as an intellectual exercise of some theoretical and perhaps political interest.”124 Indeed, Wight even sought to place the doctrine in a particular historical context, arguing that “[i]n so far as the Beast represents a kind of collective Hobbesian Leviathan it stands for the Roman Empire” rather than any kind of later polity.125 There was a qualification, but not a strong one: he drew attention to the revival of the idea in the work of Barth and Maritain, as well as in Huxley’s Brave New World and Orwell’s Nineteen-Eighty Four.126 All of Wight’s later religious writings show a concern for the theory of End-Time or the Last Days. In “The Church, Russia and the West” (1948), Wight observed: “[t]he revival of the eschatological elements in Christianity has been one of the main achievements of the theologians of the twentieth century.”127 His focus was not, however, on every eschatological account in the Bible—he rarely mentioned Daniel’s visions (especially 7–8) or indeed John’s Revelation—but simply upon the short reports of Jesus’s view of EndTime in the Synoptic Gospels.128 There is a logic to this: while the Books of Daniel and of Revelation prophesy things-to-come, the so-called Little

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Apocalypse provides more that a description of future tribulations and of the kingdom that awaits the elect.129 There was, Wight argued, a distinction between prophecy and apocalyptic, the latter represented an advance upon the former: the “Apocalyptists were [the] first to see history sub specie aeternitatis [from the point of view of eternity], to experience the tension of trying to think in terms of Eternity as well as thinking temporally.”130 Indeed, as he observed in 1950, “the N[ew] T[estament] introduces a new plan of history, so to speak: the conception of the Kingdom as having arrived, and these being ‘the last times’. . .[which] gives the Christian Era a new kind of spiritual dimension.”131 Wight’s concern here was with the underlying theory of the relation of secular and sacred history—of Time and Eternity—to be found in the “Little Apocalypse.” There Jesus tells his disciples that now, after His Coming, they are living in the End-Time—indeed, that “for the elect’s sake, who he hath chosen, he hath shortened the days” (Mark 13:20)—and he enjoins them to “endure” and “[w]atch . . . for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come” (Matt. 24:13 and 42). At the End, “Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away” (Mark 13:31). This account of the relation between Time and Eternity convinced Wight that Christianity was, as he put it, “unique among the Higher Religions in the comprehensiveness and development of its eschatology.”132 It cast secular history—Time—as an interval. The events that occur in Time—wars, persecutions, famines, pestilence—thus have no intrinsic meaning: “when ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars, be ye not troubled: for such things must needs be; but the end shall not be yet” (Mark 13:7). The happenings of secular history do not signal the End and are merely to be endured. Only when Eternity intrudes upon Time, when God intervenes in history, will the End come and events acquire meaning. In the postwar period, Wight spent much time examining this relation of secular and sacred history, what he called “history as process only and history as purpose” or “history aetiological and history teleological,” and with the “rhythm in their interaction.”133 Although he was aware of St Augustine’s formulation of his problem as “the distinction between . . . two cities,”134 the principal influences on Wight’s understanding of eschatology were contemporary. In one of his later lectures, “God in an Age of Nuclear War” (1963), Wight observed that “[t]he eschatological hasn’t yet filtered through into popular religion but [it] has played a great part in intellectual Christianity since its rediscovery by [Albert] Schweitzer before 1914.”135 He set himself apart from the philosophy of history innate in liberal theology, which he thought had produced “an evolutionary Christianity whose central tenet is that God restores or redeems or reintegrates the universe through man, rather than Christ,” and instead drew upon the neoorthodox school.136


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The principal influence on Wight’s thought, at first- or second-hand, through the work of Edwyn Hoskyns or Christopher Dawson, was Karl Barth. This influence may have been personal and direct—the two men were both present at the World Council of Churches meeting in Amsterdam in 1949. By that time Wight had read Barth’s Epistle to the Romans—it is cited in an essay written a year earlier.137 In his religious writings, Wight used a number of terms particular, though by no means unique, to Barth. In Church and State (1939), Barth wrote of the state in its “demonic form”; in “The Church, Russia and the West” (1948), Wight observed “demonic concentrations of power.”138 The latter article, indeed, is the most Barthian of his essays, though nowhere is Barth cited. Not only did Wight insist that eschatology must be restored to Christianity, but he meditated upon another central Barthian theme, that the Faith must be “Christological”139—“the centre and circumference,” Wight wrote, of the Church’s “attempts to build a Christian civilisation” is “the proclaiming of the gospel of the crucified and risen Christ.”140 Wight’s understanding of eschatology and its centrality to Christianity was distinctly Barthian. Both emphasized the imminence of the “eschatological moment”; the notion that God, and especially Christ, is near at hand at all points in secular history.141 For Barth, the Word of Judgment and Grace brought eternity into time;142 for Wight, the Christian conception of History presented “through the intrusion of a metahistorical element, Judgment and Redemption.”143 Both, moreover, emphasized the centrality of hope to Christian belief, and offered almost identical conceptions of what form that “hope” should take. According to Doyle, Barth argued that the Bible offers hope, not as a vacillating and pragmatic response to changing circumstances we see in pagan thought, the hoped-for fulfilment of one’s own dreams, but as the sure expectation that God will keep his promises about salvation . . . . [T]he Bible makes it clear that hope is the defining characteristic of Christian existence, we exist in hope.144 Hope was not to be vested in earthly things: for “anthropocentric hopes,” Barth maintained, “cannot have the clarity and power . . . as hopes grounded in God . . . [and] are always exposed to the possibility of relapse into scepticism or ambivalent obscurity.”145 Wight agreed. In a broadcast lecture of 1948, “Christian Commentary,” he lamented the political “debasing and perverting” of Hope, arguing in unmistakably Barthian terms that “the object of Hope is God”: Hope is one of those words, like most of the Christian verbal currency, that has become gravely debased. If we are talking about the Hope that is

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a Christian duty . . . we mean something more than hope in its ordinary sense . . . . Hope is not a political virtue: it is a theological virtue. It is a facet of the relationship between the individual soul and a Personal God.146 This “hope,” moreover, was not to be vested in any “particular things God may allow in history, but [in] God himself ”—“in the humanly ineluctable factor of God’s grace.”147 Though uncompromising, this was not a pessimistic position, as some critics of Wight’s thought have suggested: thorough-going pessimism is incompatible with the Promise renewed by Christ that the Kingdom and salvation “is nigh at hand” (Luke 21:31). Nor does it imply, as Michael Nicholson argued, that “politics is a charade”148—it merely states that the matters of the world are of secondary importance to those of the soul. For Wight, politics mattered greatly, but there came a point at which, as he put it, one must decide “whether we think of the political crisis we have lived through since 1914 as primarily a condition w[hi]ch challenges us to improve it or primarily a condition w[hi]ch the N[ew] T[estament] suggests is inherent in acceptance of [Christian] faith.”149 If it is the latter, the response must be one that lies “beyond politics”: in “the exhortation to flee from the wrath to come, which is escaping from the necessities of secular history” in repentance.150

Beyond Politics Christian politics embody a belief in Providence. But to believe in God’s beneficent core of the human drama, is to recognise that if ours is the Christian course it is not because God has chosen us, that our best purposes are only the materials of God’s intentions, and that the outcome designed by God will be different from what we want or imagine. Political humility can appreciate the irony of politics, which marks the pattern of divine judgment. Martin Wight151 Wight’s wartime and postwar concerns with the doctrine of Antichrist and with eschatology should not be taken to imply that he thought the End was nigh or that politics were futile. He believed, of course, that the calamities described in the “Little Apocalypse” were not “discordant with the record of history or the experience of my generation.”152 But he acknowledged, even the dark days of the late 1940s, that “[t]he Second Coming is


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always imminent”: Christ said three things about it: that it would be sudden, catching mankind unawares; that it was unpredictable, and must not be made a factor in human speculations; and that it was to be expected by the Church with the watchful humility of good servants awaiting the return of an absent master. . . . The end of human history is by definition outside the range of human knowledge; speculation about it is therefore foolish; we should not allow ourselves to be diverted either by attempts at certainty or by the absence of certainty from our moral responsibilities within history.153 Wight warned against despair as well as against optimism, Christian or secular, reminding his readers that all history, since the Christ’s coming, had been an “epilogue.”154 Like the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, he urged that Christians look “beyond politics,” but also to remind them that “to the Christian the world is always ending, and every historical crisis is, as it were, a rehearsal for the real thing.”155 In Wight’s religious writings after the mid-1950s, he remained staunch in his insistence that Christianity was an eschatological religion, but placed greater emphasis on Providence.156 This may reflect his reading of contemporary events; he observed in a talk for a German radio station in 1966, that “as the War receded, we learned to live with the Bomb and the Cold War and our mood became less apocalyptical.”157 In an unpublished essay on “Christian Politics,” he incorporated a lengthy exposition of the idea of Providence alongside the discussion of the Last Judgement; in his last piece on “Antichrist” (1971) he mused on the Christian’s “intellectual responsibility to understand the ways of Providence.”158 Though largely consistent with his earlier work—Wight reflected again, in the former, on the parable of the tares and the wheat and on the “astringent realism about political experience” to be found in the Bible—the tone of both is slightly more sanguine.159 Throughout his religious writing, however, there is a consistent message. The Christian, Wight thought, must be realistic—in the common-place understanding of the term—about the secular world. In “The Church, Russia and the West” (1948), he was clearest on this point: It is the duty of Christians to analyse the secular situation with ruthless realism, and without the timidity, distaste and self-deception that Communists attribute to bourgeois culture in decline. The Church was enjoined to cultivate the wisdom of the serpent as well as the simplicity of the dove, and the Pharisees were condemned for not being able to discern the signs of the times.160

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But realistic analysis did not, as we shall see in chapter 4, imply the pursuit of political Realism in practice. What it did demonstrate, for Wight, was the need for Christians to display what he called “political humility”—the moral of his dictum that “Hope is not a political virtue: it is a theological virtue.”161 With this in mind, the Christian can move in the secular world and fulfil his or her “moral responsibilities within history.”162 In Wight’s last “Antichrist” talk, he set out the three basic lessons thus: 1. Our first duty is to the present. . . . 2. Our second duty is to Providence. . . . 3. Our third duty is to be ready. . . . Watch and pray.163 These were not the beliefs of a “passive spectator,” but they were those of a man whose religion informed his every action.164

CHAPTER 3


A true politics . . . is above all a philosophy of history. Harold Laski1

W

ight began and ended his academic career as an historian. Late in his life he wrote to a correspondent: “[O]ne of the things that the change from the LSE to Sussex has done is to show me that I am irremediably a historian in my beliefs and outlook . . . I want to make people aware of the relevance, the topicality of the past.”2 He was never truly reconciled to the “discipline” of International Relations (IR). When he moved to Sussex in 1961 he asked for a Chair in History rather than the one muted in “Political Theory,” arguing that “History is wider and less limiting.”3 He thought, at that time, that his “best work” had been on “inter-war diplomatic history”—that was contained in the Survey of International Affairs for March 1939—and that although he had worked since upon the “political theory of international society,” as he put it, he wanted most to “continue to inhabit the Ernest Barker borderland where classical studies and history and political theory meet.”4 Wight’s historical thought—like his religion—was unorthodox. He was highly critical of the “modernist” mode of historiography that dominated the field during his lifetime and which, as Michael Bentley has put it, “implied the availability of truth, the undesirability of metaphysics and all forms of blurredness, the necessity for a rationalism of an Enlightenment kind.”5 To Wight’s mind, the assumptions of this kind of historical writing were “closely similar, a kind of cultural parallel, to [the] analytical movement in philosophy”—and just as flawed. He lamented this “attempt to establish a neutral technical history valid irrespective of the individual historian, to write history without any philosophy of history, to separate facts from philosophical interpretations” and denied that it could be done.6

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In reviews, lectures and essays, Wight suggested an alternative, but, as with Lord Acton, whom he greatly admired, he did not produce the great work of history that demonstrated its worth. His scattered reflections on the subject divide themselves into four categories: judgments on past and contemporary historians, thoughts on historical method, explorations in the philosophy of history, and observations on the relationship between history and political practice. This chapter examines each in turn. The first provide a sense both of context and of location: they help to identify the influences that shaped Wight’s approach to history. The other three are important in themselves, but also because they show some of the presuppositions that informed his treatment of the state-systems, international society, and international theory. Historians I do tend to think of the big historians rather as one thinks of artists or musicians, each with his own perfection, each bringing his own outfit of moral purpose or imagination and technical virtuosity to the business of interpreting the past. Martin Wight7 Wight was a keen student of historiography, both ancient and modern. His tastes were catholic and idiosyncratic. In a “provisional classification of living English historians” that can be found in his papers—sadly undated—he ranked as “first-rate” Denis Brogan, Winston Churchill, Lewis Namier, Maurice Powicke, R. H. Tawney, Arnold Toynbee, and George Macauley Trevelyan. Others with the potential to reach those heights were Herbert Butterfield, Keith Hancock, Michael Oakeshott, and Richard Pares. Among the “unspeakable,” Wight included some whom many since have considered greater names: A. L. Rowse, A. J. P. Taylor, and Hugh Trevor-Roper.8 In another list, he ranged further, including both the foreign and the dead. The “great” included Acton, Burckhardt, Macauley, Ranke, Sorel, Spengler, Stubbs, Tocqueville, and Toynbee. The “hacks,” at the other end of the scale, again included some distinguished names: T. S. R. Boase (who had taught Wight at Oxford), Arthur Bryant, George Clark, Geoffrey Elton, Keith Feiling, A. L. Rowse, and E. L. Woodward. This attempt at classification was no mere whimsy: it was an aspect of a wider concern with the philosophy of history. Wight was troubled that there was no parallel in historical studies to literary criticism, with “a body of principles [that] would organize our thoughts about what a great historian is.”9 In “What Makes a Good Historian?,” a radio talk delivered for the BBC in


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February 1955, he proposed four criteria: “mastery of the sources,” “historical imagination,” “historical architecture,” and “historical reflection”10— what he termed in an earlier draft as “philosophical depth.”11 The first two were relatively straightforward: good historians must know their evidence and be able to “re-experience” the past to evoke it in full. The second two were more contentious. By “historical architecture,” Wight meant the “apprehension of the passage of time.” He gave as examples the work of Fernand Braudel on the Mediterranean and that of Richard Southern on the Middle Ages.12 “Philosophical depth,” on the other hand, marked the level of “historical reflection,” the theory that underlay the narrative. E. H. Carr’s work on Soviet Russia offered one example of this, the history being “inspired by the belief that historiographical truth lies in the recognition of historical necessity . . . even if this means sacrifice of ‘attachment,’ of justice towards the defeated side. . . .”13 Very few historians of his own time seem to have fulfilled all of Wight’s criteria. Arnold Toynbee was one. The impression made by Wight’s first reading of A Study of History, in the winter of 1936–1937, has already been noted, but the extent of his admiration for Toynbee needs further exploration. The Study provided him with a standpoint that allowed him to place his undergraduate studies in constitutional history in wider context and to explain what he called in 1954 his “inarticulate dissatisfaction” with the predominant mode of English historiography. It created, indeed, a “universe of meaning within which I have ever since moved,” making Wight one of those “beatified ticks, clinging to the fleece of the ram that treads with assurance across the bridge to immortality.”14 He did, admittedly, become more critical of Toynbee in the postwar years: he came to recognize flaws in Toynbee’s method and became disaffected by his “political unsophistication” and theological naivety:15 His logic is sometimes faulty—he does not define his terms, he uses false analogies, he argues in circles. It is indeed perhaps unfortunate that he makes a parade of scientific method.16 But what lingered in Wight’s mind were the effects of what he called the “revolution in historical perspective” Toynbee had helped to bring about.17 Although his later judgments of Toynbee’s work—especially of volume VII to X of the Study—were less florid and more measured, Wight was still to compare him with Herodotus and Athenaeus, and to ponder whether, “when we are all dead,” he might be “proved right after all.”18 No other contemporary historian exercised such an influence on Wight, but there were some that he admired. He thought highly of R. G. Collingwood’s

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The Idea of History (1946). He praised the first two-thirds of it as “a brilliant and penetrating philosophical survey of historiography,” but complained that in the final part, he pushed “too far” the argument that history could be considered—as Benedetto Croce and Michael Oakeshott had argued before—an autonomous mode of thought.19 Wight was fascinated too by the work of Herbert Butterfield—his erstwhile examiner—whom he called, in 1950, “the professor of history with the widest range and the most agile and original mind in England to-day.”20 His general conviction, indeed, was that “all the seminal English historians . . . are from Cambridge.” This included three “giants” (Lord Acton, J. B. Bury, and Butterfield), “at least two of great eminence, [G. M.] Trevelyan and [Harold] Temperley; and on the flank . . . the tremendous peak of [Edwyn] Hoskyns.”21 Wight reviewed almost all of Butterfield’s books during the 1950s. While his praise was sometimes lavish, he was not uncritical; indeed, taken together these reviews lay out in greater detail than elsewhere Wight’s own understanding of historical method and his philosophy of history. Butterfield pursued the “modernist” ideal—he wrote extensively on the “science” of “technical history” and thought it could produce narratives of universal validity—and pointed beyond it. He was a committed Christian, concerned with the relationships of scholarship and history to religion, and thus Wight found in his thought much to admire, despite disagreements both theological and historical. His engagement with the work of Reinhold Niebuhr took the same form. Both, Wight argued, emphasized the “Old Testament at the expense of the New Testament, and seem to undervalue the doctrine of the Church.”22 He was drawn, however, to their understandings of history as “tragedy,” and his own reflections upon the pattern of secular history derived from much of those accounts.23 Of other contemporary historians, Wight thought much less. He castigated “those prophets of historiographical cybernetics like Sir Charles Webster, who imagine that it will be possible to pool brains and write synthetic history.”24 He had reservations about A. J. P. Taylor, thinking his “art . . . vitiated by a corroding contempt for mankind.”25 He was no admirer of E. H. Carr: His historical method is like Bacon’s scientific method: he puts history on the rack to extort from it “critical insights” to help in the solution of political problems. The past has no claim on his loyalty . . . He has no views on the irreducible values of our civilisation, or the degree of breach in tradition that would be intolerable. He does not ask how much of the cargo and crew need to be retained on board to justify the voyage. The voyage is everything, and anyhow it is now under way. “I do not know why we are


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doing this,” said Hitler once, “I only know that I must do it. You lose the past and gain the future.”26 This comparison with Hitler is damning, but echoed Wight’s earlier verdict on the second edition of Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis. That book was “brilliant, provocative and unsatisfying,” he wrote, and “the most comprehensive restatement, other than Marxist or Fascist, of the Hobbesian view of politics.”27 In part, this disagreement was political: Carr had argued that “morality and law derive their authority” from power and Wight, as we shall see, thought that political obligation had a different source.28 But he had a further objection. It lay with the philosophy of history implicit in his history. Just as Wight objected to the progressivism in liberal theology, so too did he baulk at the idea in historiography. His criticisms were intimately connected to his religious views; indeed, in all of his historical thought, he was unable to maintain a distance between his Christianity and his approach to the past. “History was,” Wight was convinced, “an achievement of Christian culture”—just as the social sciences represented “a reversion to the pagan belief in the cyclic.”29 History, as an art, was a bulwark to religion and to civilization itself. It reflected, to his mind, “the personalism [sic], libertarianism w[hi]ch we like to think fundamental to [the] W[estern] way of life and w[hi]ch has Xn [Christian] origins.”30 Method I don’t think historiography became different in kind with Ranke; the historian only acquired new tricks and equipment; the moral qualities of his craft remain pretty well what they were for Clarendon or Sarpi or Commynes or Herodotus. Martin Wight31 Wight had great misgivings about the approach to the past that most historians had come to espouse by the mid-twentieth century. He agreed that the historian must have “craftsmanship” and “mastery of his sources,” but thought that good historical writing involved a great deal more than mere technique. He did not think, as someone like Charles Webster implied, that the proper application of method could produce an objective narrative of past events.32 Nor did he believe that it was possible for the historian to “vanish himself from his books,” as Acton had thought Leopold von Ranke wished to do.33 In other words, Wight disagreed with the attempt to create a “historical science” and insisted that it remained an art comparable to literature or to

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music. Moreover, he was convinced that history contained a moral quality and that the historian could not and should not avoid the requirement to make moral judgments. The modernist historiography to which Wight objected praised method and denigrated philosophy. It sought to emulate the natural sciences, but to avoid the epistemological problem—“whether the past can be known at all”—that the enterprise raised.34 Modernists fell back upon a straightforward inductive empiricism that implied that there were such things as “historical facts” and that the historian could find them providing they applied the right method to their sources and avoided “bias.” The sophisticated among them, like Butterfield, recognized that this might be an impossible ideal, but demanded that it be an aspiration: It is not a sin in a historian to introduce a personal bias that can be recognised and discounted. The sin in historical composition is the organisation of the story in such a way that bias cannot be recognised . . . It is to abstract events from their context and set them up in implied comparison with the present day, and then to pretend by this “the facts” are being allowed to “speak for themselves.”35 History thus required “severe measures of self-discipline and self-purification” and the eschewal of theory: the “facts,” warned Butterfield, must not be selected “in accordance with some abstract principle.”36 The historian’s task was conceived as a process of collecting the evidence, identifying points of agreement, inconsistencies or lacunae, and reconstructing a narrative of the events they described. Bias, theory, and, perhaps worst of all, moral judgment should be allowed not intrude upon this exercise. The historian must not seek to “punish unrighteousness, avenge the injured or reward the innocent.”37 This attempt to make history more “objective” went hand-in-hand with the creation of an historical “profession”: the displacement of the gentlemanly amateur outside the universities by the trained scholar within. It was accompanied too by the narrowing of the historian’s purview. Professional standards set limits upon the historian’s chronological and geographical ranges. Charles Webster argued: it is necessary for historians to recognise the limitations of their craft and confine themselves to a topic, a problem, a period or a personality, so that they can master, if not all, at least so much of the existing evidence that the rest is unlikely to disturb the balance of their work, however much the details have to be adjusted.38


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To dissenters from modernism like Arnold Toynbee, this implied the “industrialization of historical thought”: the depreciation of “general works” and their replacement by “interim reports” of historical research “contributed to learned journals or to synthetic histories.”39 The obsession with primary evidence, with finding the “richest mine of unworked raw material in the field,” he thought, had made the “potter . . . the slave of his clay.”40 The “spirit of Nationality” had, moreover, exacerbated this tendency. Historians had abandoned “Universal History” in favour of national histories that, for Toynbee, were simply not “intelligible in isolation.”41 In his Study of History, Toynbee offered a monumental challenge to the “parochial” view of the modernists. He took as his models works like Gibbon’s Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire or Wells’s The Outline of History, extending, to his own expression, the “field of historical study” in “time” and “space” in order to make it “intelligible.”42 British history, he argued, “does not become intelligible until we view it as the history of a wider society of which Great Britain is a member in company with other national states, each of which reacts, though each in its own way, to the common experiences of the society as a whole.”43 Toynbee proposed, therefore, that history be written from the perspective of “Societies” or “civilizations” rather than nations. In order for this to be done, he counselled that historians pause in their “collection of facts” and engage in “synthesis and interpretation,” for “[s]ooner or later [the mind] finds itself so formidably beleaguered by the mass of facts which it has gathered . . . that, until it has sorted them out and arranged them into some kind of order, it can no longer sally out into the Universe to gather more.”44 The Study was originally conceived, therefore, as an interim statement: a Universal History that summarized and organized the available historical knowledge to be gleaned from the array of narrower, secondary sources. As Wight pointed out, the Study is “not only an argument but a kind of anthology or commonplace book.”45 Although Wight, as we have seen, became more critical of aspects of Toynbee’s work in the 1950s and 1960s, he retained a Toynbeean historical perspective and a commitment to “holism.” Indeed, he once commented to Harry Pitt that “nothing in history makes sense short of the whole of it.”46 His first reading of the Study in 1936/1937 and his encounter with Toynbee at Chatham House left a lasting impression. In a lecture given in 1963, Wight recalled: when I left Oxford I was overwhelmed (because of the accident of the job I went into) by a flood of impressions of the vast tracks of history which the Oxford history school had taught me nothing of, and I struggled for some years to see the manorial developments in Southern England in the

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first half of the 14th century against the great perspective of Islamic or Chinese history. But I don’t think I regretted the microcosmic study I had done; I regretted only that I had not had macrocosmic study as well.47 He recognized that this set him apart from the overwhelming majority of professional historians because he was at the “great disadvantage” of being “content with nothing less than universal history.”48 It might be “prevalent” or “fashionable” to study just “the complexity of a particular society at a particular time,” but it was not necessarily the best or only way to do history.49 At Sussex, Wight found the opportunity to take a different historical perspective to that of his contemporaries. He mused to Pitt in 1964: The other weekend I was saying to Butterfield that I admire the versatility of Cambridge historians, and he said yes, the distinction used to be that Oxford men knew the whole of English history and the Cambridge men knew the whole of European. What can Sussex men know the whole of?50 The answer to this was distinctly Toynbeean: he designed a history curriculum for the School of European Studies that was “dedicated,” as he put it, “to a whole civilisation, or the civilisation as the unit of study.”51 The object was the examination of those “unities of experience and harmonies of insight . . . [that]. . . dwell in the great recurrent themes of history rather than in a particular society at a particular time.”52 Wight described the approach thus: Instead of national evolutions, other longitudinal themes have been selected in European history: the relations of church and state; the balance of power, or the development of the diplomatic community; aristocracies and bourgeoisies, or transformations of the European social structure; enterprise and industry; labour movements; science, technology and society; the universities.53 This was “problem-type” rather than “period-type” history and it combined “historical with contemporary interest.”54 Wight was not satisfied, however, with Toynbee’s view that such study could rely upon secondary materials. Though it was “impossible,” he argued that “the only obvious thing for the historian is to study the totality of the human record from the original materials.”55 Wight’s work illustrated both the possibility—and, indeed, the profound difficulty—of that endeavor. “Western Values in International Relations” is a case in point: there are few references to secondary scholarship—when he mentions Grotius or Dante or Kant, he refers to the authors’ own work, usually in the original language.56


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Of the over ninety references in his later essay on “The states-system of Hellas,” only ten refer to the work of modern commentators, the remainder to classical texts.57 This approach is unquestionably impressive, but it is also limiting. It is clear from the many commonplace books and files among Wight’s papers that he spent a great deal of time gathering quotations from a remarkable range of writers, but this meticulous concern for the “original materials” must have hampered his ability to write a substantive book. The clearest parallel is with Lord Acton, another obsessive collector of facts and sayings, whose inability to write his great “History of Liberty” Toynbee called a “tragedy.”58 It will be clear from the foregoing discussion that Wight was not averse to the professional historians’ ideal of having “mastery” over the “sources”; indeed, it might be argued that he pursued it almost to a fault. He did, however, find the assumptions upon which the modernists’ method rested problematic. He objected both to the epistemological pre-supposition of Butterfield’s empiricism and to the possibility that the historian could engage in what the latter called “self-emptying” prior to his or her engagement with the evidence. During the Toynbee-Jerrold controversy in 1954, to which Wight was a prominent contributor, he attacked what he called “the oldfashioned positivist belief in ‘the facts’. . . as something separable from their interpretation.”59 As he put it less forcefully, but more elegantly, a year later: “the historian’s fundamental beliefs about politics and man are necessarily implicit in his discussion of what he calls historical facts, and these beliefs give colour and texture to his picture of history.”60 “Historical facts,” Wight argued, are of a different order to those facts that “our senses give us.”61 The relation between the historian and their “facts” was thus more complicated than someone like Butterfield or his fellow modernists allowed. Wight did not directly challenge an approach grounded in inductive empiricism, but it seems safe to assume, given his animus towards the Realist politics he thought reliant upon that view, that he did not approve.62 In any case, in asserting that “historical facts” were of a different order to the “facts” given to us by sense perception, he may simply have been following Collingwood’s development of that argument in The Idea of History, or indeed Oakeshott’s in Experience and its Modes.63 History was not a science, Collingwood argued, except in the sense that Aristotle understood the term; and historical facts were not like scientific facts. “In science,” as he put it, “the facts are empirical facts, facts perceived as they occur.” Historical facts, on the other hand, are “arrived at inferentially by a process of interpreting data according to a complicated system of rules and assumptions.”64 Wight challenged too another fundamental modernist dogma: that the historian must eschew moral judgment. He took particular issue with

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Butterfield’s insistence that academic historiography had to take the form of “technical history”: a “matter-of-fact” affair, a “way of setting out the concrete story, the observed phenomena . . . leaving it for people of all beliefs to make their varied commentaries.”65 For Wight, this posed the question: can one “describe sin without implicitly denouncing it?”66 Although Butterfield repeatedly argued that the historian must not act, as he thought the whig historians had, as a “hanging judge,” and instead asserted that only self-judgment was valid, it appeared to Wight that his historical thought implied judgment: He describes [in Christianity and History]. . . how history has a bias or “gravitational pull” which regularly deflects human efforts from their purposes. Thus revolutions swerve away into military dictatorships, and our glorious allies of yesterday become our morose and implacable enemies of to-day . . . On the moral level this catastrophic tendency appears as judgment on human sinfulness: history is spiritual drama.67 In another review, he complained that Butterfield did “not admit that language is an instrument incapable of being used to discuss human affairs without cadences of interpretation and judgment.”68 On this point, the extent to which Wight’s faith was entwined with his history becomes evident. In correspondence with Butterfield he argued that the “problem of moral judgements in history . . .[is]. . . an example of the tension between Love and Justice, a tension that is only resolved in the Personality of God.” But although he agreed that “only self-judgement” was ultimately valid, there remained a “provisional duty of making judgements”: The Christian historian has the double obligation of saying that Belsen is evil, and at the same time of explaining in charity how men could get like that and of bearing in mind that he himself might have got like that. (The non-Christian history is likely to be weak on the latter obligation). Both poles have to be kept upright or the line of interpretation becomes slack.69 All of this was consistent with Wight’s view that history was, ultimately, a story of moral significance. “[T]he greatest history ever written,” he declared in “What Makes a Good Historian?” is “concealed tragic drama”—that of Thucydides, for instance, or von Ranke.70 Pattern History is not like a train which passes through a succession of stations and leaves them behind, so that we can say “Oh, we passed


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through Charlemagne junction ages ago,” or “Hitler was two stops back, and we didn’t get out thank goodness.” Martin Wight71 Wight acknowledged that a concern with the philosophy of history— meaning not simply methodological enquiry or a theory of historical knowledge, but an account of what Gordon Graham has called the “shape of the past”72—was not “academically respectable.”73 His religious position, however, especially his concern with eschatology examined in the previous chapter, entailed a particular understanding of the pattern of history. And just as he was hostile to progressivism in liberal theology, so too did he object to its intrusion into historiography. Indeed, he thought it equally oldfashioned, observing in one essay that J. B. Bury had published his study of The Idea of Progress (1919) just at the “very end of the liberal period of European history whose religion progress has been.”74 Wight recognized that “our culture today is saturated with ideas of progress” and that “[s]ecular optimism is the philosophy of ordinary men.”75 But he objected to this progressivism on two grounds: moral and eschatological. The notion that history could be understood as a story of progress, he suggested, created a moral problem: it implied that the lives of those in the past served as “mere stepping-stones to the present day,” as Butterfield put it, “mere preparations or trial shots for an authentic achievement that was still to come.”76 For Wight, it meant judging “the past by its contribution to the present, awarding marks to forward-looking minds,”77 but devaluing almost all those lives lived—as well as the ideas held and ideals pursued—in the past. There was, Wight argued, a certain “patronage of the past inherent in [the idea of ] progress.” He declared—echoing Butterfield—that the proper Christian attitude should be different, viewing “[e]very generation as equidistant from eternity, [because] the purpose of life [is] not in [the] future, nor even around the next corner, but the whole of it here & now, as fully as it ever will be.”78 Wight balanced this Butterfieldian plea for “sympathy” to be “extended” to persons in the past with an insistence, born of his eschatology, that secular history had no meaning.79 In one of his wartime essays on Antichrist, for example, he simply stated: “[s]ecular history is the empirical succession of events occurring within time; it is a process whose meaning cannot be found within time, for neither its beginning nor its end are empirically verifiable, and they can be stated only in myth.”80 In his postwar writings, Wight expanded upon this thus: The theory of history to which the Church has always been committed and from which only in the last century perhaps some churches allowed

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their attention to be distracted, is the Biblical theodicy. History is not an autonomous process which secretes its own meaning as it goes along, like a cosmic endocrine gland. (This view of history as an autonomous process, by the way, is hard to separate from determinism and the denial of man’s moral freedom.) History is a process with an author, who lies outside it, that is to say outside time. It had a beginning and it will have an end, both of them determined by its author; and it is only in relation to what lies outside itself that it has meaning.81 Or, as he put it in a later unpublished essay: Secular history is [the] wrong side of [the] tapestry, muddle, knots, crossstitches, dead ends of wool. Sacred history is [the] right side of [the] tapestry where the pattern and design are apparent. Secular h[istory] is gesta hominum. Sacred h[istory] is gesta Dei per homines.82 This position was not dissimilar to that of a number of Wight’s contemporaries. Butterfield argued much the same—in a more roundabout and slightly inconsistent way—in Christianity and History (1949) when he wrote: “academic history cannot provide a man with the ultimate valuations and interpretations of life under the sun, . . .[nor]. . . is it generally competent to take them away from the person who actually possesses them.”83 Although secular history has no intrinsic meaning for Wight, it did display certain patterns. In his religious writings of the 1940s and early 1950s, he agreed with Christopher Dawson’s view that [W]hen Our Lord spoke of the future He gave His disciples no optimistic hopes, no visions of social progress; He described all the things that we are afraid of to-day and more—wars, persecutions, disasters and the distress of nations.84 This did not mean, however, that some progress could be made in some places; rather, it meant that “temporal success” will be accompanied by “the penalties and humiliations of earthly failures.”85 This view and his reflections upon the failures of his own time prompted Wight to suggest that “[t]he tendency of secular history is cyclic . . .[t]he characteristic mark of the process of secular history is peripeteia, a ‘falling round,’ like the convolution of a descending spiral.”86 In “The Church, Russia and the West,” Wight mused: The replacement of the old-fashioned and inefficient tyrannies in Eastern Europe by modern stream-lined efficient tyrannies does not confer


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meaning upon the historical process. It suggests rather the ancient meaninglessness of a cyclical process, the historical philosophy of the ancient world, by which the author of Ecclesiastes was oppressed, and from which Christianity liberated man.87 The qualification at the end of this passage should not distract attention from the claim that Wight seems to make here: that secular history, considered in isolation, appears to be cyclical in nature. This idea does not seem simply to have been a function of Wight’s eschatology or his disillusionment with contemporary politics. The notion that secular history shows cyclical patterns was central to Toynbee’s Study of History. In the first six volumes of the Study (1934 and 1939), the twenty-six “Societies” or “civilizations” rise and fall, displaying a similar “rhythm”: phases of birth, growth (in response to the challenges they face), breakdown, and disintegration. Human history was thus transformed, in Toynbee’s hands, from a story of progress—at least not of linear progress—into one of “recurrence and repetition,” to use Wight’s phrase in “Why is there no International Theory?”88 In his “Antichrist” essays and in some of his early lectures at the LSE, Wight employed Toynbee’s account of the rhythm of civilizational development. In the former, the emergence of antichrists were located in the period of civilizational “disintegration,” or rather, as Toynbee had argued in volumes IV to VI of the Study, in those “crises of the Church [that] precede those of civilization, and determine them.”89 They were, indeed, putative agents of that “torpor following the paroxysm of disintegration represented in a civilization by the universal state.”90 During the “period of western disintegration,” as Wight called it, Napoleon and Hitler, with their imperial ambitions and demonic abilities,91 were just such agents, seeking to reunite Europe in one tyrannical state.92 Although, as we shall see below and in later chapters, this understanding of the pattern of the development of civilizations did have a lingering influence on Wight’s thought, in his later work he moved away from this rather inflexible schema. By 1952, he had come to appreciate that Toynbee had distorted the histories of other civilizations in taking the Greco-Roman history as his model and imposing it upon them.93 But though Wight rejected Toynbee’s rather Procrustean account of the pattern of the past, he did not abandon the notion that, in secular history, events, conditions, and especially ideas recur. Hence his remark in the opening lecture on international theory: “[i]t is a liberation of the spirit to acquire perspective, to recognize that every generation is confronted by problems of the utmost subjective urgency . . . to learn that the same moral predicaments and the same ideas have been explored before.”94

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For Wight, as for Toynbee, this perspective had methodological implications. In the Study, the latter argued that civilizations, because they displayed recurrent patterns of social growth and disintegration, could be compared; that there were analogies to be drawn between the events that occurred, the ideas that arose and modes of social organization that developed in each of the “societies” in the “species.” He attacked his contemporaries for implying that the pattern of the history of Western Civilization was unique—indeed, for assuming that it was “the consummation of human history”—and asserted that similarities could be found in other “societies.”95 “Societies,” he argued in a very opaque manner, could in fact be treated like any other “species of any form of Life” and compared96—an assertion that later prompted Wight to observe that the Study was, in fact, a “natural history of civilizations.”97 Toynbee’s inspirations for this exercise were varied; from Oswald Spengler, whose influence he never properly acknowledged,98 to Sir James Frazer’s comparative study of religions.99 The most important, however, was the Victorian historian E. A. Freeman, for whose work, Toynbee declared he had “immense admiration”—especially for the Historical Essays, which he thought “one of the finest books in the world.”100 The parallels between Freeman and Toynbee are themselves unsettling. A “man of . . . tireless energy and . . . enormous literary output” whose work generated “acrimonious” controversy, Freeman also had a “strange aversion to the employment of manuscript authorities.”101 He was too “an inveterate classifier and lover of parallels and analogies.”102 In the Historical Essays, he sketched a theory of historical cycles or, more properly, a theory of recurrence, for as he insisted, “no event in history ever repeats itself.” His concern was with events that had occurred many years apart but which still showed “a likeness which pierces through the differences necessarily caused by the diversities of countries, times, and men’s manners.”103 His comparative method, he believed, could help historians as it had aided linguists and anthropologists, breaking down the division between classical and “barbarian,” ancient and modern, and bringing about the recognition of what he called the “unity of history.”104 Toynbee seized upon the idea of the “unity of history,” but in so doing, twisted its original shape. For Toynbee, Freeman had taught that “history” meant not “the derived objective meaning of a field of inquiry consisting of events in a time-series.”105 In other words, Freeman was not so much insisting that the past formed a connected whole and should be treated as such, and that, therefore, the division in the academy between the study of classical history and modern history be removed.106 Instead, what he had really been concerned to argue, Toynbee asserted, was that the “history” should be


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holistic: that what he meant by the term was, as he put it, “the original subjective [i.e. Ionic] meaning of an inquiry.”107 According to Toynbee, his hero had thus “victoriously attained a perception of the truth that Hellenic and Western history are philosophically contemporary.”108 He found justification for this interpretation in a passage from “The Unity of History,” quoting Freeman as having written: “no portions of history are more truly ‘modern’ than the history of the times which in mere physical distance we look upon as ‘ancient.’ ”109 Rendered in that way, this statement did indeed seem to imply that one could consider aspects of ancient history as “philosophically contemporary” to modern history. But what Freeman had actually written was no portions of history are more truly “modern”—that is, more full of practical lessons for our own political and social state—than the history of the times which in mere physical distance we look upon as “ancient.”110 This was not statement, as Toynbee had it, about method; rather it was a statement about the practical uses to which historical knowledge might be put. It reflected Freeman’s view that “as man is the same in all ages, the history of man is one in all ages.”111 But for Toynbee, all of this simply provided justification for an approach that involved the drawing of analogies between different civilizations in different places at different times. The Study became, therefore, a massive exercise in the compilation of analogical individuals, doctrines, governments, and so on, all intended to illustrate the recurrent patterns of history. Volume III, for example, which deals with the “process of the growths of civilizations” compares the lives of over thirty “creative individuals” from Saint Paul to Garibaldi, all of whom, Toynbee suggested, had “withdrawn” from their civilizations and “returned” to spur their “growth.” Wight’s observation—that the Study was more of a “commonplace book” than an argument—was well judged. Wight’s historical writings and his work on international theory displayed a similar fascination with analogies. In the “Antichrist” essays he compiled lists of historical personages in a manner akin to Toynbee’s effort on “creative individuals”: Alcibiades, Antiochus, Nero, and Julian the Apostate all appear as “Hellenic Antichrists,” with Frederick II, Cesare Borgia, Napoleon, and Hitler as their “Western” counterparts. Behind the latter stood “Antichrist thinkers”: Joachim of Fiore, Machiavelli, Rousseau, and—somewhat peculiarly—Marx.112 Wight’s contributions to the Survey of International Affairs in March 1939 show a similar predilection, with Hitler compared to Cromwell, Napoleon, and Lenin, described as “both Cesare and Machiavelli in one,”

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and National Socialism as “a perversion of the Old Testament.”113 In his lectures on international theory, discussed in greater depth in chapter 7, Wight extended this “analogical” approach to the past into the history of ideas. They are, as we shall see, a distinctly Toynbeean exercise in classification and comparison, albeit with international thinkers rather than with civilizations. In the concluding volumes of the Study (VII–X), published in 1954, Toynbee abandoned—or at least substantially modified—his early understanding of the pattern of the past in favor of a progressivist model. Wight, however, retained the view that secular history showed no such shape. This disagreement, combined with Toynbee’s move away from the relatively orthodox Christian position adopted in volumes IV–VI of the Study toward a Jungian-inspired syncretism in the latter parts, helped revise Wight’s verdict on both the man and his work. The embrace of progressivism disappointed Wight, even if, as he conceded in 1969, Toynbee’s “latter-day optimism is less pervasive than his pre-war pessimism.” He went on: At that time, his professional concerns with current affairs gave him an insight and an edge to his mind that he has since lost . . .[Since then] He has tended either to interpret the new international scene in the obsolete terms of the inter-war years, such as collective security, or to adopt the comfortable current commonplaces of Anglo-American social thought.114 The hard tone here barely disguised Wight’s disillusionment, nor does his final verdict on the Study: “another great sub-Christian theodicy.”115 It is tempting to suggest that Wight, in his account of the pattern of the past and the comparative approach to be taken to its study, was actually a more consistent Toynbeean than Toynbee himself.116 They differed, however, over the meaning of history, over how that pattern should be interpreted. In the early volumes of the Study, Toynbee had said little on this question, but in the last four he waxed lyrical on human destiny, on the evidence secular history provided for human progress toward what he now thought was its telos: “Man’s Fellowship with One True God.”117 In Wight’s view, as we have seen, no such meaning could be found by the study of history. But this did not imply that history did not have moral significance. Irony and Tragedy The dominant tendency of historians in the past century has been to deprecate the detection of moral patterns in history. Martin Wight118


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What Wight called “historical reflection,” he recognized, could take a variety of forms, each with their particular lessons. A “power political” interpretation of history, one that concentrated upon the “power-factor in diplomacy & I. R.” led to the “assumption that all politics [was] explicable in Hobbesian terms.” Similarly, a psychological interpretation, applying the techniques of psychoanalysis to historical figures, led to the “assumption that all behaviour and culture [was] explicable in Freudian terms.” Both of these, however, Wight thought “insidious substitute interp[retatio]ns drawn from secondary causes and usurping the role of final causes.”119 He observed, however, that there was one “category of interpretation” that the “modern neutral historian finds it hard to discard”: that of “tragedy.”120 How else, Wight asked, “can we interpret [the] inter-war period,” with its “good intentions, weakness and blindness,” “except as tragic drama?”121 In “What makes a Good Historian?” (1955), he called “concealed tragic drama . . . by common consent . . . the greatest history ever written.”122 It was great, he suggested elsewhere, because it conveyed a sense of the ironies of politics and because it was the only form of history that stood “one stage below the summit” of a Christian understanding of secular history.123 Wight was fascinated by manifestation of irony in politics. The idea of irony, he argued, suited the modern age of “power politics.” It was, he argued in his lectures on Four Seminal Thinkers, “a category of philosophical Machiavellians.”124 He described it thus: Irony is . . . the factual skeleton of tragedy, stripped of its moral and transcendental clothing. In literature it is the warping of a statement by its context; a character means one thing by a statement but we know the context and outcome that he does not, and see it has a different meaning . . . Irony can be seen in politics when statesmen pursue ends that recoil upon them, and turn into their opposites.125 In a later essay, “Fortune’s Banter,” first entitled “Fortune and Irony in Politics,” Wight reflected upon this phenomenon at greater length, linking it with ideas—notably that of “peripeteia”—that he had examined before: The idea of historic irony seems to comprehend, but more organically and with richer connotations, the old naked naïve idea of fortune. It broadens the idea of fortune from a theory of politics into a theory of history. . . . Irony in politics might be defined as the warping of political intention by the historical context. . . . Irony is manifested in peripeteia. This is the word Aristotle uses for the reversal of situation which provides the hinge of tragic drama. It is a train of action intended to bring about a certain

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end, but resulting in something different. The situation swings around and recoils against the agent who is attempting to deal with it. Aristotle uses the same word more broadly in the Historia Animalium to describe the revolution of circumstance—one might almost say, the law of retribution—illustrated by the relations between crawfish and other fish. The crawfish can overpower large fishes, including the conger; the conger can eat the octopus; but the octopus is the one animal which outmatches the crawfish, and inspires in the crawfish such terror (according to Aristotle) that when crawfish find themselves in the same fishing-net as an octopus they die of fright. This might be a parable of international politics. Peripeteia, irony in action, the warping of political intention by the historical context, is the regular, repeated, one is tempted to say, fundamental experience of international politics.126 When political ironies pass into history, Wight argued, these reversals of fortune take on a tragic quality: it is difficult to adopt a tragic standpoint about politics, because “politics” implies a situation in which we are still involved, where we can still act and affect the outcome, and anyway where we do not know the outcome because the drama is unfinished. To become fully tragic, politics have to be dead politics, that is, history: the tragedy of Athens, and of the League of Nations.127 The best historiography, Wight judged, demonstrated an acute sensitivity to the workings of irony; indeed, it applied irony as a category of historical explanation. In “Fortune’s Banter,” he observed that historians were generally not keen to write history in such terms, to give political ironies the overt acknowledgment they required, though he cited three examples in which irony was employed to explain, whether consciously or unconsciously on the part of the historians concerned. The “pervasive view,” he argued, was that “irony is an illusion engendered simply by not knowing enough about the matter in hand.”128 Wight thought this view parochial and criticized it in quasi-Toynbeean terms: more detailed knowledge of a part is often brought about at the price of a less clear apprehension of the whole. . . . Political reporting and historical writing which lack the sense of irony are apt to remain as naïve as painting without chiaroscuro, as abstract as Newtonian physics in the universe of Planck and Einstein.129 His insistence on this point betrays deeper concerns. A sensitivity to irony, Wight implied, entailed an appreciation of the “chain of linked peripeties at the end of which the world now dangles”—Germany


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“crushed and disarmed” by World War II, “the heroic Soviet ally became the Communist menace, and Germany . . . within a few years rearmed against Russia,” and so on.130 Irony thus provided a means of interpreting the “phenomenology of political experience.”131 For Wight, it too was a prophylactic against progressivism; it was “the converse of the belief in progress.”132 Most importantly of all, however, a grasp of the ironies of politics went hand-in-hand with political humility, that virtue he thought essential to the Christian, and that which marked “the pattern of divine judgment.”133 Wight’s philosophy of history drove a via media between, on the one hand, Toynbee’s civilizational holism and, on the other, Butterfield’s insistence that history “deals with the drama of human life as the affair of individual personalities.”134 Christian historiography, he argued in his review of the latter’s Christianity and History and Niebuhr’s Faith and History, “must take a wider sweep than the affairs of individual personalities”: It is the oldest crux of the prophetic interpretation of history that it is not applicable on the biographical level. The unrighteous flourish; judgment does not regularly fall on individuals . . . The rôle of nations and communities in a Christian interpretation of history is mysterious and intractable . . . But even if nations and communities have no other purpose in history, they are theologically important as the dimension in which the moral fabric of history is normally made apparent.135 This fabric, Wight argued, displays a pattern of judgment, with the rise and fall of nations showing how “the sins of the fathers are visited on the children.”136 When God is seen as sovereign in history, “the peripeteia of the historical process are properly understood as judgments, and all history is ultimately sacred history.”137 There is a line in his thought, in other words, that connects political irony to historical tragedy and on to religion.

