Contents

• Notes on Contributors ix

• Acknowledgements xiii

1. 1Introduction: Rengger’s Anti-Pelagianism: International Political Theory as Civil Conversation

   Vassilios Paipais 1

2. PART IAnti-Pelagianism and the Civil Condition in World Politics
   1. 2Revisiting Rengger’s Anti-Pelagianism

      Noël O’Sullivan and Sophia Dingli 29

   2. 3Poetics and Politics: Rengger, Weber, and the Virtuosi of Religion

      John-Harmen Valk 53

   3. 4‘Keep your Mind in Hell, and Despair Not’: Gillian Rose’s Anti-Pelagianism

      Kate Schick 75

3. PART IIChallenging the Anti-Pelagian Imagination
   1. 5‘A Dangerous Place to Be’? Rengger, the English School, and International Disorder

      Ian Hall 97

   2. 6Rengger’s War on Teleocracy

      Chris Brown 115

   3. 7Conservatism, Civility, and the Challenges of International Political Theory

      Michael C. Williams 132

4. PART IIIThe Uncivil Condition in World Politics
   1. 8Rengger the Reluctant Rule Follower

      Anthony F. Lang, Jr 155

   2. 9Rengger and the ‘Business of War’

      Caroline Kennedy-Pipe 172

   3. 10Just War as Tradition in a Civil International Order

      Valerie Morkevičius 188

5. PART IVAFTERWORD
   1. 11Rengger, History, and the Future of International Relations

      Richard Whatmore 211

• Bibliography 229

• Index 246

Notes on Contributors

• Chris Brown is Emeritus Professor of International Relations at the LSE. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, and International Society, Global Polity (2015), Practical Judgement in International Political Theory (2010), Sovereignty, Rights and Justice (2002), International Relations Theory: New Normative Approaches (1992), editor of Political Restructuring in Europe: Ethical Perspectives (1994) and co-editor (with Terry Nardin and N.J. Rengger) of International Relations in Political Thought (2002) and (with Robyn Eckersley) of The Oxford Handbook of International Political Theory (2018). His textbook Understanding International Relations 5th edition (2019) has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Euskara, Portuguese, Thai, and Turkish.

• Sophia Dingli is Lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science, University of Glasgow. Her work is at the intersection of critical theory and political realism. Her work focuses on silence and silencing in politics, and she has also published work on gender and security, states of exception and peace theory. Her work has appeared in Politics, Journal of International Political Theory, European Journal of International Relations, edited volumes, and online forums.

• Ian Hall is Professor of International Relations at the Griffith Asia Institute, Griffith University, Queensland. He is also Academic Fellow of the Australia India Institute and a co-editor (with Sara E. Davies) of the Australian Journal of International Affairs. He has written or edited several books, including Modi and the Reinvention of Indian Foreign Policy (2019), and articles in various journals, including the European Journal of International Relations, International Affairs, and Third World Quarterly. His research and teaching focuses on Indian foreign and security policy, and the history of international thought.

• Caroline Kennedy-Pipe is Professor of International Security and International Relations at Loughborough University. She has published on the Cold War, the War on Terror and contemporary security challenges. She is currently a Visiting Fellow in the Danish Institute of Advanced Studies (DIAS) at the University of Southern Denmark working on climate change and its effects on the business of war.

• Anthony F. Lang, Jr is Professor of International Political Theory at the School of International Relations, University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the intersection of politics, law, and ethics at the global level through such topics as universal values, global constitutionalism, international legal theory, and the just war tradition. He has published three single-authored books, edited nine, and published numerous articles, book chapters, and reviews. His publications can be found at www.st-andrews.ac.uk/ir/people/lang/ and he tweets @ProfTonyLang.

• Valerie Morkevičius is Associate Professor of Political Science at Colgate University, Hamilton, New York. Her work focuses on the intersection between strategy and ethics, and the applicability of traditional just war thinking to contemporary challenges. She is the author of Realist Ethics: Just War Traditions as Power Politics (Cambridge University Press, 2018).

• Noël O’Sullivan is Research Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Hull. His undergraduate and postgraduate study was at LSE and Harvard. His monographs are on European Political Thought since 1945 (2004), The Philosophy of Santayana (1992), The Problem of Political Obligation (1986), Fascism (1983), and Conservatism (1976). He has in addition edited volumes which include The Place of Michael Oakeshott in Contemporary Western and Non-Western Thought (2017), The Concept of the Public Realm (2010), and Political Theory in Transition (2000). His work has been translated into Chinese, Czech, Dutch, French, Italian, Persian, Serbo-Croatian, and Spanish.