Conclusion It may be fanciful, but I cannot get away from the belief that history-writing in its essence is only a specialised kind of personal relationships [sic] like being a magistrate or a medical practitioner, but involving relationships (and the whole range of humility, charity, sympathy, insight, forbearance: perhaps everything except tact!) with persons who happen to be dead. Martin Wight138

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In a lecture at Sussex, Wight gave his most succinct definition of what he considered history to be—“systematic reflection about human experience in time.” He recognized, however, that this was an idiosyncratic position: Academy history has come to be limited to analysing arrangements for [the] supply of boots to Wellington’s army in the Peninsula. This is sterile positivism.139 History was, for Wight, a moral endeavor. His resistance to the idea of the “technical historian” and to progressivism were rooted in the belief that neither did justice to the past. He denied that history was a science, as Bury had famously declared, “no less and no more.”140 That contention flowed from a misapprehension both of the ontological position of historians in relation to the past—“a blindness,” as Wight put it, “to the historical conditioning of their own way of studying history”141—and of epistemology, for historical truth cannot be established in the same manner that scientific facts might be. It would be plausible to suggest that Wight’s rejection of “technical history” and “historical science” simply confirms Nicholson’s view that he was the “ ‘arts man’ par excellence.”142 That he thought of the “big historians” as “artists or musicians” supports such a conclusion. Wight did declare— echoing Toynbee again—that the “truth” of history “is poetry rather than science.”143 But it would not be reasonable to assume that he viewed history purely as an art or interpreted it solely in aesthetic categories. The writing of history was far more important than that: it was a “spiritual discipline.”144 “We cannot,” he wrote in 1949 stop short with Collingwood at saying that history is the re-thinking of past thought: we must go on to say that history is the embroilment of ourselves in past moral conflicts, moral delinquencies and spiritual decision . . . I would like to have the courage to say that History is Personal Relationships, nothing more and nothing less.145 This conception of history-writing was echoed in his “History and Judgment”: “the historian,” Wight argued, “is both inside his characters, straining to re-enact their thoughts . . . and at the same time outside them, seeing the context and consequences of their actions, and passing judgment on them.” It was, of course, preferable that this judgment be “implicit and held in reserve”—giving the history “weight and truth”—and portrayed “as inherent in the moral texture of history.”146 In a later lecture, he went even further, arguing that “to achieve [an] intellectual relationship with a historical personage by re-enacting his thought [was] not so far from achieving [a]


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spiritual relationship by praying for his soul.”147 Indeed it might, he went on, “be regarded as complementary ways [sic] of achieving solidarity with all mankind in ‘X [Christ]!’ ”148 There is what Jones called “a transcendental quality in Wight’s historical thinking,”149 especially in Wight’s insistence that secular history is simply a succession of events in time, but his insistence on the moral duties of the historian brings it back closer to the world: Towards the actors in history the Christian historian will try to be a reconciling mind that comprehends; concerning their deeds he cannot attempt neutrality without abdicating his status as a moral being.150 So too does his conviction that history deals with individuals not with structures or systems. In one of his reviews of Butterfield’s work, Wight made an approving note of his belief that “historical study [should be] essentially concerned with the personal actions of individuals,” observing that “[m]any of the greatest historians have held a similar view.”151 Wight contrasted this approach with that of the social sciences, which deal with collectivities: Modern historiography lives under the pressure of the social sciences as the modern individual lives under the pressure of society. The citadel in each case is the same: a free will that can modify the course of events. The gallantry and ardour with which Butterfield has now hoisted his flag there will rejoice not only the Christian historian but everybody who believes that history . . . is the true science of man.152 Thus although secular history has no meaning and displays no pattern of progress, its study, for Wight as for Butterfield, nevertheless has moral worth. Wight’s approach to the past and his philosophy of history, like his religious beliefs, shaped his interpretation of the origins of the crisis of politics he perceived in the modern era. The next chapter examines that account. His historical thought, like his religion, also informed his international thought: it gave him a standpoint from which to appraise the field of IR and to analyze the practice of international politics. These subjects are reserved, however, for the second half of this book.


CHAPTER 4


Paganism came nowhere near the combination of political fanaticism and spiritual coercion which is the essence of a Modern Western “totalitarianism,” for these are characteristics of a postChristian Neo-Paganism—of the transfer of the religious “drive” and exclusive claims of Christianity to a debased secular creed . . . which is the supreme evidence, up to date, of a civilization of the third generation being a regression. Martin Wight1

W

ight’s political allegiances, tentative though they often were, shifted during his lifetime. There are hints that he had sympathies for socialism in the 1930s and clearer signs that, in the 1950s and 1960s, he moved further to the political right, where in both his thinking and his voting he oscillated between liberalism and conservatism.2 These changes reflected those in the development of his religious and historical thinking, in part, although some commitments—notably his opposition to racism— remained fixed.3 This not to say, however, that they are easy to discern: in Wight’s published work his political views remained largely implicit and even in his unpublished papers there is only fragmentary evidence of his attitudes. Wight’s earliest article, “Christian Pacifism” (1936), betrays a youthful radicalism. In the first two-thirds of the piece, he confined himself to elaborating his argument in the context of church history and theology, but in the last three pages he turned to politics. Just as the Church had capitulated to “political necessity” in the Crusades, he asserted, so had it bent to the

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demands of new modern powers: The interests of British commerce and finance have been consecrated by ecclesiastical Hegelianism as the movement of God in the world, and the ruling classes are still supported by the episcopate in declaring that since British institutions and British imperialism have divine approbation, it is a Christian duty to defend them by force.4 The socialist undertone became even stronger in the final passages of the article. Although Wight implied that war was, in the final analysis, a function of human sinfulness, he maintained that there were more immediate causes: Military and political warfare is the result, in the modern world, of the continual economic and financial warfare which is the dynamic of bourgeois society; and the Christian pacifist is a pacifist in both spheres.5 This radical diagnosis of the causes of wars was matched by an equally radical prescription. The political programme of the Christian pacifist, he insisted, must include not just unilateral disarmament, but also the abolition of tariffs, “unlimited co-operation” with the International Labour Organization, and the surrender of all colonies and mandates to the international administration of the League of Nations.6 For Wight, this programme represented stages toward the “final aim of the Christian pacifist . . . the sanctification of the State and the concentration of State force.” This meant much more than just the renunciation of war: [a] country that refuses to wage war has achieved nothing if it continues to tolerate the Means Test, the distressed areas, and complacence about slum conditions. It is a sin to kill a man, but it is no less a sin to keep him alive in the British prisons in India, the concentration-camps in Russia, the ghetto in Germany, or in the perpetual misery of unemployment. . . . [The Christian pacifist] . . . shares the ideals of the Communist, who uses class-war as an instrument of social justice, and of the orthodox theologian, who condones war as the instrument of international justice; but he believes that their ideals are belied by their methods, for violence breeds no lasting peace7 Wight’s comparison of Indian prisons to German concentration-camps drew furious condemnation from Richard Dyke, the Bishop of Bombay.8 In his reply, Wight repeated it and went even further. Britain’s rule of India, he argued, was “an iniquity.” “I see nothing Christian,” he went on, “in


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imprisoning men for the crime of seeking their freedom, and I do not think the British regime in India, either for its real purpose of exploitation or for the conditions of misery and poverty which it engenders, is worth defending.”9 The underpinnings of this radicalism are difficult to discern and “Christian Pacifism” contains few footnotes that might reveal the influences on Wight’s thought. His critique of imperialism, brief though it is, seems to suggest familiarity with at least the main themes of either J. A. Hobson’s Imperialism or Lenin’s work of the same title.10 It may also indicate a broader interest in Marxist thought and Communist practice. Wight bought (and presumably read) a number of books on both in the late 1930s and early 1940s, from the Webbs’ Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? to a French edition of Leon Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed.11 The work of Harold Laski—a photograph of whom Alan James recalled having seen on Wight’s desk at the LSE12—also featured prominently in his library at this time: his copy of Liberty in the Modern World is dated November 1934 and that of A Grammar of Politics February 1935.13 In the latter, his annotations suggest he paid particular attention to the chapter on property, especially to those passages on equality, labor-markets, and the inheritance of wealth. The enthusiasm for socialist ideas apparent in “Christian Pacifism” is notably absent from Wight’s subsequent writings, though socialist language lingered in his work into the late 1940s.14 He did vote for the Labour Party in 1945—he declared that in an aide-memoir written five years later15—but voting behaviour is, of course, no necessary indication of political belief. Moreover, the trilogy of studies on colonial constitutions that he produced during the 1940s for Perham’s Nuffield project, as well as his involvement in the writing of Attitude to Africa (1951), suggest a shift in perspective, as well as a more measured view of the British Empire. Wight hinted at approval of the “extraordinary . . . continuity” of constitutional development in the colonies and ended his examination of the Gold Coast by hailing its people as “pioneers of political advance and the touchstone of political competence in Africa.”16 The message of Attitude to Africa is precisely the opposite of “Christian Pacifism”: that Britain has a “responsibility” to continue to rule, despite the clamour of nationalist “opportunists,” in order to educate the colonial peoples to rule themselves.17 The circles in which Wight moved in the 1940s and 1950s were distinctly Liberal. Margery Perham was impeccably so, as was David Astor at The Observer, for whom, as we have seen, Wight acted as correspondent in 1946–1947 and continued to write for more than a decade afterwards. He was a member of the “Liberal Foreign Affairs Group” during the 1950s, which counted Jo Grimond among its members.18 Wight’s commitment to Liberalism, however, was not always firm. In 1950 he drew up for his own interest a brief

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account of “How to Vote” that makes the contingency of his politics—and their relation to his religious beliefs—clear. At the outset, he revealed his disillusionment with the Labour Party, especially with those “nationalisation projects of which I disapprove.”19 He then pondered voting Liberal, on the grounds that, if others did the same, this might encourage both the Labour and Conservative parties to moderate their policies to capture the “noncommitted central vote.”20 In his analysis, Wight then moved to consider the state of British politics from the point of view of the “Eschatological”—“the historical crisis, and the irrelevance of most party programmes.” He argued: “Labour has come to power (illustrating a general historical rule) at the very end of the period in which their policy makes sense, and a generation too late.” Wight predicted the onset of a severe economic crisis and mass unemployment in 1952, turning Britain into “one of the slums of international society” and accelerating “the tendency towards totalitarianism.” The Labour Party was oblivious to these “dangers,” the Conservatives more aware, but the latter, in response, might tend toward “industrialistic-corporate–paternalism, with a hint of fascism.”21 Only the Liberal party, Wight believed, really perceived the roots of the problem, but it remained bereft of its “neo-Liberal Gladstone.”22 Voting for any of the parties, therefore, had both “pros” and “cons.” It would be “nice,” Wight thought, to have “Churchill back at No. 10,” but to support them would entail a “permanent loss of self-respect.” It would also be “nice to have Attlee back at No. 10,” but voting Labour would make “you feel miserable and helpless” and “you’ll still be scared of the intellectuals.” Best of all was “to think about Gladstone at No. 10” with the “sense of moral rectitude and credulity about the future” that such a government would bring, but “[i]t would be impossible to avoid feeling secretly that you have wasted your vote.”23 How Wight cast his vote in the end is unknown. In 1955, he obviously decided that “wasting” his vote was worse than losing his “self-respect,” and supported the Conservatives.24 The Suez Crisis almost certainly dissuaded Wight from doing so again, though in 1960 he observed that the “expedition seems remote and rounded-off, a failure of high drama but small historical effect.”25 In 1964 he again voted Liberal, though he admitted to Matthew Melko that he was “in favour of Wilson winning” as it was “high time to remove the Tories, who were becoming like meat that has been kept too long out of a refrigerator.” He confessed, however, that “[l]ess and less do I think of politics as altering anything, even for the worse; more and more do I regard it as an enjoyable and absorbing spectacle, rich with historical echoes and half-glimpsed general laws.”26 Too much should not, of course, be read into the way that Wight cast his vote: many British intellectuals of his generation avowed socialism in the


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1930s and 1940s, Liberalism in the 1950s and Conservatism in the 1960s. At one level, they simply reflect periodic enthusiasms and disillusionments with political programmes and politicians: with the promises of a welfare state in 1945, for instance. But Wight’s changing political allegiances indicate both his perennial search for a practical politics that embodied his moral convictions and the shifts in his political thought—in his diagnosis of the causes of the “historical crisis” and in his account of how they might best be addressed in the political sphere. Both, in turn, were informed by his interpretations of history and of Christianity. This chapter deals with four issues. The first is Wight’s account of crisis, which, it is argued, was grounded in religion and in the modern misunderstanding of the pattern and meaning of history. The second is his treatment of the state, a political form that he considered obsolete, though its hold over the modern mind remained strong. The third is Wight’s understanding of totalitarianism, the politics to which he implied modern societies were tending. The last is his ambiguous discussion of the idea of a “Christian politics.” Crisis . . . the just man who has such a disposition will be whipped; he’ll be racked; he’ll be bound; he’ll have both his eyes burned out; and, at the end, when he has undergone every sort of evil, he’ll be crucified and know that one shouldn’t wish to be, but to seem to be, just. Glaucon, in Plato’s Republic,27 trans. Bloom In “Western Values in International Relations” (1966), Wight alluded to this and one other passage from The Republic. In his writings he implied repeatedly that in the modern world, the just suffered while the unjust flourished. In his religious works, he explained this in terms of the parable of the tares and the wheat: “[e]vil and good grow alongside, towards the final judgment: the Church spreads, but the forces that hate the Church spread too . . . .”28 The tares appeared to have the advantage in contemporary politics, as he observed in 1955: Today it requires a mental effort from us to regard as abnormal, circumstances in which ships are sunk and aircraft shot down without warning, peaceable citizens are kidnapped and disappear, traitors flee from one side to the other bringing secrets and receiving moral acclaim, prisoners are tortured into apostasy and diplomacy is replaced by propaganda.29 In such circumstances, even an emulation of the last stand of the early Christians became impossible. “[M]ass conditioning and psychological

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control,” Wight commented in a review in 1953, “have inaugurated a new kind of persecution where martyrdom is no longer possible . . . .”30 Wight’s perception that the twentieth century was an age of crisis has already been examined in chapter 2, from the perspective of his religious beliefs. In “The Church, Russia and the West” (1948), he identified apostasy as the root of the evils of the modern world. In both East and West, the “presuppositions” of “society” were now “non-Christian and increasingly antiChristian” and “neo-paganism” prevailed.31 In “post-Christendom,” moreover, power had been emancipated from “moral restraint.” This was, of course, most clearly manifest in international relations, where that “simple beast,” Leviathan, could follow its “law” of “self-preservation” and gorge its “appetite for power.”32 Non-Christians, however, could not appreciate the extent of this malaise, clinging to either a “broad pelagianism”—“the belief that we are on the whole well-meaning people doing our best”—or to “secular optimism”: Hence, perhaps, the way in which it has been usual in modern times to see public affairs as a succession of “questions” or “problems” (from the venerable Eastern Question down to the Palestine Question, one of its contemporary progeny, the problem of sovereignty, the problem of Veto, the exports problem, and so on) with the implication that they have answers and solutions, being incidents in the broad if irregular trend of progress.33 Some, having grasped something of the nature of the present crisis, had opted for “submission to Leviathan; for the demonic mass-state in both its Fascist and its Communist forms, gives freedom from meaninglessness.”34 Wight was not the only thinker of the mid-twentieth century to interpret the crisis of modern politics in religious categories, nor indeed the only one to argue that secularization had merely brought about the substitution of lesser gods for a Christian God.35 From 1930 onwards, Toynbee had condemned both the “idolatry of nationalism” and “statism”—that “kind of religion” that concerned “the worship of a local sovereign state.”36 His “Post-War Paganism and Christianity” (1937) cast both Fascism and Communism as religions that “worship the creature instead of worshipping the creator.”37 The catholic writers Christopher Dawson and Jacques Maritain provided more sophisticated versions of these arguments, the latter observing that Communism “declares that God does not exist and yet makes it [sic] own god of an idol” and that Fascism “invokes God, but as a spirit-protector attached to the glory of a people or a State,” thus emboding a “demonic para-theism.”38 One of the thinkers that came closest to Wight’s argument was the Austrian-American Eric Voegelin,39 who wrote extensively on what he thought of as the modern recrudescence of the early Christian heresy of “Gnosticism.”


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Modern politics, he argued, concerned the “immanentization of the Christian eschaton,” the belief that Heaven might be created on Earth by human efforts.40 Thus, “civilizational activity became a mystical work of selfsalvation” and the balance between Augustine’s two cities—the transcendent, which would come to “eschatological fulfilment,” and the profane, which “had no such direction”—was lost.41 For Voegelin, “Gnosticism” underpinned revolutionary movements and liberalism alike, for Western civilization as a whole had persuaded itself that its particular order in history had a greater meaning as, in one sense or another, the fulfilment of mankind’s destiny. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Wight provided a very similar account of the crisis of modern politics, cast in religious terms. In his secular analyses, his faith informed his argument, but the relationship was not always completely explicit. To acute readers, like Richard Crossman, in his review of Wight’s contributions to the Survey of International Affairs in March 1939, the “theological realism” that underpinned the account of National Socialism was clear.42 So, in a sense, it was: Wight did cast Nazism, as we shall see, as a political religion, and argued that “[a]lthough the National Socialist Revolution was a German phenomenon, it was no less a crisis of the civilization of which Germany was part” and quoted Butterfield, who was happy to think of himself as a “Christian realist,” in support.43 The political aspect of that crisis—as opposed to the spiritual one—concerned the sovereign state, nationalism, and the advent of totalitarianism. The State The conditions that made for the intellectual ascendancy of the state, buttressed by classical theories of the polis, have passed. Martin Wight44 From “Christian Pacifism” onwards, Wight displayed a distinct animus toward the secular state. In that article, as we have seen, he challenged Augustine’s “lawyer’s doctrine” that “morality binding on individuals was not binding on the state” and asserted, in response, that Christians had obligations to an authority above and beyond secular political institutions.45 This doctrine was especially important in the modern world. Although Augustine’s moral “dualism” was pernicious, Wight argued, it was only with the emergence of the sovereign state that morality began to be driven entirely out of politics.46 In Power Politics (1946), Wight claimed that the form of political thought and practice that went under that name “came into existence when medieval Christendom dissolved and the modern sovereign state

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was born.”47 The modern state was, in contrast to its forebears, “a narrower, and at the same time a stronger, unit of loyalty.” Indeed, Wight went on Modern man is in general far more conscious of loyalty to the state than to church or class or race or anything else. A Power is a modern sovereign state in its international aspect, and it might almost be defined as that ultimate loyalty for which men today will fight. With this shift in loyalties came a change in the character of politics. . . . Modern times have been a dynamic, tumultuous period of economic expansion and social change, during which agreed moral standards and political beliefs have become increasingly rarefied, as a multitude of Powers have each claimed independence of the rest and driven forward upon their own paths.48 The result, he claimed, was as William Stubbs had observed: that the medieval world of “rights and wrongs” had been replaced by a modern one of “powers, forces, dynasties and ideas.”49 It is easy to gloss these passages as mere description, but it must be recalled that Wight had made a personal stand against one of the most important claims that the modern state can make upon the individual: to defend it by force in a time of war. His antipathy toward the sovereign state was partly a function of his distaste for the power politics its rise had engendered, and partly that of an objection, rooted in his faith, to the absolute claims that it made upon the individual. One of the answers he offered to the question “Why is there no International Theory?” was “the belief in the sovereign state as the consummation of political experience and activity which has marked Western political thought since the Renaissance” and thus “absorbed almost all the intellectual energy devoted to political study.”50 Wight’s view, expressed in a meeting of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, was that [Plato’s] Republic . . . helped to fasten the idea upon us, the tradition that tied political theory to the exploration of the grounds and limits of the claims upon us of the laws of the society under which we live.51 Butterfield, in the same meeting, summed up the political ramifications of this theoretical move thus: [I regard] . . . the development of Greek political theory as the enemy, embodying the whole of man’s duties to (and relations with) his fellows within a doctrine of obligation that is centred upon the individual state, this intellectual factor combining with the cumulative effect of war


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throughout modern history to intensify the concept of the state as an end in itself.52 For Wight as for Butterfield, the modern sovereign state had sought to absorb not just intellectual energy, but also the sum of individuals’ obligations. The emergence of totalitarian regimes in the twentieth century made this problem acute. The state demanded that the citizen fulfil certain obligations; the totalitarian state demanded complete submission. In such a context, Wight argued, Paul’s insistence that Christians obey the law in the Epistle to the Romans had to be balanced by an appreciation of the grounding of John’s condemnation of the Roman Empire in Revelation. Christianity entailed, Wight thought The scrupulous fulfilment of the ordinary obligations of citizenship combined with a resolute refusal to offer worship to the emperor. Up to a point Christians are citizens of the world, beyond that they step into a different dimension of loyalty.53 The modern state—especially in its totalitarian form—posed a threat not just to liberty, but also to conscience. Yet paradoxically, Wight argued, the state in either form could no longer serve the function for which it was designed. Here he touched upon one of the most common themes of twentieth century writing on international relations: the supposed “obsolescence” of the sovereign state. The case is usually made in two ways. One version—found in Lowes Dickinson’s International Anarchy and many later books—is Hobbesian in inspiration and focuses on the changing nature of war. Developments in military technology, the argument runs, mean that the state can no longer fulfil its contractual obligations to provide security for its citizens.54 The other version of the case concentrates less on war than economics: Harold Laski was neither the first nor the last to complain of “the incompatibility of the sovereign State with that economic world-order so painfully struggling to be born.”55 For Arnold Toynbee, what stood in the way of a reconciliation of politics and economics was nationalism in particular and “idolatry” in general. In his “World Order or Downfall?” radio talks of 1930, he called nationalism the “acme of political perversity” in a world that was becoming economically ever-more united.56 The nation-state and nationalism itself had served its purpose in the nineteenth century, Toynbee maintained, when it worked in “harmony with Industrialism,” but did so no longer.57 Worse still, contemporary nationalism now involved both “statism”—the doctrine that sovereign states should constitute the highest authority in international relations—and

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a “kind of religion”: the “worship of a local sovereign state.”58 This “idolatry” became the central concern of his writing throughout the 1930s and 1940s. In volume IV of A Study of History (1939), Toynbee outlined its causes. All idolatry, he wrote, represented a failure of “Creativity” that was manifest in the passive acceptance of inherited social institutions and the “mechanization of Life”: A fatuous Passivity towards the Present springs from an infatuation with the Past; and this infatuation is the sin of idolatry . . . Idolatry may be defined as an intellectually and morally purblind worship of the part instead of the whole, of the creature instead of the Creator, of Time instead of Eternity; . . . [an] abuse of the highest faculties of the human spirit, and misdirection of its most potent energies.59 By this time, Toynbee had come to identify not merely “nationalism” as idolatry, but also fascism and communism.60 Wight acknowledged elements of Toynbee’s argument, but did not endorse it all. He condemned the “idolatry of Leviathan,”61 but saw it, as we have seen in his religious writings, as a function of apostasy rather than as a Bergsonian loss of spiritual creativity, as Toynbee had done.62 In his secular writings, he tended to emphasize the neo-Hobbesian argument against the state. In “Triangles and Duals” (1972), Wight argued: The state provided security for five centuries: it can no longer. The task is primarily military, secondly governmental, thirdly economic. Historical development produced these conditions in the reverse order. The Great Discoveries led to the economic unification of the world, and the completion of a world market in the nineteenth century. There was a wide belief that political unity would follow naturally. . . . Political development limped behind economic, and military behind political. . . . The advent of atomic power in 1945 at last produced circumstances under which the military domination of the entire states-system by a single power became possible and desirable. . . . at this point it was reasonable to assert that the states-system was ripe for unification, the world ripe for worldgovernment.63 It should be noted—though it will be discussed further in chapter 5—that Wight did not welcome the prospect of a world state. But nor was he sympathetic to the political obstacles that prevented its creation. Like Toynbee, Wight admitted that nationalism had played an important— perhaps even valuable—political function in the nineteenth century. The


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doctrine itself, both implied, was not necessarily bad, but it had become twisted. Wight made this argument in both his religious and his historical work. In “The Church, Russia and the West,” he cast it, along with war, the state and revolution, as subject to “demonic perversions.” In its perverted form, nationalism had become “a form of idolatry that was denounced by the prophets of the Old Testament,” but that implied that in an early, purer form it had not been so.64 In the Survey of International Affairs (1952), a similar story is told, this time stripped of its theological garb and cloaked instead in political irony and historical tragedy. There Wight argued that “[d]emocratic nationalism, like all great political forces, supplied . . . the dominant conception of political justice of its time; and its fruition in the collapse of the eastern empires had the character, for those involved in it, of a tremendous act of emancipation.” The problem, however, was that it was ripe for “manipulation and perversion” and, worse, contained within it the seeds of its own destruction.65 The Versailles Settlement, Wight argued, had represented only a “recognition” of a “new system [that] had been created from below by a single overmastering political impulse, that of nationalism.”66 But liberation from autocratic empire was merely the prelude to enslavement by the greater force of totalitarianism. In somewhat grandiloquent Toynbeean prose, Wight wrote: The same dialectic that had led from the Festival of the Federation to the Terror and the Empire, and Lamartine and Bakunin and Mazzini to Louis Napoleon and Bach and Cavour, led also from the liberated Eastern Europe whose most splendid figure was Masaryk to the Eastern Europe of March 1939, dominated by the Eastern European expatriate who had become Führer of the German Reich.67 The “national doctrine” that had triumphed was “too extreme to carry within itself the principle of its own correction.”68 The problem of minorities, he argued, had “speedily transformed nationalism into its own opposite”69— thus illustrating the workings of peripeteia, discussed in the previous chapter, with which Wight was so fascinated. As he put it: the assertion of the rights of national majorities at the expense of those of minorities led to the assertion of the rights of the largest national majority at the expense of those of all the other nationalities together, and the subordination of the peoples of Eastern Europe to the will of 80 million Germans.70 The moral that Wight took from this “tragedy” was not that national selfdetermination per se—or even the doctrine of nationalism—was at fault.

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Attitude to Africa (1951), the book Wight wrote with Legum, Lewis, and Scott, displays a cautious, but nevertheless positive approach to the prospect of colonial self-government. Wight may have thought, as he put it in his book on the Gold Coast (1946) that “[p]olitics is for them [‘Africans’] a new game, and neither its complexity nor its Western standards are always understood,”71 but he maintained that there was no intrinsic reason why it could not be mastered in time. Attitude to Africa shows some concern over the roots of African nationalism, which its authors argued stemmed from prejudice, Western influence, and opportunism on the part of unrepresentative local elites. It was, they wrote, “implicitly anti-white” and displayed “a deep resentment of an unjust historical inferiority, great sensitivity to any discrimination or slight . . . .”72 Moreover, it was caused in part by the social disintegration—a Toynbeean notion73—that resulted from Western influence.74 A head-long rush towards self-government was thus to be avoided. Local nationalists needed to be co-opted, so as not to avoid their becoming embittered and “irresponsible,”75 into a longer-term process of transition. Colonial administrators should seek, the book concluded, “to anticipate, control, and guide the forces of nationalism.”76 In the event, the approach taken was precisely the opposite. Even before the “winds of change” blew away the last remnants of the British Empire, Wight was not impressed by what was being left behind.77 The end of the European overseas empires, like those of Central Europe, had produced what he perceived to be similar patterns of instability, violence, and corruption. In “Brutus in Foreign Policy” (1960), he observed that World sentiment regards colonialism as wrong and revolt against it as right; in the same way, Western sentiment tends to regard any revolutionary nationalist government as progressive and virtuous.78 Yet, he complained, the practice too often belied the principle: National self-determination has a gallant ring of freedom and fulfilment, but its methods are assassination and arms-running, insurrection against established governments, confiscation of foreign property, repudiation of agreements, dissolution of moral ties.79 Here again, the subtext suggested, was the inevitable irony at work in politics.80 Totalitarianism The Church has had many adversaries, kings and heretics and radicals, but none has ever planned its complete destruction as Hitler has.


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Hitler’s hatred of the Church is unique: he has caricatured its disciplined fanaticism, its education, and its organization in his own political party. Martin Wight81 Mid-twentieth century writing on totalitarianism, David Halberstam has recently observed, may be divided into two distinct camps. In one, it was viewed as the antithesis of liberalism, as rule by force rather than consent, violating freedom of conscience and the divide between the public and private, veering between irrationalism and extreme rationalism.82 Carl Friedrich’s Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (1956) provides one version of this account.83 In the other camp, totalitarianism was seen as “the culmination of a crisis of modernity,” a response to the “loss of world” and meaning, and a grotesque “moral failure.”84 Halberstam takes Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) to be emblematic of this position, but one might easily choose Eric Voegelin’s The Political Religions (1938), as Michael Burleigh has done, Frederick Voigt’s Unto Caesar (1938) or J. L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (1952).85 Wight’s conception of totalitarianism combined both views, but leaned heavily, as the quotation with which this chapter opened shows, toward the latter—understanding totalitarian movements, in essence, as “political religions.”86 This was especially clear in his account of the rise of National Socialism in the Survey of International Affairs—so much so, indeed, that Richard Crossman marked him as a disciple of Voigt who “despised” Liberalism and Marxism as much as fascism.87 This last point was not entirely fair; a man who “despised” Liberalism would hardly have been musing, at the same time as composing his Survey essays, about how “nice” it would be to have another “Gladstone at No. 10.”88 Toward Communism he was less charitable, though whether he was excessively “crude” in his identification of the doctrine with aspects of Nazism is contentious. Crossman’s verdict was that he sees history as the struggle of cultures rather than classes; assumes myth to be the motive force of revolution; and regards demonic totalitarianism as the normal expression of popular emancipation. This distaste for rationalism enables him to make a number of extremely acute observations about National Socialism. But it also leads him into a modish overestimation of Hitler.89 Despite the hostile tone, this was not wholly inaccurate. Wight’s Survey essays display a bewildering array of influences. The section on “social conflicts” in Eastern Europe does actually contain an extensive

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discussion of class politics, not least the problems caused by “the absence or weakness of an indigenous middle class” and “bourgeois civilization.”90 In sub-Marxist fashion, Wight drew the conclusion that without both, democratic government could not be sustained. Nor, he argued, uncharacteristically deploying a materialist argument, could the French system of alliances in Eastern Europe: “a diplomatic arrangement without basis in economic interest.”91 In his critique of the Versailles Settlement, Wight changed political clothes once more and turned to that impeccable Liberal, Lord Acton, and his writings on nationality.92 Only in his essay on “Germany,” indeed, did Wight display a consistent philosophy. It takes little exaggeration to describe Wight’s account of the rise of National Socialism as a tour de force. It has range and depth: casting back to Germany’s medieval Ottonian rulers, even to ancient Sumer, and sifting the evidence of reams of contemporary documents, speeches, and memoirs. Wight’s religious convictions and philosophy of history, moreover, can be glimpsed just below the surface. The National Socialist Revolution, as he called it, combined “national resurrection after defeat, a militaristic tradition, a messianic leader.”93 It was “neither the revolution of the middle class . . . nor of the proletariat,” but of “the déclassés,of those elements which had lost their place in society, their traditions, their loyalties.”94 Wight hinted that although it was “a fulfilment of German history,” it highlighted a general problem inherent in democratic government. He did not go so far as to argue that the “masses” should not be trusted with political power, but he travelled some way in that direction. The “National Socialist Revolution,” he argued, “posed with new sharpness the problem of whether there is any method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people, the question in what way a modern nation can be held responsible for its capture and debauch by a totalitarian party.”95 Although the “Third Reich was a system of government by terror, it was nevertheless deeply popular.”96 Moreover, Wight went on, “the disease of extreme nationalism . . . was endemic in Western Civilization as a whole.”97 Quoting Gibbon on the barbarian invasions of Rome, he implied—but did not quite say—that the new barbarians came from within: How free institutions could survive the rise of the masses was the preoccupation of the greatest nineteenth-century political thinkers who remained outside the socialist movement, of Tocqueville and Mill, Burckhardt and Acton, and they generally expressed the danger in terms of opposing extremes of Caesarism and Communism.98 In the twentieth century, Walter Rathenau and Ortega y Gasset had seen this danger too—as had Toynbee, whose Study Wight cited in a footnote.99


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Almost five pages were devoted to the exploration of barbarian tradition in literature and its degeneration into “neo-barbarism,” but the underlying moral is left unspoken.100 Wight stopped just short of drawing the obvious connection that Crossman inferred: that democratic mass politics inevitably generates totalitarian mass-movements. The centerpiece of the chapter is unquestionably the dissection of Hitler’s personality and political appeal. The terms in which he was described are strongly reminiscent of the accounts of historic “antichrists” Wight wrote in wartime. Antichrists, he argued in one essay, had “ambition, . . . imaginative scope, . . . eloquence, . . . subtlety in diplomacy, . . .[and] consummate military skill.”101 They were “charismatic leaders, masters of statecraft, political geniuses, and persecutors of the Church.”102 In the Survey, as Crossman complained, Hitler was portrayed as just such an individual. He was, Wight wrote, “the creator and personification of the National Socialist Revolution”; one of the “revolutionary titans of history”; “the conjuror and medium of a mass revolution.”103 What brought Hitler to power, Wight contended, were not merely his gifts. He was the representative of his age: When we seek a precise picture of his early life and ambitions, his artistic talents, his recreations, his personal and emotional relationships, his stunted marriage with Eva Braun, we are met by blurred and uncertain impressions, as if we are dealing with a generalized symbol of mass-man rather than a particular individual, or with a typical figure of a remote epoch. . . . His life was draining of meaning by the concentration upon power; and the dominating figure of his age became nebulous, enigmatic, and legendary less through his achievements than because he had virtually no private attributes.104 It was the gifts, however, on which Wight focused his attention. Hitler was “the greatest-mass orator in history” and it was through his speeches that he “rose to power in Germany.” The speeches “illustrated his principles of simplicity of statement, repetition, and appeal to brutal emotions.”105 Moreover, Hitler had a “kind of genius for organization,” despite being “a spasmodic worker, capricious and undisciplined.”106 Wight recognized that the Nazi government was hardly efficient—he called it “gangsterism magnified to a national scale”—but was transfixed by what he identified as the third of Hitler’s gifts: “sheer technical competence in the struggle for power.”107 Wight had a particular “fascination” for Hitler’s political ideas. Mein Kampf was, he thought a landmark in political philosophy, at the point where the justification of authority was superseded by the assertion of power, where the rule of

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reason was impugned by philosophic irrationalism, and where the ordered processes of government were replaced by the manipulation of the masses for the purposes of destructive revolution. . . . Contemptible as literature, but nonetheless animated by barbaric force, like a gale of wind down an avenue of dry trees, it was perhaps the most representative political book of the twentieth century.108 Of course, Wight recognized, the “essence” of the book was “hatred”; it was “the most sustained example in political literature of the psychological phenomenon of projection, the transfer of one’s own unconscious attitudes into a scapegoat.”109 But perhaps the most interesting feature of Hitler’s work was that he had made power politics the object of his study; he understood the theory of it; and he has left dicta thereon as penetrating and enduring as Machiavelli’s, like the principle that the masses fall victim more readily to the big lie than the small lie, and that a shrewd conqueror will enforce his exactions by stages.110 He displayed the “same personal philosophy” as those other “great political adventurers, of Napoleon and Frederick, Wallenstein and Cesare Borgia”: It was a threefold belief, fusing opposite extremes—fatalism, the sense of co-operation with destiny; an extreme assertion of the personal will, the mystique of brutal decisions; and a cult of chance, of those surprise turns to affairs that give the leader the moment for his inspired interventions.111 It was this adroitness in the conduct of power politics, he implied, that also made Hitler representative of his age. It is not surprising, given this argument, that Crossman “found it difficult to remember that [Hitler] had lost the war” at all.112 Wight does appear to have found that hard to explain, at least on secular terms. He acknowledged the liberal argument that “corruption of irresponsible power and the absence of criticism” contributed to Hitler’s downfall, but sought to judge it on a “deeper” level, at “an ultimate level of analysis.” Hitler had, Wight argued, interpreted virtù as “mere slickness,” but “politics on this level have no criterion except success, and in the long run Hitler was not a success.” He went on: If virtù means something more than this, that brilliant technique shall be governed by an adequate appraisal of the circumstances in which it is to be employed, then we must take into account the ambiguity of Hitler’s


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terrible combination of realism and fanaticism. For it meant that while he saw certain things with extraordinary clarity, the periphery of his lens was always able to be fogged by nonsense. . . .[Moreover] [t]he technical criterion itself raises the question whether the fundamental flaw in Hitler’s policy was not a moral impoverishment that made him misjudge the ultimate nature of the civilization he sought to destroy.113 Toward the end of the chapter, Wight returned again to this idea, expressing it not as a question, but, equally characteristically, in aphorism: Power becomes opportunist in expression the more it is emancipated from morality; it becomes destructive in character in proportion as it has no purpose save its own expansion. Thus opportunism passes over into nihilism. Hitler’s opportunism was carried to an extent that probably was without parallel in previous Western history. Since his aims were limitless, and his methods unqualified by conformity to any exterior standard, his power tended, when checked in its operation, to destroy both itself and the field in which it was exercised.114 The repetition of this notion of power “emancipated from morality” or “moral restraint”—the phrase used in “The Church, Russia and the West”— suggests that faith was not far from Wight’s mind in writing this passage. This is history as “spiritual drama”; Hitler’s defeat was nothing short of Providential.115 Whether Wight thought the same fate would befall the Soviet Union is not obvious; indeed one of the major curiosities of all of his work in general is the scant attention that he paid to the USSR. In the Survey, to Crossman’s annoyance, he argued that in both intellectual and institutional terms the “connexion between Russian Communism and German National Socialism was particularly close,” noting that Germany had been the “original home of the international socialist movement.” Hitler had learned his “techniques of revolutionary agitation” from the German Communists and the two, Wight judged, had “collaborated” in undermining constitutional government in the Weimar Republic.116 In the final essay in the book, on “The Balance of Power,” he observed that Nazis and Communists were “[u]nited in their sense of international proletarianism and in their adoption of totalitarian government,” but divided by their ideologies.117 Wight did not, however, produce a study of Soviet Communism or Stalin’s political ideas to parallel that on National Socialism. It is clear, however, that he thought of Soviet totalitarianism, like Nazism, as a political religion. In “The Church, Russia and the West,” he drew an analogy, on which

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he did not elaborate, between Christian and Communist eschatologies.118 In a later essay on “The Communist Theory of International Relations” (1962), presented to the British Committee, he cast Communism as a kind of Manichaeism that classified “a large part of mankind as children of the devil, a present danger to the followers of the true faith, yet destined soon to perish catastrophically by the will of God or inflexible laws of ‘history.’ ”119 This was an extension of Wight’s argument in “Why is there no International Theory?” that “revolutionary political theories” are “attempts to reconstitute that older political phenomenon, a universal church of true believers.”120 In that article, Wight portrayed Soviet Communists as the true heirs to the Calvinists of sixteenth-century Geneva. The conduct of their foreign policies, he held, were analogous: both practiced “vigorous intervention and subversion.”121 In a revised version of Power Politics, he carried this comparison further: The capture of the broken Russian state by a band of determined revolutionaries, led by a commanding genius, was the most striking example of how personal force and doctrinal fanaticism can cut across the regularities of power politics since Calvin, from the petty state of Geneva . . . had poured forth a stream of preachers, fanatical, intolerant and heroic, to subvert the kingdoms of Europe.122 There are echoes here of Wight’s account of the rise of National Socialism, in the emphasis on the part played by a single (demonic?) individual and on the “ferocity” of those whose politics are dictated by doctrine.123 Together, these accounts of totalitarian movements as political religions pose the question of what Wight thought the proper relationship between politics and religion should be. It is to that issue that this chapter now turns. Conclusion You can only clarify your conscience and do what you believe is right and for the rest, trust in Providence. Martin Wight124 Wight was acutely conscious of the difficulties of discerning the proper Christian attitude to the crisis of modern politics—indeed to the political realm in general. In a late unpublished essay on “Christian Politics,” he stated what he perceived to be the problem in bald terms: “Christianity is not a political religion, and teaches no political theory.”125 “There is,” he observed, “no more striking evidence of the centrally unpolitical [sic] character of


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Christianity than the lack of any recorded advice by Our Lord for those who have political responsibilities.”126 Yet at the same time, he continued [a]s the converse of the claim of there being no Christian politics, we see a wealth of statesmen, policies, institutions, revolutions, reforms, each with a claim to be authentically Christian. Empire and national particularism, communism and free enterprise, crusades and pacifism, absolute monarchy and democracy, have all in turn been expressions of Christian principles.127 Some principles of Christian politics could, therefore, perhaps be discerned, but, important though they were, they did not amount to a single systematic political doctrine. The fundamental point was this: “Christianity . . . seems capable of accommodating itself to any political régime: all that it asserts is that every political regime must be responsible to God, or . . . that the state . . . is a means, not an end.”128 This was a recognition of the “necessity but secondariness [sic] of politics.” This view was to be found in Paul and in Revelation, and was perhaps implicit in the Gospels. Politics, it was suggested, could provide order: Something is due to Caesar, for value received. Note that Jesus disparaged rich men, but not men of power, rulers.129 Christians were enjoined, moreover, to show compassion, to do justice—in politics as in history, there was a “provisional duty of making judgments”130— and to eschew idolatry in any form, including the worship of the state or its ideology. In his contributions to volume VII of Toynbee’s Study of History (1954), Wight acknowledged that modern Christianity had what he called an “unedifying political record”: in the nineteenth century it allied itself with monarchism and aristocracy in order to denounce liberal democracy; in the twentieth century it allies itself with liberal democracy in order to denounce totalitarianism. Thus, it had seemed, ever since the French Revolution . . . to be one political phase behind the times. This, of course, is the gist of the Marxist criticism of Christianity in the Modern World. The Christian answer would be perhaps that, when the Gaderene swine of a disintegrating civilization are engaged in their headlong downwards rush, it may well be the Church’s responsibility to keep as far as possible to the rear of the herd and direct the eyes of as many as possible backwards up the slope.131

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This could be taken as an endorsement of political conservatism, but Wight was concerned more with the need to recall Christians—and the secular world—to the basic tenets of their faith and to remind them of what lay “beyond politics.” Hence his message to listeners of BBC radio: what matters not is whether there is going to be another war or not; but that it should be recognised, if it comes, as an act of God’s Justice, and if it is averted, as an act of God’s Mercy. It is when all our hopes and fears are crushed and ground down to this level of submission to God’s will, that our prayers may perhaps have the quality that can even alter history.132 Only through repentance and prayer can we “expiate” our “heritage of sin,” he insisted in “The Church, Russia and the West” (1948): “if we repent and cast ourselves on God’s mercy we have the promise that we will be saved.”133 Such was Wight’s distaste for so many aspects of contemporary politics, for the obsolete sovereign state, the corruptions of nationalism and the horrors of totalitarianism, one might easily draw the conclusion that tired and disillusioned, he lapsed into quietism or even cynicism. In “Western Values in International Relations,” he suggested, musing on Plato’s Republic, that the only two courses of action for the just, especially those with “experience of the storms of nationalist politics in the twentieth century,” were defiance and death or acquiescence and passivity.134 The appeal of the latter, as he observed in his lectures on International Theory, was patent: It involves a passive attitude towards life, devotional contemplation, and the abandonment of the will . . . it is very attractive to the intelligent and sensitive person today: there is inevitably going to be a third world war which will destroy civilization; for political incompetence and buffoonery there is nothing to choose between the political parties so there is no point exercising your vote; all one can do is retire within the sphere of private life and personal relationships and cultivate one’s own garden.135 There can be no doubt that Wight was tempted by this “repudiation of the political sphere,” but that he found it ultimately an unsatisfying—indeed, an un-Christian—response to the crisis of modern politics.136 It brought with it the danger of the abdication of personal responsibility, a failing that had, in part, brought about that very crisis.137 Wight drew an implicit distinction between the repudiation of politics inherent in “quietism” and withdrawal from the political sphere. His pacifism and conscientious objection involved the latter, but not the former. The espousal of pacifism entailed the refusal to fulfil an obligation imposed by the


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state, but not the abandonment of all principle; indeed, it entailed the bearing of witness to a higher, moral obligation and the recognition that “martyrdom” was a possible consequence. “Submission,” Wight argued in “War and Peace” (1963), “can present itself to eyes wearied by vigilance or struggle as repose perhaps worth purchasing at [the] price of freedom.”138 “It is easy to say ‘Rather Red than Dead,’ ” he went on, “but not easy to apprehend its full meaning.” He asked: “[w]ould you rather be a brothel-keeper for children or a reluctant torturer in a French military prison or a slave-trader in the Yemen than dead?” To the man who replied “yes,” Wight was dismissive: If he says he’d rather be alive in however degraded a way, than be dead, it is clear that he isn’t concerned with quality of life at all and he ceases to be a witness who interests us.139 One could choose to be alive, but this meant “choosing, with full consciousness, [the] prospects of collective passive resistance in Redland.”140 In an earlier essay, “Christianity and Power Politics,” Wight had termed this position “Spiritual Revolutionism.” It was, he argued, “a mode of political action which the Church must return to from time to time. . . . When [Christian] society dissolves . . . [leaving only an] obligation of heroic sanctity of martyrdom.”141 There was, however, a positive message entwined in Wight’s considerations of the relations between Christianity and politics. Wight recognized that there was always the potential for humanity to be unified, wars to cease, and justice to be done on earth. Jesus had suggested that “[t]he human race had a potential unity,” but, Wight observed, it was “to be fulfilled in relation to himself; and it depended on the individual’s choice whether he would join the human race, so to say, or opt out.”142 And there was, he thought, an approach to politics that could, in theory, help to overcome the crisis of modern politics and provide a modicum of order and justice: The least evil society would be that with the strongest sense of the existence of a moral order in the universe, which is discernable by human reason, and from which flow binding obligations of morality and justice, irrespective of religious sanctions. One of the most prominent political expressions of a respect for Natural Law would be a tradition of truthfulness and good faith, and the subordination of expediency to principle in public affairs. Wight added, in a pencil note in the margin, “Esp. in international relations.”143


CHAPTER 5

Systems of States

[L]ooking back once more beyond the Roman Empire we see the familiar sight of a multitude of independent units, brilliant cities and large kingdoms, each jealous of its freedom and ambitious to expand, fighting and intriguing, making alliances and holding conferences, and all of them, in the end, conquered, pacified and swallowed up by Rome, which had begun by being one of them. This political kaleidoscope of the great Greek and Hellenistic ages looks modern to our eyes, while the immense majesty of the Roman peace, and the religious culture of medieval Christendom, seem remote and alien. Martin Wight1

T

he bulk of Wight’s writing in the field of International Relations addressed what he called “international theory.” His lectures on that topic, his three essays in Diplomatic Investigations and the majority of those in Systems of States deal primarily with what others have thought about international relations, rather than with the practice of international relations. Even his explorations of the geographical and chronological limits of “our states-system” concentrate more upon ideas: those of Guicciardini or Bolingbroke, Lorimer, More, Burke, and so on. Wight’s treatments of the balance of power follow the same approach, privileging the various representations of the concept over its workings in the practice of international relations. The only extended treatment of the latter in Wight’s work is to be found in Power Politics, in both its original and revised forms, though his essays in the Survey of International Affairs, his assessment of the “power struggle” in the United Nations (1956) and his review of Anthony Eden’s memoirs (1960) cast a little more light on the issue.

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Power Politics has all too often posed a problem for interpreters of Wight’s thought. Those who wish to view him as a “Grotian” or Rationalist, as Hedley Bull did, have been keen to highlight what they see as a “difference of emphasis, if not of basic content” between that pamphlet and his later work.2 Tim Dunne has followed this line, arguing that the “geist” of Power Politics “approximates to realism” and that, in the 1950s, Wight left behind “the narrow realist pursuit of interpreting the causes of the present predicament.”3 Whether there was indeed a shift from Realism to Rationalism in Wight’s thinking is one issue addressed in this and later chapters. The suggestion in what follows, however, is that there is a certain consistency in his treatment of the practice of international relations, not least a commonalty of approach and tone in both the original and revised versions of Power Politics. The chapter has two objectives. The first is to reconstruct what Wight thought about the field of international relations, about how it should be studied and taught, and about the methods that might be employed. The next section thus examines Wight’s attempt to answer the fundamental question “what is International Relations?” and his growing disillusionment with the field during the 1950s. The second section explores Wight’s account of the “state-system” and the means by which he studied it. It assesses his understanding of how states behave in the modern “system” and why they behave in the way that they do. In the conclusion, his predictions for the future of the “state-system”—and the prospects of a “world-state”—are addressed. What is International Relations? the teaching of International Relations . . . convinced me that the only subjects which ought to be taught were philosophy, literature and history. Martin Wight4 The manner in which Wight thought International Relations should be studied has intrigued some and enraged others. Tim Dunne has observed, with a hint of approval, that he “completely undermined” Charles Manning’s attempt to provide IR at the LSE with a more “scientific” grounding.5 His antipathy to “science” in any form was a particular irritant to Michael Nicholson, who detected not just an aversion to scientific method, but found too “a divorce from the ethos of science, which does hold out the hope of change.”6 Yet at the same time, many have acknowledged that Wight conceived of IR as something distinct from mere narrative history, tending to point to his “analytical-mindedness,” as James did, or to his concern for classification, as Jones or Dunne have done.7 Nevertheless, it has proved difficult

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to establish in Wight’s published work a methodology or even a substantive understanding of what he thought IR to be and how it should be studied. His unpublished papers, however, allow a fuller account to be given. The prospect of teaching IR at the LSE prompted Wight to engage in extensive reflection not just about the principles and practice of the relations between states, but about the evolution of the academic field, its proper subject-matter and content, and its pedagogy. It is clear from the outset that he had reservations about the state of thinking in the field and about the manner in which the subject was taught to students. These doubts grew as the 1950s wore on. In the beginning, Wight displayed enthusiasm, tolerance and catholicity, as befits a relatively junior academic, but he quickly became disaffected, worried that the subject was not providing the education that undergraduates required and increasingly hostile to the “social scientific” modes of thought that were influencing the field. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, there was much scholarly discussion of what constituted “International Relations” and how—indeed whether—it should be taught in universities. On the one side of this debate were the enthusiasts, notably Georg Schwarzenberger at University College London and Charles Manning at the LSE, who, despite their other disagreements, argued that IR could and should be studied as a separate field. Both conceived it as a branch of sociology. For Schwarzenberger, “justice” could not be done to the “structure of international society” if IR were thought of as a branch of History. That, he argued, “would stifle the infant.” A sociological approach was thus preferable because it could provide a “synopsis” of the complex nature of international society.8 With much of this Manning agreed, though he was concerned, according to Suganami, that sociologists themselves would not be willing to take up the task and that the insights of other fields, including geography and social psychology, be drawn upon.9 Ranged against these enthusiasts were the sceptics, mainly drawn from the ranks of the historians. Herbert Butterfield feared that an undergraduate degree in IR would simply produce “dabblers in a journalistic kind of thinking,” especially if the focus were on current events. “[A]ll the prejudices, passions and wishful thinking which are involved in present-day controversies,” he told a conference on the university teaching of IR in 1949, “often make this more contemporary study a form of self-indulgence rather than a discipline for the mind.”10 Butterfield’s concern was that education be seen as more than merely the imparting of information, that it be considered instead a “training” of the mind against “wishful thinking” or “partisanship.”11 For a time, Wight searched—characteristically—for a via media between these two positions, criticizing both as he went. In a paper called “What is International Relations?”, probably delivered at the Bailey conference in

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1950, he observed that it was: “a mushroom growth on the interstice between International Law on the one side and History on the other.” Having grown where it had, he argued, its development had been both “conditioned” and “deformed.”12 Its relationship with the social sciences created further problems. He mused on the contrast of those approaches with History, which he agreed with Butterfield had no justification apart from the purely intellectual.13 Whereas History is “useless,” Wight argued, “an activity of the mind, like philosophy or mathematics, whose results may be put to use by busy-bodies,” the social sciences were “pragmatic” in “purpose and inspiration.”14 Their aim was to “organize knowledge as a means to action”; they are, therefore, concerned primarily with the present rather than the past.15 In its “Gilbert Murray period,” from 1918 to about 1936, IR had aspired to be a social science and was thus similarly “pragmatic.”16 In the 1920s, indeed, the subject had been conceived as a “science of peace.” Wight welcomed the fact that this was no longer the case—indeed that the students at the LSE “did not regard International Relations as being of any use”—but remained concerned about the predominant approaches to the field.17 He was critical of those, like Butterfield, who thought diplomatic history alone could suffice and who deprecated the writing of “contemporary history.” The argument that the latter was impossible for lack of sources—by which the diplomatic historians meant primarily the contents of foreign ministry archives—Wight thought patently untrue. The opposite held, for though official papers remained inaccessible, the contemporary historian had an overabundance of material at their disposal: “far better evidence” than that of “the medievalist.”18 Moreover, he observed, some of the greatest historical writing is to be found in the form of “contemporary history,” not least that of Herodotus, Thucydides, Clarendon, and Churchill. Contemporary history, then, had to constitute one “pole” of IR. The other was what Wight called “the Sociology of the International Community.”19 What he meant by this, however, is not entirely clear. He did not comment in “What is International Relations?” on Manning’s understanding of “sociology,” but he did criticize Schwarzenberger’s. To Wight’s mind, the latter had been too eager to tie IR down to “the study of Power.” He asked: “[d]o we not deal also with considerations of welfare, with problems of morality, with certain kinds of habitual behaviour crystallised in diplomacy and with rudimentary attempts at co-operation, which are nothing or little to do with Power?”20 An obsession with power, moreover, was both an “unhistorical” way of examining international relations and “not what we do”: scholars in the field do not examine all the relationships between all powers in history, but rather only those in the “society of states.”21

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Wight was uneasy too about the notion of an “International Community.” Hinting that using such a term implied a pragmatic orientation, he expressed a preference for the “Sociology” of “international anarchy.”22 What IR dealt with were “public affairs at their ugliest and worst,” replete with “passion and unreason, violence and deceit.”23 His choice of the expression “public affairs” was quite deliberate, for Wight did not argue that international relations should be conceived as hermetically sealed from politics. “[A]ll domestic events,” he insisted, “come to have an international bearing.”24 The approach to be taken had to take this into account: since the “subject-matter” is “integral,” “oecumenical” and “synthetic,” so too should the mode of its study. It must draw upon both History and the social sciences because the “subject is both,” the one emphasizing “particularity” and the other “theory.”25 The characterization of IR as the point at which History and the social sciences meet was underlain by a somewhat naïve account of the latter. The “father” of the social sciences, Wight noted in “What is International Relations?” was Aristotle and there were none after him until Machiavelli. Their defining feature—apart from their innate pragmatism—was their reliance upon the “comparative method,” from which they sought to elucidate “general laws.”26 In “History and Judgment” (1950), Wight added a little to this portrayal: The social sciences deal with the activities of the individual as a member of a group; to some extent therefore history belongs to them. The chief difference is that history studies the connections between events, the social sciences coordinate and classify them; history sees events as part of the time-process—sub specie temporis, the social sciences see them as illustrations of general laws and systems of causation—sub specie quantitatis. And it seems that the social sciences, seeking as they do to establish system and pattern, uniformity and repetition in human affairs, may perhaps in their higher theoretical reaches have a bias towards a determinist conception of events and behaviour.27 Thus he moved quickly—perhaps too quickly—from a discussion of method to one of philosophy, revealing, as he did so, his objections to that which he thought underpinned the social sciences. In “History and Judgment” Wight recounted with some sympathy Reinhold Niebuhr’s “attack . . . on the pretensions of the social sciences and of the culture they inspire.”28 They embodied, Wight agreed, a volatile and ultimately unstable mix of “voluntarism” and “determinism” as well as progressivism: “on the one hand they aim at bringing the whole of social life

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under human control, on the other hand they tend towards the construction of inexorable laws of social life, which may be laws of social decay and mutual annihilation.”29 Such a view was not, of course, particular to Christian historians; indeed a similar critique of the social sciences can be located in contemporary thought of a radically different orientation, in Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, to take just one example.30 In Wight’s case, however, there was a clear link between his faith and his antipathy toward the social sciences. “It is possible,” he wrote in “History and Judgment,” “that the ascendancy of the social sciences . . . illustrates a reversion of post-Christian civilization to pre-Christian cyclic conceptions of human affairs, and that causality and frequency-distribution are only sophisticated versions of the ancient deities Fate and Luck.”31 Given his conviction, discussed in chapter 3, that History was “an achievement of Christian culture,” it is not surprising that Wight preferred it to the more “pagan” social sciences.32 Seen in this light, it may have been that Wight’s initial indulgence of the claims of the social sciences in “What is International Relations?” was merely a diplomatic ruse designed to avoid offending his new colleagues at the LSE. In later talks he was far less kind and was, at times, straightforwardly dismissive. In “History and the Study of International Relations,” for instance, which probably dates from the mid-1950s, he declared: I am not sure that except in the easier [sic? “case”] of statistics, the specific technique of for instance, the economist, the psychologist, or the anthropologist, as a/part [sic] from the general techniques of observation and hypothesis which they share with the natural sciences, are really applicable to the study of international relations. We cannot, after all, construct indifference curves for the state’s choice of one alliance over another, or express graphically the diminishing marginal utility of non-aggression pacts: we cannot stretch the sovereign state—or even the sovereign statesman—out on the psychologist’s couch: and though no doubt, it would be instructive as well as diverting (?) to lurk around chancellories and f[oreign] o[ffices], notebook in hand, in the manner of the anthropologist by a witch-doctor’s campfire, we are not likely to be given the chance.33 He offered, however, no substantive argument as to why none of these were possible, apart from insisting that the number of “units” available for analysis were too small. The roots of Wight’s antipathy lay elsewhere—in religion, but also in his concern that the scientific treatment of human society undermined ethics. His discussion of psychology in his international theory lectures

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makes this clear: Psychological theories might not seem prima facie to need to lead to Realism. But they do in fact, and the reason is not difficult to find. The most comprehensive an explanation of human behaviour a psychological theory claims to give, the more it tends towards determinism, and the more, therefore, it is implicitly derogatory to the claims of ethics. Underneath almost all modern psychology (unless perhaps Jungian)34 lies a behaviourist assumption about human nature which discards ethical values. Wight followed this bald statement with a quote from Collingwood’s “intemperate and exhilarating onslaught on psychology” that denounced it as a “pseudo-science of thought which claims to usurp the fields of logic and ethics . . . .”35 These harsher assessments, made in the latter half of the 1950s, mark both Wight’s hostility to the social sciences and his growing disillusionment with IR as a field. In the 1960s, he was even less inhibited in his criticisms; indeed, he compared the social sciences, in the essay “Fortune’s Banter,” to their “comprehensive and practical predecessor”—astrology.36 The question remains, however, of how Wight thought IR should be done. In “History and the Study of International Relations,” he set out an agenda for research that pointed in “four directions”: attempts to build a body of theory on the subject, like Morgenthau’s “Politics among Nations,” contemporary history like Gathorne-Hardy’s, reconsiderations of past theorists on international relations (of which I don’t know an example, but on the lines on which a political scientist might treat Hobbes’ Leviathan) and finally, what I can only call history written from the point of view of the questions that international relations seeks to answer: for instance, a history of the balance of power, 1815–1914.37 Wight echoed Ernest Barker’s claim that political theory was, at bottom, a meditation upon history, and argued for a “notion of the study of international relations . . . that it is essentially a meditation on that part of history which is concerned with the relations between states.”38 The crux here is precisely what “meditation” would involve. As we have seen in chapter 3, Wight was no enthusiast for the modernist mode of historical writing predominant in his lifetime—that “technical history” that eschewed judgment, made a pretence of objectivity and avoided the “big questions.” His concern was with the “theory” embedded in historiography, observing that Carr, Acton,

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and Taylor were “read at least as much for . . . political aphorisms as for . . . history.”39 What Wight desired for the study of international relations was a form of history with philosophical depth. In its earliest manifestation, he called this idea a “philosophy of history,” urging in “What is International Relations?” that both historians and social scientists “acquire” one, though it may be “something they intensely dislike.”40 In “What Makes a Good Historian?” he provided a little more detail as to what this might entail: “historical reflection” or “philosophical implication.” This concerned the “theoretical coherence” underpinning a history, like A. J. P. Taylor’s theory of the balance of power on which he “firmly modelled” his interpretation of nineteenth century international history. But it also concerned “mood” or “tone,” like the “sombre grandeur” of Ronald Syme’s The Roman Revolution.41 In “Why is there no International Theory?” Wight put further flesh on the bare bones of this approach to international relations. In his view the quality of international politics, the preoccupations of diplomacy, are embodied and communicated less in works of political or international theory than in historical writings. It would be possible to argue that the highest form of statecraft, both in the end pursued and in the moral and intellectual qualities required, is the regulation of the balance of power, as seen in Lorenzo the Magnificent or Queen Elizabeth, Richelieu or William III, Palmerston or Bismarck. But to understand this statecraft one can turn to no work of international theory; in the way, for example, that to understand the Founding Fathers one reads The Federalist. One turns to historical writing; to Ranke or Sorel. Works of international history, whether of wide chronological range . . . or detailed studies . . . , convey the nature of foreign policy and the workings of the states-system better than much recent theoretical writing based on new methodologies. . . . Historical literature at the same time does the same job—the job of offering a coherent structure of hypotheses that will provide a common explanation of phenomena.42 With all of this in mind, Wight offered the formula, which has puzzled many: “Politics: International Politics ⫽ Political Theory: Historical Interpretation.”43 The language of history, he argued, was more suited to international politics; that of political theory and law dealt with “the realm of normal relationships and calculable results”—the implication being that history deals better with abnormality and contingency “constantly bursting the bounds of the language in which we try to handle it.” Wight was thus tempted to answer his question by denying that there was any international

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theory “except the kind of rumination about human destiny to which we give the unsatisfactory name of philosophy of history.”44 There is, however, much more that is unsatisfying about this claim. Wight never made it clear what relationship these ruminations had to political or diplomatic practice. In “What is International Relations?” he struck a very pessimistic note: For us the occurrence of a Third World War is almost an axiom, and we are studying its causes. . . . We no longer want to justify ourselves on utilitarian grounds. All we aim at is understanding. What we pursue is wisdom. I believe this is very great gain indeed. The objective was the attainment of a “liberal education,” which Wight thought of as the “upholding of a standard which is more fundamental to civilization than any political solutions.”45 Wight denied that the academic study of IR or History should furnish practical knowledge. He recognized, of course, that both could exercise a malign influence—in the Survey of International Affairs he discussed this problem in the context of Eastern European nationalism.46 Indeed, he devoted a great deal of attention to Hitler’s approach to history and to his philosophy of history, such as it was.47 Whilst Wight believed that “the argument that ignorance of history can be politically disastrous has an obvious truth,” he did not believe that knowledge of history made one politically capable or wise. In a review of A. L. Rowse’s The Use of History, he argued: historical knowledge is an ingredient of political judgment, not a substitute. It does the common man little service to sell him history now, as in the nineteenth century he was sold natural science, as a means of solving all the problems of human affairs. Historians can be as silly as anybody else . . . Respected historians said that Britain should sympathise with Mussolini’s dictatorship because it was the Italian counterpart of the Tudor despotism.48 Of course, Wight admitted, one measure of a good historian was their “judgment on contemporary affairs,”49 but historians were often wrong and history does not lend itself to straightforward conclusions. Indeed, he thought that Every policy can be backed or opposed by readings of history. Why, says Mr. Rowse, did the Germans defy the lessons of history and try to unify Europe where France and Spain had failed? Because they had no historical

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understanding . . .[?] All he means is that they too failed. They came within an inch of succeeding, and it was lack not of historical but of political sense that ruined them. The Romans succeeded; the Russians may. It depends on the length of historical view from which history’s lessons are deduced, and Mr. Rowse is mainly limited to the past four centuries.50 This narrowness of historical vision, Wight thought, held great dangers. Anthony Eden, for example, had fallen prey to this, being prone to read contemporary politics as an analogue of the 1930s, seeing Nasser first as “Mussolini to Russia’s Hitler, [then as]. . . Hitler himself.”51 Wight’s experience of teaching IR, his encounter with the social sciences and his reading of contemporary events drove him back to History, albeit in an idiosyncratic form. In 1960, he reflected: “I have never been convinced— to Manning’s grief—that International Relations, in its LSE sense, is a subject that ought to be taught to undergraduates.” He went on It has seemed to me that the critical awareness and methodological insight that we instil into our students is equipping them with a fine set of cutlery but with nothing on their plates to eat, and by reaction I have found myself driven perhaps excessively towards educational traditionalism.52 This disaffection with IR was signalled not simply by his move from the LSE to Sussex and his assumption of a Chair in History, but also by his rejection of the proposal that he head, as Dean, a “School of International Studies.” He favored instead one of “European Studies.”53 The curriculum he designed there reflected both his “educational traditionalism” and his antipathy to the social sciences. “The seminal idea of the School,” he wrote in 1964, “was of a European Greats, in which European civilization might be studied through the combined disciplines of history, philosophy and literature, in the same way as Oxford Greats studies the civilization of antiquity.”54 Wight did not deny that European studies could be undertaken with the “methods of the social sciences,” but he chose to exclude those approaches that did, arguing—slightly disingenuously—that “undergraduates cannot learn everything.”55 His objective was “the critical study of the values of our civilization, of their development and some of the works in which they find protean expression.”56 The centerpiece of the curriculum was thus “intellectual history, the history of ideas, which provides the intellectual thread or axis . . . .”57 Wight’s insistence that the study of ideas be at the core of European studies reflected his assumption—conviction would be too strong a word for what is never fully spelt out in his work—that the state-system was best

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understood through the exploration of the ideas that inform those concerned with the practice of international relations. He resisted any form of explanation that implied determinism, insisting, as he did in “God in an Age of Nuclear War” (1963), that history is always “open.”58 It is thought that shapes practice, Wight argued, rather than impersonal structures or forces. Origins Modern times have been a dynamic, tumultuous period of economic expansion and social change, during which agreed moral standards and political beliefs have become increasingly rarefied, as a multitude of Powers have each claimed independence of the rest and driven forward upon their own paths. Martin Wight59 Although Wight became disaffected with the nascent “discipline” of IR during the 1950s and with the social scientific approaches that had come to prevail, he did not abandon the study of international relations. Indeed, most of his major writings on the subject date from after 1959, including nine papers for the British Committee and a dozen new chapters for a revised version of Power Politics. In these works, there are underlying consistencies. Wight tried to remain true to the obligation, as he saw it, to “analyse” with “ruthless realism”—by which he meant to be realistic, in the common-place sense of the term—and to eschew “foolish expectations.”60 He sought to apply his preferred approach to the subject, one that drew upon history, philosophy, and literature, and provide an account, informed by his philosophy of history, of the workings of the “state-system.” The first edition of Power Politics is, in essence, a meditation upon modern diplomatic history. Wight’s concern is with what “Powers” are and have been hitherto in modern history, how they have differed, what they have done and how they have done it. Many readers have considered the pamphlet Realist in theoretical orientation. Certainly Wight sought to describe international relations in a clear-sighted manner, arguing that: “[i]t is wisest to start from the recognition that power politics . . . is always approximating towards ‘power politics’ in the immoral sense, and to analyse it in this light.” But he stopped well short of advocating the practice of power politics, immoral or otherwise. He wished to avoid prescription and the pragmatic orientation that marked the social sciences, and conceived the pamphlet as a study preliminary to the consideration of the normative implications of “power politics.” Once analysis was done, he wrote, “we can more usefully assess the moral problem” which is “always at our elbow.”61

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Power Politics does not provide a narrative history of the development of the Western “state-system.” It offers only the briefest account of its origins, locating it in the “revolution in loyalties” and the “change in the character of politics” that Wight thought had brought about the dissolution of medieval Christendom.62 He suggested no specific date for its beginnings beyond the assertion, made in passing, that “the record of European power politics” was that of the “past five hundred years.”63 Wight did not depart from this explanation for the emergence of the system or his chronology in any of his later writings. For Wight, it is the growth of nationalism—loosely defined as the idea that an individual’s “ultimate loyalty” is to the state—that brings about the state-system and the “power politics” that characterize its workings. The close of the fourteenth century and the opening of the fifteenth marked, for Wight, the turning-point because they witnessed the initial stirrings of “national” consciousness. It was England’s “first flush of national vigour” during the Hundred Years’ War, for example, that underlies its attempt to become the first “Dominant Power” and “unify Western Europe” at the point “[w]hen the modern international system was beginning to emerge out of the ruins of the medieval system.”64 In his essay on the “chronological limits” of “our states-system” (1971) he extended and elaborated on this thesis,65 drawing upon his LSE lectures on “International Institutions,” delivered in the early 1950s. Wight began his lectures with a study of Council of Constance (1414–1418). Harold Laski, he observed, had regarded this ecclesiastical gathering, designed to reunite a Catholic Church rent by schism, as the “watershed” between medieval and modern history.66 It represented, for Wight, the “culmination of medieval constitutionalism and the beginnings of modern constitutionalism”—the last assertion of the notion of the “ultimate sovereignty of [the] community” of Christendom and the first occasion at which the participating clergy were organized by nations.67 The Council did not, he wrote in 1971, “inaugurate the states-system,” but it marked the end of Christendom: It is the last Ecumenical Council of undivided Latin Christendom, whose failure to effect reform of the Church makes revolution inevitable. It attempts to reform the international system of Christendom, which is the papally-centralized Church. Its failure leads directly to the break-down of the system and to rebellion within the Church.68 What it “left,” Wight concluded, was “an international anarchy of strengthened secular powers,” if not a “states-system” in a strict sense.69

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This preference for 1414–1418, rather than 1494 or 1648, as the moment of the Western state-system’s advent, should be seen in the broader context of Wight’s conception, discussed in chapter 2, of the “apostasy of Christendom” and his animus, discussed in chapter 4, toward the sovereign state. The shift in “loyalties” from Church to state, from God to Caesar, represented what Wight called “[t]he real break” from the medieval system, “prepared through the fourteenth century” and becoming “manifest in the fifteenth”: The assertion of sovereignty by the secular powers, growing since the thirteenth century, becomes normal. The first lamentations about international anarchy are heard. To mitigate the anarchy, the first attempts at collective security are made. To assist them, the new invention of reciprocal resident embassies becomes general. As collective security becomes unworkable, because demanding too much, the simpler system of a balance of power grows up.70 Wight did, of course, recognize that the “internal marks” of the modern statesystem—not just the existence of states, but also mutual recognition, accepted hierarchy, the diplomatic system, international law, and the “means of defending . . . common interests”—did not come into being until much later: he thought by “the time of the Congress of Utrecht, 1712–1713.”71 But all of this was preceded by the “secularization of international society and international law that came to completion about the time of the Peace of Westphalia.”72 Wight’s account of the origins of the Western “state-system” is revealing too about his attitudes to Realism. His students, as we saw in chapter 1, were keen to highlight the “pessimism” of his outlook, and they and some later writers have suggested that his “realism” was thus rooted in an Augustinian account of human nature and the ubiquity of sin. Molloy has put this view succinctly: The doctrine of original sin gave Wight a perfect starting point for the study of human motivation in international politics. Given the strictness of his religious beliefs, it would have been impossible for Wight to adopt anything but the most pessimistic attitude towards human nature. . . . For Wight, the immorality of man is the ultimate cause of international anarchy, the flawed system of flawed creators.73 Wight wrote very little, however, about human nature or indeed sin—in stark contrast to avowed Augustinians like Reinhold Niebuhr or Herbert

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Butterfield.74 The theological starting-point for his account of international relations was not sin in general, but the particular sin of apostasy, that turning away from God and the Church toward the worship of secular powers. It was apostasy, as was discussed in chapter 2, that had emancipated power from moral constraint, allowed “power politics” to flourish, and brought about the “judgements” of war and revolution.75 The System If anarchy is understood to mean the absence of common government, then this is indeed precisely the feature in which international politics differ from domestic politics. But if anarchy means complete disorder, it is not a true description of international relations. There is cooperation in international affairs as well as conflict; there are a diplomatic system and international law and international institutions which complicate or modify the workings of power politics; and there are even rules to limit the wars, which have not been entirely without influence. It can scarcely be denied that there is system of states, and to admit that there is a system comes halfway to admitting that there is a society; for a society is a number of individuals joined in a system of relationships for certain common purposes. Martin Wight76 There are many curiosities about Power Politics, both in its original version and in the later, revised edition. Wight’s terminology is idiosyncratic: irritatingly imprecise to those trained to be meticulous with definition, but often deliberately so. He defines a “Power” as a “modern sovereign state in its international aspect.”77 He wrote of “Powers” as a synonym for “states, nations, countries”—none of which are generally thought of as synonymous—and as more than a synonym for those entities. “Power politics” is a very carefully chosen phrase with which to describe international relations: it has a doublemeaning. On a literal reading, it means the politics conducted between “Powers,” and, at the same time, it also suggests a particular way of conducting those politics. Wight admitted this: we must note the significance of the fact that the phrase “power politics” in common usage means, not just the relations between independent Powers, but something more sinister. It is indeed a translation of the German word Machtpolitik, which means the politics of force—the conduct of international relations by force or the threat of force without consideration of right and justice . . . . But as we have seen, what

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distinguishes modern history from medieval history is the predominance of the idea of power over the idea of right; the very term “Power” to describe a state in its international aspect is significant. The choice of terms, in other words, reflect both empirical realities and normative concerns; as have already been seen, Wight argued that: “[i]t is wisest to start from the recognition that power politics . . . is always inexorably approximating towards ‘power politics’ in the immoral sense, and to analyse it in this light.”78 Wight’s use of the phrase “state-system” to refer to international relations is equally troubling. The word “system” is especially problematic: it suggests a mechanistic—even a deterministic—understanding of international relations, especially to later readers steeped in structuralist thought about the “logic of anarchy.”79 But Wight did not conceive of “system” in such terms. He argued in the second edition that “[i]t is not possible to understand international politics simply in terms of mechanics,” for Powers have qualitative differences as well as quantitative, and their attraction and influence is not exactly correlative to mass and weight. For men possess not only territories, raw materials and weapons, but also beliefs and opinions. . . . power varies very much in effectiveness according to the strength of the beliefs that inspire its use.80 Wight’s hostility to any doctrine that implied determinism, whether it was Freudian psychology or theological liberalism, has already been discussed in some detail, but it is as apparent in his accounts of international relations as it is in those of method or religion. His discussion of “international anarchy” illustrates this clearly. Wight’s terminology, however, is not the only odd element of Power Politics. Although it is often read as a Realist work, its treatment of key Realist ideas is peculiar. This is especially true of the idea of “international anarchy.” The notion first appears in Wight’s work in “Christian Pacifism,” but is not outlined in any detail.81 In the original Power Politics pamphlet, chapter 6 is nominally given over to the exploration of the term, which he acknowledged was coined by Lowes Dickinson. What is curious, however, is why Wight did not begin the whole argument with an account of “anarchy,” as later Realist writers have been wont to do. The opening paragraph Power Politics describes “international anarchy,” but without giving it the name: Power politics means the relations between independent Powers. This implies two conditions: independent units which acknowledge no political superior, and continuous and organized relations between them.

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We take this affair for granted. We have the independent units, which we call states, nations, countries or Powers, and we have a complicated system of relationships between them, now peace, now war.82 When Wight did come to discuss the idea of “international anarchy” in detail, he noted that “the international scene is properly described as an anarchy,” but he did not address all the implications of this contention; rather, the account is limited only to a very brief analysis of Lowes Dickinson’s argument that “anarchy” is “the fundamental cause of war.”83 Wight agreed with Lowes Dickinson: “[i]n a world of independent sovereign Powers,” he wrote, “war is the only means by which each of them can in the last resort defend its vital interests,” but he stopped well short of the Hobbesian contention that the condition of anarchy imposes its own logic upon the behaviour of states. The causes of war and peace, he implied, were to be found elsewhere. “[G]overnments . . . are in a state of potential enmity,” he stated in an almost certainly unconscious echo of Carl Schmitt,84 but other modern phenomena are of concern: The patriotism of ordinary people can have its ugly side, if it is joined to suspicion and ignorance of other countries. The growth of democracy and socialism has probably tended to accentuate this, by spreading among the middle classes and the masses the sentiments of national pride that used to be confined to kings and courts; and in too many countries there is a powerful section of journalism that thrives by promoting distrust of foreigners and the illusion of self-sufficiency.85 This was an odd admixture of arguments: at once redolent of those prescient nineteenth-century critics of democracy Wight praised in the Survey of International Affairs, from Acton and Tocqueville to Ortega y Gasset, and of interwar radicals like Norman Angell, who in The Unseen Assassins (1932) attacked the education system and media for stoking nationalist animosities.86 Wight followed this by recounting an exchange between Lords Milner and Cromer on the idea that better knowledge of foreigners would improve international relations, which Cromer dismissed as naïve: “the better they understand one another,” he argued, “the more they will hate each other.”87 Wight concluded by stating that “[t]he causes of wars are inherent in power politics”—a statement which could be taken as an endorsement of Lowes Dickinson, if it were not for the quotation from Alexander Hamilton with which he ends the chapter: To presume a want of motives for such contests as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and

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rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighbourhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.88 The emphasis is thus shifted away from the condition of anarchy to the nature of human history. The implication appears to be that though anarchy pertains in international relations, the absence of government is not the cause of its ills. Wight made considerable revisions to this chapter for the mooted second edition, eventually published posthumously by Bull and Holbraad. The reference to Lowes Dickinson was omitted; Wight instead turned to Thomas Hobbes and to Herbert Butterfield’s account of “Hobbesian fear.” The impression is conveyed that he had come to have more sympathy for the notion that anarchy is the “fundamental cause of war”: “all particular causes of war,” he wrote, “operate within the context of international anarchy and the Hobbesian fear.” Moreover—and importantly—Wight now asserted that it was anarchy that was “the characteristic that distinguishes international politics from ordinary politics.”89 He went on: In the past two or three generations much emphasis has been laid on the economic factor in history and politics. This has provided a new dimension of historical interpretation, but it has led to the neglect, perhaps, of the power-political factor—of the influence exerted by the existence of international anarchy itself.90 Wight’s point here, however, was more historiographical than anything else—he went on to urge historians to pay greater attention to the “international pressures short of war” that shaped the development of particular states.91 What is clearest in Wight’s account of “anarchy,” then, is just how insignificant a factor he seemed to consider it in the workings of international relations. Indeed, it demonstrates the extent to which he was unconcerned with setting out a “systems-level” approach. The contrast with later thinkers is stark: whereas the starting point of Hedley Bull’s Anarchical Society is a “system” defined by “anarchy,” Wight treated it as almost a marginal issue. His primary concern was with states: what they are, how they differ, and what they do. His secondary interest, as he put it in De systematibus civitatum was with the “kinds of communication or intercourse, arising from relations more or less permanent, which we consider ‘systemic’ ”—by which he probably meant “systematic.”92 The underlying assumption is that these take their

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form not because of some kind of structural “logic” in the “system,” but because they are created and sustained by states animated by particular ideas. The state itself, moreover, is itself an idea; it arose out of a “revolution of loyalties”—a “fundamental moral and psychological” change.93 Indeed, as Wight hinted, “it might almost be defined as that ultimate loyalty for which men today will fight.”94 Bull did, to some extent, recognize this, as is clear in the essay in which he introduced Systems of States: in contrast with those studies of states-systems which view them as determined purely by mechanical factors such as the number of states in the system, their relative size, the political configuration in which they stand, the state of their military technology, [Wight] places emphasis on the norms and values that animate the system, and the institutions in which they are expressed.95 But this remark does not quite capture the essence of Wight’s approach and its implications are left hanging by Bull, who then moves on to dwell upon the idea of a “common culture” underlying a states-system. In the revised edition of Power Politics, Wight did indeed repeatedly challenge “scientific” approaches, as in his discussion of Great Powers, for example: The truest definition of a great power must be a historical one, which lays down that a great power is a power which has done such and such. A scientific definition, laying down the attributes that a great power may be supposed to possess, will be an abstraction in some degree removed from our complicated and unmanageable political experience.96 Wight’s approach emphasized instead rank, status, recognition and aspiration: all normative categories used by states themselves. The concern here was sensitivity to historical particularity. It can be seen too in his discussion of the heterogeneity of Powers—a “heterogeneity,” he pointed out, “accentuated by fewness.”97 Wight made the obvious point— later fixed upon by Roy Jones98—that not all states are alike. They ranged in type, he maintained, from “Dominant Powers” with aspirations to “universal empire,” to “Great Powers” either recognized as such by tacit agreement or by law, to “World Powers” capable of exerting power in Europe with resources from outside, and finally to the “Small” or “Minor Powers” that constitute the majority within the system.99 What is also notable about Wight’s approach to the study of international relations is the lack of a priori-ism. He rarely formulated a hypothesis and

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“tested” it; rather, his theory consisted of post hoc reflection. Both versions of Power Politics consist of the examination of a series of historical analogies: in them Wight applied, in what he understood to be the mode of social science, the comparative method to the history of the state-system. Thus in the chapter on “Dominant Powers,” the bids of Henry V, the Habsburgs, Gustavus Adolphus, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler for hegemonic power in Europe are compared and contrasted.100 The same approach recurs throughout: on compensation, intervention, buffer zones, and so on. From these comparisons, Wight derived—albeit tentatively—a series of rules. These were either perennial (“It is the general nature of all Powers to expand”) or particular to contemporary circumstances (“It seems likely that henceforward the independence of Small Powers cannot include the chief attribute of full independence, the right to an independent foreign policy”).101 What the original Power Politics presented, however, was an account of a system shaped as much by ideas as by power. Thus Wight tempered his assertion that the “balance of power is as nearly a fundamental law of politics as it is possible to find” with the qualification that “rulers often make mistakes in their forecasts of power, and sometimes have other motives besides the interests of the state they rule.”102 In the 1950s, he came increasingly to believe that one of these “other motives”—the cause of revolution—had done more to shape the nature of the Western state-system than any other idea. Revolution If it is seen as beginning after 1648 rather than after 1494, the states-system wears a different aspect. Secularized politics, raison d’état or national interest, and a multiple balance of power become the norm, and the ideological strife of the French Revolutionary period and the twentieth century an aberration. If we go back to 1494, though Machiavelli writes the foreword to the story, it quickly moves into a chapter he neither foresaw nor was capable of understanding, and we watch the states-system begin shaped by the strains of four generations of doctrinal conflict, and of a bipolar balance of power. Martin Wight103 A discussion of revolution is curiously absent from the first edition of Power Politics. Wight did, admittedly, observe that Napoleon and Hitler sought to establish “a united Europe with a new order on revolutionary foundations,” but he did not explore in any detail the affect of revolutionary doctrines upon modern international relations.104 He did note, in the chapter on intervention,

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that in “a period of conflicting ideologies, vertical national loyalties . . . are then confused by horizontal loyalties.”105 Wight neglected, however, to examine the latter in any detail. By 1948, however, he had come to the view that revolution had “been swollen into the decisive fact of contemporary secular history, and . . . produced a giant debased substitute for the Church.”106 Revolution figures prominently in Wight’s work that follows. In Attitude to Africa (1951), he and his co-authors analyzed that “world-wide racial struggle” and “revolution” caused by the “impact of Western civilization”; in the Survey (1952), the “National Socialist Revolution” is dissected.107 In “The Power Struggle in the United Nations” (1956), Wight applied the same approach to the “revisionist” claims of the Bandung powers, drawing an explicit parallel between their claims and the justifications for those claims with those of the Axis powers. Both, he argued, were motivated by “resentment, a sense of inferiority, a self-pity,” as well as by a self-conscious proletarianism.108 These underpinned an anticolonialist campaign rather than an acquisitive one of conquest, but both illustrated the power of doctrines to trump the power of self-interest, with the United Nations serving to enhance that of the anticolonial movement still further.109 Wight’s criticisms of the Bandung powers were informed by broader concerns over the influence of revolutionary ideas. In “War and International Politics” (1955), he wrote: since the end of the eighteenth century, international society has been in a condition of stasis. . . . Stasis appears in the international community when, in several states, bodies of men acquire loyalties which attach them more to bodies of men in other states than to their fellow-citizen. . . . [T]o borrow Mr Koestler’s language, “horizontal forces” shake and distort “the vertical structure of competing national egotisms.”. . . The members of international society have never all been national states, and nationalism itself has been one of the most disruptive international doctrines, an interstate revolutionary movement. Besides Marx’s International there has been Mazzini’s and Hitler’s. The climax of international stasis is when a horizontal doctrine claims a territorial foothold. The doctrine then becomes an armed doctrine, and the state where it is enthroned becomes, for its adherents abroad, an exemplar, an asylum, and perhaps a saviour.110 The state-system, therefore, was constantly under challenge from “horizontal loyalties,” especially when these are asserted by war. Indeed, Wight argued, “the striking development in war in the past two hundred years is not its growing destructiveness, but the way in which it has increasingly become the instrument of doctrinal conviction.”111

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Wight’s fullest treatment of revolution came in a new draft chapter for Power Politics, composed sometime in the early 1960s. It opens with an examination of three “doctrinal conflagrations,” those that followed the Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. By far the most intriguing aspect, however, is Wight’s reflections on the implications of viewing the history of “international society” in terms of “recurrent waves of international revolution.” It offers, he wrote, a “different picture”: Instead of a loose company of sovereign states, it seems more of an organic unity; individuals feel international loyalties, which override national allegiance. But this more organic unity is only apparent, by a paradox, because the unity is sharply broken by a horizontal fracture. The unity of international society is thrown into sharpest relief when it is riven by an international civil war.112 Revolution transformed diplomacy into espionage and propaganda, peace into cold war, war into crusades. Wight, however, was more concerned with a wider question: “why unrevolutionary [sic] international politics should be regarded as more normal than revolutionary, since the history of international society has been fairly equally divided between the two.” On his calculation, there had been since 1492 no less than 256 years of international revolution and only 212 of “normality.”113 Wight’s point was well made, but there was a problem. Although he was insistent that “the three most important influences” on the “development” of international society “have been the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, the French Revolution, and the totalitarian revolutions of the twentieth century,”114 the state itself and “state-system” have manifestly survived. The “melody of power politics” may have been transposed into a “new key,”115 but the basic refrain remains the same. Wight was perhaps on firmer ground when he argued that “none of these upheavals has produced any notable body of international theory; each has written only a chapter of political theory.”116 But his focus upon the revolution on the state-system seems out of kilter with the evidence; it can be explained only in terms of another concern: the imminent creation of a world-state. The World-State Our world since 1945 has been moving out of the period of selfsufficient sovereign states into a new though inchoate period of international interdependence, towards the possibility of international government. . . . The age of the League of Nations was

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Grotian in many of its assumptions; the age of the United Nations brings us closer to the arguments of Marsiglio and Dante. Martin Wight117 Wight’s reading of Toynbee appears to have convinced him, perhaps as early as 1937, that the modern states-system was soon to be superseded by a world-state. In one of his wartime essays on Antichrist, he observed that the state-system is rapidly approaching a political unification, which may result either from the present war or from a succeeding war. The World State, when it is at last achieved, may be the reconstitution of Christendom, but it may instead be the empire of Antichrist.118 In Power Politics, he stated this once more, though without the theological speculations, musing that “every other period of power politics known to us in history has ended” in a “single-super-World-Power.”119 He argued that this was, in part, a function of the instability of “power politics,” though other developments were playing a role: “world-unification,” he wrote, was imminent as “the inexorable result of economic expansion and technical progress.” He did not, however, think this would mean the end of war; rather, it would “lose its international character and become ‘civil’ and revolutionary.”120 Toynbee’s Study of History demonstrated that this was almost an inevitability: the Sinic system of independent state had been replaced by the Pax Oecumenica of the Ts’in and Han empires, the Hellenic by the Roman, the Andean by the “Incaic,” and so on.121 The West was on the cusp of unification, he argued, and the only question remaining was whether this would be done by force—by a “knock-out blow” administered by one or other Superpower in a Third World War or by peaceful, consensual federation.122 Wight agreed that these were the alternatives, but was more pessimistic than Toynbee, who thought the latter would prevail. In the conclusion to Power Politics, Wight mused about the prospect that the “Powers may henceforward . . . regard their deepest common interest as being the prevention of war and liberation from anarchy . . . by acquiescence in a common government provided by the strongest Power.” But Wight was not convinced that this would come about—nor that it would be desirable. He went on to argue that the “idea of common interest can never have much vitality if it is separated from the idea of common obligation,” implying that, of this, there was a distinct lack in contemporary international relations.123 In his later treatments of the idea of a world state, it is this sceptical note that dominates. In “Why Is There No International Theory?” Wight observed the antipathy of many international theorists—among them Vitoria, Grotius,

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Pufendorf, Kant and Gibbon—toward the idea of a world-state and asserted that there were “very few reasoned arguments” in its support.124 Kant, he pointed out in one lecture published in Four Seminal Thinkers, feared that the “remedy” of a “universal monarchy established by one state conquering all the rest . . . would be worse than the disease, a ‘soulless despotism’ leading to anarchy, like the Roman Empire did.” A Universal Republic would be a positive ideal, but a federation of republics was a “preferable” “negative substitute.”125 Wight treated this and other arguments against a world-state with some sympathy: that a world-state could not be efficient, that it would remove the guarantee of freedom for states and individuals inherent in a world of many states, that war would not be abolished, but simply transformed into civil, rather than interstate, conflict.126 If one was to find a positive argument for a world-state, Wight thought, one had to return to the Middle Ages, “to the philosophy of imperial mission or vocation expressed in Dante.”127 He spent much time, during the 1960s, studying and teaching Dante’s thought, especially De Monarchia, the argument for a universal monarchy.128 The book is mentioned in passing in “Why is there no International Theory?” and in “Western Values.”129 Given Wight’s preference for the medieval world of right over the modern era of power, it might be assumed that he sympathized on both religious and political grounds with Dante’s case. Yet while he clearly admired his art, he did not agree with his politics.130 Wight abhorred the idea of a world-state on religious—or more specifically eschatological—grounds. In his wartime essay on Antichrist, he had voiced the fear that such a state would be “rationally organised” and controlled by a scientific elite providing security and comfort—a “Kingdom of God on Earth,” and therefore the veritable “definition of Antichrist.”131 He reiterated his objections, albeit without the references to Antichrist, in one of the drafts of “The Church, Russia and the West”: A world state has generally been looked forward to with relief as the ending of international anarchy; but a world state established not by agreement, as the League of Nations tried to do, but by force, would probably be a more frightful concentration of tyrannical power than any we have yet experienced.132 Such was his fear of the world-state, he was able even to countenance the idea that nuclear war might be preferable to its inception. In “God in an Age of Nuclear War” (1963), Wight speculated: Nuclear war [is] not the worst thing that could happen in our life-times, Christianly-speaking. Suppose a comfortable materialist World-State kindly suffocating religion out of existence. A Huxley’s “Brave New World”—not Orwell’s “1984.”

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A world-state, he suggested, might be worse because it was “dangerous to souls” as well as bodies; and if there was to be a nuclear war “God would not be dethroned, nor less just and merciful.”133 Conclusion We have not yet produced our Tocqueville or our Durkheim, our Lombroso or our Frazer, our Marshall or our Webbs. Martin Wight134 The troublesome nature of IR was symbolized, Wight thought, by the dearth of great texts on the subject. In 1951, he predicted that Toynbee’s Survey of International Affairs, Lenin’s Imperialism, Hitler’s Mein Kampf, and Keynes’ Economic Consequences of the Peace might still be read in two hundred years, but could think of no book produced by a scholar of IR would be remembered.135 The appearance of Raymond Aron’s Peace and War in 1966 prompted a reappraisal of this belief: On his first page Aron notes how the political classics have been the fruit of meditation in times of political crisis, and that the age of the World Wars has not yet borne such fruit. I have sometimes been tempted to use this argument against the existence of international relations as a distinct discipline. So much has been written about it, but where are its Hobbes and Locke, its “Wealth of Nations?” Aron’s noble, temperate and magisterial book makes it impossible for me to use that argument any more.136 Aron did IR how Wight wished it to be done. His book was “philosophical in treatment, sceptical in temper.” It “asserts the indeterminacy of politics” and treats “[d]iplomacy as the realm of the contingent and the unforeseen,” emphasizing that the “statesman’s supreme virtue is prudence.”137 What Wight sought was an approach to IR that espoused these virtues and was yet sensitive to history. In Power Politics he tried to achieve these objectives, but the revised book remains unfinished. His view of the Western statesystem as one shaped not by anarchy or material necessity, but by ideas, came to support a conception, developed in the 1950s, of “international society.” The next chapter explores that notion.

CHAPTER 6


[F]or Burke the state was a mysterious moral community, a partnership for pursuing the ultimate ends of man, and a necessary figure in the pattern of the cosmic design. Perhaps today the study of international relations has approached the point where international society itself could begin to be seen in a similar light. Martin Wight1

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rasping Wight’s understanding of “international society” is no easy task, even if one sets aside the issue of whether he approved of the idea or its workings in practice. The initial problem to be faced is that of disentangling his conception from that of the foremost interpreter of his work, Hedley Bull, who developed in his Anarchical Society one of the most systematic accounts of the notion. There is a considerable danger of reading into Wight’s thought elements of Bull’s latter formulation; a danger to which Bull himself drew attention, albeit inadvertently, in “Society and Anarchy in International Relations” where he noted: “[a] number of the leading ideas in this essay derive, in a process in which they may have lost their shape, from Martin Wight; and a number of others from C. A. W. Manning [italics added].”2 What this chapter tries to do is provide an interpretation of Wight’s treatment of international society that is acute to that process of distortion. Wight and Bull began from rather different premises in their analysis of international relations. The former, as we have seen in chapter 5, acknowledged that anarchy—in the sense of an absence of common government— was a condition of international relations, but fought well shy of the suggestion that this predicament determined the behavior of states. Instead, he implied that international relations were shaped primarily, but not exclusively, by the nature of the sovereign state, by the absolute claims it

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makes upon the individual and by the doctrines—those “horizontal forces”—that periodically convulse the state-system.3 Bull, by contrast, argued that “anarchy . . . [is] . . . the central fact of international life and the starting-point of theorizing about it.”4 His concern, therefore, was with the relationship of anarchy to “society”: with whether the one precluded the other or whether anarchy could, as he claimed, allow a limited form of society to emerge. Bull’s argument, in essence, was a semi-Hobbesian one—anarchy is intolerable and thus states establish institutions, though not a sovereign, to mitigate its worst consequences and allow the pursuit of certain “elementary goals.”5 He provided, in other words, what has rightly been called a theory of “asocial sociability.”6 International society is formed and sustained, on Bull’s account, by states acting in accordance with the dictates of instrumental rationality. States cooperate with each other because it is in their interest to do so. Rules are made to avoid the worst pains of anarchy and to enjoy the comforts of a basic society; a society that he considered akin to Locke’s precontractual state of nature, “without government, whose members must judge and enforce the law.”7 Bull thus understood international society as being in existence when a group of states, conscious of certain common interests and common values, form a society in the sense that they conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations with one another, and share in the working of common institutions.8 The mention of “common values” points to another element of international society: an underlying “common culture or civilization.” It confused Bull’s explanation of its emergence, however, for he seemed to be suggesting that the rules and institutions of international society are rational (and implicitly nonculturally specific) responses to the condition of anarchy and, at one and the same time, are the products of particular cultures. He was, in fact, quite careful in his choice of words on this issue, asserting only that “elements of a common civilization” “facilitate” the “working” of international society, but this distinction has not always been apparent to later readers of his work.9 Bull’s discussion in the Anarchical Society of the role of a common culture or civilization in the sustenance of international society is one of the more obvious signs of Wight’s influence over his thought. This is not to say, of course, that Bull adopted Wight’s ideas uncritically; still less that he should be viewed as a neutral cipher for the latter’s arguments. Bull and Wight disagreed on much more than is often recognized. Wight was, for example, appalled by Bull’s interpretation of Grotius and of the “Grotian Conception of International Society,” condemning his “cavalier use of evidence” and his idolatry of “certain historical institutions—the laws of war, neutrality,


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alliances, sovereignty and the obligations of citizens to bear arms.” He was astounded, moreover, to find that Bull thought there were “no aspects of International Relations which urge the sensitive and intelligent man to strive for their amelioration.”10 This chapter explores Wight’s understanding of international society. It does so in four sections. The first looks at his notion of “society” and relates it to Toynbee’s historiographical category of “civilization.” The second part examines Wight’s thought on natural law and its relationship with “international society.” The third concentrates upon his account of the institutions of “international society” and the last upon his argument that it was in decline. Society and Civilization Politics is the study of the use of power in the state. IR is the study of the use of power in the ecumenical society. Martin Wight11 The phrase “international society” does not appear in Wight’s work until after his move to the LSE in 1949. In Power Politics, he wrote of an “international system,” an “international community,” even a “world community,” but not of an “international society.”12 In “The Church, Russia and the West” (1948), the terms used to describe the international realm is “system of sovereign states.”13 It was not until the early 1950s, however, in the lectures he gave on “International Institutions,” that he began to use the word “society” in connection with international relations. It would be easy to conclude that here there is evidence for a waning of Wight’s supposed early Realism under the influence, at the LSE, of Charles Manning, an advocate of the idea of “international society” since the 1930s.14 Hedley Bull put forward just such a thesis and others that have followed the broad lines of his interpretation of Wight’s thought have found it equally attractive.15 At this time, however, the clearest influence on Wight’s terminology and thought, appears again to have been Toynbee’s Study of History. His early LSE lectures laid out an understanding of the modern state-system very much in a Toynbeean context.16 In “Elements of International Relations,” delivered in the Lent Term of 1951 he deliberately employed what he called Toynbee’s “schematization” as a basis for his analysis. The history of the West, Wight argued, could be divided into the following “stages”: 1. Growth 2. Disintegration / Decline 3. Torpor

Society of States I[nter]nat[ional] R[elatio]ns Universal State

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Growth stage failed because it didn’t express moral and cultural unity on political plane. I[nter]nat[ional] R[elatio]ns stage failed because it established too small political units. Universal state at last is comprehensive . . . pol[itical] unit corresponding to total society of states—but does so too late (on the Roman model).17 On this account, it should be noted, the “society of states” was located prior to the emergence of the sovereign state, to the “revolution in loyalties” discussed in the previous chapter, and the “power politics” that accompanied both. In his Study of History, however, Toynbee had used the term “society” not to refer to any one period, but as a synonym for a “Civilization”—“societies,” in other words, were entities “of which national states like Great Britain or city-states like Athens are parts.”18 Elsewhere in Wight’s “Institutions” lectures, it is this broader understanding of “society” that prevails. The “International Institutions” lectures began with some brief but revealing remarks about the field to be discussed. Wight argued that Politics is [the] study of use of power in human groupings. . . . [and is] conventionally limited to [the] use of power in the optimum organized civil society which we call the state. The conduct of politics, Wight went on, is mostly confined within the borders of states. But there is also a wider “society” in which political transactions occur: [T]he society of which states are themselves members the ecumenical society the society whose examples are civilizations, as examples of optimum civil society are states. Because this is [a] maximum, not optimum, society, its organization may well be thinner, and more shadowy than in the optimum society and its civility less civil.19 This understanding of the term—and indeed, the use of the word “ecumenical”—was much more conventionally Toynbeean: the assertion that there is a “society” beyond by the boundaries of the state.20 Wight echoed Toynbee’s argument, indeed, that the “true unity of Western Society . . .[had been]. . . temporarily obscured” by the claim of “national states” to be “each sufficient unto itself and independent of the rest of the World.”21 Wight’s “schematization” of Western history aside, in the “Institutions” lectures it was argued there was a “society” beyond just the “growth” stage of


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Western history; it was prior, indeed, to the form of political organization that had developed since the Middle Ages. For Wight, “[t]he medieval phase of ecumenical society may be likened to a gaseous nebula in which the stellar units that the astronomy of IR is concerned with have not yet consolidated.”22 The study of International Relations (IR), however, is not concerned with the earlier phase, just with that which “lies between the medieval chapter and the universal state” to come, with, as Wight put it, the “period between 1494 and, shall we say, 1984.”23 The features of this age, he argued, were threefold: “international anarchy,” “international intercourse” and “[a]cknowledgement of [the] existence of a society of states.”24 Wight’s first formulation of the idea of “international society,” therefore, was less a consequence of his early encounters with Manning, but rather part of the longer-running intellectual engagement that he had with Toynbee. In his later descriptions of international society and accounts of the ideas that sustain it, however, very little evidence of that conversation remains, as Wight moved from the study of the nature of international relations to that of the history of international thought and theory. What did survive was a “civilizational” conception of “international society,” one that was concerned with the ideas and values that give it a particular identity. In his Study, Toynbee initially defined “civilizations” or “societies” in historiographical terms. They were simply “intelligible field[s] of historical study.”25 He was very keen to disabuse Western readers of any sense that their “civilization” was unique.26 There had been others that had experienced similar “challenges” and generated their own “responses”—new political and social forms—and displayed similar “rhythms” in their histories. Moreover, the “Western Society of our day,” he asserted, must not be seen as the “consummation of human history,” nor as “synonymous with ‘Civilization’ itself.”27 Toynbee sought thereby to purge the idea of “civilization” of earlier Western notions of what it meant to be “civilized,” that “egocentric illusion” of cultural superiority: we people of the West . . . have apparently sunk deeper into this slough of error in the course of our history. In the so-called Middle Ages we portrayed one of the Magi as a negro and looked forward to the intervention of an Oriental champion of Christendom called Prester John. In the eighteenth century, when we had degraded the negro to the role of a slave, we were still capable of admiring the culture of the Far East. To-day, after dismissing the artists and philosophers of China to the limbo—or corral— which we have constructed for “Natives,” we are apparently even losing our admiration for Hellenism, the civilization to which ours is “affiliated.” When we have closed this last door against the humanities, we shall have touched the nadir of our fall from grace.28

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Toynbee was not himself entirely able, however, to avoid passing judgement on other “societies” on grounds informed by “egocentric illusions.” Those he thought worthy of examination and comparison were only those whose history paralleled, in his mind, that of ancient Greece and Rome. Those that did not were deemed “Primitive Societies,” the development of which had been “arrested” by the enormity of the “challenges” they faced or by the lack of “creativity” in the “responses” they made.29 For Toynbee, “Civilizations” developed because of these creative “responses.” He understood them, in essence, as ideas fostered by “creative individuals” who withdrew from their “society” to formulate them and returned to put them into practice. The mere “conquest of the physical environment,” he argued, was not a “criterion of growth”; “civilization” did not progress because of the development of technology.30 Nor did it “grow” because of the “conquest of the human environment”—the geographical spread of a “society” to encompass a greater population. Indeed, there was evidence, Toynbee concluded, of a correlation between “geographical expansion and social retardation.”31 “Growth” came from another source: the transformation of a society by a “creative individual” who has grasped—by a mystical process— the new social forms that are required to overcome the challenge posed. These individuals ranged from Gregory the Great, who transformed the Roman Church and laid “the foundations of a new empire for Rome . . . in a new and more etherical form,” to Machiavelli, whom Toynbee praised for his exhortation to liberate Italy from the French and assure its political unity.32 Traces of these arguments linger in Wight’s understanding of international society, as they do in his historical thought. Most evident, as we have seen, is the shared commitment to “holism,” the idea that the history of any “society” or “civilisation” can properly be understood only “at full length.”33 What Wight also seems to have taken from Toynbee, consciously or not, was a notion of “civilization” that set aside the material and technological—the means by which the physical and human environments were “conquered”— and concentrated solely upon social and political thought. “Civilizations” or “societies,” in both of their work, are understood in terms of their ideas. In “Western Values” this conception is, at the very least, strongly implied in the following passage: Perhaps modern Europe has acquired a moral sensitiveness, and an awareness of the moral complexities of politics, denied to a simpler civilization. The Greeks and Romans gave little thought to political ethics, still less to international ethics. It is striking that the civilization which invented political philosophy and political science gave so little attention to the relations between states.34


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In “The states-system of Hellas,” Wight related that paucity of thought to the instability of Hellenic international relations; without a conception of international law or of resident embassies, he suggested, war was endemic and the system ripe for conquest by an external power. By the fourth century, he wrote, the “poleis had become coarsened and weakened, bereft of broad policies and grand conceptions, and incapable of carrying them out had they had them.”35 The relationship between ideas and practical politics in Wight’s thought, however, is more obscure than in Toynbee’s. In the Study, “creative individuals” withdraw from society, return sometime later with the mystically attained response to the challenge faced, proselytize and provide a mode of action for the “uncreative majority” to imitate.36 For Wight, the relationship was much less complicated. There were politicians and thinkers, he suggested, who embodied and promoted particular conceptions of politics and thereby changed the society in which they acted. In Power Politics, he wrote of two statesmen whose beliefs were saturated with conceptions of Natural Law, and whose politics were grounded in its traditions, Gladstone in nineteenth-century England, and Franklin Roosevelt in twentieth-century America; nor is it any accident that each of these men in his generation had a moral ascendancy and a power over the public opinion of the world, evoking a trust and loyalty far beyond his own country, which was unapproached [sic] by any other contemporary political figure.37 In “The Balance of Power and International Order” (1973), a similar case was made: The balance of power . . . owed most to the least articulate and theoretical of statesmen, William III. He devoted his life to the most single-minded practical demonstration of the policy of the balance of power in European history.38 While both show how Wight conceived the relationship between ideas and politics, it is the first quotation that is the most revealing about the ideas that he preferred. Natural Law The expansion of Europe itself weakened the tradition of Natural Law, by admitting states that had not been schooled in it to the international community. Of the two new Great Powers of the

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eighteenth century, Prussia was at the extreme limit of Western Christendom, and had been in many ways scarcely touched by its characteristic culture; and Russia is the heir and champion of the very different traditions of Byzantine Christendom. In the nineteenth century international intercourse was extended far beyond the Christian world, at the same time that Christian political theory was at a greater discount inside the Christian world than it have ever been before. . . . Though the tradition of an international community with a common standard of obligation and justice has faded, however, it has not altogether disappeared. It is the main influence that has modified, and can yet modify, the operations of power politics, and it still gleams faintly in the preamble to the Charter of the United Nations. Martin Wight39 At the core of Wight’s conception of “international society” was natural law. His concern with that set of propositions, indeed, predates his formulation of an idea of “international society.” In the conclusion to Power Politics, when he turned to speculate on the possibility of moving “beyond” them, Wight evoked “a theory of international relations which asserts the primacy of common conceptions of justice, right and law”—an “ancient tradition . . . of Natural Law or the Law of Nature.”40 He went on: It taught that man is a rational and social animal, that there is a moral order in the universe to which his rational nature bids him always and everywhere to conform, that the true interest of human societies therefore do not conflict, and that they are bound together by obligations of law and morality.41 This tradition continued to have influence on the conduct of international relations, tempering the worst excesses of “power politics,” Wight argued, though it was increasingly “eclipsed,” as he put it, “by the new revolutionary creed of progress at the end of the eighteenth century” and by the admission of new states into the European state-system.42 The tradition was threatened too by the endemic insecurity inherent in a system of “power politics.” “Once security is destroyed,” Wight wrote, “all the higher objects of politics are swallowed up in the struggle for self-preservation, a tendency seen in every war.”43 That argument was a nod in the direction of E. H. Carr and his Twenty Years’ Crisis. Wight acknowledged that that “morality” was, as Carr had suggested, “the fruit of security,” but argued that “lasting security as between many Powers depends on their observing a certain common standard of morality.” The League of Nations, he thought,


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in stark contrast to Carr, had sought to transform this “vicious circle” into a “virtuous circle, by making collective security a moral obligation.”44 Wight thought little of Carr’s alternative basis for international morality, expressed in the conclusion to The Twenty Years’ Crisis and especially in Nationalism and After, calling it the “Law of Common Material Interest.” What this amounted to, he thought, was “the universal demand for social justice and a rising standard of living, which implies the growth of new economic and social relationships between peoples, and co-operations between Powers” in economic planning.45 For Wight, such a project was excessively utopian—to use Carr’s term—and did not adequately address the “problem of power,” for “[e]very Power has an interest greater than welfare . . . the maintenance of power itself.”46 He admitted that “there was equally anarchy in the period when men talked of the Law of Nature, so that its influence upon politics was tenuous and remote,”47 but nevertheless, a politics guided by those considerations was preferable to what Carr called the “path of economic reconstruction.”48 “[I]n the long run,” he concluded, “the idea of a common moral obligation is probably a more fruitful social doctrine than the idea of a common material interest.”49 The tradition of thought that was most fruitful on this question, Wight believed, was what he tentatively termed, in “Elements in International Relations” (1951), “Rationalism”—which did not “depreciate the Ought in favour of the Is.”50 Wight’s later depictions of this Rationalist or “Grotian” tradition of international theory remained consistent with the account, in Power Politics, of the concept of national law and the pattern of international relations it shaped, though, as we shall see forthwith and in the next chapter, matters were confused greatly by the employment of these alternative monikers. In his international theory lecture, he argued that the “tradition of natural law” concerned a belief in a cosmic, moral constitution, appropriate to all created things including mankind; a system of eternal and immutable principles radiating from a source that transcends earthly power (either God or nature). But it is also a belief that men and women have some inherent correspondence with this law, some inherent response to it, because of their possessing a rational faculty.51 In the unpublished “Christianity and Power Politics,” Wight went further, and identified this tradition as “essentially Christian.” Using “Rationalist” as a synonym for an advocate of natural law, he argued Traditional Xn attitude, for 1500 years, since Augustine, has been Rationalist. Xty didn’t create Natural Law tradition—it had Stoic and

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earlier origins—but nothing in cultural heritage of Antiquity so congenial to it, and took it over and consecrated it. What I have called that tradition of political theory is essentially Christian and practically all the Great Xn political thinkers and statesmen belong to it. St Thomas the first Whig. Neo-Scholasticism. Grotius. Gladstone. R[obert] Cecil. B[isho]p Bell. Excl. J. F. Dulles.52 The centerpiece of this tradition, he continued, was the “Doctrine of Just War,” now “debased” by “endless argument and complex casuistry.”53 The best—and least muddled—account of natural law thinking about international relations in Wight’s work is found in his lecture on the Dutch theologian and philosopher Hugo Grotius, in Four Seminal Thinkers. It is also the account that shows clearest his sympathy for the tradition and, more importantly, its congruity with his religious and historical thought. Wight found in Grotius, indeed, a temper akin to his own. There can be no doubt, given his own commitments and theological position, that he approved of what he called Grotius’s “ecumenical and irenic standpoint, transcending the Reformation, writing for ‘the whole Christian world.’ ” He was, Wight thought, “an ancestor of the World Council of Churches.”54 “[H]e did not,” moreover, “believe in progress.”55 Rather, Wight implied, he was like Burke a believer in the parable of the wheat and the tares: “[h]e imagined a static condition of affairs, both in the continuation of a half-anarchical international society, and in the constancy of good and evil, happiness and suffering.”56 Grotius was convinced too that the Christian was not always obliged to submit to the requirements of secular powers and, again like Wight, was deeply unconvinced that a world state, as Dante conceived it, would serve the interests of humanity.57 Grotius’s views, as Wight described them, were thus almost identical to his own. Human beings, for both, were naturally sociable and endowed, by nature, with the faculty of reason that allows them to deduce the rules by which society should be governed and the virtues to which individuals should aspire.58 Political life was replete with irony, and history thus with tragedy.59 Together they lamented the division of Christendom and sought its reunion. They emphasized the “morally multidimensional character of our experience,” dismissing the Kantian view that “moral problems . . . are simple” and the Machiavellian argument that they are “non-existent, bogus or delusory.”60 Neither “Fiat justitia et pereat mundus” nor “the Athenian case in the Melian dialogue” will do.61 Wight was acutely conscious, however, of the fact that such views were not widely shared in the contemporary world. At the end of his lecture on Grotius, he reflected upon the changes to the intellectual climate brought


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about by later thinkers. Kant’s formulation of natural law, he argued, “is scarcely recognizable” from that of Grotius. During the century or so that divided them, “ ‘Nature’ [had] become dynamized, divinised, become purposeful, equated with Providence or Fate; it is the immanent significance of the movement of human affairs.” Hobbes and Newton, in the interim, had “physicized” the “Law of Nature” and made it analogous to “the regularities of inanimate nature.” Natural law, moreover, had become individualized (presumably also at the hand of Hobbes) and been transformed into “Natural Rights.” Grotius, therefore, was the “last great theorist of Natural Law,” a tradition to which Hobbes had subsequently dealt a “violent and lasting injury.”62 One consequence was that “[r]eason . . . [became] . . . inflated and divinised”—a development to which Wight had first drawn attention in his notes on Toynbee’s Study.63 The first change was, however, the most important, which posed a question: The natural law doctrine offered a static or stable order as the groundwork of history and society; progress substituted a dynamic order. Historically, one replaces the other; people ceased to believe in Grotian natural law and found themselves believing in progress, passing from one to the other across the bridge of natural rights. Contemporaries have not yet found a new alternative. Do we go back to natural law, resurrect progress, or go forward to nihilism?64 Wight did not, as we shall see, answer this clearly. In the twentieth century, there were to Wight some signs of the continued influence of the Natural Law tradition, even perhaps of a recrudescence. In his review of Voegelin’s New Science of Politics, he argued that one of the three “most important developments of political theory in this century” was the “revival of the doctrine of Natural Law by writers such as Troeltsch, d’Entrèves, and Lippmann”—the others being the “rediscovery of Hobbes” and the “analysis of revolutionary movements.”65 There were signs of its influence to be read in political practice too, especially in the Nuremberg Trials.66 In a lecture in 1960, Wight speculated that these returns to natural law were a function of the “breakdown of [the] general belief in Progress, from 1914 onwards”—that belief which, in his lecture on Grotius, he had implied was antithetical to the tradition.67 In “Western Values,” further signs of what Wight now called “the natural law ethic” in international relations were discerned. He concluded that The vitality of the natural law ethic might be looked for, not only in the encouragement it may give to ordinary men to criticize their rulers, but

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also in the encouragement it may give to rulers themselves to break free from political categories, to deny the finality of human institutions. Wight admitted that here, perhaps, what “[w]e are concerned with . . . is not so much the doctrine of natural law (whatever that is), as a certain ethical temper which may be regarded as its residue or hangover.”68 He detected it in Burke, Lincoln, Kipling, Bismarck, Gladstone, Salisbury, and Churchill, especially in their sense of “being . . . the instruments of Providence,” but was more concerned with instances when “the politically expedient and morally permissible come into conflict.”69 The two examples he offered were Fox’s betrayal of a plot to assassinate Napoleon and Churchill’s denunciation of Stalin’s proposal to shoot, as punishment for Germany’s misdeeds, fiftythousand officers and technicians.70 Nevertheless, the influence of the tradition of natural law remained limited, in thought and practice, surviving perhaps only “in an awareness of the moral significance and the moral context of all political action.”71 It held within itself, moreover, some dangers. Wight wrote: the characteristic fruit of the natural law ethic in modern politics is not so much the dramatic moral veto on political action (though this is always held . . . in reserve) as the discovery of an alternative positive position which avoids the occasion of the veto . . . [and] . . . embodies the notion of a middle course, of a possible accommodation between moral necessity and practical demands. At worst, the alternative rests on self-deception, and the search for it becomes the kind of supple casuistry that finds moral arguments to cover the dictates of interest of [sic-“or”] passion.72 Despite these weaknesses, Wight remained convinced that, as he put it: “the upholding of moral standards will in itself tend to strengthen the fabric of political life.”73 The problem, however, was how to encourage the acceptance of the natural law ethic in a post-Christian world, without the “philosophy of history, or belief in Providence” that underpins the Christian worldview. Wight’s response was to echo Grotius, to argue that natural law pertained and that the human capacity for reason obtained even in the absence of God. In his lecture on Grotius, he warned against the “the notion of natural law as a kind of super-morality, a statement of the highest ethic of political life; as a suit that trumps all other suits in the card-game of political argument,” but went on: It is concerned with the fundamental principles of human social life as they can be rationally deduced, and this is a different enterprise from


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exploring the highest ethic. Take, for example, the principles of marriage. Grotius says that polygamy, concubinage, and divorce are permissible by the law of nature, though forbidden by the Gospel. . . . Thus natural law is not necessarily Christian theory at all.74 But Wight was wary of a Rationalism—drawing some, all, or even none of its inspiration from the natural law tradition—that was, at bottom, not Christian. This produced a tension, explored further in the next section, in his account of “international society.” Institutions It is the habitual intercourse of independent communities, beginning in the Christendom of Western Europe and gradually extending throughout the world. It is manifest in the diplomatic system; in the conscious maintenance of the balance of power to preserve the independence of the member-communities; in the regular operations of international law, whose binding force is accepted over a wide though politically unimportant range of subjects; in economic, social and technical interdependence and the functional international institutions established latterly to regulate it. All these presuppose an international social consciousness, a world-wide community sentiment. Martin Wight75 What Wight thought of as an “institution” in international politics was unusual, though Bull’s adoption and adaptation of his definition has made it familiar to most students of IR. He used the term to refer to two sets of things: first, what might best be called “formal” institutions—the League of Nations or the United Nations—and second, what Buzan has called “primary” institutions.76 In the revised Power Politics, Wight enumerated the latter as “diplomacy, alliances, guarantees, war and neutrality.”77 In his earlier writings, he treated the balance of power and international law as institutions,78 though in his later work he referred to the first only as a “system.”79 Wight’s attitude to “formal” institutions was quixotic. In the mid- to late 1940s, he was prone to dismiss formal institutions as “epiphenomenal”: “[t]hey flit across the foreground,” he wrote to J. H. Oldham in 1946, “like wraiths.”80 He used the same expression again in “The Church, Russia and the West” two years later.81 The “International Institutions” lectures Wight gave at the LSE in the early 1950s may display a slightly more sanguine view, but he did joke with his students that such “institutions are dull” and that

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lecturing on the League and UN was of “no educational value” because it “shrivels the soul.”82 His other work reveals continued sympathy for the principles of the League and considerable hostility to those of the UN, an issue which will be discussed further in what follows. Wight’s settled view appears to have been that “formal” institutions did little to modify the workings of “primary” ones. He professed the view on several occasions during the 1950s and 1960s that the UN’s institutionalized multilateralism had not substantively modified interstate diplomacy. In “The Power Struggle in the United Nations,” for instance, he argued: The United Nations is a complicated bit of . . . diplomatic machinery, nothing more. In mechanical terms, it is like the governor which controls the speed of the engine, or the flywheel that keeps it balanced; it is not itself an energizing force. [. . .] The United Nations is useful as a clearing-house for minor disputes. It can not settle big issues; these are settled, if at all, as they have always been, in direct negotiation between the powers directly concerned. [. . .] the United Nations does a disservice in so far as it tends to obscure the abiding conditions of international life; the inescapable conflicts of interest between nations; the reiterated need to make adjustments to new pressures and new relationships of power . . . the perpetual strain of choosing which of the possible courses is the lesser evil and the constant moral tension lying at the heart of statecraft.83 A very similar attitude is to be found in an unpublished essay on diplomacy. Conferences, he argued, “never change the situation,” they merely “record the existing distribution of power.” They “complete,” indeed, “negotiations begun thru [sic] the ordinary diplomatic channels” and their value “lies entirely in the private diplomacy [they] make possible.”84 Wight’s essay on Arms Control for the new edition of Power Politics, written probably in 1971 or 1972, embodied a similar, sceptical outlook. He commended the “heroic scope of vision” of the Baruch Plan of 1946 and went so far as to suggest that the International Atomic Energy Agency, as first conceived, was nothing short of an “embryonic world government.”85 The bulk of the chapter, however, related the successive failures of the nuclear weapons regime. The Baruch Plan proved incapable of preventing the spread of nuclear arms; the IAEA was partially successful, but only after the USSR had “begun to see the advantages of a system of controls.”86 The NonProliferation Treaty, Wight argued, was characterized by “implausibility” and


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undermined by “the conflict of interest between nuclear and non-nuclear powers, and the treaty’s lack of effective sanctions.”87 Here Wight again asserted that formal institutions are merely the stages on which the dramas of power politics are played out. What is most notable about the chapter, however, is the conclusion: The embryonic world government lurking within the Non-Proliferation Treaty had the same weaknesses as the United Nations itself. Like disarmament, arms control would continue to be discussed and desiderated, but not attained, because it could only follow, not precede, the political unification of the world.88 This was a strong claim, but not one on which Wight elaborated. It implied that a “constitutional world order” akin to the League of Nations was an impossibility in a system of states.89 Two alternatives thus presented themselves: a world-state, a prospect that, as we have seen, Wight feared, but which offered the chance of some kind of “constitutional . . . order,” or an “international society” of states, which did not. Wight complicated his account of “international society” and its moral underpinnings by arguing, as he did in the revised Power Politics, that it was or could be “manifest” in certain “primary” institutions of the Western statesystem. This opened his account, indeed, to the kind of interpretation that Bull imposed upon it: that the balance of power, international law, the diplomatic system, war and the category of “great powers” are in-and-ofthemselves evidence for the existence of an “international society.”90 But Wight’s criticism of Bull’s “Grotian conception,” namely that he elevated these and other institutions into “something like idols,” is telling: it hints at a quite distinct view of “international society” from the one Bull presented.91 It was not, for Wight, the existence of these institutions that made “international society” a reality, as it did for Bull. Rather, what mattered was the manner in which, and the purposes for which, they were employed by “statesmen.” Wight’s definition of “international society,” quoted at the opening of this section and taken from “Western Values,” needs to be read closely, not least because of his tendency to choose his words with consummate care. His assertion that “international society” is “manifest” in the “diplomatic system” does not necessarily imply that its existence alone is evidence for that of “international society.” Much turns on the meaning of “manifest”: does Wight mean “clear” or “discernible” or, indeed, “immanent?” His claim can be taken to mean that an understanding of “society” exists, alongside others, within the diplomatic system, but that the system itself is not sufficient evidence for its

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existence. Diplomacy, Wight argued in the revised Power Politics, can be conducted in ways not conducive to the maintenance of “international society”—as a cover for espionage or as an outlet for propaganda.92 A similar point can be made about Wight’s mention of the “balance of power.” International society is “manifest,” he wrote, “in the conscious maintenance of the balance of power to preserve the independence of membercommunities [italics added].” This does not mean that awareness of the notion of the “balance of power” on the part of states was evidence for the existence of “international society.” There are, as Wight himself pointed out, many different understandings of the “balance of power”—he identified nine in his essay in Diplomatic Investigations—but here he referred only to one. The kind of balance that underlies “international society” is a specific one: a “contrived balance,” to use Bull’s term,93 that aims to maintain the liberty of individual states. It is a Burkean understanding, predicated on a greater fear of what Wight called “universal dominion” than of “universal anarchy.”94 This was consistent with his view, expressed in “Western Values” that “[w]e can perhaps discern the values of a society, not so much in the record of its practice, nor even in the simple doctrines which, like those of international law, are mainly a codification of practice, as in the history of its ideas [italics added].”95 The institutions of the state-system can be employed, therefore, for a range of purposes, but only when they are moved by certain ideas can an “international society” be deemed to exist. When diplomacy, the “institution for negotiating,” is conducted in accordance with “revolutionary” principles, the “normal diplomacy” key to “international society” is undermined. The diplomatic system still exists, but espionage, subversion, and propaganda take the place of information, negotiation, and communication.96 The institution of war is prone to similar processes; indeed, for Wight, the predominance, since the eighteenth century, of wars of doctrine over wars of gain or fear was one of the clearest signs that “international society has been in a condition of stasis.”97 Decline There is a kind of crisis of international society more fundamental than threats to the balance of power; it is when the principle of international obligation itself deliquesces. Such a crisis has been endemic in international politics ever since 1776, with the slow fermenting of the doctrine that the only valid claim to membership of the society of nations is to have established a State expressing the popular will, and the slow exploration of the corruptions that the popular will is liable to. Martin Wight98


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Despite Bull’s claim that Wight became, during the 1950s, more persuaded of the value of the Grotian perspective, it is clear that he remained convinced, from Power Politics onwards, that in the twentieth century international society was in decline. He was not persuaded that economic interdependence would lead to more peaceful relations between states, nor that scientific advancements could transform international politics.99 He did not consider the creation of the United Nations to mark any kind of progress, moral, legal, or political. In Power Politics, as we have seen, Wight argued that the natural law tradition was weak in contemporary international relations. He found very few expressions of “Grotian” principles in its workings: only the League of Nations Covenant, the Nuremberg Trials and perhaps the United Nations’ action in Korea showed evidence of its influence.100 In his early writing— especially in Power Politics—Wight argued that what he later called Realist or “Machiavellian” principles had undermined “international society.” During the 1950s, however, he came to the contrary view that “revolutionary” ideas, rather than “realist” ones, had brought about its decline. Throughout, however, he maintained that “international society” was in crisis. There were both long-term and short-term causes. The underlying causes—the “apostasy of Christendom” and the revolution in loyalties that went with the emergence of the modern sovereign states—have already been discussed. All of Wight’s international thought is informed by the belief, first expressed in “Christian Pacifism,” that “any relation between organised force and morals has been lost for centuries.”101 But Wight was concerned too with immediate failures. The collapse of the League of Nations, which he considered one of the few contemporary examples of “Grotian” principles in action, was one problem that vexed him greatly. In Power Politics, he concentrated upon the “peculiar and temporary conditions” of which the League was a “product”—the “pattern of power politics” extant at the point of Germany’s defeat, Russia’s revolution, and America’s withdrawal into isolation.102 His ire, however, was reserved for the “victor Powers.” The League, he argued, presupposed the “intention . . . to uphold the existing law,” which in turn presupposed “their obligation to it and enforcement of it between themselves.” These presuppositions, Wight implied, proved wrong.103 The failure of the League—and indeed the structure of the United Nations—demonstrated to Wight that modern states could not be relied upon to fulfil their moral or legal obligations. In 1946, he commented to a correspondent: “[i]t is . . . quite plain that governments have no intention, and are indeed by their nature virtually incapable, of accepting public law at the expense of their parochial ‘vital’ interests.”104 He was repelled by the outcome of the San Francisco conference and incensed by the structure of the United Nations Charter. His objections can be glimpsed in Power Politics and

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are made plain in his unpublished writings. The UN, Wight argued in the first, was an “organization of a different kind” to the League. The “Small Powers” were now subordinate to the “Great Powers”; the Assembly just a “debating society,” with “executive powers” in the hands of the Security Council. Moreover, the veto held by the five permanent members meant that “their relations with one another will be regulated as of old by the Balance of Power.”105 The UN’s “true parentage,” therefore, was “not the League, but the Concert of Europe.”106 The founders of the United Nations, Wight argued in somewhat oblique terms in Power Politics, had been misled by recent history: The Great Powers will impose the law, but are themselves above it. The emphasis on the Charter is on the maintenance of security, that ambiguous word, not on justice or a rule of law. And it is founded . . . on the assumption that the only threats to security will come from the defeated enemy. It is unlikely that Germany and Japan are going to be able a second time to confuse and divide the victor Powers by a clamour for “revision.” But the main lesson of the League’s failure, that the victor Powers, if they are to remain united, need to accept a rule of law themselves, is less clearly apparent in the organization of the United Nations.107 In a talk at the Royal Naval College at Greenwich in 1947, he put this argument more bluntly. The UN, he said, was a “fake.” He poured scorn on what he thought of as the popular view that the UN was “[b]etter than the League” and maintained that “it could never work.” A piece of “political machinery,” he argued, was only an “instrument” not a “solution” and the “success of constitutions presupposes [the] will to cooperate.” The crux of his argument was that the “function of law is to impose limits to [sic] [the] exercise of power.” The Covenant of the League was designed to do this—indeed it was the “[e]nthronement of international law”—but the Charter patently was not.108 For Wight, the UN Charter thus represented more than just a misreading of history. It demonstrated, he argued, the “[t]riumph of [the] totalitarian principle” that “[l]aw is the expression of power.” The Security Council, he pointed out, had “[n]o legal limits on its power” and was not bound to observe rules of law or existing treaties.109 It was, in fact, a “quinquevirate, which, given unanimity, possesses despotic and irresponsible powers.”110 The only precedents for an international system organized thus, as a “G[reat] P[ower] Directory,” lay in the dismemberment of Poland in the eighteenth century, the operations of the Concert of Europe in the nineteenth, and in the Munich conference that dismembered Czechoslovakia in the twentieth.


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Fortunately, however, as Wight pointed out, all of this theoretical “power remains useless unless unanimous.” In practice, in other words, the system “doesn’t work.”111 Wight was consistent in his criticisms of the UN throughout the 1950s and 1960s. In his LSE “International Institutions” lectures, he again described the UN as a “product of a totalitarian age, [the] age of E. H. Carr” and argued that the “historian of the future” would see it as a “quasitotalitarian institution” that “would have been a good deal more dangerous if it had worked than it was frustrated and immobile.”112 Its failure to operate as it was intended did make him a little more sanguine, but he was concerned at the extent to which the UN had become an instrument in the “revolutionary power politics” that characterized the post-war years.113 In his “Institutions” lectures and in the “Power Struggle” essay (1956), he observed that the institution had passed through three main phases. In the first, there had been a brief moment of cooperation. After 1947, however, the USSR had effectively withdrawn from the UN to create “a rudimentary Rev[olutionary] Alternative to [the] UN in [the] World Peace Conference.” At the same time, the United States was “contemplating turning [the] UN into [an] antiCommunist League.” It “very nearly” became, in this second phase, an “antirevolutionary organisation, a contemporary Holy Alliance.”114 In the third phase, after 1953, this “American UN [was] succeeded by [the] Bandung UN” as it became an “organ of [the] anti-colonial movement, a kind of Holy Alliance in reverse.”115 The United Nations, for Wight, was both symbolic of the decline of international society and the arena in which its degenerate politics were played out. The Charter “showed a reversal of a faltering trend towards international constitutionalism which could be traced from the Concert of Europe . . . down to the League Covenant.”116 The sessions of the General Assembly, moreover, showed the dominance of revolutionary principles. Wight had little sympathy for these ideas, or rather was keen to point out the yawning gap between the ideals professed and the reality of the politics they encouraged. In his “Power Struggle in the United Nations,” he drew unfavorable parallels between the claims of the decolonized “Bandung Powers” and those of the Axis: Perhaps the essence of the have-not powers is to be found in a state of mind, a motive, in which resentment, a sense of inferiority, and self-pity are the prime ingredients. . . . The Bandung powers and the Axis powers are united in history through a common resentment of Western civilization; and by a familiar and elementary psychological mechanism, the resentment is combined with a passionate desire to imitate.117

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He acknowledged that the “Bandung powers” had a more just case than the Axis, but objected to the means by which they desired to pursue it: The Axis powers were driven by resentment of the territorial empires and deep-rooted stable cultures of France, Britain, and America. The Bandung powers are moved correspondingly by the contrast between their poverty and our wealth . . . by resentment against the privileged minority . . . who form one-sixth of the world’s population and possess two-thirds of its wealth. At its best this is expressed in the demands for equality, and clothes itself in Wilsonian language of national rights, liberty, and self-determination. But it would be an error to suppose that this language means the same to those whose historical experience and religious premises are totally different from ours as it does to us. Hitler, too, employed it with consummate effect.118 There were, of course, major dissimilarities: not all the Bandung states were authoritarian and, moreover, “[t]he Axis powers operated outside the League of Nations; the Bandung bloc operates within the United Nations.”119 What this meant is that the UN had become “the instrument of the havenot and Communist powers for promoting revolution”—an ironic contrast to the nineteenth-century Holy Alliance, “a coalition of kings for suppressing revolutionary movements.”120 It had augmented the power of the “have-nots” and, Wight complained: The paradoxical consequence has been that powers which, taken collectively, exhibit a low level of political freedom, governmental efficiency, public probity, civil liberties, and human rights, have had the opportunity to set themselves up in judgment over powers which, taken collectively, for all their sins, have a high level in these respects.121 Decolonization and the spread of revolutionary doctrines had, in Wight’s view, brought about poorer standards of government and weakened international society. He had, of course, warned of this in Attitude to Africa (1951), and by 1960 it was clear that his fears were being realized. The contemporary world was, he commented in his review of Anthony Eden’s Full Circle, one of “dissolving standards”: Some of Eden’s critics seem to argue that the right policy is to grant independence to the rest of Asia and Africa as quickly as possible, and let the newly enfranchised members of international society settle down to industrialize themselves and practise democracy with only such benevolent help


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from the older Powers as the newer will ask. This may be a dreamtransformation of the historical experience called Balkanization, which means a Kleinstaaterei of weak States, fiercely divided among themselves by nationalistic feuds, governed by unstable popular autocracies, unaccustomed to international law and diplomatic practice as they are to parliamentary government, and a battle-ground for the surrounding Great Powers. This, Wight thought, was the “future of the uncommitted world.”122 Conclusion [T]he period after 1919 saw the greatest attempt ever made to provide international society with an effective constitution and to establish international law and order by cooperation between states. But the period after 1945 has shown, by contrast, a reversion to revolutionary power politics. Martin Wight123 The commonly accepted view of the development of Wight’s ideas—that derived largely from Bull’s interpretation of his work—characterizes it as a movement from Realism to a more Rationalist or “Grotian” perspective. While at the LSE in the 1950s, on this reading, Wight became more appreciative of the “societal” elements in international relations that mitigate the worst aspects of anarchy. The influence of Manning, a mellowing of his hitherto stark, eschatological Christianity, and the study of the subject that he was required to teach all prompted a shift away from the conviction that contemporary international relations were best seen as “power politics.” What this chapter has tried to suggest, however, is that Wight’s commitment to a “Grotianism,” to the tradition of natural law, pre-dated his move to the LSE and can be located in the original Power Politics. It suggests too that he continued to believe, throughout the 1950s and 1960s, that that tradition had been eclipsed by Realism and, latterly, by Revolutionism. “International society,” for Wight, was dependent upon the acceptance of the view of politics inherent in the natural law position. It was not created and sustained, as it was for Bull, by the rational calculations of states seeking to secure order and allow the pursuit of “primary goals” with the construction of a rudimentary system of rules and institutions. Rather, it was extant when statesmen (the term Wight used) and indeed peoples were motivated by a sense of moral obligation born of an adherence to natural law. At times, he thought there were signs of a revival of that tradition, and a move toward the

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acceptance of the conception of international society as a “mysterious moral community, a partnership for pursuing the ultimate ends of man.”124 Certainly, he believed that such a view had survived, in part, in the West, which was, he wrote, “by tradition . . . morally amphibious, living half in the world of natural law, half in raison d’état; but the Establishment in Britain, in the USA less, even in France, is Grotian by tendency.”125 More often, however, Wight thought this understanding of “international society” in decline. In 1963, in a lecture on “War and Peace,” he stated: “[a]ll international history since [the Abysinnian crisis] has been retrograde.”126 The United Nations and “disarmament” were “[v]arious red herrings and opiates for the people.”127 The “ ‘natural law’ ethic,” Wight thought, had been undermined; it informed protest against indiscriminate warfare, nuclear weapons, and so on, but not policy.128 Underlying this view was a continued suspicion, on Wight’s part, that the loyalties of the apostate West were either to the Godless “Leviathan” of the sovereign state or to a “comfortable materialist” cosmopolis.129

CHAPTER 7


By “international theory” is meant a tradition of speculation about relations between states, a tradition imagined as the twin of speculation about the state to which the name “political theory” is appropriated. And international theory in this sense does not, at first sight, exist. Martin Wight1

W

ight’s work on international theory is that for which he is most celebrated in International Relations (IR). Certainly it can, without risk of over-statement, be described as pioneering. He was not the first to examine texts in the history of political thought for scraps of past insight about the nature of international relations,2 but he was the first to attempt to construct something close to a comprehensive schema of the history of modern international thought. Wight ventured far wider than most scholars who have toiled in this field, before or since, going beyond the canon of political thought to explore the work of the international lawyers, the “speeches, despatches, memoirs and essays of statesmen and diplomatists,”3 the reflections of historians and many a literary text.4 His aims were to describe the main elements of modern Western thought about international relations and to explain why “international theory” was so “scattered, unsystematic, and mostly inaccessible to the layman,” so “repellent and intractable in form.”5 Although widely acclaimed, Wight’s historical studies of international theory—especially that found in his LSE lectures—has been subjected to some considerable criticism. Roy Jones wondered, as many have subsequently, if his division of theory into the three traditions of “Realism,” “Rationalism,” and “Revolutionism” was merely a “pedagogical device” or whether “they were conceived to be modes of perceiving the relations of states and of acting in and

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upon them.” If they were, he asked, what is the relation between these thoughts and the practice of international relations: “from what, or where, do they spring?” Jones accused Wight, moreover, of stifling the “doing” of theory by limiting theoretical investigation to the classification of past thought. His entire endeavour, Jones argued, was a “stopping” rather than a “starting” point.6 Since the publication of the reconstituted “three traditions” lectures in 1991, a great deal more ink has been spilt on these questions. Of particular concern has been Wight’s concept of a “tradition.” Sympathetic analysts have generally agreed, implicitly or explicitly with Brian Porter’s suggestion that the idea of a “tradition” was a “device, as the arrangement of stars in constellations is a device, for the convenience of the observer.”7 The “three traditions” imposed a modicum of coherence on a field of bewildering complexity; they were an aid to Wight’s students’ understanding. Tim Dunne’s notion of “tradition as method” expresses a similar view,8 as does the understanding, common to Hedley Bull, Roger Epp, and to Seán Molloy, of Wight’s approach as the construction of a “dialogue.”9 Other commentators have been less forgiving. David Boucher, for instance, has argued that the “relations” between the traditions are not “adequately” explained, nor are “the traditions and the thinkers who are said to exemplify them.” “The traditions,” in his view, “are little more than classificatory categories into which thinkers are forced irrespective of the embarrassing elements which appear ill at ease in their putative homes.”10 Advocates of both contextualist and discursive approaches to the history of international theory have concurred: Wight’s “traditions,” they argue, are more “analytical” than “historical.”11 This chapter is not intended as an attempt to acquit Wight of these charges. Rather, it provides an account of the development of his approach to “international theory” and his understanding of its relationship with the conduct of international relations. The first part seeks to explain the origins of his idea of the “three traditions.” The second examines the content of the LSE lectures. In the third part, it is argued that in his later work Wight, himself less than content about the notion of a “tradition” and its applicability to his history of international theory, moved toward a rather different approach. What is International Theory? Theory of int[ernationa]l community, not “crisis of [the] modern state,” or problems of foreign policy or “national interest.” Martin Wight12 Wight’s definition of “international theory” was characteristically idiosyncratic. He did not mean by term what many might assume it meant: an explanation


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of the behaviour of states in the international system. In his earliest reflections upon the idea, in “Elements of International Relations” (1951), he argued that it was analogous to “political philosophy,” the “central preoccupation” of which was “Obligation.” He continued: “it is concerned with Authority—the justification of Power, the moral bases of power, not with Power nakedly, or the description and analysis of the distribution of Power.”13 Wight must have found, once he began his investigations in the field, that very little international theory takes this form: hence perhaps his remark, in “Why is there no International Theory?,” that it is marked by “moral poverty.”14 Wight’s later definitions of “international theory” were more expansive. In a talk entitled “An Anatomy of International Theory,” probably delivered in the mid-1950s, Wight called it “the political theory of the states-system and the principles of foreign policy.”15 By 1960, he was conscious that some might deny that such a thing existed or indeed should exist, and toyed with the idea of calling what he was concerned with something different: You might say there is no such thing as the political philosophy of international relations; I have therefore played safe and called it “international thought” in my title to use the least pretentious phrase describing speculation about international relations.16 But Wight went on to argue: International thought is what we find in the discussions of the man-in-the-street or in the popular press. International theory is what we find in the better press and hope to find in diplomatic circles and foreign offices. The political philosophy of international relations is the fullyconscious, formulated theory, illustrations of which you may find in the conduct of some statesmen, Wilson, probably Churchill, perhaps Nehru; and it may be expressed by serious writers, for example Kant or Kennan, Machiavelli or Morgenthau.17 Wight did not, however, cling to these distinctions. In “Why Is There No International Theory?” he adopted a much simpler explanation: “international theory” was, he wrote, “a tradition of speculation about relations between states.”18 Origins Modern science . . . proceeds by the elaboration, testing and discarding of hypotheses; Philosophy does no such thing—least of

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all Metaphysics. Thus Newton’s hypotheses have now been replaced by Einstein’s, because the latter explain observed phenomena more satisfactorily; but there is no sense in which Kant has replaced Plato, or Bergson has replaced Anselm. Their relationship with one another is not a relationship of progress and supersession, but of facets of a single truth, soundings of a single ocean, portraits of a single sitter. Martin Wight19 Wight’s interest in “international theory” clearly began in the 1930s—it may be found in the analysis of the just war tradition in “Christian Pacifism”— though it was only in the 1950s that he began work in earnest on the subject. The original Power Politics displays a familiarity with the work of Alfred Zimmern, Walter Lippmann, E. H. Carr, and Harold Nicholson, and betrays some signs that he was beginning to search for snippets of theory in works of political thought.20 His contributions to the Survey of International Affairs, as has already been shown, offer as much of an analysis of international thought in March 1939, especially that of the Nazis, as they do a narrative of events. In the closing essay on the “balance of power,” he again returned to Zimmern, Carr, and others, and included a brief—and second-hand— reference to Thucydides.21 Wight’s approach to the history of international theory was shaped by a number of influences and convictions. It stands within the broader context of a peculiarly British manner of studying politics, one that placed the history of political ideas at the centre of its concerns. Harold Laski, for instance, described this “attempt to gather . . . what men have thought about the state” as his “main interest” and conceived of his effort in terms not dissimilar to the way in which Wight viewed his exploration of international theory. He justified it thus: the study of ideas in their historical context is a source of political illumination as valuable as any that lies to our hand. Not only does it serve to correct, more truly than any other discipline, that tendency to over-estimate the originality and significance of out own ideas. It prevents, as no other study can, that vicious habit of making the immediate need the eternal good, which is the source of some of the worst evils in contemporary politics.22 Wight probably knew this argument well—certainly, he owned a copy of the book in which it was presented.23 In both the introduction and the valedictory to his International Theory lectures, it may be possible to discern an echo


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of Laski: in the argument, quoted previously, that it is “a liberation of the spirit to acquire perspective, to recognize that every generation is confronted by problems of the utmost subjective urgency” or the plea to “combine the urgency of the committed citizen with . . . philosophical detachment.”24 Wight’s antiprogressivism—manifest in his theological and historical thought—also played its part in shaping his presentation of international theory. In his comments on volume VII of A Study of History, he protested vehemently against Toynbee’s suggestion that thought could display a pattern of “progress” and asserted an alternative view: If one thinks of a moral or intellectual tradition, not in the physicogeographical terms of a silt-laden river, but in the perhaps more accurate and appropriate biological terms of ontogenesis or of a tree putting on rings, then very little (if anything) is seen as antiquated or ephemeral: everything takes its place in a tradition that steadily develops and becomes richer, the new reflecting back upon and giving fresh meaning to the old.25 Again, these early reflections found expression in his subsequent work on international theory. The germ of Wight’s idea of “three traditions” can be located in one of his earliest LSE lectures: “Elements of International Relations” (1951). It lies latent within the Toynbeean division of the international history of the West into three periods: a “society of states,” “international relations,” and a “universal state.”26 Toward the end of the lecture, Wight reflected upon the theory that might correspond to these phases, to “Rationalism”—“which does not depreciate the Ought in favour of the Is”—and “Realism,” as well as to “Political Missionaries or Fanatics.” Among the first, he counted Hans Morgenthau and George Orwell; among the second, E. H. Carr and the American writer James Burnham. The last encompassed “Jesuits, Huguenots, Jacobins, [Richard] Cobden and Marxists.”27 Wight’s identification of three traditions of theory—as opposed to the two described by Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939)—was, as with Carr’s own effort, more the product of his reading of patterns of international practice rather than of the history of political thought. In his essay on the balance of power in March 1939 in the Survey of International Affairs (1952), Wight interpreted the history of interwar international relations not, as Carr had done, in terms of a struggle between satisfied British, French, and American “utopians” and unsatisfied German, Japanese, and Soviet “realists,” but as a three-cornered conflict of ideas. In the late 1930s, he argued, the “Great Powers fell into three divisions: the Western Powers, the Anti-Comintern Powers, and Soviet Russia.”28 His concern, in the chapter, was to set out, in

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the form of an imaginary dialogue between them, the principles that had informed the conduct of their foreign policies. Without using the labels “Rationalist,” “Realist,” and “Revolutionist,” Wight’s account prefigured his later elucidation of key ideas of the “three traditions.” The Western Powers, Wight wrote, comprised Britain and France—the “two senior nation-states of Western Christendom”—with the United States bound to them “by a more tenuous historical association and by a community of political ideals.”29 This grouping, he argued, had sought to “constitutionalize international politics,” but between them their “power varied inversely with acceptance of responsibility for maintaining the international system from which all three benefited.”30 The Anti-Comintern Powers, on the other hand, were “[b]anded together by dissatisfaction and greed”— “proletarian nations,” in Mussolini’s words, that sought a “new order of things.”31 He went on: Their common interest was predatory, their common ideology was the assertion of incompatible national egoisms. They had no loyalty to a common tradition, and rejected the conceptions of political morality which mitigated the unequal distribution of strength between the Western Powers.32 Finally, Wight characterized Soviet Russia as the “first revolutionary nation,” “inspired by Marxism” and “[h]eir to the Byzantine tradition, . . . possessed [of ] a sense of messianic vocation as world-leader and supplanter of the decadent West.”33 At the outset of his dialogue, Wight thus cast the Western Powers as what he would later call “Rationalists,” the Axis as “Realists” and the Soviet Union as “Revolutionists.” The Western Powers begin by arguing: “we have . . . embarked on the endeavour to turn the former anarchy of international relations into a reign of law and order and a reasonable measure of justice,” with the League “approximating towards a higher concept of civilization and an unprecedented degree of world co-operation.”34 The response of the Axis is to declare, in language reminiscent of Carr’s “Realism” in Twenty Years’ Crisis, the League nothing more than a cabal of “haves” bent on keeping the “have-nots” from their due. The Soviet speaker breaks into this dispute to assert to point out that Fascism is the open terrorist dictatorship established against the rising revolt of the working class by the most aggressive, chauvinist, and reactionary elements of finance-capitalism; and it is at the same time the highest expression of the preparation for a new imperialist war to redivide the


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spoils of the world. Thus it is that the hopes of all progressive mankind are fixed on the Soviet Union, where Socialism holds power.35 The Axis Powers make the predictable dishonest Machiavellian response, arguing that they are what Wight calls “the bulwark of European discipline and civilization, and in taking upon ourselves the struggle against Bolshevism we are undertaking a truly European mission . . . .”36 At this point in the dialogue another major theme of Wight’s later lectures on international theory becomes clear. When pushed to extremes, he implied, “Realism” here shaded into “Revolutionism”—the Axis Powers talk of a “crusade” against “Bolshevism”—and Soviet Revolutionism, a little later, into “Realism.”37 At this point, Wight has the Western Powers unveil the Machiavellianism of the Axis: their argument, it is charged, is “disingenuous”: “[w]e suspect,” the Western Powers state, “that the Anti-Comintern Pact may be a good piece of propaganda, serving to conceal your designs against us.”38 Their reassertion of the value of the “normal machinery of diplomatic intercourse” and the “precious” but “fragile” League,39 serves its purpose, prompting a furious but frank statement of “Realism” from the Axis Powers: we have the feeling that throughout this argument we are talking about facts, about the forces that govern history and make the real stuff of politics, while you are talking about theories, about legal abstractions and moral utopias. We are realists, and perhaps we understand the nature of international relations more clearly than you do. Man’s existence is subject to the law of eternal struggle; men, by natural law, always rule where they are stronger.40 In characterizing “Realism” thus, Wight drew upon both the speeches of Mussolini and Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis, both cited in a footnote,41 and in the last part recalled, without citation, Hobbes’ Leviathan. The counterargument of the “Rationalists” is grounded in one rather less orthodox source (Ortega y Gasset’s Revolt of the Masses) and one liberal tract (Leonard Woolf ’s Barbarians at the Gate). It runs: we believe that morality and the conscience of mankind are equally facts that must be taken into account. We believe that civilization consists, not in the mere assertion of vitality, impulse, and will, but in their control; not in the exhibition and accumulation of force, but in disciplining it to serve settled habits of persuasion and law.42 The Soviets meet this claim with an accusation that the Western Powers act out of “cynical self-interest”—suspecting them, in other words, of practicing

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the same “Realism” as the Axis, albeit under a different Machiavellian mantle. The Axis, for its part, cry hypocrisy. As Wight suggests, in the voice of the Western Powers, “open diplomacy” has by now reduced “diplomatic intercourse to a competition of simultaneous gramophone programmes in unrelated languages.”43 Wight’s objective in his dialogue, however, was not simply to demonstrate that by March 1939 there was little mutual trust between the three main blocs, but to illustrate the extent to which the nature of the arguments of each, as well as the interpretations of the others, influenced their diplomacy and ultimately the balance of power itself. He concluded: At that time the balance of power appeared extremely fluid owing to the imbecility of Western policy, the arbitrariness and caprice of German, the inscrutability of Russian. Great Power relationships fell into an equilateral triangle; and it was possible for different observers to convince themselves that destiny would be fulfilled by the alliance of the Western Powers with Russia to encircle Germany, or of Russia with Germany to overbalance the Western Powers, or of the Western Powers with the Fascist Powers against the interests of Russia. Each of these combinations had its historical precedents . . . Each of these combinations had its arguments from interest.44 This argument is straightforward, but its underlying assumptions say much about Wight’s understanding of international theory and its relationship to practice. The dialogue, as has already been suggested, prefigures Wight’s later division of past international thought into “three traditions.” But it also demonstrates the extent to which Wight believed international politics were driven by perception, informed by history and philosophy. While he recognized simple questions of interest—notably the challenge posed to the Great Power status of France after the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia, its strongest ally, after Munich—these do not lead naturally to agreement or to conflict. This stance is clear in Wight’s discussion of Stalin’s speech to the Eighteenth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party on March 10, 1939. He observed that the Germans “closely studied” the speech and that, despite criticism of the Axis, it was “considered encouraging.”45 Wight noted that afterwards some, including Molotov himself, had credited Stalin with showing great prescience and fore-shadowing the Nazi-Soviet pact that was to follow five months later. He goes on to point out: But this was an ex post facto interpretation which exaggerated Stalin’s gesture towards Germany, for the speech could equally well have been cited


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to prove his statesmanship if events had gone the other way and Russia had alined [sic] herself with the Western Powers. In fact the speech was cautious and non-committal; it emphasized Russia’s detachment, and said she was prepared to negotiate with either side.46 Wight concluded the essay with another warning about the need for careful interpretation and an insistence that attention must be paid to ideas, not merely material circumstance or interests: The victors in the war, whoever they are, would be only an incongruous ad hoc combination of Powers. . . . if the Western Powers in alliance with Russia were to defeat the Axis, the future co-operation of such ill-assorted and suspicious partners could only be assumed by those who ignored the gulf between the Byzantino-Marxist ideology of the Soviet Union and the liberalism of the West.47 The belief that ideas rather than interests shaped international relations underlay all of Wight’s later examinations of international theory.48 Three Traditions All great thinkers, while historically conditioned, are philosophically contemporaneous. At least Grotians and Machiavellians would accept this; it is Kantians who believe that philosophers are superseded. Martin Wight49 There are references to “Rationalists,” “Realists,” and “Revolutionists” in many of Wight’s lectures in the mid- to late-1950s. In his “International Institutions” lectures, for instance, he was concerned to highlight the “revolutionary” alternatives to the Conciliar Movement (he thought it the “Czech Hussite Revolution”), the Concert of Europe (the “counterrevolutionary” Holy Alliance), the League (the Communist International) and the UN (the World Peace Campaign, later, from within, the Bandung movement).50 In “Christianity and Power Politics,” he examined in greater detail the “essentially Christian” Rationalist tradition and indeed the Realism that underlies the conduct of international relations as “power politics.” But only in 1956–1957, while at the University of Chicago,51 did Wight seek to draw these insights into a systematic treatment of international theory. The conventional division of international theory into “realist” and “utopian” or “idealist” camps—in Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis, for example, or in the work of Morgenthau—Wight found unsatisfactory. He called it

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“a reflection of a diseased situation” of the 1930s. Moreover, it was “untrue,” because with such an approach, thinkers “like Grotius or Lenin get crammed into pigeon-holes which were not made for them.”52 His classification was an attempt to improve upon the schema presented by Carr or Morgenthau, but Wight did not take their understandings of realism and idealism as a startingpoint. His Realism and Revolutionism, as we shall see, are quite distinct from those found in the former works; indeed, his conception of the first is radically different from the understanding of the theory most twentieth-century “Realists” held. Underlying the lectures was Wight’s philosophy of history. He carried over Toynbee’s version of the comparative method into the history of ideas, with thinkers rather than civilizations treated as being “philosophically contemporary.” His view that secular history displayed no pattern of progress, that it showed instead only “peripeteia,” permitted theories to be treated, as he put it, as “soundings of a single ocean, portraits of a single sitter.”53 Hence the justification for his approach in the introduction to the lectures: This course of lectures is in the first place an experiment in classification, in typology, and in the second an exploration of continuity and recurrence, a study in the uniformity of political thought; and its leading premises is that political ideas do not change much, and the range of ideas is limited . . . One needs to read very little in political theory to become aware of recurrences and repetitions. Thus, if one turns to E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis after Hobbes’ Leviathan, one cannot fail to note that the basic arguments are the same.54 The belief that “the same moral predicaments and the same ideas have been explored before” is predicated by both an antipathy to a progressivist philosophy of history and by a conviction that history is, fundamentally, a “moral drama.”55 In the “International Theory” lectures, Wight made elaborate what he had first sketched in outline in the Survey and provided his account of the three traditions with historical depth. He did not, as Molloy has rightly observed, set out each “axiomatic” terms, describing the key features of each tradition in a manner akin to Carr.56 Instead, he chose to examine them thematically, in terms of how each addressed central issues in international relations: human nature, international society, mankind, national power and interest, diplomacy, war, law, and ethics. This blend of two different approaches—a comparative one that identified the ideas typical to the “traditions” and a thematic one that examined how thinkers have treated issues—lends his lectures their “dialogical” quality.57 Indeed, at times, Wight explicitly casts the


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discussion in the form of an imaginary dialogue, as he does in his account of the different theories of foreign policy.58 The lectures were constructed in a characteristically clear and methodical manner. He began by introducing his three traditions of “Realism,” “Rationalism,” and “Revolutionism” and observed that they were, as he put it, “in some sense related to the three interrelated political conditions which comprise the subject-matter of what is called international relations.” These were: “international anarchy,” “diplomacy and commerce,” and “the concept of a society of states, or family of nations.”59 Two points should be noted here. The first is that Wight never fully explained the precise relationship between these political “conditions” and the corresponding theory. It is not clear whether the conditions generate the theory or vice versa; though given his resistance to determinism, examined in chapters 3 and 5, it is unlikely that he thought the former. He did, admittedly, come close to suggesting this in “An Anatomy of International Thought” (1960). There he cast the three “conditions” as the “state of affairs which produces international theory,” stating that the “three component social elements” were “international anarchy,” “habitual intercourse,” and “moral solidarity.” “To each of these elements,” he continued, “there corresponds a way of looking at international relations.”60 Wight did not, however, make any similar claims elsewhere. The overwhelming impression to be gleaned from his work is that he thought that ideas formed conditions—from the “revolution in loyalties,” discussed in Power Politics, that brought about the state-system, to the changing understandings of “international legitimacy” that had transformed international relations after 1919.61 In Wight’s essays on the “balance of power,” this assumption is particularly evident. The failure of collective security in the interwar period, he argued in one, came about “largely because of those who believed that international order was not dependent so much upon maintaining the balance of power as upon satisfying claims to national justice.”62 The changed belief precedes the changed conditions: “the idea of international order as a work of political construction” is required for order to be realized.63 The second point that must be made on Wight’s initial outline of the “three traditions” regards his identification of “Revolutionism” with “the concept of a society of states, or family of nations.” In the work of later “English school” writers, these concepts have generally been seen as more characteristic of “Rationalism” than “Revolutionism.” Bull, for instance, used the terms “international society” and “society of states” interchangeably, and associated both with a via media between understandings of international relations that emphasized anarchy and those that demonstrated a desire for “universal empire or cosmopolitan society.”64 This terminological disagreement, however,

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should not obscure the affinity between Bull’s understanding of international society and the account of “Rationalism” Wight gave in the lectures. Whether he endorsed that theoretical position, as Bull did, is a matter of contention, discussed in the next three sections, in which Wight’s traditions are considered in turn. Revolutionism The Revolutionists . . . believe so passionately in the moral unity of the society of states or international society, that they identify themselves with it, and therefore they both claim to speak in the name of this unity, and experience an overriding obligation to give effect to it. Martin Wight65 In the lectures, Wight introduced the “Revolutionists” first, as befits their importance in shaping the modern international system. There was, he thought, a further logic to this: “an effective society of states, the Respublica Christiana” preceded the development of the system of habitual diplomatic and commercial intercourse of the Rationalists, which in turn was followed historically by a system characterized by anarchy. As he had argued in Power Politics and “Elements of International Relations”: “[o]nly lastly and latest did the bonds between [states] become so slight that they accepted warfare as the ultimate regulative of their relationship, and repudiated any allegiance to a political superior.”66 Revolutionism was the most fragmented of Wight’s traditions. Its representatives ranged from sixteenth and seventeenth century Calvinists and Jesuits to eighteenth century Jacobins, Kant, Lenin, and the twentieth-century totalitarians. There was, he acknowledged, no clear continuity in the Revolutionist tradition; it was “less a stream than a series of waves.”67 There were some instances of “conscious affiliation” between Revolutionist thinkers, however, and like Talmon and other contemporary theorists of totalitarianism, Wight thought there was a discernible strand of ideas connecting Calvin via Rousseau to Communism.68 The Revolutionists, he went on, were “optimistic and perfectionist about human nature,” committed to the creation of a world-state or civitas maxima, and to doctrinal uniformity imposed by force or reason.69 They argued that power must be justified in terms of the political goal it is used to pursue— indeed, that the end justifies the means—and that the interests of the civitas maxima trump those of the individual or the state.70 They desired the transcendence of foreign policy and diplomacy—seeing both as obstacles to the realization of their telos—and deny that international law binds them to those


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whom they oppose.71 They insist, moreover, upon the subordination of private ethics to the political project.72 Such a summary, however, imposes a consistency of doctrine upon Wight’s Revolutionists that together they did not have. In the lectures, he sought to address this problem by dividing them into sub-categories: “soft” and “hard,” and, indeed, “inverted.” The first comprised figures like Woodrow Wilson, who pursued their objectives by “yearning and talk”; the second Lenin, who stirred revolution in practice; and the third, Tolstoy, who withdrew from politics to embrace pacifism.73 To Wight’s mind, what justified these multifarious groups being yoked together was that their various doctrines tended—to use that characteristic word—to “intertwine” when put into practice.74 His treatment of Kant’s notion of the categorical imperative, in Four Seminal Thinkers illustrates this point. Wight’s objections are not so much to the idea—though he had those too, rooted in his faith—but rather to its practical implications. Being both “subjective” and “divorced from metaphysics,” Kant’s idea of duty could only be, in practice, “egotistical, infallible and ruthless.”75 All of this Wight argued in his theory lectures demonstrated that the “dry theories and formulas of dusty dons and German professors about human commonwealths and civitates maximae can become politically explosive.”76 Rationalism Sovereign states, they will say, do form a society; they do not exist in a political or cultural vacuum, but in continuous political relations with one another. . . . It is a society with a system of law that is crude and not centrally enforced but still true law, a society without a government but regulated by certain special institutions such as diplomacy, the balance of power and alliances. Martin Wight77 Rationalism is the most amorphous of Wight’s traditions. He thought of it as a “broad middle road” sometimes “rather uncertainly wide”—and with good reason: he perceived not just Grotius tramping along it, but also Burke, Mill, and Cobden, as well as Tocqueville, Lincoln, and Wilson. There are, in essence, two versions of Rationalism presented in the lectures, one Christian and one secular, with the work of the Neo-Scholastics, and especially Grotius, providing a “bridge” between the two.78 The first itself took two separate forms: one that simply espoused an understanding of politics based upon natural law and a deeper view that combined this position with a belief in “a cosmic, moral constitution” with a conviction that “[m]en and women in

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essence are rational creatures.”79 The second version of Rationalism Wight traced primarily to Locke: it was secular and appealed to human reason. In the lectures, he moved between the two, sometimes presenting as the Rationalist case an argument derived from a premodern, natural law argument, and sometimes one with a later, Lockean source. Wight began the discussion of Rationalism with a somewhat confusing account of its relationship to philosophical rationalism—“the explanation according to reason of what appears supernatural”—but justified his adoption of the term on the grounds that it simply implied a belief that “men are reasonable.” He ascribed this premise to Locke, pointing out that it opened up the possibility that “men” could “live together according to reason even when they have no common government,” whether in a state of nature or in an anarchical international system.80 Some Rationalists believed that this predicament could be overcome by the natural sociability of human beings: this was the argument, Wight wrote, that Locke drew from Grotius to use against Hobbes. For both, the state of nature, was “a quasi-social condition, institutionally deficient, [leading] to a limited contract; a contract of a Lockean type.”81 This account of the Rationalist understanding of “international society” is relatively straightforward. Later in the lectures, however, matters become more complicated, as Wight shifted between premodern and modern Rationalist perspectives. On the theory of “national power,” the first is to the fore. Wight argued that the Rationalist view was that: “[p]ower is not self-justifying; it must be justified by reference to some other source outside or beyond itself, and thus be transformed into ‘authority.’ ”82 All of this firmly attached Rationalism to natural law. He went on: The doctrine of natural law, or moral Realism in politics, with its sanction in the human conscience, means that the ultimate reality of politics and the guarantee of political health, lies not in democracy, votes, selfdetermination, economic aid, etc, and all those idols of the market place, but in the lonely individual, passing judgement on the false justice and lawless power of his judges and torturers.83 Wight gave no examples of this view being expressed in modern politics, unless one counts the reference to Benda’s La Trahison des clercs (1926). In the discussion of national interest, by contrast, the Rationalist view presented is almost entirely modern. The Rationalist, Wight argued, conceives the “great aim of statecraft . . . to pursue and safeguard the national interest within the setting of a respect for the interests of others, or of international society as a whole.”84 The act is informed primarily by reason, indeed by a


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rational concern to maintain order, and by a theory of natural rights, rather than by considerations of natural law.85 Like the Revolutionist tradition, Rationalism not only unites under one banner a disparate collection of thinkers; it joins together two or perhaps three rather distinct sets of ideas. Again, as with the Revolutionists, Wight resolved this problem by appealing to the pattern of their practice. Thus any theory that seeks to limit war and achieves that aim in practice qualified it as Rationalist: the Christian just war tradition and the modern secular movement to place legal restrictions upon war are both, despite the very different assumptions that inform them, expressions of the same tradition.86 In his later work, it will be argued forthwith, Wight resolved these tensions in the most straightforward way: by abandoning the idea of the tradition altogether. Realism For this line of thought, the question: What is international society? admits of only one answer: Nothing!—until there is a world state. Martin Wight87 Wight’s account of Realism is the most consistent and the most intriguing. It is also the most dogmatic of the three: he was far more categorical in his treatment of Realism. He thought it “as familiar, virtually as self-conscious and as continuous as the Rationalist,” with Machiavelli as its “inventor” and Hobbes his only “peer.”88 Realism, Wight wrote, was predicated upon theories of “human badness” and baldly denied that international politics were anything more than a state of nature, which meant a state of war.89 Without a social contract, the Realists maintained, there could be no “society.” Without society, only the “law of self-preservation or law of the jungle” pertained.90 Thus, in international politics, states pursue power and their national selfinterest, conduct diplomacy by “coercion and bribery” and war by all available means.91 The peculiarities of Wight’s account of Realism, however, lie elsewhere. The first is to be found in the emphasis he placed on the scientific nature of Realism. The “philosophical basis of all Realism,” he argued, lay in one of three scientific “presuppositions”: “the mechanistic, the biological, and the psychological.”92 Mechanistic ideas of balance “underlay all Machiavelli’s pictures of international politics,” though the “highest expression” of this conception was to be found in Tolstoy’s War and Peace.93 Biological ideas, by contrast, were derived from Darwin. This “biological theory of international realism was eagerly seized upon by [Hitler’s] brutal and inelastic mind, and he gave it its classic expression (because with a crude theory the classic

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expression is the crudest) in Mein Kampf.”94 Finally, the psychological theory was to be found in Hobbes and later in Freud. Wight considered, as we saw in chapter 5, such scientific treatments of politics deterministic and “implicitly derogatory to ethics.”95 They were both symptoms and causes of emancipation of politics from morality. Realism, indeed, represented the culmination of this historical development. For the Realist, he argued, “the validity of ethics is restricted to private relations, and politics is left as the domain of the non-ethical.”96 It was Machiavelli who effected this move: “the first man (since the Greeks) to look at politics without ethical presuppositions,” to “break away from the theologico-ethical Rationalism dominant in the Middle Ages, and equally from the latent Revolutionism . . . which ran back to the origins of Christianity.”97 For Wight, the argument that politics can be seen as “the sphere of the non-moral is in effect to regard it as the sphere of the immoral,” and thus it is governed only by expediency.98 Realists, therefore, judge political acts solely in terms of necessity or success. Wight argued that an appeal to the first involved “some degree of illusion or intellectual dishonesty,” asking “is a government ever faced with a situation in which there is no choice of evils?”99 He found an appeal to the second was even more disturbing: to justify a political decision on the grounds that it is unavoidable represents a last departing tribute to the validity of the ethical: the tribute of recognition by non-fulfilment. The principle of success shows Realism fully matured, and moral tensions finally replaced by considerations of technical accomplishment: politics for politics’ sake.100 Wight illustrated this point with quotes from Hitler, Treitschke, and Sumner Welles. His treatment of Realist ethics—or rather his claim there was a lack thereof—is the second peculiarity in his account of the tradition. Wight was clearly aware of the attempts of Carr to construct what a recent writer has called a “utopian realism” and of Morgenthau to delineate a Weberian ethics of responsibility.101 The discussion in the lectures hints that one of their objects was to demonstrate the futility of such efforts, that Realism always tends to degrade into pure atavism and opportunism: perhaps this is what Wight meant when he wrote, in 1961, of trying to put “the American Realists into perspective and providing a critique of them.”102 Certainly, he wished to deny, as he had done earlier in “Christianity and Power Politics” that anything like a “Christian Realism” was possible: “Realism [is] prima facie incompatible with Xty,” he wrote, “[n]o Xn can believe that morality and law


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derive from power.”103 Wight thus cut off, for Christians, a retreat into Realism, gently mocking Butterfield for the “certain sentimentality of outlook” that led him toward that position.104 Instead, he believed, as he wrote in a review of John Herz’s International Politics in the Atomic Age, he thought it “better that the West should be capable of . . . balance, moderation and noble solicitude for the future of mankind, and lose the Cold War, than that it should win the Cold War with a more Machiavellian philosophy.”105 These convictions appear also to underpin the third peculiarity of Wight’s account of Realism: his desire to associate it with fascism and specifically with Nazism. Indeed, his description of the tradition in the lectures is best viewed as an extension of his analysis of Hitler”s thought—that “terrible combination of realism and fanaticism”—and the underpinnings of Nazi diplomacy in the Survey of International Affairs.106 The argument that Realism cannot but ultimately collapse into nihilistic opportunism was prefigured, as we saw in chapter 4, in the conclusion to his explanation of Hitler’s failure: “[s]ince his aims were limitless, and his methods unqualified by conformity to any exterior standard, his power tended, when checked in operation, to destroy both itself and the field in which it was exercised.”107 Wight’s association of Realism with Nazism was not uncommon amongst British scholars and intellectuals. George Orwell—whose work he greatly admired—also made this connection and, like Wight, pointed out that Realism was self-defeating. In a review of James Burnham’s The Machiavellians in 1944, he wrote: In our own day, Mussolini, the conscious pupil of Machiavelli and Pareto, does not seem to have made a very brilliant success of things. And the Nazi regime, based on essentially Machiavellian principles, is being smashed to pieces by the forces which its own lack of scruple conjured up. It would seem that the theory that there is no such thing as a “good” motive in politics, that nothing counts except force and fraud, has a hole in it somewhere, and that the Machiavellian system fails even by its own test of material success.108 This association with fascism inured both Orwell and Wight against Realism, encouraging both to read the work of the postwar American Realists in a light that they did not appreciate. Hans Morgenthau’s unhappiness is evident in his very gentle chastisement of Wight for the “series of lectures linking my name to Machiavelli.” “[T]he great Florentine,” he joked, “was already sufficiently discredited and didn’t need another blemish to his name.”109 What Morgenthau thought about his name appearing alongside Hitler’s can only be imagined.

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The greatest flaw in Wight’s account of Realism is his failure to convey the extent to which Morgenthau’s thought, and that of the other early American Realists, represented a reaction against fascist or Nazi conceptions of international relations; specifically, in Morgenthau’s case, against those of Carl Schmitt.110 It may be that he simply overlooked this aspect or that he read into the postwar Realists’ ideas more characteristic of fascist thought or what he called Carr’s “theology of appeasement.”111 It is also the case, however, that Wight was prone to take those parts of the American Realists’ thought of which he approved and to cast them into the Rationalist or even the Revolutionist traditions, leaving Realism bereft of anything other than atavistic, opportunistic immoralism. In his “valedictory” to the lectures, he recognized this: “if Realism is defined by the classic realists—Machiavelli, Richelieu, Hobbes, Hume, Frederick II, Hegel—then contemporary Realists appear as much Rationalist as Realist.”112 In “An Anatomy of International Thought,” he did something similar, asking “why it is that you so often find a jump from a shrewd realistic appraisal of international politics to a sentimental idealism, even pacifism: in Tolstoy, Kennan or Butterfield.”113 This admission implies that Wight’s lectures were motivated, in part, by a desire to discredit Realism; certainly it illustrates the porous boundaries of his traditions. In the concluding lecture, he acknowledged the problems that his schema raised, arguing that “the purpose of building pigeon-holes is to reassure oneself that the raw material does not fit into them.”114 He portrayed the traditions not as parallel “railroad tracks,” but as “streams, with eddies and cross-currents, sometimes interlacing and never for long confined to their own river bed.”115 Each tradition, Wight observed, had a propensity to mutate, in practice, into another: the French Revolution, for example, had been informed by Rationalist principles, but was transformed into Revolutionism; Hitler’s “Realpolitik” became “demonized into a Revolutionist nihilism.”116 It is tempting to interpret these concluding reflections as instances of intellectual modesty or sensitivity to the particularities of history. But it may be possible too to detect a certain dissatisfaction with the “traditions” approach. This impression seems to be conveyed in the Four Seminal Thinkers lectures, delivered in 1959. Wight began his talk on Machiavelli by arguing All individual thinkers transcend typology; and in social studies, generalizations are abstractions, mental conveniences, and to that extent unreal. They must be contrasted with the concrete, historical person in all his richness and possible inconsistency. It seems true that, when a proper name becomes used adjectivally of a school or way of thought, it falsifies the man possessing the name. Grotius was not a Grotian, nor Keynes a Keynesian; Freud was not a Freudian, nor Marx a Marxist.117


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In Wight’s later work on international theory, as we shall see, he moved away from the idea of the “three traditions.” His approach to the subject changed: his focus was concentrated either on the work of a particular thinker or on a concept, the development of which might be traced through the history of modern international relations. This shift in Wight’s treatment of international theory, it is argued, suggests that the reconstructed version of the international theory lectures, though faithful and sensitive, should best be treated as an interim statement of his thought. Western Values [International Theory is]. . . academically similar to that of Political Theory or the History of Political Ideas in most Politics or Government courses . . .[But] to teach it historically might impoverish it. Its essential subject-matter is the recurrent questions concerning justice, obligation, security and survival which arise anew for every generation in the relation between states. To borrow a sentence of Dilthey’s, international theory “seeks to show up what is firm and enduring in the flow of international events.” Martin Wight118 It would be wrong to think that the LSE international theory lectures represent Wight’s last word upon the topic. His approach developed and changed in the years that followed. He continued to teach the subject for another three years after his move to Sussex and returned to it again in 1967, introducing the later lectures with the declaration quoted above. There are points of contact with the approach he took a decade before—the idea of recurrence recurs—but there is a noticeable change of perspective toward “questions.” Quite what he meant by teaching it “historically” is hard to assess, though he may have meant examining the thinkers and theory of particular periods, as opposed to tracing the manner in which specific questions had been addressed throughout international history. Equally difficult to judge is what Wight had come to think of his earlier classifications and typologies and his “three traditions.” The proposed book based upon the LSE lectures, “The Anatomy of International Theory,” was never written.119 Instead, he returned to rewrite Power Politics and planned a major study of the balance of power. In the work he did publish on international theory during the 1960s, the “three traditions” idea is pushed into the background. The essays in Diplomatic Investigations, that on the balance of power written for Manning’s Festschrift, and those collected in Systems of States were far more cautious—and indeed sophisticated—exercises than the theory lectures

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or the “Anatomy” talk. The idea of a “tradition” appears only rarely in any of them. In “Why Is There No International Theory?” Wight claimed only that there was a “tradition of speculation about the state.”120 In “Western Values,” he observed a “tradition of constitutional government which descends from Aristotle through Aquinas to Locke and the Founding Fathers of the United States.”121 But he was very tentative in calling the approach to international politics described in that essay a “tradition,” preferring more open terms: “values,” “lines of thought,” “a certain coherent pattern of ideas.” Indeed, Wight even amended the original title of the paper—it had been called “The Whig Tradition in International Theory and Western Values” when first presented to the British Committee.122 “Western Values” was not structured, as were the lectures, around the poles of Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism, but rather around “figures”: international society, the maintenance of order, intervention and morality. When he first uses the term “realist” in the essay he attributes it to Carr,123 and when later he writes of a “school of . . . realists” it is to the tightly delimited “school of American realists in political theory who acknowledge Reinhold Niebuhr as their patriarch.”124 He avoided the word “idealism” altogether. There are no mentions of “Machiavellian” or “Kantian” positions, though there are frequent references to the thinkers themselves. In methodological terms, however, “Western Values” does represent something of a stepping-stone between the international theory lectures and his later studies of the balance of power and international legitimacy. After listing some of the thinkers whom he argued “exemplified” the Western “tradition,” he stated: The names are merely illustrative. It is ideas and assumptions we are concerned with, and their logical interdependence; and this commits us to the dangerous method of tracing ideas through a variety of writers and politicians without dwelling on their place in each’s [sic] complex aggregate of doctrine.125 Wight thus proceeded much as he had done in the lectures, identifying what he thought to be a common theme and then demonstrating its validity with a welter of quotations. Thus, after associating “Western Values” with the “political philosophy of constitutional government,” he turns to the “quality of a via media,” supporting it by arguing This pattern of ideas usually appears as the juste milieu between definable extremes, whether it is Grotius saying: “A remedy must be found for those that believe that in war nothing is lawful, and for those for whom all


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things are lawful in war” or Halifax’s classic exposition of the balance of power . . . or Gladstone’s conception of the European Concert seen as a middle way between the radical non-interventionism of Cobden and Bright and the Realpolitik of Beaconsfield and Bismarck, or the policy of collective security between the World Wars as a middle way between the pacifists and disarmers on the one side and the imperialists turned appeasers on the other.126 At other times, Wight took a slightly different approach, seeking to define the axioms particular to a position and working their implications to their logical conclusions. This tendency is particularly clear in the discussion of “international society.” Wight observed that Machiavelli and Hobbes, and then Hegel, the Social Darwinists and legal positivists, all “took the view that there is no such thing as international society.” Treating this as a first principle, he then moved quickly to assert that if it were true, then international law differs from municipal law, because it comprises only those “principles and rules” agreed upon by states, and therefore the “basis of international obligation is contractual.”127 By the mid-1960s, it appears that Wight had tired of such Procrustean devices as “traditions” or “schools.” When one former student showed him a doctoral thesis in which he took an approach not dissimilar to that of the “international theory lectures,” Wight’s response was unforgiving: You herd your thinkers into “schools,” and the schools are sub-divided into “strands.” You are guilty of the German vice of hypostatising your categories. A school is surely a group of men who consciously shared a common outlook and a common aim and work together. There was a Manchester school; those who belonged to it knew they belonged to it and gloried in their colleagueship. In the same way one could talk about the LNU in the 1920s as the focus of a school, or the CND today. But your schools are simply loose overlappings [sic] of view between different people.128 The last criticism, he must have known, could easily have been made of the theory lectures. Quite why Wight moved away from the “traditions” approach is not entirely clear. In “Western Values,” however, there may be a hint as to the reason for his change of mind. In setting out his method, he referred to the now much-maligned Arthur O. Lovejoy and his Great Chain of Being (1936). Although Wight mentioned only Lovejoy’s notion of a “unit-idea,” he must have been aware of the critique of the history of ideas presented in

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his book—in particular, Lovejoy’s attack on writing it in terms of “-isms.” The case is worth quoting at length: Idealism, romanticism, rationalism, transcendentalism, pragmatism—all these trouble-breeding and usually thought-obscuring terms, which one sometimes wishes to see expunged from the vocabulary of the philosopher and the historian altogether . . . . They stand, as a rule, not for one doctrine, but for several distinct and often conflicting doctrines held by different individuals or groups to whose way of thinking these appellations have been applied . . . and each of these doctrines, in turn, is likely to be resolvable into simpler elements, often very strangely combined and derivative from a variety of dissimilar motives and historic influences. . . . These large movements and tendencies . . . these conventionally labelled—isms, are not as a rule the ultimate objects of the interest of the historian of ideas; they are merely the initial materials.129 If Wight had been persuaded by this argument, it might explain, at least in part, his move away from “traditions” and toward “questions” in international theory. This new approach did also fit with the general movement of his thought on history. At Sussex, as we saw in chapter 3, Wight developed a curriculum that examined “longitudinal themes” rather than particular periods, among them the “balance of power” and the “development of the diplomatic community.”130 In his research, he showed a particular concern for the first. The essay on that subject in Diplomatic Investigations took a rather ahistorical form: examining nine meanings of the term found in modern international politics. Like the international theory lectures, the essay is an exercise in classification and typology, though Wight eschewed any substantive discussion of “traditions.” “Idealist internationalism” is mentioned in passing; “Realism” or “Rationalism” not at all. Wight’s later studies of “International Legitimacy” (1971) and “The Balance of Power and International Order” (1973) are of a different order. Both examined the origins of ideas central to international theory and their corresponding patterns of practice. In these essays—as in “Western Values”— Wight was concerned with the “principles that prevail,” the views of a given question that predominate at different stages of international history.131 In the case of international legitimacy, this involved outlining how the dynastic principle that had been accepted in medieval Christendom had developed into the principle of national sovereignty, buttressed by international law, which survived until the French Revolution, and the principle of national self-determination that displaced it.132 Wight’s concern is with the


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philosophical underpinnings of each principle: how dynasticism was rooted in custom; the “popular principle” in ideology.133 The second half of the essay addresses how these principles functioned in practice. Wight took a similar approach in “The Balance of Power and International Order.” The first parts of the piece explore the origins of the two ideas and their relationship to practice. In antiquity and during the Renaissance and Reformation, he argued, there was no fully formulated concept of the balance of power; it emerged in the eighteenth century. Practice preceded theory: “the struggle against Philip II had brought a balance of power into systematic operation, [but] it was the struggle against Louis XIV that raised it to the level of theory.”134 In the central part of the essay, Wight identified the fifteen propositions that informed the theory, demonstrating each with a quotation from the contemporary literature. In the last, he described the unravelling of the theory under pressure from the new doctrine of legitimacy that had emerged from the American and French Revolutions. These later essays are distinguished from the “three traditions lectures” in two ways. First, Wight showed himself much less prone to draw, in Toynbeean fashion, analogies between different thinkers and periods. They proceed, instead, chronologically. They display, moreover, far greater confidence in the material: Wight no longer felt the need to pile quotation upon quotation in order to illustrate a point. Second, he showed a greater concern to relate theory and practice: not to confine the examination of theory to a separate sphere, but to demonstrate how one shaped, and in turn was shaped, by the other. Wight had tried to do this in his account of the three traditions—exploring Chamberlain’s Realist defence of Munich, for instance135— but without the same consistency. Conclusion Education, for Martin, was, as he . . . told us, a question of “being made free of a tradition.” Charles Manning136 Wight’s idea of the “three traditions” is, as many have recognized, problematic. They do not, as he himself acknowledged, conform to any historical traditions of international theory in the manner of Marxism or liberalism in political theory. Wight used them as pedagogic devices in his lectures, but his “anatomy of international thought”—and indeed the book of that he mooted in 1961—never found its way into print during his lifetime. The essays on international theory that he did see fit to publish took, as this chapter has tried to show, a rather different approach, examining either, as in “Western

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Values,” what he thought to be the dominant modes of thought in the European state-system, or “longitudinal themes,” like international legitimacy or the balance of power.137 Wight’s attachment to the “three traditions,” this chapter has argued, was not as strong as some have suggested; certainly, not strong as the hold that they have had over his followers. Nor was his attachment to any one of the traditions. Wight was attracted to aspects of the Rationalist tradition, to those that conformed to his Christian worldview, and considered it, even in its modern secular form, the least worst of the three. But to label his thought in that manner would be to miss one of the primary objects of the lectures. For Wight as for Laski, the examination of past thought and practice— indeed, university education itself—was intended to liberate minds from the “Zeitgeist” and to free them, at least temporarily, from attachments to particular doctrines.138 Certainly, Charles Manning thought that to be his purpose. The greatest criticism that can be made of Wight’s work on international theory is that, in classifying and anatomizing, he failed to theorize. This was Jones’ charge, in his case for the closure of the English school, and it still stands.139 Wight did not provide a “political theory of the states-system.”140 In “Why Is There No International Theory?” he argued that, even if one escaped the “intellectual prejudice imposed by the sovereign state” and “the belief in progress,” such a theory would be difficult to formulate. There was a “recalcitrance” about international politics “to being theorized about,” partly because the language of political theory and law is not suited to the material, and partly because of its sheer contingency.141 This is not an argument with which all would agree, though some have: “[a]nyone attempting to do political theory about the relations of states,” Jones observed, “would be severely hampered if he had to start and end with so indigent an entity as the collectivity of states.”142

Epilogue: The Legacy of Martin Wight

Martin Wight was not Martin Wight in those days, and did not think he ever would be. Matthew Melko1

I

t is something of a peculiarity that such an enigmatic, idiosyncratic, even occasionally arcane thinker as Martin Wight is held in such high esteem in International Relations (IR). He himself never thought that he would achieve such status: “[g]reat scholars who never wrote their great works,” he once wrote to his friend and former student Matthew Melko, “are less creditworthy to posterity.”2 He knew, of course, that academic reputations could be made in other ways: teaching, he observed, again to Melko, was “perhaps the most useful thing we can do.”3 The devotion of Wight’s students is testimony to the efforts that he made in that regard, to the patience with which he compiled his lectures, and, indeed, to his intellectual authority. Yet to see Wight through his students’ eyes is not to see all. The attention they have concentrated upon his lectures, especially upon his “three traditions” of international theory, has diverted attention away from other equally intriguing aspects of his thought. This book has tried to cast light back upon some neglected parts of Wight’s work, upon his religious and historical writings, upon his politics and upon his treatments of the conduct of international relations. This book has also tried to present Wight’s thought on its own terms, to consider it apart from theoretical paradigms, from traditions, and indeed, from the “English school” that claims him for its own. This is not to suggest that his approach to the study of international relations does not have affinities with the “classical” tradition in international theory or that his ideas were not influential upon later thinkers who sought to develop, in their own ways,

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concepts they found in Wight’s work. Both of those claims, it is fair to say, are true, but reading texts through the lens of a tradition does not always produce a clear perception of their meaning. There is a tacit agreement amongst Wight’s admirers and his critics that there is no obvious “approach” to the study of international relations to be found in his work. The interpretation that has been presented here does not, in the main, challenge that view. His treatment of international relations was distinctly personal, dependent upon his particular religious beliefs and his understanding of history, neither of which are widely shared today. Wight was indeed, as Roy Jones put it, an “erudite historian of strongly Toynbeean persuasion”; his Christian eschatology complicating this picture even further.4 Hedley Bull was right to be concerned about the “extent to which his view of IR derives from his religious beliefs”: that extent was very great indeed.5 Wight’s work deserves attention, in part, precisely because it presents an account of international relations, infused with religious thought, that is distinct from that of those Christian intellectuals—Reinhold Niebuhr and Herbert Butterfield amongst them—most often read by scholars in the field. Wight rejected the idea that academic study should serve, at least in a direct way, the world of practice. It is not surprising, therefore, that there are few answers to the problems of international relations, past or contemporary, to be found in his writings. He challenged the notion that one should conceive of politics in terms of “a succession of ‘questions’ or ‘problems’. . . with the implication that they have answers and solutions.”6 His work emphasized conditions that must be negotiated and standards to be maintained. It was informed by a radically different philosophy of history to that which, as he appreciated, now predominates in the West. Although Wight provided few answers, he posed many questions. It is in the challenges he made, to use Toynbee’s terminology, rather than the responses he offered, that perhaps his greatest legacy to IR lies. His arguments against the prevailing modes of studying the subject were sometimes grounded more in prejudice—in the fullest sense of that word7—than in knowledge of their intricacies, but nevertheless they demand engagement. More important are the questions he asked about the subject itself. The most famous—“Why Is There No International Theory?”—has not yet been answered in the terms in which Wight cast the problem. Why, indeed, does international theory differ so radically in form and content from political theory? And if it was the case, as he argued, that the modern state-system has been more shaped by successive revolutions, each cutting across borders and claiming the loyalties of citizens, then what does this imply for the traditional, statist account of its development? These questions are, it seems reasonable to suggest, perennial or at least of long-standing concern.

Epilogue: The Legacy of Martin Wight

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There are others that are simply pressing. The creation of a world-state, one scholar has recently argued, is inevitable.8 Wight, as we have seen, feared that such a polity would prove to be “frightful concentration of tyrannical power,” that it would “embody a fundamental lawlessness.”9 That is a challenge to which theorists of international relations have not, in the main, made an adequate response. Wight’s endeavor concerned the interpretation of international relations in terms of those “ideals . . . concretely embodied in social institutions.”10 Such an approach to IR presents perhaps the most substantial of his challenges to present scholars in the field, the majority of whose accounts of political behavior assume its determinant to be material interest. In one of Wight’s late unpublished essays, he mused “[a]cademic students of politics, being unusually wedded to schemes of political improvement, tend to neglect the phenomenology of political experience.”11 His animus toward activism should not distract attention from the more important point made. What makes Wight’s work distinctive is that he sought to read politics, to interpret the text presented by the conduct of international relations. His world was irredeemably normative, not to be measured or modelled, but to be translated into a language that conveyed the meaning of politics. This meant moving beyond the mere description of the happenings of politics or international relations to what Wight might have called a “higher level of analysis.” Thus analogous events—historical recurrences—are expressed in terms of “ironies,” or, at a higher level still, of “tragedies.” Wight was vociferous in his repudiation of the argument that history and politics should not be read, as he did, in categories usually considered more proper to aesthetics. The use of terms like “irony” and “tragedy,” he considered, both grasp the meaning of the events described and allow them to be understood by readers, for “the reversals and incongruities of life are common experience.”12 This was what lent a text like Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War—with its “architecture of irony”—such power.13 It was to those heights that Wight aspired in his analyses of international relations.


Notes

Chapter 1


1. Throughout this book I have followed the convention that “International Relations” or “IR” refers to the academic field that concerns the study of the relations—political, economic, social, and so on—between states, sub-state actors, international institutions, and so on, and that “international relations” refers to their actual conduct. 2. Tim Dunne, Inventing International Society: A History of the English School (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 47. 3. Michael Nicholson, “The Enigma of Martin Wight,” Review of International Studies 7:1 (1981): 15–22. 4. Wight, Power Politics, Looking Forward Pamphlet no. 8 (London: Royal Institute for International Affairs, 1946), p. 66. 5. Ibid., p. 68. 6. Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis, 1911–1918 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923–1931); George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1961), p. 164. 7. E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1939). 8. Leslie Paul, The Age of Terror (London: Faber & Faber, 1950); G. F. Hudson, The Hard and Bitter Peace: World Politics since 1945 (London: Pall Mall Press, 1966). 9. Denis Brogan, The Price of Revolution (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1951), p. vii. 10. Plato, The Republic, trans. Allan Bloom, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 361–362, pp. 38–40. 11. Wight, “Western Values in International Relations,” in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966), p. 122. 12. Plato, Republic, trans. Bloom, 496c–d, p. 176. 13. Some will find this idea unsettling, but there is a parallel to be drawn between Wight and his near-contemporary, the political philosopher Leo Strauss. Both

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14. 15. 16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

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thought modern politics was in crisis, both thought Socrates’s remarks were relevant, and both were prone to convey their ideas in esoteric subtext. On Strauss and the “art of writing,” see Anne Norton, Leo Strauss and the Politics of American Empire (New Haven CT and London: Yale University Press, 2004), pp. 95–108. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” in Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations, p. 33. Nicholson, “The Enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 15. Kenneth W. Thompson, Masters of International Thought: Major TwentiethCentury Theorists and the World Crisis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 60. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” in Butterfield and Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations, p. 20. Hedley Bull, “Introduction: Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” in Wight, Systems of States, ed. Hedley Bull (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1977), pp. 1–20. Thompson, “Martin Wight (1913–1972): The Values of Western Civilization,” in his Masters of International Thought, pp. 44–61; Dunne, Inventing International Society, pp. 47–70; H. G. Pitt, “Wight (Robert James) Martin (1913–1972),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press), online at: http://www.oxforddnb.com/articles/38/38935article.html. (Accessed September 24, 2004). Pitt, “Wight (Robert James) Martin (1913–1972),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition. T. S. R. Boase, Boniface VIII (London: Constable, 1933); English Art 1100–1216 (London: Clarendon, 1953); English Art 1800–1870 (London: Clarendon, 1959). C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, A History of the Great War 1914–1918 (London: Clarendon, 1934); A History of Peaceful Change in the Modern World (London: Oxford University Press, 1937). Anon., “Cruttwell, Charles Robert Mowbray Fraser (1887–1941)”, in L. G. Wickham Legg (ed.), Dictionary of National Biography 1941–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1959), pp. 190–191. V. Cunningham, “Literary Culture,” in Brian Harrison (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford, VIII (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 446. Wight to Pitt, July 29, 1964, Wight MSS 233 7/9. Wight to Toynbee, October 13, 1954, Toynbee MSS 86. Brian Porter, “E. H. Carr—The Aberystwyth Years, 1936–1947,” in Michael Cox (ed.), E. H. Carr: A Critical Appraisal (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2004), p. 53. The successful applicant, favored by Carr, was Hugh Seton-Watson. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” p. 3. On Carr’s conversion from advocate of the League to its opponent in the wake of the Abyssinian crisis, see his correspondence with Gilbert Murray, especially Carr to Murray, December 8, 1936, Murray MSS, 227/142–145. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” p. 3. Ceadel notes that: “The Abyssinian affair enabled pacifism to discover a distinct and

Notes

31. 32. 33.

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41. 42.

43. 44.

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confident voice because its circumstances were so clear cut: collective security meant war; pacifism meant peace” (Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980), p. 191). Wight, “Christian Pacifism,” Theology 33:193 (July 1936): 12–21. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” p. 3. Bull (Ibid.) dates Wight’s employment at Chatham House from 1936 to 1938. Wight’s correspondence with Toynbee (Wight to Toynbee, October 13, 1954, Toynbee MSS 86), however, states that Wight joined Chatham House in the spring of 1937. See Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934–1960). Wight to Toynbee, October 13, 1954, Toynbee MSS 86. Toynbee, Study of History, VII, p. 396, note 3, p. 415, note 5, p. 428, note 2, pp. 456–457, note 3, p. 460, notes 1 and 4, p. 464, note 1, p. 488, note 2, p. 489, note 3, p. 505, note 2, p. 543, note 1, pp. 711–715. See also Wight’s “The Crux for an Historian Brought up in the Christian Tradition,” pp. 737–748. See The Republic of South Africa (London: Oxford University Press, 1937) and The Political and Strategic Interests of the United Kingdom (London: Oxford University Press, 1938). See H. V. Hodson (ed.), The British Empire: A Report on its Structure and Problems (London: Oxford University Press, 1937). I am grateful to Mrs Mary Bone, Librarian at Chatham House, for the information regarding Wight’s work on “Ocean Routes.” Hedley Bull, in “Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” states that during this period, Wight also worked on the Surveys, and contributed to Toynbee’s Study. This is almost certainly wrong. It is more likely that Wight’s involvement with both projects was confined to his second term at Chatham House (1946–1949). Laski to Wight, December 26, 1938, Wight MSS 233 3/9. Pitt (1923–2000) spent most of his career as a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Mack-Smith (1920– ) is an historian of modern Italy and a Fellow of All Souls. Pitt to Bull, April 2, 1974, Wight MSS 250. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” p. 4. An abstract from his application is included in Dunne, Inventing International Society, p. 65, note 23. Pitt, “Wight (Robert James) Martin (1913–1972),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online version. Bull to Butterfield, March 19, 1976, Butterfield MSS 531(i)/ B191. Wight had known Perham since his school-days: he had been at Bradfield with Perham’s nephew and the two of them had gone up to Oxford together in 1932. He later recalled that, as a boy, he had thought of Perham as “an Aunt-figure out of P. G. Wodehouse, whirling her nephew and his friends off to the river, or to an evening at Stratford, always pointing to the Higher Life”(Wight to Ferris, November 16, 1961, Wight MSS 233 8/9).

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45. Wight, The Development of the Legislative Council 1606–1945 vol. I (London: Faber & Faber, 1946); The Gold Coast Legislative Council (London: Faber & Faber, 1947); British Colonial Constitutions (London: Clarendon, 1952). Perham had intended that the introduction to the latter be even longer, stretching to 250 pages, something which Wight was later “shocked” to discover (Draft of Wight to Perham, April 3, 1947, Wight MSS 209). 46. See Vidler to Wight, June 26, 1942, Wight MSS 45. 47. Wight to Perham, May 11, 1945, Wight MSS 209. Wight’s relationship with Perham seems never to have been good. Some six months earlier, he had written to protest that “after four years of obscure activity and of worrying officials and the Colonial Office, Nuffield has still produced nothing to justify its existence and secondly, . . . it gives no cause for confidence that it has academic standards” (Wight to Perham, November 21, 1944, Wight MSS 209). Despite his criticisms, Wight retained a certain affection for Perham, later recalling her “impeccable political judgment” and observing that “I doubt there is a single public political issue on which the opinion of posterity will show him as having been erratic. She was anti-appeasement, anti-Munich, coolly objective about Soviet atrocities . . . at the height of the “heroic Soviet ally” feeling in 1942–1944, anti-Suez” (Wight to Ferris, November 16, 1961, Wight MSS 233 8/9). 48. At this time it seems that Charles Manning made an unsuccessful bid to bring Wight to the LSE. Manning was unable, however, to persuade the institution to create a new Readership in his Department. See Manning to Bull, April 11, 1974, Wight MSS 250. 49. Power Politics Looking Forward Pamphlet no. 8 (London: RIIA, 1946). 50. Richard Cockett, David Astor and the Observer (London: André Deutsch, 1991), p. 148. 51. Ibid., p. 185. 52. The Times announced his appointment, to the Survey department, on February 28, 1947 (Wight MSS 20). 53. W. Arthur Lewis, Michael Scott, Colin Legum, and Martin Wight, Attitude to Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951). 54. Cockett, David Astor and the Observer, p. 187. 55. Toynbee to Macadam, March 31, 1947, RIIA MSS, 4/TOYN/42. Toynbee wrote: “If Martin Wight turns out as well as we all expect him to do, I think the most effective and economical step would be to promote him rather rapidly to the post of Deputy Director [then held by Veronica Toynbee], and put on him the responsibility of actually getting the work [i.e. the Survey] done.” 56. Wight, “Spain and Portugal,” “Switzerland, The Low Countries, and Scandinavia,” “Eastern Europe,” “Germany” and “The Balance of Power” in A. J. Toynbee and F. T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds.), Survey of International Affairs 1939—1946: The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 138–150, 151–165, 206–292, pp. 293–365 and pp. 508–532. 57. The outline of the address is preserved in the Wight MSS 10. 58. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” An Ecumenical Review: A Quarterly, 1:1 (Autumn 1948): 25–45.

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59. See Wight MSS 232. 60. See Wight MSS 11. 61. See Wight MSS 232. Wight attended the second meeting of the Ecumenical Commission on European Co-operation, May 19–20, 1950, at Bièvres in France. 62. Although Charles Manning was the prime mover in luring Wight to the LSE, his former examiner, Herbert Butterfield, also had a hand in the appointment. Almost thirty years later, Manning wrote to the latter thanking him for “the service you did me, and the school, in helping me to get Martin his Readership.” He continued: “how well I recall our little conference in the corridor that day” (Manning to Butterfield, January 4, 1977, Butterfield MSS 531(ii)/M42). 63. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” p. 6. 64. Cleeve to Wight, September 29, 1954, RIIA MSS 4/TOYN/18; Cleeve to Wight, March 25, 1955, RIIA MSS, 4/TOYN/18. In the latter, the Institute’s Research Secretary Margaret Cleeve wrote: “may we hope for the revised edition of POWER POLITICS by the end of the present vacation? We really should be able to say something definite to enquirers.” 65. These reviews are listed in the bibliography. 66. Wight, “History and Judgment: Butterfield, Niebuhr and the Technical Historian,” The Frontier 1:8 (1950): 301–314; Harold J. Laski, An Introduction to Politics, new ed. prepared by Martin Wight (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1951). The bulk of the revisions that Wight made were to chapter 4, “The State and the International Community,” pp. 88–105. 67. Wight, “What Makes a Good Historian?” The Listener, 53:1355 ( February 17, 1955): 283–284; “War and International Politics,” The Listener 54:1389 (October 13, 1955): 584–585. 68. Wight, “The Power Struggle within the United Nations,” Proceedings of the Institute of World Affairs 33rd session (Los Angeles: USC, 1956), pp. 247–259; “Why Is There No International Theory?” International Relations 2 (1960): 35–48; “Brutus in Foreign Policy: The Memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden,” International Affairs 36:3 (1960): 299–309. 69. Wight, “Christianity and Power Politics,” no date, Wight MSS 39. The other talks are discussed in later chapters. 70. See Wight MSS 228. 71. Wight to Kyle, July 26, 1954, RIIA MSS 4/TOYN/18. This letter details Wight’s misgivings as to the desirability of the idea, and speculates on possible contributors. 72. Bullock to Wight, July 9, 1955, Wight MSS 233 1/9. 73. Wight to Bullock, July 17, 1955, Wight MSS 233 1/9. 74. See, for example, the “standing invitation” offered in Morgenthau to Wight, January 14, 1952, and also Morgenthau to Wight, January 20, 1954, Wight MSS 233 2/9. 75. Wight to Morgenthau, undated draft (January 1956), Wight MSS 103. 76. Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Leicester & London: RIIA & Leicester University Press, 1991). On the book’s importance for the English school, see Dunne, Inventing International Society, p. xiii.

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77. Wight to Grodzins, May 27, 1957, Wight MSS 103. 78. The negotiations over the latter position, which went on during Wight’s time at Chicago, are detailed in Wight MSS 32. 79. The paper on “Scientific Developments” was originally to have been included in Diplomatic Investigations. It was removed after an unfavourable referee’s report received by Cambridge University Press, whom Butterfield had approached as a possible publisher. See the letter from R. W. David at CUP to Butterfield, August 11,1965, Wight MSS 248. Butterfield thought the offending referee was F. H. Hinsley, who was, he thought, in a “curious state”, “impatient” for a Chair and upset at not having been asked to join the Committee (Butterfield to Wight, August 13, 1965, Wight MSS 248). 80. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?”; “Western Values in International Relations,” and “The Balance of Power” in Butterfield & Wight (eds.), Diplomatic Investigations, pp. 1–34, 89–131, and 149–175. 81. On the delays Butterfield caused to the appearance of the book, see Bull to Wight, January 31, 1964, Wight MSS 233 1/9. 82. Wight, “University of Sussex,” 1960, Wight MSS 233 7/9. See also Wight to Fulton, December 8, 1960, Wight MSS 233 7/9. 83. Asa Briggs, “Drawing a New Map of Learning,” in David Daiches (ed.), The Idea of a New University: The Experiment in Sussex (London: André Deutsch, 1964), p. 61. 84. Wight, “The Place of Classics in a New University,” Didaskalos: The Journal of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers, 1:1 (1963): 28. See also J. Harris, “The Arts and Social Sciences 1939–1970,” in Harrison (ed.), History of the University of Oxford VIII, pp. 226–227. 85. Harris, “The Arts and Social Sciences 1939–1970”, p. 227. Rumours of bright students favoring the chance of studying under Asa Briggs “caused widespread alarm” in the early to mid-1960s, according to Harris. 86. Wight, “European Studies,” in Daiches, Idea of a New University, p. 110. 87. Wight, “Place of Classics in a New University”; “European Studies.” “The Place of Classics in a New University,” Didarkalos: The Journal of the Joint Association of Classical Teachers 1:1 (1963): pp. 27–36; “European Studies,” in D. Daiches (ed.), The idea of a New University: An Experiment in Sussex (London: Andre Deutsche, 1964), pp. 100–119. 88. Wight “International Legitimacy,” reprinted in Systems of States, pp. 153–173; “The Balance of Power and International Order,” in Alan James (ed.), The Bases of International Order: Essays in honour of C. A. W. Manning (London: OUP, 1973), pp. 85–115. 89. Wight, Power Politics ed. Hedley Bull and Carsten Holbraad (Leicester and London: RIIA and Leicester University Press, 1995 [1978]). 90. “Is the Commonwealth a Non-Hobbesian Institution?” Journal of Commonwealth and Comparative Politics 26:2 (1978): 119–135; “An Anatomy of International Thought,” Review of International Studies 13 (1987): 221–227; “On the Abolition of War: Observations on a Memorandum by Walter Mills,” in Harry Bauer and Elizabeth Brighi (eds.), International Relations at the LSE: A History of 75 Years (London: Millennium Publishing Group, 2003), pp. 51–60.

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91. Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (London: Leicester University Press, 1991); Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory: Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, and Mazzini ed. Gabriele Wight and Brian Porter (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 92. Dunne, Inventing International Society, p. xiii. 93. Wheare, review of British Colonial Constitutions, Times Literary Supplement 2678, May 29, 1953, p. 346. 94. R. R. Oglesby, review of Wight, Power Politics and Ogburn (ed.), Technology and International Relations, American Journal of International Law 44:3 (1950): 605. On Chatham House and Power Politics, see Cleeve to Wight, March 25, 1955, RIIA MSS 4/TOYN/18. 95. Max Beloff, “Before the War,” The Spectator, May 30, 1952, Toynbee MSS 18. 96. G. M. Gathorne-Hardy, Review of Survey of International Affairs: The World in March 1939, International Affairs 28 (July 1952): 361. 97. Elizabeth Wiskemann, “Prelude to War,” Times Literary Supplement, 2628, June 13, 1952, p. 387, Toynbee MSS 18. 98. R. H. S. Crossman, review of The World in March 1939, New Statesman and Nation May 13, 1954, Toynbee MSS 18. 99. A. K. Chesterton, “Chatham House History,” Truth, August 29, 1952, Toynbee MSS 18. 100. Waltz to Wight, March 20, 1959, Wight MSS 233 1/9. 101. Hans J. Morgenthau, “The Intellectual and Political Functions of Theory,” in his Truth and Power: Essays of a Decade 1960–1970 (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 248. This essay was first published in 1964. 102. Ibid., pp. 250–251. 103. Hans J. Morgenthau, Review of Butterfield and Wight, Diplomatic Investigations, Political Science Quarterly 82:3 (1967): 462–463. 104. Asa Briggs, “Professor Martin Wight—European Studies at Sussex,” The Times, July 19, 1972, p. 14. 105. C. A. W. M[anning], “Professor Martin Wight,” The Times, 21 July 1972, p. 14. 106. Michael Howard, “Hedley Norman Bull,” Proceedings of the British Academy 72 (1986): 396. 107. Butterfield, Raison d’état: The Relations between Morality and Government (Sussex: Martin Wight Memorial Lecture, 1975), p. 6. 108. Michael Howard, “Ethics and Power in International Politics,” in his The Causes of Wars (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983), pp. 51 and 52. 109. Donald M. MacKinnon, “Power Politics and Religious Faith,” in his Themes in Theology: The Three-Fold Cord (Edinburgh: T & T. Clark, 1987), p. 104; Elie Kedourie, “Religion and Politics: Arnold Toynbee and Martin Wight,” British Journal of International Studies 5 (1979), p. 14. 110. Famously, at the end of his international theory lectures at the LSE, Wight declared that he found “his own position shifting round the circle,” moving between Realism, Rationalism, and Revolutionism (International Theory, p. 268). 111. Alan James, “Michael Nicholson on Martin Wight: A Mind Passing in the Night,” Review of International Studies 8:2 (1982): 117.

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112. J. G. Garnett, Commonsense and the Theory of International Politics (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1984), p. 35. 113. James, “Michael Nicholson on Martin Wight,” p. 117. 114. Ibid., pp. 117–118. 115. James, “Michael Nicholson on Martin Wight,” p. 118; Garnett, Commonsense, p. 53. 116. Brian Porter, “Patterns of Thought and Practice: Martin Wight’s ‘International Theory,’ ” in Michael Donelan (ed.), The Reason of States: A Study in International Political Thought (London: Allen & Unwin, 1978), p. 69. 117. William Olson, “The Growth of a Discipline,” and Hedley Bull, “The Theory of International Politics, 1919–1969,” both in Brian Porter (ed.), The Aberystwyth Papers: International Politics, 1919–1969 (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 3–29 and pp. 30–55. The word “sophistication” is used repeatedly by Bull, p. 51. A similar process had occurred some twenty years earlier in the United States, though Kenneth Thompson was keen to point out, in 1952, that “No serious student would presume to claim that the study of international relations had arrived at the stage of an independent academic discipline” (“The Study of International Relations: A Survey of Trends and Developments,” Review of Politics 14:4 (1952): 433). 118. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” in James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics (Cambridge: Polity, 1988), pp. 63–64. 119. Many of the letters Bull sent and received are collected in Wight MSS 250. 120. This did not go unnoticed: Asa Briggs complained in correspondence that Bull had not said “more about Sussex” (Briggs to Bull, July 8, 1974, Wight MSS 250). 121. Bull, “Introduction: Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” p. 10. 122. Ibid., pp. 13–14. 123. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations,” in Wight, International Theory, p. xxiii. 124. Bull, “Introduction: Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” p. 10. 125. Ibid., p. 8; Bull, “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations,” p. xv. 126. On Grotius and the Grotian “tradition,” see Renée Jeffery, Hugo Grotius in International Thought (New York: Palgrave, 2006). 127. Roy Jones, “The English School of International Relations: A Case for Closure,” Review of International Studies 7:1 (1981): 1–13. 128. Nicholson, “The Enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 15. 129. See, inter alia, Hedley Bull, “International Theory: The Case for the Classical Approach,” World Politics 18:3 (1966): 361–377. 130. See Hidemi Suganami, “The Structure of Institutionalism: An Anatomy of British Mainstream International Relations,” International Relations 7 (1983): 2363–2381. Suganami had published a version of this argument in Japanese in 1979 (see Hidemi Suganami, “A New Narrative, a New Subject? Tim Dunne on the ‘English School,’ ” Cooperation and Conflict 35:2 (2000): 217). 131. To this list might be added, again inter alia, Robert Purnell, The Society of States: An Introduction to International Politics (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973); E. Luard, Types of International Society (Houndmills and London: Macmillan, 1976); James Mayall, Nationalism and International Society

Notes

132. 133. 134.

135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147.

148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155.

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); and Geoffrey Stern, The Structure of International Society: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London and New York: Pinter, 1995). Jones, “The English School of International Relations,” p. 5. Purnell, Society of States, p. xiii. Northedge criticized Wight because, in “Why Is There No International Theory?,” he seemed “to confound two kinds of theory: theory of explanation . . . and theory of legitimacy or justification. . . .” (The International Political System (London: Faber & Faber, 1976), p. 123). Jones, “The English School of International Relations,” pp. 9–10. Ibid., p. 11. Ibid., p. 12. Nicholson, “The Enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 22. Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 21. Sheila Grader, “The English School of International Relations: Evidence and Evaluation,” Review of International Studies 14:1 (1988): 41. Ibid., p. 34. Nicholson, “The Enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 15. Robert Keohane, Review of Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions, American Political Science Review 86:4 (1992): 1112. Dunne, Inventing International Society, p. xi. See Tonny Brems Knudsen, “Theory of Society or Society of Theorists? With Tim Dunne in the English School,” Cooperation and Conflict 35:2 (2000): 193–203 and, in the same issue, Hidemi Suganami’s “A New Narrative, a New Subject? Tim Dunne on the ‘English School’ ” (pp. 217–226), Tim Dunne’s “All Along the Watchtower: A Reply to the Critics of Inventing International Society” (pp. 227–238) as well as Suganami’s last word, “Heroes and a Villain: A Reply to Tim Dunne” (pp. 327–330). For a slightly different perspective, see Ian Hall, “Still the English Patient? Closures and Inventions in the English School,” International Affairs 77:4 (2001): 931–942. Dunne, Inventing International Society, p. xiii and p. 47. See also Suganami, A New Narrative,” p. 225, note 2. Dunne, Inventing International Society, p. 54. Hidemi Suganami, “C. A. W. Manning and the Study of International Relations,” Review of International Studies 27:1 (2001): 100–101. Thompson, Masters of International Thought, p. 51. Cornelia Navari, “English Machiavellism,” in her edited British Politics and the Spirit of the Age (Keele: Keele University Press, 1996), pp. 107–109. Seán Molloy, “The Realist Logic of International Society,” Cooperation and Conflict, 38:2 (2003): 83–99. Suganami, “C. A. W. Manning and the Study of International Relations,” p. 92, note 5 and p. 100. Carr’s special indebtedness to Mannheim is acknowledged in his Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. x.

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156. For one account of this approach to international thought, see Duncan Bell, “International Relations: The Dawn of a Historiographical Turn?” British Journal of Politics and International Relations 3:1 (2001): 115–126. 157. For a treatment of international thought that applies this method, see Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998). 158. J. W. Burrow, Whigs and Liberals: Continuity and Change in English Political Thought (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 4. 159. On this point, see Kenneth Minogue, “Method in Intellectual History: Quentin Skinner’s Foundations,” in Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context, p. 178.

Chapter 2


1. Wight, “Christian Politics,” dated, in Gabriele Wight’s hand, post-1968?, Wight MSS 52, p. 2. 2. Wight, “Our Christian Position in the Face of the Conflict between Russia and the West,” May 1948, Wight MSS 10, p. 45. 3. Wight, “Progress or Eschatology,” 10 May 1951, Wight MSS 42, p. 8. 4. Jones, “The English School of International Relations,” p. 10; Nicholson, “The Enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 18. 5. Dunne, Inventing International Society, pp. 53–54. 6. Nicholson, “The Enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 16. 7. Wight, “History’s Theme,” The Observer, October 23, 1949, p. 7. 8. Wight, Notes on “Towards an Understanding of our Present Crisis,” August 5–7, 1949, Wight MSS 11, no page no. 9. Pitt to Bull, April 2, 1974, Wight MSS 233 6/9. 10. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 29. 11. Ibid., p. 45. 12. Ibid., p. 34. 13. See Wight MSS 232. 14. The conversion of his mother to Roman Catholicism, sometime in his youth, may have had some influence. See the (recycled) draft letter from Wight to Perham, November 29, 1942, on the reverse of p. 28 of “Historic Antichrist,” Wight MSS 42, in which Wight noted that she had “turned papist a good many years ago.” 15. Wight, “Antichrist,” talk given to the Newman Society, Tunbridge Wells, February 3, 1971, Wight MSS 42, p. 8. 16. Pitt to Bull, April 2, 1974, Wight MSS 233 6/9. 17. “Encounters of Belief,” BBC broadcast transcript, March 1953, Wight MSS 15, p. 2. The programme was recorded on March 10, and broadcast on March 24. 18. Wight, Notes for lecture “Towards an Understanding of our Present Crisis,” to be given at the YWCA meeting in Geneva, August 5–7, 1949.

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19. For a discussion of this term, see Maurice Cowling, Religion and the Public Doctrine in Modern England III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. xvi. 20. MacKinnon, “Power Politics and Religious Faith,” p. 88. 21. Pitt to Bull, May 4, 1974, Wight MSS 250. 22. Wight, “Ellul and the Predicament of the Christian Intellectual,” April 24, 1953, Wight MSS 39, pp. 15–16. 23. “Encounters of Belief,” BBC broadcast transcript, March 1953, Wight MSS 15. 24. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” p. 14. 25. Gabriele Wight to Bull, April 1974, Wight MSS 250. Some of what Gabriele Wight wrote was included in Bull’s “Introduction: Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” pp. 13–14. 26. Wight, “God in an Age of Nuclear War,” February 12, 1963, Wight MSS 204. 27. Wight, “Christian Politics,” Wight MSS 52. 28. Pitt to Bull, May 4, 1974, Wight MSS 233 6/9. 29. On “The Responsible Society,” see the collected papers in Wight MSS 21. 30. D. M. MacKinnon, God the Living and the True (Westminister: Dacre Press, 1940), p. 13. 31. See “Some Reflections on the Historic Antichrist,” p. 4; “Progress or Eschatology,” pp. 18–19; “Antichrist” (1971), p. 27. 32. See, for example, note 2 on page 505 of Toynbee’s Study VII. 33. Ibid., p. 474, note 1. 34. Ibid., p. 464, note 1. 35. Ibid., p. 728, note 2 and p. 750, note 3. 36. Ibid., p. 728, note 2. 37. Ibid., p. 697, note 2. 38. Ibid., p. 429, note 2. 39. Pitt added: “He was less sloppy in his religion than any Christian I ever knew” (Pitt to Bull, April 2, 1974, Wight MSS 233 6/9). 40. Quoted in Alec R. Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), p. 213. 41. Ibid., p. 212. 42. Adrian Hastings, A History of English Christianity 1920–1985 (London: Collins, 1986), p. 225. 43. Kenneth Hylson-Smith, The Churches in England from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, vol. III (London: SCM Press, 1998), pp. 154–156. 44. Duncan Wilson, Gilbert Murray, OM 1866–1957 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), pp. 269–282. 45. Hastings, History of English Christianity, p. 289. 46. Ibid., p. 279. Hastings argues, plausibly, that the converts of the 1930s were attracted to the “authoritativeness” of Roman Catholicism: “they found in it a sure framework for spiritual progress, literary creativity and political stability, but also for an ordered and coherent view of the world to replace the increasing intellectual and ideological confusion evident outside the walls” (pp. 279–280). Dawson had converted in 1914, at the age of 25.

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47. Ibid., p. 305. 48. See, for instance, T. S. Eliot’s The Idea of a Christian Society (London: Faber & Faber, 1939). It was not only Catholic intellectuals who promoted this vision of a Christian society. The thought of V. A. Demant’s Anglo-Catholic “Christendom Group” was also marked by a rejection of secular liberalism, and a belief that Catholic dogma and the medieval social system could solve modern economic problems and restore social harmony (John Kent, William Temple: Church, State and Society in Britain 1880–1950 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 151; See also V. A. Demant’s Theology of Society: More Essays in Christian Polity (London: Faber & Faber, 1947)). 49. Clifford Green, “Introduction: Barth’s Theological Existence,” in Green (ed.), Karl Barth: Theologian of Freedom (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1991), p. 17. 50. Karl Barth, “Fiat Iustiti,” in Green (ed.), Karl Barth, p. 255. 51. Green, “Introduction: Barth’s Theological Existence,” in his edited Karl Barth, p. 39. 52. Barth, quoted in Green, “Introduction: Barth’s Theological Existence,” in his edited Karl Barth, p. 17. 53. Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 314. An alternative translation of Barth’s words may be found in Klaus Koch’s The Rediscovery of the Apocalyptic trans. Margaret Kohl (London: SCM Press, 1972), pp. 99–100: “A Christianity which is not entirely and simply and wholly eschatological has entirely and simply and wholly nothing to do with Christ.” 54. Barth, Epistle to the Romans trans. Hoskyns. 55. Niebuhr was not a Barthian, but his work may be seen to have accustomed English-speaking audiences to Barth’s message. On Niebuhr and on the ecumenical movement, see Vidler, The Church in an Age of Revolution, pp. 220–221 and pp. 257–268 respectively. 56. Hastings, History of English Christianity, p. 305. The ecumenical movement, argues Hastings, “saw themselves as Church over against the world, in a near-Barthian way, different from that of the theologically rose-tinted spectacles and natural/ supernatural assimilation of earlier years.” The fruit of the ecumenical movement of the time was the creation of the World Council of Churches in 1938. 57. Churchill used this expression on a number of occasions in 1940. See “War of the Unknown Warriors,” BBC broadcast, July 14, 1940 and “Their Finest Hour,.” Speech to the Commons, June 18, 1940, both at http://www.winstonchurchill. org/speeches.html. 58. Basil Willey, Christianity Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), pp. 7, 134. 59. V. H. H. Green, Religion at Oxford and Cambridge (London: SCM Press, 1964), p. 354. 60. Hastings, History of English Christianity, p. 335. Hastings argues that by the time Sheppard died, in 1937, the PPU was beginning to take on the appearance of “an incipient millenarian cult.” 61. Kent, Temple, p. 1.

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62. See Graham Dale, God’s Politicians: The Christian Contribution to 100 Years of Labour (London: HarperCollins, 2000), pp. 126–144. 63. Hastings, History of English Christianity, pp. 430–433. 64. Sir Alfred Zimmern, Spiritual Values and World Affairs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939), p. 24, 63. 65. Ibid., pp. 70–71. 66. Wight, “Christian Pacifism,” p. 13. 67. Both are discussed in Nicholson, “The Enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 18. 68. As Martin Ceadel has observed: “[t]he Abyssinian affair enabled pacifism to discover a distinct and confident voice because its circumstances were so clear cut: collective security meant war; pacifism meant peace” (Pacifism in Britain, 1914–1945, p. 191). 69. MacKinnon to Bull, February 5, 1974, Wight MSS 250. 70. Martin Ceadel, “The ‘King and Country’ Debate, 1933: Student Politics, Pacifism and the Dictators,” Historical Journal 22:2 (1979): 398. 71. Wight, “Christian Pacifism,” p. 21. 72. Sybil Morrison, “I Renounce War”: The Story of the Peace Pledge Union (London: Sheppard Press, 1962), p. 8. 73. Ibid., p. 14 and p. 10. 74. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” p. 3. 75. MacKinnon to Bull, April 19, 1974, Wight MSS 250. 76. Desiderius Erasmus, “Dulce Bellum Inexpertis,” in Chris Brown, Terry Nardin, and Nicholas Rengger (eds.), International Relations in Political Thought: Texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 221–231. 77. Sheppard quoted in C. H. S. Matthews, Dick Sheppard: Man of Peace (London: James Clarke & Co., no date, 1948?), p. 76. 78. Roberts, “Sheppard,” p. 335. 79. Sheppard quoted in Matthews, Dick Sheppard, p. 77. 80. Wight, “Christian Pacifism,” p. 13. 81. Dunne has argued that this represents a logical inconsistency in the argument, asking “if Wight’s pacifism does not condemn all uses of force then the question must be asked, what kind of cause is worth fighting for?” (Inventing International Society: 64–65, note 19). This is, it should be clear from the exposition I have presented, a misreading of Wight’s position: some causes he suggests might be worth fighting for, but no cause is worth killing for, because it contravenes the sixth Commandment. The problem here is not logical inconsistency, but how this might work in practice. See also Wight’s statement that: The New Testament teaches an ethic of love. It does not condemn the use of force. About the use of force, it is very realistic. It assumes a world in which force plays a regulatory part (Wight, “Development of Christian Thought on Violence,” Talk for Chaplain’s Study Group, Sussex, 1 March 1971, Wight MSS 52, p. 4).

174 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118.

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Wight, “Christian Pacifism,” p. 15. MacKinnon, “Power Politics and Religious Faith,” p. 104. Wight, “Christian Pacifism,” p. 16. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., pp. 18–19. Ibid., p. 19, p. 13 and p. 20. Ibid., p. 20 and p. 21. Harry Pitt observed that, at Haileybury, Wight had two heroes: Lenin and T. E. Lawrence. He seems to have considered the latter a “secular saint” for most his life, but his ardour for Lenin cooled as he got older (Pitt to Bull, April 2, 1974, Wight MSS 233 6/9). Wight, “Christian Pacifism,” p. 20. Ibid. Wight did discuss—and dismiss—a possible Marxist critique of the Church in Toynbee’s Study, VII, pp. 456–457, note 3. Pitt to Bull, March 2, 1974, Wight MSS 250. Ibid. Wight, “Diplomacy of Contemporary Christianity,” Wight MSS 61, pp. 18–19. Ibid., p. 19. Quoted in Dunne, Inventing International Society, note 23, p. 65; “Christian Pacifism,” p. 19. Wight to Bull, February 12, 1974, Wight MSS 250. Record of the discussion of Wight’s “Our Christian Position in the Face of the Conflict between Russia and the West,” June 4, 1948, Wight MSS 10, p. 8. Wight, International Theory, p. 254. Ibid., pp. 255–256. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., p. 256. Ibid., p. 257. Ibid., p. 257. Wight, “Christianity and Power Politics,” Wight MSS 39, p. 29. Ibid., pp. 29–31. Martin Wight, “Christian Commentary,” BBC radio talk, October 29, 1948, p. 4. Vidler to Wight, June 26, 1942, Wight MSS 45. Vidler did not publish the article, judging it too long, but suggested instead that it be turned into a small book. Wight, “Historic Antichrist,” Wight MSS 42, part IV, no page number. Ibid. Ibid, p. 20. Ibid, no page number. Wight “Some Reflections on the Historic Antichrist,” Wight MSS 43, p. 2. Wight, “Diplomacy of Contemporary Christianity,” Wight MSS 61, p. 8. Ibid., p. 3. Wight, “Our Christian Position in the Face of the Conflict between Russia and the West,” June 2–5, 1948, Wight MSS 10, p. 14.

Notes 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124.

125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134.

135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144.

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Wight to Oldham, April 27, 1946, Wight MSS 12. Wight, “Antichrist” (1971), pp. 3–4. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 30. Ibid., pp. 40–41. Wight makes reference here to, amongst other sources, Revelation xiii, which discusses the emergence of the Beast (note 4). Wight, “God in History,” pp. 33–34. Gabriele Wight to Bull, March 1, 1974, Wight MSS 233 6/9. It should be noted that Wight did outline the doctrine of Antichrist on at least one other occasion, in his 1963 lecture “God in an Age of Nuclear War,” Wight MSS 204, pp. 4–7. Wight, “Antichrist,” Wight MSS 42, p. 14/20. Ibid., p. 27. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 43. See Matthew 24:6–51; Mark 12:6–37; Luke 21:8–36. MacKinnon, “Power Politics and Religious Faith”, p. 88, 106. Wight, “Progress or Eschatology,” 10 May 1951, Wight MSS 42, p. 2. Wight to Butterfield (draft), September 2, 1950, Wight MSS 233 1/9. Wight, “The Last Trump and the Future of Life on the Earth,” undated, 1948/1949?, Wight MSS 49. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” pp. 33–34. Ibid., p. 34. Wight has been read, by Roger Epp amongst others, as an “Augustinian” (The Augustinian Moment in International Politics: Niebuhr, Butterfield, Wight and the Reclaiming of a Tradition, International Politics Occasional Research Paper no. 10 (Aberystwyth,1991)). There are, however, reasons to think that Wight would have been unhappy with that designation. In “Christian Pacifism,” as we have seen, Augustine is treated as something of a villain—as the man who legalised ‘the second-best’ and promoted a “low morality” (p. 17). In the international theory lectures, Wight denied that Augustine was a Rationalist, because he “asserted the primacy of faith over reason” and wrote that his conception of the state was that of an “age-long Borstal or approved school.” Only in his theory of war, Wight thought, did Augustine approach a Rationalist position (International Theory, p. 13, p. 161 and p. 206). Wight, “God in an Age of Nuclear War,” Wight MSS 204, p. 12. Ibid., p. 19. See Wight, “Our Christian Position in the Face of the Conflict between Russia and the West.” Wight MSS 10, p. 35. Karl Barth, Church and State (Toronto: Macmillan, 1939), p. 14; Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 30. On Barth’s “Christological Ontology,” see Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings: Versions of Transcending Humanity (London: SPCK Press, 1997), pp. 42–45. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 44. This phrase is taken from Robert C. Doyle’s Eschatology and the Shape of Christian Belief (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1999), p. 361. Ibid. Wight, “Progress or Eschatology,” p. 10. Doyle, Eschatology, pp. 365–366.

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145. Doyle, Eschatology, p. 268. 146. Wight, “Christian Commentary,” pp. 2–3. 147. Wight, “Our Christian position in the Face of Conflict between Russia and the West,” Wight MSS 10, p. 31. 148. Nicholson, “The enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 18 and p. 22. 149. Wight, “Christianity and Power Politics,” Wight MSS 39, p. 33 150. Wight, “Our Christian position in the Face of Conflict between Russia and the West,” Wight MSS 10, p. 31. 151. Wight, “Christian Politics,” Wight MSS 52, p. 4a. 152. Wight, “Progress or Eschatology,” Wight MSS 42, p. 22. 153. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 39. 154. Wight, “God in History,” p. 13. 155. Christopher Dawson, Beyond Politics (London: Sheed & Ward, 1939), p. 136, 149. Wight quoted this sentence in “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 42. 156. Gabriele Wight to Hedley Bull, March 1, 1974, Wight MSS 233 6/9. 157. Wight, “Arnold Toynbee at Eighty,” Wight MSS 47, p. 1. 158. Wight, “Antichrist” (1971), Wight MSS 42, p. 31. 159. Wight, “Christian Politics,” Wight MSS 52, pp. 4–5. This manuscript seems to have been written after 1968. On the parable of the wheat and the tares, see “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 41 and the 1971 lecture on “Antichrist,” p. 31. 160. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 33. 161. Wight, “Christian Commentary,” BBC radio broadcast, October 29, 1948, p. 3. 162. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 39. 163. “Antichrist” (1971), Wight MSS 42, p. 31. 164. Nicholson suggested that Wight believed the proper orientation of scholars to practical politics was that of “passive spectators deploring the appalling standard of play” (“The Enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 19).

Chapter 3


1. Harold Laski, “On the Study of Politics” (1926), in his The Danger of Being a Gentleman and Other Essays (London: Basis Books, 1940), p. 37. 2. Wight to Vital, November 27, 1968, Wight MSS 233 1/9. 3. Wight to Fulton, December 31, 1960, Wight MSS 233 7/9. 4. Ibid. On Barker, see Julia Stapledon, Englishness and the Study of Politics:The Social and Political Thought of Ernest Barker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 5. Michael Bentley, Modern Historiography: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 138. 6. Wight, “Christianity and the Philosophy of History,” November 17, 1954, Wight MSS 50, pp. 35, 39. 7. Wight to Butterfield, September 2, 1950, Butterfield MSS 531(iii)/W180. 8. Wight, “Provisional Classification of Living English Historians,” no date, Wight MSS 59.

Notes

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9. Wight, “The Principles of Historiographical Criticism” (1955?), Wight MSS 39, p. 2. 10. Wight, “What Makes a Good Historian?” pp. 283–284. 11. Wight, “The Principles of Historiographical Criticism” (1955?), Wight MSS 39, p. 6. 12. Ibid., pp. 11, 13. See Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean World and the Mediterranean in the Age of Philip II (London, 1971) and R. W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1993 [1953]). 13. Wight, “The Principles of Historiographical Criticism” (1955?), Wight MSS 39, pp. 15, 16. 14. Wight to Toynbee, October 13, 1954, Toynbee MSS 86. 15. Wight, “Arnold Toynbee: An Appreciation,” International Affairs 52:1 (1976): 12. 16. Wight, “Personal Portrait: Arnold Toynbee,” radio talk, November 27, 1952, Wight MSS 47, p. 4. 17. Ibid., p. 6. 18. Wight, “Arnold Toynbee: An Appreciation,” International Affairs 52:1 (1976): 11; Wight to Melko, April 21, 1969, copy in author’s possession. 19. Wight, review of Rowse, The Use of History and Collingwood, The Idea of History, International Affairs 23:4 (October 1947): 576. 20. Wight, “History and Judgment: Butterfield, Niebuhr and the Technical Historian,” The Frontier 1:8 (1950): 301. 21. Wight, “Notes for World Student Christian Federation Conference on the Meaning of History’, July 28–August 5, 1949, Wight MSS 13, p. 6. 22. Wight, “History and Judgment,” p. 313. 23. For Butterfield’s account of “tragedy,” see “The Tragic Element in Modern International Conflict,” in his History and Human Relations (London: Collins, 1951), pp. 9–36 and for Niebuhr’s, see “Christianity and Tragedy,” in his Beyond Tragedy: Essays on the Christian Interpretation of History (London: Nisbet, 1938), pp. 153–170. 24. Wight, “In the Service of Clio,” review of Powicke, Modern Historians and the Study of History, The Economist, June 25, 1955, Wight MSS 16. On Webster’s thought, historical and political, see Ian Hall, “The Thought and Practice of a Diplomatic Historian: Sir Charles Webster, 1886–1961,” International Politics 42 (2005): 470–490. 25. Wight, “Fall of an Empire,” review of Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, The Observer, February 13, 1949, p. 3. 26. Wight, “Problems of Mass Democracy,” review of Carr, The New Society, The Observer, September 23, 1951, p. 7. 27. Wight, “The Realist’s Utopia,” review of Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, The Observer, July 21, 1946, p. 3. 28. Ibid. 29. Wight, Notes from a discussion at SCM meeting at Swanwick, July 11–21, 1949 and at World’s Student Christian Federation Conference on the Meaning of History at Château de Bossy, July 28–August 5, 1949, Wight MSS 13, p. 9. 30. Wight, “Christianity and the Philosophy of History,” November 17, 1954, Wight MSS 49, p. 47.

178

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31. Wight to Butterfield, September 2, 1950, Butterfield MSS 531(iii)/W180. 32. For Webster’s views on historiography, see “Fifty Years’ of Change in Historical Teaching and Research,” in his The Art and Practice of Diplomacy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 133–151. 33. Lord Acton, “The Study of History,” in his Essays in the Study and Writing of History ed. J. Rufus Fears (Indianapolis: LibertyClassics, 1986), p. 533. 34. Geoffrey Elton, The Practice of History (London: Fontana, 1987 [1967]), p. 71. 35. Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York: Norton, 1965 [1931]), p. 105. 36. Butterfield, History and Human Relations, p. 165 and The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 103. 37. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 1. 38. Webster, “Fifty Years’ of Change in Historical Teaching and Research,” p. 142. 39. Toynbee, Study of History, I, pp. 5, 2, 4. 40. Ibid., pp. 6, 7. 41. Ibid., p. 13. 42. Ibid., pp. 17–44. 43. Ibid., p. 23. 44. Ibid., p. 49. 45. Wight, “Arnold Toynbee: An Appreciation,” p. 11. 46. Wight to Pitt, July 29, 1964, Wight MSS 233 7/9. 47. Wight, “Devising a History Syllabus,” talk given at Reading, February 28, 1963, Wight MSS 50. 48. Wight to Melko, October 13, 1967, copy in author’s possession. 49. Wight to Pitt, July 29, 1964, Wight MSS 233 7/9. 50. Ibid. 51. “Wight, “The School of European Studies,” October 1968, Wight MSS 49, p. 4. 52. “Wight to Pitt, July 29, 1964, Wight MSS 233 7/9. 53. “Wight, “European Studies,” in Daiches (ed.), The Idea of a New University, p. 110. 54. “Ibid., p. 110. 55. “Wight to Pitt, July 29, 1964, Wight MSS 233 7/9. 56. “See, for example, “Western Values in International Relations,” pp. 91, 94. 57. “The States-System of Hellas,” pp. 46–72. 58. Toynbee, Study of History, I, p. 47. 59. Wight, Letter on “Counsels of Hope,” Times Literary Supplement 2727, May 7, 1954, p. 297. 60. Wight, “What Makes a Good Historian?” p. 284. 61. This point arose in a letter to Maurice Keens-Soper in which Wight reported a conversation with Hedley Bull about history. Bull, he complained, had turned out “to be a positivist, at least in this matter” (August 9, 1971?, Wight MSS 233 6/9). 62. On “realism” and empiricism, see International Theory, pp. 17–18.

Notes

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63. R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History ed. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), pp. 249–282. See also Michael Oakeshott, Experience and its Modes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1933). 64. Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 133. 65. Butterfield, Christianity and History, p. 20. 66. Wight, “The Tragedy of History,” review of Butterfield, History and Human Relations, The Observer, September 2, 1951, p. 7 67. Wight, “History’s Theme,” The Observer, October 23, 1949, p. 7. 68. Wight, Review of Butterfield, Man on His Past, The Economist, November 2, 1955, Wight MSS 16. 69. Wight to Butterfield, September 2, 1950, Butterfield MSS 531(iii)/W180. 70. Wight, “What Makes a Good Historian?” p. 284. 71. Wight, “United Europe: The Historical Background,” Lecture given at the Institute for Education, Oxford, May 1963, Wight MSS 5, p. 1. 72. Gordon Graham, The Shape of the Past: A Philosophical Approach to History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 73. Wight, “Christianity and the Philosophy of History,” Talk at Bristol, November 17, 1954, Wight MSS 50, p. 1. 74. Wight, “Fortune’s Banter,” Wight MSS 1/3, p. 35. 75. Wight, “Progress or Eschatology,” May 10, 1951, Wight MSS 42, pp. 14, 15. 76. Butterfield, Christianity and History, p. 65. 77. Wight, “New History in Old Forms,” review of Bronowski and Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, The Economist, December 3, 1960, p. 1021. 78. Wight, “Does Christianity Care For the World and How?” no date, Wight MSS 1/3, no page. Butterfield argued: “[t]he technique of historical study itself demands that we shall look upon each generation as, so to speak, an end in itself, a world of people existing in their own right” (Christianity and History, p. 65). 79. On the “growth of intellectual charity” brought about by historical study, see Wight, “Christianity and the Philosophy of History,” November 17, 1954, Wight MSS 49, p. 48. 80. Wight, “Antichrist,” Wight MSS 43, p. 4. 81. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 38. 82. Wight, “Christianity and the Philosophy of History,” November 17, 1954, Wight MSS 49, p. 26. 83. Butterfield, Christianity and History, p. 22. 84. Dawson, Beyond Politics, p. 135. 85. Ibid., pp. 133–134. 86. Wight, “Antichrist,” Wight MSS 43, p. 4. In “God in History” (1951), Wight also uses this idea of peripeteia to describe the pattern of secular history. 87. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 37. 88. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 26. 89. Wight, “Historic Antichrist,” Wight MSS 42, part IV. 90. Ibid.

180 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

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Notes

Wight, “Antichrist,” Wight MSS 43, p. 28. Wight, “Historic Antichrist,” Wight MSS 42, part IV. Wight, “Personal Portrait: Arnold Toynbee,” p. 4. Wight, International Theory, p. 6. Toynbee, Study of History, I, p. 157. Ibid., p. 173. Wight, “Personal Portrait: Arnold Toynbee,” p. 3. On the Spengler problem in Toynbee’s writings, see W. H. McNeill, “Toynbee’s Life and Thought: Some Unresolved Questions,” in C. T. McIntire & M. Perry (eds.), Toynbee Reappraisals (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), p. 35. Toynbee called Frazer “the greatest of living comparative anthropologists” and made a number of references to his The Golden Bough (Toynbee, Study of History, p. 426). Toynbee, “What the Historian Does,” Toynbee MSS 1; Toynbee to Darbishire, August 19, 1912, Toynbee MSS 80. H. A. Cronne, “Edward Augustus Freeman, 1832–1892,” History 27:1 (1943): 79, 83. J. W. Thompson, A History of Historical Writing: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries II (New York: Macmillan, 1942), p. 317. John Burrow and Stefan Collini, “The Clue to the Maze: Political Science and the Lessons of History,” in Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics: A Study in Nineteeth Century Intellectual History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 220–221. E. A. Freeman, “Historical Cycles,” in his Historical Essays 4th series (London: Macmillan, 1892), pp. 249–250. E. A. Freeman, “The Unity of History,” in his Comparative Politics (London: Macmillan, 1873), p. 303. Toynbee, Study I, p. 339. This was, however, exactly what Freeman meant. The “oneness” of history, he wrote in “The Unity of History,” lay in its “long chains of events bound together in the direct relations of cause and effect” (p. 333). Toynbee, Study I, p. 339. Ibid., p. 341. Quoted in Toynbee, Study I, p. 341. Freeman, “The Unity of History,” p. 337. Ibid., p. 303. Wight, “Historic Antichrist,” Wight MSS 42, p. 20. Wight, “Germany,” pp. 313, 320, 323. Wight, “Arnold Toynbee at Eighty,” September 1969, Wight MSS 47, p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. In his comments on volume VII of the Study Wight turned a number of Toynbee’s weapons on their creator. See especially the attack on the identification of the “Higher Religions” with Jungian psychological types, in which Wight wielded the idea of the “illusion of finality,” in “The Crux for a Historian brought up in the Christian Tradition,” Study of History, VII, pp. 739–741.

Notes

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117. Toynbee, Study of History, VII, p. 506. 118. Wight, “History and Judgment,” p. 308. 119. Wight, “Christianity and the Philosophy of History,” November 17, 1954, Wight MSS 49, p. 44. 120. Ibid., p. 50. 121. Ibid. 122. Wight, “What makes a Good Historian?”, p. 284. 123. Wight, “Christianity and the Philosophy of History,” November 17, 1954, Wight MSS 49, p. 51. 124. Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 17. 125. Ibid., p. 18. 126. Wight, “Fortune’s Banter,” pp. 39–40. 127. Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 17. 128. Wight, “Fortune’s Banter,” p. 46. 129. Ibid. 130. Ibid., p. 41. 131. Ibid., p. 43. 132. Ibid., p. 35. 133. Wight, “Christian Politics,” Wight MSS 52, p. 10. 134. Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History (London: G. Bell & Sons, 1949), p. 26 (quoted in Wight, “History and Judgment,” p. 303). 135. Wight, “History and Judgment,” p. 309. 136. Ibid. 137. Wight, “God in History,” BBC radio talk, October 29, 1948, copy in author’s possession courtesy of Mr Daniel Young. 138. Wight to Butterfield, September 2, 1950, Butterfield MSS 531(iii)/W180. 139. Wight, “Plato to Dante,” Summer 1963, Wight MSS 124, p. 64. 140. Quoted in Collingwood, Idea of History, p. 148. 141. Wight to Pitt, July 29, 1964, Wight MSS 233 7/9. 142. Nicholson, “The Enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 21. 143. Wight, “History and International Understanding,” no date, Wight MSS 39, p. 1. See also Toynbee, “Poetical truth and scientific truth in the light of history,” International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 20:3 (1949): 143–152. 144. Wight, “History and Judgment,” p. 312. 145. Wight, Notes from a discussion at SCM meeting at Swanwick, July 11–21, 1949 and at World’s Student Christian Federation Conference on the Meaning of History at Château de Bossy, July 28– August 5, 1949, Wight MSS 13, p. 22. 146. Wight, “History and Judgment,” p. 312. 147. Wight, “Christianity and the Philosophy of History,” November 17, 1954, Wight MSS 50, p. 49. 148. Ibid. 149. Jones, “The English School of International Relations,” p. 10. 150. Wight, “History and Judgment,” p. 312. 151. Ibid., pp. 303, 304. 152. Ibid., p. 307.

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Chapter 4


1. Wight, quoted in Toynbee, Study VII, p. 543, note 1. 2. There is a scrap of evidence amidst his papers that indicates that Wight was a member of the Labour Party in the late 1930s and perhaps the early 1940s. See Brain (?) to Wight, no date, Wight MSS 209a. 3. For evidence of this, see Wight, “Our Christian Position in the Face of Conflict between Russia and the West,” June 2–5, 1948, Wight MSS 10, where he argued that “[o]ne of the biggest indictments of the Church in the United States and the British Empire . . . is its failure to eradicate the colour bar”(pp. 22–23) or The Power Struggle within the United Nations’ (1956), where he expressed his approval of the anti-apartheid campaigner Michael Scott’s “convictions about South African racialism” (p. 256). 4. Wight, “Christian Pacifism,” pp. 18–19. 5. Ibid., p. 20. 6. Ibid., p. 20. 7. Ibid., p. 20. 8. Richard Dyke, letter on “Christian Pacifism,” Theology, 195 (September 1936), pp. 175–176. 9. Wight’s letter on “Christian Pacifism,” Theology, 198, (December 1936), pp. 367–368. 10. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism: A Study (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965 [1902]). 11. Sidney and Beatrice Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation?, Special Limited Edition (London: University Labour Federation, no date). Wight’s copy is dated October 31, 1936. His copy of Leon Trotsky’s La Révolution Trahie, trans. Victor Serge (Paris: Grasset, no date), is dated April 1940. Both are in the author’s possession. 12. James, “Michael Nicholson on Martin Wight,” p. 120. 13. In author’s possession. 14. See, for example, Wight’s reference to “bourgeois liberalism” in “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 27. 15. Wight, “How to Vote, 1950,” Wight MSS 62, p. 1. 16. Wight, Development of the Legislative Council, p. 23; Gold Coast Legislative Council, p. 207. 17. Wight et al., Attitude to Africa, pp. 7, 33. 18. “Membership List, January 1952,” Wight MSS 228. 19. Wight, “How to Vote, 1950,” Wight MSS 62, p. 1. 20. Ibid., p. 2. 21. Ibid., p. 3. 22. Ibid., p. 4. 23. Ibid., p. 4. 24. Pitt to Wight, June 7, 1955, Wight MSS 233 7/9. 25. Wight, “Brutus in Foreign Policy,” p. 301.

Notes 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38.

39.

40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

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Wight to Melko, December 15, 1964, in author’s possession. Plato, The Republic, trans. Bloom, 361e–362a, p. 39. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 41. Wight, “War and International Politics,” p. 585. Wight, review of Dawson, Understanding Europe, International Affairs 29:3 (July 1953): p. 341. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 27. Ibid., p. 30. Ibid., pp. 35–36. Ibid., p. 36. For an introduction to some similar arguments, see Michael Burleigh, Earthly Powers: Religion and Politics in Europe from the French Revolution to the Great War (London: HarperCollins, 2005). Arnold Toynbee, “The Idolatry of Nationalism,” The Listener, 4:96, November 26, 1930, pp. 873–874. Arnold Toynbee, “Post-War Paganism versus Christianity,” The Listener, 17:419, January 20, 1937, p. 124. Jacques Maritain, Scholasticism and Politics (London: The Centenary Press, 1938), pp. 10–11, 13. See also Dawson’s Religion and the Modern State (London: Sheed & Ward, 1935). See Wight, review of Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, in International Affairs 31:3 (1955): pp. 336–337. Wight did make a few criticisms, notably concerning Voegelin’s use of the “Gnosticism” to describe the “essence of modernity”— he thought this the “wrong word for a real thing,” but acknowledged that it was “difficult to find another” (p. 337). Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), p. 163. Ibid., pp. 118, 129. Richard Crossman, review of Survey of International Affairs: The World in March 1939, New Statesman and Nation, May 31, 1954, Toynbee MSS 18. Wight, “Germany,” p. 299. Wight, Draft review of Beryl Smalley (ed.), Trends in Medieval Thought, dated “early 1966,” Wight MSS 59, pp. 2–3. Wight, “Christian Pacifism,” p. 16. Wight addressed moral dualism at length in International Theory, pp. 245–251. Wight, Power Politics, p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. Stubbs quoted by Wight, Power Politics, p. 9. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 21. Donald MacKinnon, “ ‘Philosophy of History’ and the Problems of International Relationships,” RIIA BCTIP Papers 3, p. 4. Butterfield, “Notes on discussion of Martin Wight’s paper on ‘Why is there no International Policy [sic]?’ ” Butterfield MSS 336, p. 2. Wight, “Christianity in the Conflict between Russia and the West,” Wight MSS 10, pp. 40–41.

184

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Notes

54. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, The International Anarchy, 1904–1914 (London: Allen & Unwin, 1926). 55. Harold J. Laski, Preface to the third edition of Grammar of Politics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1934), no page. 56. Toynbee, “Economics versus Politics,” The Listener 4:95, November 19, 1930, p. 825. 57. Toynbee, Economics and Politics in International Life (Nottingham: University College Nottingham, 1930), p. 6. 58. Toynbee, “Economics versus Politics,” p. 825; “The Idolatry of Nationalism,” pp. 873–874. 59. Toynbee, Study of History IV, p. 261. 60. Toynbee, “Post-War Paganism versus Christianity,” pp. 123–124. 61. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 37. 62. The influence of Henri Bergson’s thought on Toynbee is not well appreciated; indeed, it is one of the main failings of McNeill’s biography that this connection is not examined in greater detail, not least because, as McNeill himself points out, Toynbee’s encounter with the Frenchman’s work prompted his final break from Anglicanism (Arnold Toynbee: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 36). For a partial corrective, see Marvin Perry, Arnold Toynbee and the Crisis of the West (Washington: University Press of America, 1982). 63. Wight, “Triangles and Duals,” in Systems of States, pp. 192–193. 64. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 43. 65. Wight, “Eastern Europe,” p. 226. 66. Ibid., p. 226. 67. Ibid., p. 227. 68. Ibid., p. 229. 69. Ibid., p. 229. 70. Ibid., p. 229. 71. Wight, The Gold Coast Legislative Council, p. 178. 72. Lewis et al., Attitude to Africa, p. 31. 73. Toynbee first put this argument in The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilizations, 2nd ed. (London: Constable, 1923). His claim was that the “indigenous civilizations” of the “Near-East” and “Middle-East” had “partly or wholly broken down” under Western influence (p. 5), resulting in the creation of states, especially Turkey, that aped Western political institutions that lacked the same cultural restraints and were therefore more prone to bad government and aggressive foreign policies. The argument was repeated in many subsequent publications, especially in The World and the West (London: Oxford University Press, 1953). 74. Lewis et al., Attitude to Africa, pp. 32–33. 75. Ibid., p. 39. 76. Ibid., pp. 11–12. 77. Wight’s unhappiness at the “rapidity” with which the British Empire had been dismantled is patent in his discussion of the so-called “blue water fallacy”— “colonies across the sea were examples of wicked colonialism, while colonies held

Notes

78. 79. 80.

81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86.

87.

88. 89.

90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

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in territorial contiguity (like Russia’s) escaped censure”—in “International Legitimacy” (1971). See Systems of States, p. 171. Wight, “Brutus in Foreign Policy,” p. 308. Ibid., pp. 307–308. There are other examples to be found elsewhere in Wight’s work. In “International Legitimacy” (1971), for instance, he highlighted another “paradox about the principle of national self-determination: that the more passionately it has been asserted, the less has it led to impartial popular consultation” (Systems of States, p. 165). Wight, “Diplomacy of Contemporary Christianity,” no date, but 1939–1945, Wight MSS 61, pp. 18–19. David Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 5–6. Carl J. Friedrich, Totalitarian Dictatorship and Autocracy (New York: Praeger, 1966 [1956]). Halberstam, Totalitarianism and the Modern Conception of Politics, pp. 6–7. See Burleigh, Earthly Powers, pp. 1–12. Wight clearly had a particular sympathy with the argument of J. L. Talmon’s The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955), which is cited on a number of occasions in International Theory (see, for example, p. 10). Crossman, review of Toynbee & Ashton-Gwatkin (eds.), Survey of International Affairs: The World in March 1939, New Statesman and Nation, May 31, 1954, Toynbee MSS 18. Wight, “How to Vote, 1950,” Wight MSS 62, p. 4. Crossman, review of Toynbee & Ashton-Gwatkin (eds.), Survey of International Affairs: The World in March 1939, New Statesman and Nation, May 31, 1954, Toynbee MSS 18. Wight, “Eastern Europe,” pp. 220, 223. Ibid., p. 260. Ibid., p. 229. Wight, “Germany,” p. 295. Ibid., pp. 296–297. Ibid., p. 297. Ibid., p. 298. Ibid., p. 300. Ibid., p. 301. Ibid., p. 301, note 3. In one of the passages cited, Toynbee wrote: “[t]he familiar barbarians of the antique type may have been effectively wiped out of existence. . . . [b]ut this unprecedented triumph will have profited us nothing if the barbarians . . . have stolen a march on us by re-emerging in our midst. . . . Are we not seeing a host of neobarbarian war-bands being recruited nowadays under our eyes in one country after another . . . Black shirts, and not black skins, were assuredly the badges of barbarism in the war that was waged in Africa in 1935–6 [i.e. the Italian invasion of Abyssinia]” (Study of History, V, p. 335).

186 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112.

113. 114. 115.

116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137.

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Wight, “Germany,” p. 302. Wight, “Historic Antichrist,” Wight MSS 42, p. 20. Wight, “Antichrist” (1971), Wight MSS 42, p. 4. Wight, “Germany,” pp. 305–307. Ibid., p. 307. Ibid., pp. 309–311. Ibid., pp. 311–312. Ibid., p. 316. Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., pp. 321, 323. Ibid., p. 317. Ibid., p. 347. See also the discussion of Hitler’s idea of fortune in “Fortune’s Banter,” Wight MSS 1/3, pp. 16–17. Crossman, review of Toynbee & Ashton-Gwatkin (eds.), Survey of International Affairs: The World in March 1939, New Statesman and Nation, May 31, 1954, Toynbee MSS 18. Wight, “Germany,” pp. 319–320. Ibid., p. 348. Wight argued that “history is a spiritual drama” in his review of Butterfield’s Christianity and History in The Observer (“History’s Theme,” October 23, 1949, p. 7). Wight, “Germany,” p. 305. Wight, “The Balance of Power,” pp. 515–516. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 43. Wight, “The Communist Theory of International Relations,” October 1962, RIIA BCTIP MSS 4, p. 1. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 25. Ibid., p. 24. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 85. Ibid., p. 91. Wight, “War and Peace,” May 1963, Wight MSS 204, p. A/37. Wight, “Christian Politics,” Wight MSS 52, p. 1. Ibid., p. 3. Ibid., p. 1. Wight quoted in Toynbee, Study of History, VII, p. 543, note 1. Wight, “Christian Politics,” Wight MSS 52, p. 2. Wight to Butterfield, September 2, 1950, Butterfield MSS 531(iii)/W180. Wight in Toynbee, Study of History, VII, pp. 456–467, note 3. Wight, “Christian Commentary,” p. 5. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 36. Wight, “Western Values,” p. 122. Wight, International Theory, p. 257. Ibid., p. 256. In a review of Friedrich Meinecke’s Machiavellism in 1958, Wight castigated what he thought of as the German “heresy of idealizing State power and

Notes

138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

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fatalistically abdicating personal responsibility” (International Affairs 34:1 (1958): p. 69). Wight, “War and Peace,” May 1963, Wight MSS 204, p. A/28. Ibid., pp. A29/30. Ibid., p. A/31. Wight, “Christianity and Power Politics,” Wight MSS 39, pp. 27–28. Wight, “The Disunity of Mankind,” dated “1953/1954?,” Wight MSS 15, p. 3. Wight, “Christianity in the Conflict between Russia and the West,” Wight MSS 10, p. 20.

Chapter 5

Systems of States

1. Wight, Power Politics, p. 8. 2. Bull, “Introduction: Martin Wight and the Study of International Relations,” p. 10. 3. Dunne, Inventing International Society, pp. 52, 62. 4. Wight to Kedourie, November 21, 1961, Wight MSS 233 3/9. 5. Dunne, Inventing International Society, p. 52. Manning recalled that he had been shocked at Wight’s questioning of the subject of International Relations and the manner in which he thought it should be studied (Manning to Bull, February 5, 1974, Wight MSS 250). 6. Nicholson, “The Enigma of Martin Wight,” p. 21. 7. James, “Michael Nicholson on Martin Wight,” p. 117; Jones, “The English School of International Relations,” p. 10; Dunne, Inventing International Society, p. 56. 8. Georg Schwarzenberger, Power Politics: A Study in International Society 2nd ed. (New York: Praeger, 1951 [1941]), pp. 6, 7, 8. 9. Suganami, “C. A. W. Manning and the Study of International Relations,” p. 99. 10. Herbert Butterfield, “Notes on How Far Can and Should the Subject of International Relations be Included in the Curriculum for Undergraduate Students of History?” Talk to the Fourth Conference on the University Teaching of International Relations, LSE, 6–7 January 1949, Butterfield MSS 130/2, pp. 2, 3. 11. Ibid., p. 4. Wight, “What is International Relations?” Wight MSS 112, p. 1. The paper is dated. 12. Summer 1950 in Gabriele Wight’s hand. 13. It should be noted that Butterfield was not entirely consistent on this point. In Christianity and History and elsewhere, he implied that what he called “historical thinking” could aid political practice, but he never laid out in detail quite what this entailed. See Ian Hall, “History, Christianity and Diplomacy: Sir Herbert Butterfield and International Relations,” Review of International Studies 28 (2002), especially pp. 727–736. 14. Wight, “What is International Relations?” Wight MSS 112, pp. 4, 5. 15. Ibid., pp. 4–5.

188 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

42. 43.

44. 45.

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Notes

Wight, “What is International Relations?” Wight MSS 112, p. 6. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., p. 13. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 15. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 10. Ibid., pp. 23–24. Ibid., pp. 3–4. Wight, “History and Judgment,” p. 305. Ibid., pp. 305–306. Ibid., p. 306. See, for example, the argument that “Men pay for the increase of their power with alienation from that over which they exercise that power” (Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment trans. John Cumming (London: Verso, 1997 [1944]), p. 9. Wight, “History and Judgment,” p. 306. Wight, Notes of discussion at SCM meeting at Swanwick, July 11–21, 1949, Wight MSS 13, p. 9. Wight, “History and the Study of International Relations,” Wight MSS 112, p. 3. Wight would have been familiar with the work of C. G. Jung, if not at first-hand, through Toynbee’s Study of History, volumes VII to X of which were deeply influenced by his thought. It is tempting to speculate that this qualifier marks a certain degree of sympathy with Toynbee’s use of Jung, though probably not with Jung’s own thought. Wight, International Theory, p. 21. Wight, “Fortune’s Banter,” p. 33. Wight, “History and the Study of International Relations,” no date, probably 1950s, Wight MSS 112, p. 7. Wight, “History and the Study of International Relations,” Wight MSS 112, p. 1. Ibid., p. 4. Wight, “What Is International Relations?” Wight MSS 101, p. 25. Wight, “What Makes a Good Historian?” p. 284. The book of A. J. P. Taylor to which Wight referred was The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, 1848–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971 [1954]). Wight, “Why is There No International Theory?” p. 32. Ibid., p. 33. Hedley Bull was particularly perplexed, observing in his “International Relations as an Academic Pursuit” (1972): “I do not accept Martin Wight’s equation” (Kai Alderson and Andrew Hurrell (eds.), Hedley Bull on International Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 253). Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 33. Wight, “What Is International Relations?”, Wight MSS 101, p. 8.

Notes

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189

46. Wight, “Eastern Europe,” p. 222. 47. In lecture notes on the “Origins of World War II,” Wight observed that “Hitler himself had a sense of history [. . .] was an amateur historian and had a consistent subjective notion of his historical role” (Notes dated November 16, 1963, Wight MSS 6, p. 37). 48. Wight, review of Rowse, The Use of History and Collingwood, The Idea of History, International Affairs 23:4 (October 1947), p. 576. 49. Wight, review of Petrie, Diplomatic History 1713–1933, International Affairs 23:4 (October 1947): p. 574. 50. Wight, review of Rowse, The Use of History and Collingwood, The Idea of History, p. 576. 51. Wight, “Brutus in Foreign Policy,” p. 304. 52. Wight to Fulton, December 8, 1960, Wight MSS 233 7/9. 53. Ibid. 54. Wight, “European Studies,” in Daiches (ed.), The Idea of a New University, p. 101. 55. Ibid., pp. 102–3. 56. Ibid., p. 104. 57. Wight, “The Place of Classics in a New University,” Didaskalos I (1963), p. 29. 58. Wight, “God in an Age of Nuclear War,” February 12, 1963, Wight MSS 204, p. 28. 59. Wight, Power Politics, p. 9. 60. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 33; Power Politics, p. 68. 61. Wight, Power Politics, p. 11. 62. Ibid., pp. 8–9. 63. Ibid., p. 11. 64. Wight, Power Politics, p. 12. 65. Wight, “The Origins of Our States-System: Chronological Limits,” pp. 129–152. 66. Wight, “International Institutions: Introduction and Conciliar Movement,” Wight MSS 122, p. 16. 67. Ibid, pp. 29 and 33; “The Origins of Our States-System: Geographical Limits,” Systems of States, pp. 111–112. 68. Ibid., p. 132. 69. Ibid., p. 133. 70. Ibid., p. 151. 71. Ibid., p. 129. 72. Ibid., p. 152. 73. Molloy, “The Realist Logic of International Society,” p. 89. 74. See, for example, Niebuhr’s Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (New York: Scribner’s, 1952) or Butterfield’s “The Tragic Element in Modern International Conflict,” in his History and Human Relations, pp. 9–36. 75. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 43. 76. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 105. 77. Wight Power Politics, p. 8.

190

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Notes

78. Wight, Power Politics, p. 11. 79. For a “structuralist” account of international relations, see Barry Buzan, Charles Jones and Richard Little, The Logic of Anarchy: Neorealism to Structural Realism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 80. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 81. 81. The phrase is used in “Christian Pacifism,” p. 19. 82. Wight, Power Politics, p. 7. 83. Ibid., p. 34. 84. There is no evidence that Wight ever read Schmitt’s work, despite his exploration of National Socialist international thought in the Survey of International Affairs. For Schmitt’s discussion of enmity, see The Concept of the Political trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 85. Wight, Power Politics, pp. 34–35. 86. Sir Norman Angell, The Unseen Assassins (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1932). 87. Wight, Power Politics, p. 35. 88. Hamilton, quoted in Wight, Power Politics, pp. 35–36. 89. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 102. 90. Ibid., p. 102. 91. Ibid., p. 103. 92. Wight, “De systematibus civitatum,” in Systems of States, p. 22. 93. Wight, Power Politics, p. 8. 94. Ibid., p. 9. 95. Bull, “Introduction,” in Systems of States, p. 17. 96. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 48. 97. Ibid., p. 106. 98. One of Jones’ objections to the “English school” was what he perceived to be their tendency to assume that all states, by virtue of their sovereignty, could be considered in the same terms. He argued: “states do not conform to one model of statehood . . . .[m]any states differ from one another fundamentally” (“The English School of lnternational Relations,” p. 5). 99. Wight called “Minor Powers” “Small Powers” in the first edition of Power Politics. 100. Wight, Power Politics, p. 13. 101. Ibid., pp. 30, 40. 102. Ibid., p. 47. 103. Wight, “The Origins of our States-System: Geographical Limits,” Systems of States, p. 114. 104. Wight, Power Politics, p. 13. 105. Ibid., p. 51. 106. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 43. 107. Wight et al., Attitude to Africa, pp. 15, 20; “Germany,” Survey, pp. 295–305. 108. Wight, “The Power Struggle within in the United Nations,” p. 249. 109. Ibid., p. 257. 110. Wight, “War and International Politics,” p. 585. 111. Ibid.

Notes 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136.

137.

191

Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., pp. 86–87. Ibid., p. 92. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 24. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 88. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 24. Wight, draft review of Smalley, Trends in Medieval Thought, Wight MSS 59, pp. 2–3. Wight, “Some Reflections on the Historic Antichrist,” Wight MSS 43, p. 36. Wight, Power Politics, p. 27. He repeated this observation again in “De systematibus civitatum”: “Most states-systems have ended in a universal empire, which has swallowed all the states of the system” (Systems of States, p. 43). Wight, Power Politics, p. 33. See “Table I. Universal States” in Toynbee, Study of History VI, p. 327. These alternatives are discussed in Toynbee, “The International Outlook,” International Affairs 23:4 (October 1947): pp. 463–476. Wight, Power Politics, p. 63. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” pp. 22–23. Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 74. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 23. Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 75. See Dante, Monarchy ed. Prue Shaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?”, p. 22; “Western Values,” pp. 92–93. See the lecture notes on “Plato to Dante,” Summer 1963, Wight MSS 124, p. 3. Wight, “Antichrist,” Wight MSS 43, p. 37. Wight, “Christianity in the Conflict between Russia and the West,” Wight MSS 10, p. 30. Wight, “God in an Age of Nuclear War,” February 12, 1963, Wight MSS 204, pp. 29–30. Wight, “What Is International Relations?”, Wight MSS 112, p. 6. Ibid. Wight, “Tract for the Nuclear Age,” The Observer, April 23, 1967, Wight MSS 14. See Raymond Aron, Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations trans. Richard Howard and Annette Baker Fox (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966). Ibid.

Chapter 6 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

●


Wight, “Fortune’s Banter,” Wight MSS 1/3, p. 7. Bull, “Society and Anarchy in International Relations,” p. 35, note 1. Wight, “War and International Politics,” p. 585. Bull, “Society and Anarchy in International Relations,” p. 35. See Bull, The Anarchical Society, chapter 1.

192

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6. Kai Alderson and Andrew Hurrell, “Preface” to their edited Hedley Bull on International Society (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. vii. 7. Bull, “Society and Anarchy in International Relations,” p. 44. 8. Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 13. 9. Ibid., p. 15. 10. Wight, “Comments on Hedley Bull’s Paper ‘The Grotian Conception of International Relations’ ” RIIA BCTIP MSS 1, pp. 1–2. 11. Wight, “International Institutions: Introduction and Conciliar Movement,” Wight MSS 122, p. 3. 12. Wight, Power Politics, pp. 12, 64, and 67. 13. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 30. 14. Suganami, “C. A. W. Manning and the Study of International Relations,” p. 101. 15. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations,” p. xv. Bull wrote: “As one of the factors causing him to move closer to the Grotian perspective after he came to the London School of Economics, I should not myself discount the influence upon him of Professor Manning, despite the great contrasts in their respective approaches to the subject.” 16. According to Harry Pitt, Wight had taught history at Haileybury with a similar “conceptual, or chronological, framework” (Pitt to Bull, April 2, 1974, Wight MSS 233 6/9). 17. Wight, “Elements of International Relations,” Wight MSS 101, p. 11. 18. Toynbee, Study of History, p. 45. 19. Wight, “International Institutions: Introduction and Conciliar Movement,” Wight MSS 122, p. 2. 20. The word “ecumenical”—always spelt by Toynbee “oecumenical”—is particularly characteristic (see, for example, Toynbee, Study of History, III, p. 212). 21. Toynbee, Study of History, I, p. 10. 22. Wight, “International Institutions: Introduction and Conciliar Movement,” Wight MSS 122, p. 3–4. 23. Ibid., p. 6. 24. Ibid., pp. 7–10. 25. Toynbee, Study of History, I, p. 17. 26. Ibid., p. 150. 27. Ibid., p. 157. 28. Ibid., p. 160. 29. Toynbee included in this category the “Polynesians and the Esquimaux [sic] and the Nomads” (Study of History, III, p. 2). 30. Toynbee, Study of History, III, p. 155. 31. Ibid., p. 134. 32. Ibid., pp. 267–269 and 299–310. 33. Toynbee, Study of History, I, p. 37. 34. Wight, “Western Values,” p. 126. 35. Wight, “The States-System of Hellas,” in Systems of States, p. 61. 36. The notion of mimesis was particularly important in Toynbee’s argument. See especially Study of History, III, pp. 217–248.

Notes 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

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193

Wight, Power Politics, p. 65. Wight, “The Balance of Power and International Order,” p. 97. Wight, Power Politics, pp. 64–65. Ibid., p. 63. Ibid., pp. 63–64. Ibid., p. 64. Ibid., p. 66. Ibid., p. 67. Ibid., p. 67. See Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, pp. 287–308 and Nationalism and After (London: Macmillan, 1945). Wight, Power Politics, p. 67. Ibid., p. 67. Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 304. Wight, Power Politics, pp. 67–68. Wight, “Elements of International Relations,” Wight MSS 101, p. 43. Wight, International Theory, p. 14. Wight, “Christianity and Power Politics,” Wight MSS 39, p. 7. Ibid., p. 8. Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 30. Ibid., p. 32. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid., pp. 34, 35. Ibid., pp. 36–37. Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 33. Wight, “Western Values,” p. 130. Wight, “Natural Law” (1960), Wight MSS 100, p. 1. See also the argument, in “Why Is There No International Theory?” concerning the effort by Wolff and Vattel to “subjectivize” the “doctrine of natural law” and transform it into a “doctrine of autonomy of the national will, a counterpart of the theory of the rights of man” (p. 30). Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 43. In the Study, Wight wrote of “an emancipated sovereign Reason” that “burst forth in the debacle of Christendom with Giordano Bruno, Bacon, Descartes and Hobbes” (Quoted in Toynbee, Study of History, VII, p. 474, note 1). Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 44. Wight, review of Voegelin, New Science of Politics, International Affairs 31:3 (July 1955): p. 337. Wight, “Natural Law,” Wight MSS 100, p. 2. Wight considered the War Crimes Tribunal in a little more depth in the revised Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 111. Wight, “Natural Law,” Wight MSS 100, p. 2; See also Four Seminal Thinkers, pp. 32, 35. Wight, “Western Values,” p. 123. Ibid., p. 124. Ibid., pp. 125–126. Ibid., p. 124.

194 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105. 106.

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Notes

Wight, “Western Values,” p. 128. Ibid., pp. 130–131. Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 37. Wight, “Western Values,” p. 97. Buzan, From International to World Society?, pp. 167–176. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 111. See Wight, “An Anatomy of International Thought,” p. 223. See Wight, “The Balance of Power and International Order,” p. 86. See also Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 169. Wight to Oldham, June 27, 1946, Wight MSS 12. This conviction was informed by a belief that the “real issues” were those of power, like who controls the Persian Gulf. Wight wrote: “The League of Nations, the Kellogg Pact, the Disarmament Conference, the Atlantic Charter, the United Nations, the Baruch Plan for the control of atomic energy—they have been a procession of wraiths” (“The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 30). Wight, “International Institutions: Introductory Drafts,” Wight MSS 122, no page number. Wight, “The Power Struggle within the United Nations,” pp. 258–259. Wight, “Diplomacy,” no date, Wight MSS 69, pp. 7–8. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 279. Ibid., p. 282. Ibid., p. 287. Ibid., p. 288. Ibid., p. 278. See Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 71. Wight, “Comments on H. Bull’s Paper ‘The Grotian Conception of International Relations,’ ” RIIA BCTIP MSS 1, p. 2. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., pp. 113–121. Bull, Anarchical Society, p. 100. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 184. Wight, “Western Values,” p. 90. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 117. Ibid., p. 140. Wight, “Brutus in Foreign Policy,” pp. 307–308. See especially Wight, “Has Scientific Advance Changed the Nature of International Politics in Kind, Not Merely in Degree?” January 8–11, 1960, RIIA BCTIP MSS 4. Wight, “Comments on Hedley Bull’s Paper ‘The Grotian Conception of International Relations,’ ” RIIA BCTIP MSS 1, pp. 1–2. Wight, “Christian Pacifism,” p. 19. Wight, Power Politics, pp. 56–57. Ibid., p. 58. Wight to Oldham, June 27, 1946, Wight MSS 12. Wight, Power Politics, pp. 60–61. Ibid., p. 62.

Notes

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195

107. Ibid., p. 62. This argument may have been derived from the British international lawyer J. L. Brierly’s 1946 Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, a copy of which Wight owned. Brierly argued that, with regard to the Security Council, “. . . we have been led into a cul-de-sac by the over-hasty pursuit of a perfectionist policy, and by a too shallow diagnosis of the causes of the failure of the League. By insisting that only an institution which has power to decide can act effectively we have created one that can neither decide nor act” (The Covenant and the Charter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946, pp. 25–26. Wight’s copy in the author’s possession). 108. Wight,”The United Nations,” Lecture given at RNC Greenwich, July 15, 1947, Wight MSS 226, p. 1. 109. Ibid., p. 2. 110. Wight, “The United Nations General Assembly,” probably late 1946, Wight MSS 266, no page number. 111. Wight, “The United Nations,” Wight MSS 226, p. 2. 112. Wight, “United Nations,” no date, probably early 1950s, Wight MSS 123, p. 30. 113. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 216. 114. Wight, “United Nations,” Wight MSS 123, pp. 94–95. 115. Ibid., p. 96. 116. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 219. See also Wight’s discussion of the Great Power veto in “The Balance of Power and International Order” (1973), in which he argued that it “marked a retrogression from the standards of the Covenant, a recognition that the rule of law is unobtainable in international relations” (p. 113). 117. Wight, “The Power Struggle within the United Nations,” p. 249. 118. Ibid., p. 250. 119. Ibid., p. 251. 120. Ibid., p. 256. 121. Ibid., p. 257. 122. Wight, “Brutus in Foreign Policy,” pp. 308–309. 123. Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., pp. 216–217. 124. Wight, “Fortune’s Banter,” Wight MSS 1/3, p. 7. 125. Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 52. 126. Wight, “War and Peace,” May 1963, Wight MSS 204, p. A/17. 127. Ibid., p. A/20. 128. Ibid., p. A/25. 129. Wight, “God in an Age of Nuclear War,” February 12, 1963, Wight MSS 204, p. 29(iii).

Chapter 7


1. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 17. 2. See, for example, F. Melian Stawell’s The Growth of International Thought (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1929). Wight’s own copy of this book is dated October 1941 (in author’s possession). 3. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 20.

196

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Notes

4. David S. Yost, “Introduction: Martin Wight and the Philosophers of War and Peace,” in Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. xviii. 5. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 20. 6. Jones, “The English School of International Relations,” p. 10. 7. Porter, “Martin Wight’s ‘International Theory,’ ” p. 71. 8. Tim Dunne, “Mythology or Methodology: Traditions in International Theory,” Review of International Studies 19:1 (1993): p. 311. 9. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations,” p. xviii; Roger Epp, “International Relations as a Realm of Persuasion,” in Francis A Beer and Robert Hariman (ed.), Post-Realism: The Rhetorical Turn in International Relations (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1996), pp. 132–135; Molloy, “The Realist Logic of International Society,” pp. 84–85. 10. David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 16. 11. Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998), p. 24–32 12. Wight, “Why Is There No International Political Theory?” Wight MSS 100, no page number. See also p. 21. 13. Wight, “Elements of International Relations,” Wight MSS 101, p. 30. 14. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 20. 15. Wight, “An Anatomy of International Theory,” Wight MSS 100, no page number. 16. Wight, “An Anatomy of International Thought,” p. 221. 17. Ibid. 18. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 17. 19. Wight, quoted in Toynbee, Study VII, p. 495, note 2. 20. For Zimmern, Lippmann, Carr, Nicholson, see Power Politics, pp. 18, 28, 30, 38, 39, respectively. Wight also made reference, inter alia, to a speech in the House of Commons by George Canning (p. 25), to Hitler’s Mein Kampf (p. 27) and to Alexander Hamilton (pp. 35–36). 21. Wight, “The Balance of Power,” in Toynbee & Ashton-Gwatkin (eds.), Survey, p. 521, note 2. 22. Laski, “On the Study of Politics,” in his The Danger of Being a Gentleman and Other Essays, p. 38. 23. Wight’s copy of Laski’s The Danger of being a Gentleman, in the author’s possession, is dated “Christmas 1939.” 24. Wight, International Theory, pp. 6, 268. 25. Wight, quoted in Toynbee, Study of History, VII, p. 488, note 2. 26. Wight, “Elements of International Relations,” Wight MSS 101, p. 11. 27. Ibid., pp. 43–55. 28. Wight, “The Balance of Power,” in Toynbee and Ashton-Gwatkin (eds.), Survey of International Affairs, pp. 509–510. 29. Ibid., p. 510. 30. Ibid., pp. 508, 511. 31. Ibid., pp. 512, 514.

Notes 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

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197

Ibid., p. 514. Ibid., p. 515. Ibid., p. 516–517. Ibid., p. 518. Ibid., p. 519. Ibid., p. 519 and pp. 526–527. In the later section, the Soviet speaker moves to attack the principles of “open diplomacy” by reference to “facts,” putting what Wight thought of as the Realist case that “understanding is to be inferred from facts rather than from arguments,” On the “confluence” of the traditions, see Wight, International Theory, pp. 260–265. Wight, “The Balance of Power,” p. 519. Ibid., p. 520. Ibid., p. 521. Ibid., p. 521, note 1. Ibid., p. 524. Ibid., pp. 525–526. Ibid., pp. 527–528. Ibid., p. 530. Ibid., p. 531. Ibid., p. 531. See, for example, Wight’s argument that “Power’s vital interests are what it decides them to be”—their determining is “subjective” (“Vital Interests,” September 1970, Wight MSS 66, pp. 9–10). Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 1. Wight “The United Nations,” probably post-1955, Wight MSS 119, pp. 83–96. Morgenthau to Wight, January 20, 1956, Wight MSS 103. Morgenthau spent that academic year at the Universities of Yale and Columbia. Wight, International Theory, p. 267. See also Bull, “Introduction,” in Wight, Power Politics, 2nd ed., p. 19; Dunne, Inventing International Society, p. 54. Wight, quoted in Toynbee, Study of History, VII, p. 495, note 2. Wight, International Theory, pp. 5–6. Ibid., p. 6. Molloy, “The Realist Logic of International Society,” p. 84. See especially Carr’s account of utopianism and realism in chapters 3 to 6 of his Twenty Years’ Crisis, pp. 31–122. Whether Wight was influenced by Laski’s argument that “Political science has not the axiomatic quality of mathematics” can only be speculated upon (“On the Study of Politics,” p. 35). Molloy, “The Realist Logic of International Society,” p. 84. Wight, International Theory, pp. 137–163. Ibid., p. 7. Wight, “An Anatomy of International Thought,” p. 221. Wight, Power Politics, p. 8 and Systems of States, p. 160. Wight, “The Balance of Power and International Order,” p. 110. Ibid., p. 113. Bull, “The Grotian Conception of International Society,” p. 53.

198 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100. 101.

102. 103.

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Notes

Wight, International Theory, p. 8. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 12. Wight, International Theory, p. 10. Wight cited Talmon’s Origins of Totalitarian Democracy on this point. Wight, International Theory, pp. 27 and 41–48. Ibid., pp. 105, 114. Ibid., pp. 196, 242. Ibid., pp. 241, 252. Ibid., pp. 46–47 and 108–110. Ibid., p. 48. Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, pp. 67–70. Wight, International Theory, p. 48. Wight, “The Anatomy of International Thought,” p. 223. Wight, International Theory, p. 15. Ibid., p. 14. Ibid., pp. 13–14. Ibid., pp. 38–39. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., p. 102. Ibid., p. 126. Ibid., pp. 128–133. Ibid., pp. 217–220. Wight, “The Anatomy of International Thought,” p. 222. Wight, International Theory, pp. 16, 17. Ibid., pp. 27,31. Ibid., p. 51. Ibid., pp. 103, 112, 192, and 220–221 Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 19. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid., p. 21. Ibid., p. 245. Ibid., pp. 16–17. Ibid., p. 249. Ibid., p. 250. Ibid., p. 251. See Wight’s review of Carr’s Twenty Years’ Crisis, “The Realist’s Utopia,” The Observer, July 21, 1946, p. 3 and his treatment of Morgenthau’s In Defense of the National Interest in International Theory, pp. 121–127. See also Paul Howe, “The Utopian Realism of E. H. Carr,” Review of International Studies 20 (1994): pp. 277–297. Wight to Pearce, March 9, 1961, Wight MSS 233 5/9. Wight, “Christianity and Power Politics,” Wight MSS 39, p. 20.

Notes

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104. Ibid., p. 23. 105. Wight, review of Herz, International Politics in an Atomic Age, American Political Science Review 54:4 (1960): 1057. 106. Wight, “Germany,” p. 319. 107. Ibid., p. 348. 108. George Orwell, Review of James Burnham, The Machiavellians, January 20, 1944, in Peter Davidson (ed.), Orwell and Politics (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001), p. 226. 109. Morgenthau to Wight, January 20, 1954, Wight MSS 233 2/9. 110. For a summary of recent work on Morgenthau and Schmitt, see Michael C. Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 84–93. 111. Wight, “International Institutions 1952–1953,” Wight MSS 121, p. 19D. 112. Wight, International Theory, p. 267. 113. Wight, “An Anatomy of International Thought,” pp. 226–227. 114. Wight, International Theory, p. 259. 115. Ibid., p. 260. 116. Ibid., pp. 263, 265. 117. Wight, Four Seminal Thinkers, p. 3. 118. Wight, “International Theory,” Course Outline, University of Sussex, February 16, 1967, Wight MSS 143, p. 1. 119. Wight to Pearce, March 9, 1961, Wight MSS 233 6/9. 120. Wight, “Why Is There No International Theory?” p. 18. 121. Wight, “Western Values,” p. 89. 122. A copy, delivered on October 7, 1961, may be found in Butterfield MSS 337. 123. Wight, “Western Values,” p. 97. 124. Ibid., pp. 120–121. 125. Ibid., p. 90. 126. Ibid., p. 91. 127. Ibid., p. 93. 128. Wight to Holbraad, November 1, 1966, Wight MSS 233 4/9. 129. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964 [1936]), pp. 5–7. 130. Wight, “European Studies,” in Daiches (ed.), The Idea of a New University, p. 110. 131. Wight, Systems of States, p. 153. 132. Ibid., p. 158. 133. Ibid., p. 162. 134. Wight, “The Balance of Power and International Order,” p. 97. 135. Wight, International Theory, p. 250. 136. Manning to Bull, February 5, 1974, Wight MSS 250. 137. Wight, “European Studies,” p. 110. 138. Wight, International Theory, p. 6. 139. Jones, “The English School of International Relations,” p. 10.

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140. Wight, “In Anatomy of International Theory,” Wight MSS 100, no page number. 141. Wight “Why Is There No International Theory?” pp. 20, 33. 142. Jones,”The English School of International Relations,” p. 10.

Epilogue: The Legacy of Martin Wight 1. Melko to the author, April 7, 2001. 2. Wight to Melko, November 1, 1971, in author’s possession courtesy of Professor Melko. 3. Wight to Melko, December 15, 1964, in author’s possession courtesy of Professor Melko. 4. Jones, “The English School of International Relations,” pp. 9–10. 5. Bull, “Martin Wight and the Theory of International Relations,” p. xxiii. 6. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” p. 36. 7. What is meant by “prejudice” here is what Hans-Georg Gadamer understands by the term: prejudices are “biases of our openness to the world” (Quoted in Roger Epp, “The English School on the Frontiers of International Society: A Hermeneutic Recollection,” Review of International Studies 24 (Special Issue) (1998): p. 51. 8. Alexander Wendt, “Why a World State is Inevitable: Teleology and the Logic of Anarchy,” European Journal of International Relations, 9:4(2003): 491–542. 9. Wight, “The Church, Russia and the West,” pp. 43 and “Western Values,” p. 122. 10. Wight, “Western Values,” p. 122. 11. Wight,”Fortune’s Banter,” Wight MSS 1/3, p. 43. 12. Ibid., p. 44. 13. Ibid., p. 47.

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Papers of Sir Herbert Butterfield, Cambridge University Library. Papers of Gilbert Murray, OM, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Papers of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, London. Papers of the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, Royal Institute of International Affairs, Chatham House, London. Papers of Arnold J. Toynbee, Bodleian Library, Oxford. Papers of Martin Wight, British Library of Political and Economic Sciences, London.

Publications by Martin Wight “Christian Pacifism,” Theology 33:193 (July 1936): 12–21. Letter on “Christian Pacifism,” Theology 33:198 (December 1936): 367–368. “The Tanaka Memorial,” History 27 (March 1943): 61–68. Power Politics Looking Forward Pamphlet, no. 8 (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1946). The Development of the Legislative Council 1606–1945, vol. 1 (London: Faber & Faber, 1946). “Sarawak,” New Statesman and Nation 31, June 8, 1946: 413–414. “The Realist’s Utopia,” on E. H. Carr, The Twenty Year’s Crisis, The Observer, July 21, 1946, p. 3. Review of John Middleton Murray, Truth or Perish, International Affairs 22:4 (October 1946): 542. Review of Henrique de Pinheiro, The World State or the New Order of Common Sense, International Affairs 22:4 (October 1946): 542.

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Review of Ely Culbertson, Must we Fight Russia?, International Affairs 22:4 (October 1946): 543. Review of C. E. M. Joad, Conditions of Survival, International Affairs 23:1 (January 1947): 81. Review of Salvador de Madriaga, First Principles, International Affairs 23:1 (January 1947): 82. “The March of History,” on D. C. Somervell’s abridgement of Arnold. J. Toynbee’s A Study of History I–VI, The Observer, January 5, 1947, p. 3 Review of Viscount Samuel, Persuasion or Force, International Affairs 23:3 (July 1947): 379. Review of Winston Churchill, Victory: War Speeches, International Affairs 23:3 (July 1947): 379–380. Review of J. L. Brierly, The Covenant and the Charter, International Affairs 23:3 (July 1947): 381–382. Review of David Mitrany, A Working Peace System, International Affairs 23:3 (July 1947): 384. Review of Reinhold Niebuhr, Discerning the Signs of the Times, International Affairs 23:4 (October 1947): 558–559. Review of British Council of Churches, The Era of Atomic Power, International Affairs 23:4 (October 1947): 568–569. Review of Sir Charles Petrie, Diplomatic History 1713–1933, International Affairs 23:4 (October 1947): 574. Review of A. L. Rowse, The Use of History and R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History, International Affairs 23:4 (October 1947): 575–577. The Gold Coast Legislative Council (London: Faber & Faber, 1947). Review of Kein Hancock, Politics in Pitcairn, International Affairs 24:2 (April 1948): 248. “The World’s Churches,” The Observer, August 22, 1948, p. 4. “Reason and Revelation,” review of E. Brunner, Christianity and Civilization and E. Lampart, The Apocalypse of History: Problems of Providence and Human Destiny, The Observer, October 17, 1948, p. 3. “The Church, Russia and the West,” Ecumenical Review: A Quarterly 1:1 (Autumn 1948): 25–45. “Fall of an Empire,” on A. J. P. Taylor, Habsburg Monarchy, The Observer, February 13, 1949, p. 3. “History’s Theme,” on Herbert Butterfield, Christianity and History, The Observer, October 23, 1949, p. 7. “History and Judgment: Butterfield, Niebuhr and the Technical Historian,” The Frontier: A Christian Commentary on the Common Life 1:8 (August 1950): 301–314. “The Policy of Containment,” on Barbara Ward, Policy of the West, The Observer, February 18, 1951, p. 7. “Portrait of a Philosopher,” on Michael de la Bedoyère, The Life of Baron von Hügel, The Observer, June 17, 1951, p. 7. “The Tragedy of History,” on Herbert Butterfield, History and Human Relations, The Observer, September 2, 1951, p. 7.

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“Problems of Mass Democracy,” on E. H. Carr, The New Society, The Observer, September 23, 1951, p. 7. “Two Nations in Travail,” on Edouard Perroy, The Hundred Years War, The Observer, December 30, 1951, p. 7. With W. Arthur Lewis, Michael Scott, and Colin Legum, Attitude to Africa (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1951). Preface and amendments to revised edition of Harold J. Laski, An Introduction to Politics (London: Allen & Unwin, 1951). British Colonial Constitutions 1947 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952). “Spain and Portugal,” “Switzerland, The Low Countries, and Scandinavia,” “Eastern Europe,” “Germany,” and “The Balance of Power,” in A. J. Toynbee and F. T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds.), Survey of International Affairs 1939–1946: The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press and Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1952), pp. 138–150, pp. 151–165, pp. 206–292, pp. 293–365, and pp. 508–532. Review of Christopher Dawson, Understanding Europe, International Affairs 29:3 (July 1953): 341. “Morals and Warfare,” on Butterfield, Christianity, Diplomacy and War, The Observer, August 16, 1953, p. 7. Review of J. Fasnacht, Acton’s Political Philosophy and Lord Acton, Essays on Church and State, International Affairs 29:4 (October 1953): 474. Review of Herbert Butterfield, Liberty in the Modern World, International Affairs 29:4 (October 1953): 475–476. Note on A (III) (a) Annex I “Spiritual Achievement and Material Achievement,” “The Crux for an Historian brought up in the Christian Tradition,” and numerous notes in Arnold J. Toynbee, A Study of History, vol. VII (London: OUP and RIIA, 1954), pp. 711–715 and pp. 737–748. Letters in Counsels of Hope: The Toynbee-Jerrold Controversy (London: Times Publishing Company, 1954), pp. 18–21 and pp. 30–32. Review of Douglas Jerrold, The Lie about the West, International Affairs 30:3 (July 1954): 352–353. “What Makes a Good Historian?”, The Listener 53:1355, February 17, 1955: 283–284 Review of Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics, International Affairs 31:3 (July 1955): 336–337. “War and International Politics,” The Listener, 54:1389, October 13, 1955: 584–585. “The Power Struggle within the United Nations,” Proceedings of the Institute of World Affairs, 33rd session (Los Angeles: USC, 1956), pp. 247–259. Review of Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism, International Affairs 34:1 (January 1958): 69. Review of Karl Popper, Poverty of Historicism, International Affairs 34:3 (July 1958): 335. “Brutus in Foreign Policy: The Memoirs of Sir Anthony Eden,” International Affairs 36:3 (July 1960): 299–309. “New History in Old Forms,” review of J. Bronowski and Bruce Mazlish, The Western Intellectual Tradition, The Economist (December 3, 1960), p. 1021.

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———, “C. A. W. Manning and the Study of International Relations,” Review of International Studies 27:1 (2001): 91–107. Talmon, J. L., The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London: Secker & Warburg, 1955). Thompson, J. W., A History of Historical Writing: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries II (New York: Macmillan, 1942). Thompson, Kenneth W., “The Study of International Relations: A Survey of Trends and Developments,” Review of Politics 14:4 (1952): 433–467. ———, Masters of International Thought: Major Twentieth-Century Theorists and the World Crisis (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980). Toynbee, Arnold J., The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilizations 2nd ed. (London: Constable, 1923). ———, Economics and Politics in International Life (Nottingham: University College of Nottingham, 1930). ———, “Economics versus Politics,” The Listener 4:95 (November 19, 1930) pp. 825. ———, “The Idolatry of Nationalism,” The Listener 4:96 (November 26, 1930), pp. 873–874. ———, A Study of History 12 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1934–1960). ———, “Post-War Paganism versus Christianity,” The Listener, 17:419 (January 20, 1937): 124. ———, “Poetical Truth and Scientific Truth in the Light of History,” Journal of Psycho-Analysis 20:3 (1949): 143–152. ———, The World and the West (London: Oxford University Press, 1953). Toynbee, A. J. and F. T. Ashton-Gwatkin (eds.), Survey of International Affairs: The World in March 1939 (London: Oxford University Press and Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1952). Trotsky, Leon, La Révolution Trahie trans. Victor Serge (Paris: Grasset, no date). Vidler, Alec. R., The Church in an Age of Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Voegelin, Eric, The New Science of Politics: An Introduction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953). Webb, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Soviet Communism: A New Civilization? (London: University Labour Federation, no date). Webster, Sir Charles, “Fifty Years of Change in Historical Teaching and Research,” in his The Art and Practice of Diplomacy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961), pp. 133–151. Wendt, Alexander, “Why a World State is Inevitable: Teleology and the Logic of Anarchy,” European Journal of International Relations 9:4(2003): 491–542. Willey, Basil, Christianity Past and Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952). Williams, Michael C., The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Wilson, Duncan, Gilbert Murray, OM 1866–1957 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987). Zimmern, Sir Alfred, Spiritual Values and World Affairs (Oxford: Clarendon, 1939).


Index

Abyssinian Crisis 5, 132, 173, 185 and pacifism 162–3 Acton, Lord 44, 46, 47, 51, 78, 93, 102, 178 Adorno, Theodor 92, 188 Alderson, Kai 188, 192 American Revolution 155 Angell, Norman 102, 190 Antichrist 6, 22, 24, 25, 35–7, 42, 53, 57, 79, 108, 109 apostasy 33, 37, 69, 70, 99–100, 127, 132 Aquinas, Saint Thomas 31, 120, 152 Arendt, Hannah 77 Aristotle 51, 59–60, 91, 152 Aron, Raymond 110, 191 Astor, David 7, 67 see also The Observer astrology 93 Atlantic Charter 194 Attitude to Africa 7, 67, 106, 130, 164, 182, 184, 190 Attlee, Clement 68 Augustine, Saint 27, 31, 38, 71, 99, 119 Augustinian 175 as Rationalist 175 Axis Powers 106, 129–30, 138–41 Bacon, Francis 193 balance of power 50, 105, 117, 123–8, 136 European, pre-World War II 137–41, 143, 151

institution of 125–6 Rationalism on 145 “The Balance of Power and International Order” 10, 117, 151, 166, 193, 194, 195, 197, 199 Bandung Powers 106, 129–30, 141 Barker, Ernest 43, 93, 176 Barth, Karl 25, 27–8, 37, 39–40, 172, 175 see also eschatology, neoorthodox theology Baruch Plan 124, 194 Beaconsfield, Lord (Benjamin Disraeli) 153 Bell, Bishop George 120 Beloff, Max 11, 167 Benda, Julien 146 Bentley, Michael 43, 176 Berdyaev, Nicholas 25 Bergson, Henri 74, 136, 184 Bismarck, Otto von 122, 153 Bloom, Allan 2, 69 Boase, T. S. R. 4, 44, 162 Bolingbroke, Lord 87 Bonhoeffer, Dietrich 25 Boucher, David 134, 196 Bradfield College 4, 163 Braudel, Fernand 45, 177 Brierly, J. L. 195 Briggs, Asa 12, 166, 167, 168 Bright, John 153 British Colonial Constitutions 6, 11, 164

214

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Index

British Committee on the Theory of International Politics 5, 9, 10, 11, 12, 72–3, 82, 97, 152, 166 see also Bull, Hedley, Butterfield, Herbert, Diplomatic Investigations, Howard, Michael, MacKinnon, Donald British Empire 66–7, 76, 182, 184–5 see also decolonization Brogan, Denis 2, 44, 161 Brunner, Emil 28 Bruno, Giordano 193 “Brutus in Foreign Policy” 8, 76, 87, 165, 182, 184, 188, 194, 195 Bryant, Arthur 44 Bull, Hedley 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 11, 14–19, 21–2, 25, 29, 33, 88, 103, 104, 111–13, 123, 125, 126, 127, 131, 143–4, 158, 162, 163, 166, 168, 170, 171, 173, 174, 176, 178, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 194, 196, 197, 199, 200 see also English school, Grotius, international society, Rationalism Bullock, Alan 8, 165 Burckhardt, Jacob 44, 78 Burke, Edmund 87, 111, 120, 122, 145 Burkean 126 Burleigh, Michael 77, 183, 185 Burnham, James 137, 149, 199 Burrow, John 19, 170 Bury, J. B. 46, 53 Butterfield, Herbert 5, 8, 9, 12–13, 15, 22, 44, 46, 48, 50–4, 61, 63, 71, 72–3, 89–90, 99–100, 103, 148–9, 161, 162, 163, 165, 166, 167, 175, 176, 177, 178, 179, 181, 183, 186, 187, 188 see also British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, Diplomatic Investigations Buzan, Barry 123, 190, 194

Calvin, John 82, 144 Calvinists 82, 144 Carr, E. H. 5, 19, 45, 46–7, 93, 118–19, 129, 136, 137, 138, 141–2, 148, 150, 152, 161, 170, 177, 193, 196, 197, 198 see also Realism Ceadel, Martin 162–3, 173 Cecil, Lord Robert 120 Chamberlain, Neville 155 see also Munich Agreement, Realism Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) 4, 5–8, 9, 10, 11, 14, 49, 163, 167 see also Power Politics, Survey of International Affairs: The World in March 1939, Toynbee, Arnold J. Chesterton, A. K. 11–12, 167 Christendom 87, 118, 138, 154 Byzantine 118 dissolution of 36, 70–2, 98 and world-state 108 “Christian Pacifism” 5, 6, 29–35, 71, 101, 127, 136, 163, 173, 174, 182, 183, 190 Christian socialism 27–8, 32 Christianity 21–42 Anglican 1, 23, 26 Marxist critique of 41, 83 and natural law 119–21 and Rationalism 122–3, 156 and Realism 148–9 Roman Catholic 23, 26, 31, 32, 36, 170, 171–2 and world-state 108–11 see also Antichrist, Christendom, Marxist critique of Christianity, natural law, pacifism, pessimism Churchill, Winston 29, 44, 90, 122, 135, 161, 172 “The Church, Russia and the West” 37–8, 39, 41–2, 54–5, 64–7, 70, 75, 81, 84, 109, 113, 123, 164, 170, 175, 176, 179, 182, 183, 184, 186, 188, 190, 192, 194, 200

Index Clark, George 26, 44 Cobden, Richard 137, 145, 153 Collingwood, R. G. 45–6, 51, 62, 93, 177, 179, 181 Communism 32, 36, 61, 66–7, 74, 77, 78, 81–2, 144 Communist eschatology 82 Communist International 141 Communist Manichaeism 82 see also Marx, Karl, Soviet Union Concert of Europe 128, 129, 141 Conciliar movement 141 see also Council of Constance Congress of Utrecht 99 conscientious objection 6, 32, 72, 84 conservatism 65, 84 Conservative Party 68 Council of Constance 98–9 see also Conciliar movement Croce, Benedetto 46 Cromer, Lord 102 Crossman, Richard 11–12, 71, 77, 79, 80, 81, 167, 183, 185, 186 Cruttwell, C. R. M. F. 4–5, 162 Dante Alighieri 50, 108, 109, 120, 191 D’Arcy, Martin 25 Darwin, Charles 147 Dawson, Christopher 25, 26, 39, 41, 54, 70, 172, 176, 179, 183 decolonization 75–6, 129–31, 184–5 Demant, V. A. 172 Descartes, René 193 Development of the Legislative Council 6, 164, 182 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes 73, 101–3, 184 Dilthey, Wilhelm 151 diplomacy 90, 94, 123 diplomatic system 50, 100, 125–6, 139 multilateralism 124 open diplomacy 140 and propaganda 69

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215

Rationalism on 145 Realism on 147 Revolutionism on 144 see also League of Nations, United Nations Diplomatic Investigations 9, 12, 87, 126, 151, 154, 161, 162, 166 Dodd, C. H. 25, 28 Doyle, Robert C. 39 Dunne, Tim 4, 6, 18, 21–2, 88, 134, 161, 162, 163, 165, 167, 169, 170, 173, 174, 187, 196, 197 see also English school Dyke, Bishop Richard 66–7, 182 ecumenism 23, 24, 26–7 ecumenical movement 172 see also World Council of Churches Eden, Anthony 87, 96, 130 Eliot, T. S. 24–7, 172 Ellul, Jacques 25 Elton, Geoffrey 44, 178 English school 9, 11, 15–19, 21, 157, 168, 169 Epp, Roger 18, 134, 175, 196, 200 Erasmus, Desiderus 30, 173 eschatology 13, 22, 15, 27–8, 29, 35–42, 53–5, 68, 71, 109–10, 132, 158 see also Antichrist, Barth, Karl, neoorthodoxy fascism 47, 70, 74, 77, 149–50 Feiling, Keith 44 Four Seminal Thinkers in International Theory 10, 59, 109, 120–1, 145, 150–1, 166, 181, 190, 193, 194, 195, 196, 197, 198, 199 Frazer, James 56, 180 Freeman, E. A. 56–7, 180 French Revolution 107, 150, 154, 155 Freud, Sigmund 148, 150 Freudian psychology 59, 101 Friedrich, Carl 77, 185

216

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Index

Gadamer, Hans-Georg 200 Garnett, John 13–14, 167, 168 Gassett, Ortega y 78, 102, 139 Gathorne-Hardy, G. M. 11, 93, 167 Gibbon, Edward 49, 78, 109 Gladstone, William Ewart 68, 77, 117, 120, 122, 153 Gold Coast Legislative Council 6, 67, 164, 182, 184 Goodwin, G. L. 16 Grader, Sheila 17, 169 Graham, Gordon 53, 179 Great Powers 131 as institution 125 Greene, Graham 26 Grimond, Jo 6, 67 see also Liberal Foreign Affairs Group, Liberal Party Grotius, Hugo 15, 50, 108, 112, 120–3, 142, 145–6, 150, 152–3 Grotian tradition 15, 119, 121, 131–2, 141, 150 Grotianism and League of Nations 107–8, 127 Wight’s critique of Bull’s account of 112, 125 see also Rationalism Haffner, Sebastien 7 Haileybury College 6, 8, 14, 35, 174, 192 Halberstam, David 77, 185 Hancock, Keith 44 Hastings, Adrian 26, 28, 171, 172, 173 Hegel, G. W. F. 150, 153 Herz, John 149, 199 Hinsley, F. H. 166 history of ideas 10, 19, 96–7, 126, 136, 137 in International Relations 3–4 “History and Judgment” 91–2, 165, 177, 181, 187 Hitler, Adolf 11–12, 32, 36–7, 47, 53, 55, 57, 75–7, 79–81, 95, 95, 105,

106, 110, 130, 147–50, 186, 188, 196 see also Nazism, Realism Hobbes, Thomas 73, 93, 103, 110, 121, 139, 142, 146, 147–8, 150, 153 Hobbesian 59, 102, 112 Hobbesian fear 103 Hobbesian internationalism 73–4 Hobbesian Leviathan 37 Hobson, J. A. 67, 182 Holbraad, Carsten 10–1, 103, 199 Holy Alliance 129, 130, 141 Horkheimer, Max 92, 188 Hoskyns, Edwyn 28, 39, 46 see also Barth, Karl, eschatology, neoorthodox theology Howard, Michael 12, 15, 167 see also British Committee on the Theory of International Politics Howe, Paul 198 Hudson, G. F. 161 Hume, David 151 Hurrell, Andrew 188, 192 Huxley, Aldous 30, 37, 109 imperialism 66–8 institutions 100, 103–4, 112–13, 123–6, 159 international anarchy 15, 91, 98–9, 100–4, 108–12, 115, 126, 131, 138, 144, 146 International Atomic Energy Agency 124 international law 90, 99, 100, 117, 123, 125, 131, 138, 153 as expression of power 128 Rationalism on 145 Revolutionism on 144–5 and United Nations Charter 128 “International Legitimacy” 10, 166, 184 international society 1, 15–18, 43–4, 90–1, 100, 107, 111–32

Index decline of 126–31 Manning on 89 as moral community 111, 113, 117–23, 139, 145–6 Rationalism on 145 Realism on 147, 153 Revolutionism on 143–4 Schwarzenberger on 89 international theory 9, 12–15, 44, 55, 57, 87, 107, 133–56 and philosophy of history 3, 95 International Theory: The Three Traditions 9, 10, 14–15, 84, 136–7, 142–51, 165, 166, 167, 174, 180, 183, 186, 188 irony 40, 58–61, 75–6, 120, 159 see also tragedy James, Alan 11, 13–14, 17, 88, 167, 168, 182, 187 Jeffery, Renée 168 Jerrold, Douglas 51 Jesuits 137, 144 Joad, C. E. M. 29 see also pacifism Jones, Charles 190 Jones, Roy 15–16, 18, 21–2, 63, 88, 104, 133–4, 156, 158, 168, 169, 170, 181, 187, 190, 196, 199, 200 see also English school Jung, C. G. 58, 93, 188 just war tradition 31, 120, 136, 147 Kant, Immanuel 50, 109, 121, 136, 144, 145 Kantian 120, 141, 152 see also Revolutionism Kedourie, Elie 12–13, 15, 167 Keens-Soper, Maurice 178 Kennan, George 2, 135, 150, 161 Keohane, Robert 18, 169 Keynes, John Maynard 110, 150 Kierkegaard, Søren 27

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217

Kipling, Rudyard 122 Koestler, Arthur 106 Labour Party 67–8, 182 Laski, Harold 8, 43, 67, 73, 98, 136–7, 156, 163, 165, 176, 184, 196, 197 Lawrence, T. E. 174 League of Nations 5, 26, 60, 66, 107–8, 109, 118–19, 123–4, 125, 127, 130, 131, 138–9, 141, 194, 195 legal positivists 153 Lenin, V. I. 32, 57, 67, 110, 142, 144, 145, 174 Lewis, C. S. 25, 26 Liberal Foreign Affairs Group 8, 67 liberalism 77, 65, 67–8, 77, 141, 155 theological 24–8, 38, 101 see also progressivism Liberal Party 68–9 Lincoln, Abraham 122, 145 Lippman, Walter 121, 136, 196 Little, Richard 190 Locke, John 110, 112, 146, 152 London School of Economics 6, 9, 10, 12–13, 14, 16, 18, 43, 89–90, 92, 96, 113, 123, 129, 133, 151, 164, 165, 192 see also Manning, Charles Lorimer, James 87 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 153–4, 199 Macauley, T. B. 44 Machiavelli, Niccolo 57, 80, 91, 105, 116, 135, 147–8, 149, 150, 153 Machiavellian 120, 127, 139, 140, 141, 149, 152 MacKinnon, Donald 12–13, 15, 24, 25, 29, 30, 31, 167, 171, 173, 174, 183 see also British Committee on the Theory of International Politics Mack-Smith, Denis 6, 163

218

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Index

Mannheim, Karl 19, 170 Manning, Charles 8, 9, 12, 15, 16, 18, 88, 89, 90, 96, 111, 113, 115, 132, 155–6, 164, 165, 167, 187, 192, 199 see also international society, London School of Economics Maritain, Jacques 25, 28, 37, 70, 183 Marsiglio of Padua 108 Marx, Karl 57, 106, 150 Marxism 67, 77, 137 Marxist 47, 138, 141, 150, 155 Marxist critique of Christianity 31, 83, 174 see also Communism, Soviet Union Mayall, James 11 Mazzini, Guiseppe 106 Melko, Matthew 68, 157, 177, 178, 183, 200 Mill, John Stuart 78, 145 Milner, Lord 102 modernism in historiography 43, 46, 48–9, 51–2, 93 Molloy, Seán 18, 99, 134, 142, 169, 188, 196, 197 morality 1, 12–13, 35, 52 Augustine on 31 Christian moral responsibilities 42, 84–5 moral judgment in history 48, 51–2, 61–3 and power politics 69–73, 81, 97–101, 126–32 Rationalism on 145–6 Realism on 148, 150 Revolutionism on 145 More, Thomas 87 Morgenthau, Hans 9, 12, 93, 135, 137, 141–2, 148, 149–50, 165, 167, 197, 198, 199 see also Realism Munich Agreement 33, 128, 140, 155 Murray, Gilbert 26, 90 Mussolini, Benito 95, 96, 138, 139, 149 see also fascism, Realism

Namier, Lewis 44 Napoleon 36, 37, 55, 57, 80, 105, 122 nationalism 67, 73–6, 84, 95, 98 as idolatry 70, 74–5 see also national self-determination, state national self-determination 75–6, 130, 154, 185 natural law 85, 117–23, 131–2, 193 see also Grotius, Hugo Navari, Cornelia 18, 169 Nazism 6, 11–12, 32–3, 58, 71, 77–82, 136, 149–50 see also Axis Powers, fascism, Hitler, Adolf neoorthodox theology 26, 27–8, 38 see also Barth, Karl, eschatology Neo-Scholastics 145 Newton, Isaac 121, 136 Nichols, Beverley 29 see also pacifism Nicholson, Harold 136, 196 Nicholson, Michael 1, 3, 15–17, 21, 40, 62, 88, 161, 162, 168, 169, 170, 173, 176, 181, 187 Niebuhr, Reinhold 8, 25, 28, 46, 61, 91, 99–100, 152, 158, 172, 177, 188 see also neoorthodox theology, Realism Niebuhr, Richard 26 Non-Proliferation Treaty 124–5 Northedge, F. S. 16, 169 Norton, Anne 162 Nuremberg Trials 121, 127, 194 Oakeshott, Michael 44, 46, 51, 179 The Observer 7, 8, 36, 67 see also Astor, David Oglesby, R. R. 11 obligation 47, 72–3, 85, 118–19, 135 and crisis of international society 126–8 Realist theory of 153 see also morality

Index Oldham, J. H. 36–7, 123, 175, 194 Olsen, William 14, 168 Orwell, George 37, 109, 137, 149, 199 pacifism 5–6, 12, 17, 21, 22, 24, 29–35, 65–7, 72, 84–5, 145, 162–3, 173 see also Christianity, conscientious objection, Joad, C. E. M., Nichols, Beverley, Pax, Peace Pledge Union, Sheppard, H. R. L. (“Dick”) Pakenham, Frank 26 Pares, Richard 44 Pareto, Vilfredo 149 Paul, Leslie 161 Pax 32 see also pacifism Peace Pledge Union 5, 30, 172, 173 see also conscientious objection, pacifism, Sheppard, H. R. L. (“Dick”) Perham, Margery 6, 28, 67, 163, 164, 170 pessimism 13, 17, 21, 99 and Christianity 13, 21, 40 philosophy of history 3, 16–17, 37–9, 43, 44–63, 158 and International Relations 94–7 and international theory 142 Pitt, Harry 4, 6, 23–4, 25, 49, 162, 163, 170, 171, 174, 178, 183, 192 Plato 2, 69, 72–3, 84, 136, 161, 183 Porter, Brian 11, 13–14, 17, 134, 162, 168, 196 power politics 3, 18, 80–1, 98, 100–2, 114, 118–19, 125, 127, 129, 131 and interpretation of history 59 and the state 73 Power Politics 1, 7, 8, 10, 11, 14–15, 71–2, 82, 87, 88, 97–105, 108, 110, 113, 117, 123, 124–8, 136, 143, 144, 151, 161, 164, 183, 186, 187, 188, 190, 191, 192, 193, 194, 194, 195, 197

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219

“The Power Struggle in the United Nations” 8, 87, 106, 124, 129, 165, 182, 190, 194 Powicke, Maurice 44, 177 progress 13, 35, 53, 54, 61, 121 Hugo Grotius on 120–1 in morals 22 in thought 136–7, 142 progressivism 13, 32, 137, 142 in historiography 47, 53, 62 in social sciences 91–2 in theology 27, 47, 53 in work of Arnold J. Toynbee 58 psychology 92–3, 180 Pufendorf, Samuel 109 Purnell, Robert 16, 168, 169 quietism

24, 30, 34–5, 84

Ranke, Leopold von 44, 47, 52, 94 Rathenau, Walter 78 Rationalism 13–18, 88, 119–20, 123, 131–4, 137, 138–9, 141–4, 145–7, 152, 154, 156 see also Augustine, Saint, Bull, Hedley, Dunne, Tim, Grotius, Hugo, international society, League of Nations, Manning, Charles, natural law Realism 11–18, 29, 51, 59, 81, 88, 93, 97, 99–100, 101, 113, 127, 131–14, 137, 138–9, 141–4, 147–51, 152, 154, 155, 178 see also Carr, E. H., fascism, Hitler, Adolf, Hobbes, Thomas, Machiavelli, Niccolo, Morgenthau, Hans, Mussolini, Benito, Nazism, Niebuhr, Reinhold, power politics, Schmitt, Carl, totalitarianism, United Nations Responsible Society 25, 171 revolution 100, 105–7 Revolutionism 13–18, 34, 131, 133–4, 138–9, 141–5, 152

220

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Index

Revolutionism––continued see also Communism, Kant, Immanuel, Marx, Karl, progressivism, Soviet Union Richelieu, Cardinal 150 Roosevelt, Franklin D. 117 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 57, 144 Rowse, A. L. 44, 95–6, 177 Russian Revolution 107 Salisbury, Lord 122 Schmidt, Brian C. 170, 196 Schmitt, Carl 102, 150, 190, 199 Schwarzenberger, Georg 89, 90, 187 see also international society Schweitzer, Albert 25, 27, 38 Scott, Michael 28, 182 secularism 3, 21, 25 Seton-Watson, Hugh 162 Sheppard, H. R. L. (“Dick”) 5, 30–1, 172, 173 Social Darwinists 153 socialism 65, 67–9, 102 see also Christian socialism, Communism, Labour Party, Marx social sciences 8, 47, 63, 88–93, 96, 97 Sorel, Georges 44, 94 Southern, Richard 45, 177 Soviet Union 81–2, 138–41 Spengler, Oswald 44, 56, 180 Stalin, Josef 122, 140 state 70, 71–6, 84, 100, 111–12, 126–7, 132, 145 Stawell, F. Melian 195 Strauss, Leo 161–2 Stubbs, William 44, 72, 183 Suez Crisis 68 Suganami, Hidemi 18, 19, 89, 168, 169, 187, 192 Survey of International Affairs: The World in March 1939 7, 11, 43, 57–8, 71, 75, 77–81, 87, 95, 102, 106, 136, 137–41, 142, 149, 164,

167, 183, 184, 185, 186, 188, 190, 196, 197, 198 Systems of States 9, 10, 14–15, 87, 104, 151, 166, 184–5, 188, 190, 191, 192, 197, 199 Talmon, J. L. 77, 144, 185, 198 Tawney, R. H. 44 Taylor, A. J. P. 44, 46, 94, 177, 188 Temperley, Harold 46 Temple, William 28 theology of crisis 22, 25–9 Thompson, Kenneth 3, 4, 18, 162, 168, 169 Thucydides 52, 90, 136 Tillich, Paul 25 Tocqueville, Alexis de 44, 102, 145 Tolstoy, Leo 145, 147, 150 see also pacifism totalitarianism 11, 25, 65, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77–84, 144 totalitarian ethics and the United Nations 128–9 Toynbee, Arnold J. 5, 7, 8, 9, 11, 17, 25, 30, 35, 44, 45, 49–50, 55–8, 60, 61, 70, 73–4, 76, 78, 83, 108, 110, 113–17, 121, 137, 142, 155, 158, 162, 163, 164, 171, 174, 176, 177, 178, 180, 181–182, 183, 184, 186, 188, 191, 192, 196 see also Chatham House Toynbee, Rosalind 26 traditions 133–4, 142–3, 151–2, 153–8 tragedy 12, 46, 52, 58–61, 75, 159, 177 and Grotius 120 see also irony, morality, philosophy of history Treitscke, Heinrich von 148 Trevelyan, G. M. 44 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 44 Troeltsch, Ernst 121 Trotsky, Leon 67, 182

Index United Nations 7, 106, 108, 123–4, 125, 127–31, 141 and totalitarian ethics 128–9 United Nations Charter 118, 127–9, 195 United Nations Security Council 128–9, 195 United States of America 138, 182 University College of Wales, Aberystwyth 5 University of Chicago 8, 141, 166 University of Oxford 4–5, 6, 10, 29, 35, 49, 163–4 Hertford College 4 Nuffield College 6, 35, 164 St Hugh’s College 6 University of Sussex 9–10, 12, 14, 19, 43, 50, 62, 96, 151, 154, 166 Vattel, Emmerich 193 Versailles, Treaty of 75, 78 Vidler, A. R. 164, 171, 174 Vitoria, Francesco 108 Voegelin, Eric 70–1, 77, 121, 183, 193 Voigt, Frederick 77 Waltz, Kenneth 12, 167 war 25, 33, 66, 72–3, 100, 123, 125, 126, 144 Rationalism on 147 Realism on 147 and revolution 106–7 “War and International Politics” 8, 106, 164, 183, 190, 191 Waugh, Evelyn 4–5, 26 Webb, Sidney and Beatrice 67, 182 Webster, Charles 46, 47, 48, 177, 178

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221

Welles, Sumner 148 Wendt, Alexander 200 “Western Values in International Relations” 2, 50, 69, 84, 109, 121, 125–6, 152, 153–4, 155–6, 161, 166, 178, 186, 192, 193, 194, 199, 200 Westphalia, Peace of 99 “What Makes a Good Historian?” 8, 44–5, 59, 94, 165, 177, 178, 179, 181, 188 Wheare, Kenneth 11 “Why is there no International Theory?” 8, 9, 12, 55, 72, 94, 108–9, 135, 152, 156, 158, 162, 165, 166, 179, 183, 186, 188, 191, 195, 196, 199, 200 Wight, Edward 4 Wight, Gabriele 24–5, 33, 171, 175, 176 Wight, Margaretta 4 Williams, Michael C. 199 Wilson, Harold 68 Wilson, Woodrow 134, 145 Wiskemann, Elizabeth 11 Wolff, Christian 193 Woodward, E. L. 44 Woolf, Leonard 139 World Council of Churches 7–8, 39, 120, 172 see also ecumenism world-state 36, 74, 144, 147, 159 and Antichrist 109–10 Yost, David S.

196

Zimmern, Alfred 173, 196

28–9, 136,

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