• Vassilios Paipais is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Relations at the University of St Andrews. He is the editor of the 2019 Special Issue ‘Political theologies of the international: the continued relevance of theology in international relations’ in the Journal of International Relations and Development, the author of Political Ontology and International Political Thought: Voiding a Pluralist World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), and the editor of Theology and World Politics: Metaphysics, Genealogies, Political Theologies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020) and of Perspectives on International Political Theory in Europe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

• Kate Schick is Senior Lecturer in International Relations at Te Herenga Waka, Victoria University of Wellington. Her research lies at the intersection of critical theory and international ethics. She is particularly interested in the way critical theories highlight our mutual vulnerability and interdependence, and in their countercultural critique of the pursuit of invulnerability and self-sufficiency. Kate is author of Gillian Rose: A Good Enough Justice and co-editor of The Vulnerable Subject: Beyond Rationalism in International Relations (with Amanda Russell Beattie), Recognition in Global Politics (with Patrick Hayden), and Subversive Pedagogies: Radical Possibility in the Academy (with Claire Timperley).

• John-Harmen Valk is University Lecturer (Assistant Professor) at Leiden University. His research interests lie at the intersection of international relations, political theory, continental philosophy, and the philosophy of religion. He has recently published work on the place of religious symbolic expression in the thought of Hans Morgenthau.

• Richard Whatmore is Professor of Modern History at the University of St Andrews and Co-Director of the St Andrews Institute of Intellectual History. He is the author of Republicanism and the French Revolution (Oxford, 2000), Against War and Empire (Yale, 2012), What is Intellectual History? (Polity, 2015), Terrorists, Anarchists and Republicans (Princeton, 2019), and History of Political Thought. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2021).

• Michael C. Williams is Professor at the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs and holds the University Research Chair in Global Political Thought at the University of Ottawa. His primary interests are in International Relations theory, including the place of classic political theory in IR. His current research explores the impact of contemporary radical conservative movement on international order and foreign policy. His publications include Security Beyond the State: Private Security in International Politics (2011), with Rita Abrahamsen, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (2005), and Culture and Security: Symbolic Power and the Politics of International Security (2007), and Realism Reconsidered: The Legacy of Hans J Morgenthau in International Relations (2008).

Acknowledgements

This is a book inspired by Nick Rengger and the intellectual legacy he left behind. Nick was nominally Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at the University of St Andrews but his remarkable knowledge of several other fields, such as History, Theology, Classics, Literature, and the broader Human Sciences, set him apart as a genuine homo universalis. To use the title of one of his favourite films featuring Paul Scofield, he was ‘A Man for All Seasons’. Perhaps among the last of a generation of academics with a humanist orientation who are rapidly becoming an eclipsing breed. I will always remember our endless conversations on topics as diverse as philosophy, politics, theology, cinema, art, history, and literature. I would learn from him insatiably as every conversation was a muesis (the Greek word for mystical initiation) into an exciting realm of intellectual pleasures, witty remarks, pithy comments, and good humour, often spurring me to look something up, a monograph, a film, a novel, a piece of poetry or music.

Nick’s generosity was legendary as was his disregard for the trivialities of academic life. He belonged to a generation of scholars that lamented the rampant bureaucratization and corporatization of contemporary academic life and had no time for it. As a scholar, he had so few insecurities about his intellectual abilities that sharing widely his expertise and knowledge was an act of returning to the world the charisma that was amply given to him. Nick was a natural optimist of the will and pessimist of the intellect. Like one of his favourite philosophers, Michael Oakeshott, he was a fine mixture of good old English scepticism with strong doses of Epicurean hedonism, but also someone who cared deeply about the future of our societies and the importance of the values and practices that bind us. He used to repeat, with that familiar twinkle in his eye, that he was a Tory anarchist or a Bohemian nihilist, fully enjoying the paradoxical sound of it as well as the bafflement he caused to his interlocutors. His irresistible desire for a punchy quip apart, this self-description revealed all that was endearing about Nick, his love of freedom combined with his care for his fellow human beings, for he was a deeply affectionate and compassionate man without being sentimental, and someone who lived the life of the mind without being otherworldly. The embodiment of a true φιλόσοφος, as one of his doctoral students aptly put it.

For me, Nick was a mentor and a paragon of scholarship, intellectual integrity, and academic ethos. This book is just a small token of my gratitude and admiration. Gratitude is also owed to his widow Vanessa and his two beloved daughters, Corinna and Natalie, about whom he always talked with boundless affection. I thank them deeply for sharing their intimate memories of Nick and for helping me gain a broader picture of his personality. Special thanks go to my dear colleague at St Andrews, Tony Lang, who in May 2019 put together a colloquium in honour of Nick’s work at St Andrews where first iterations of some of this volume’s chapters were presented. Tony offered useful advice in all the stages of the preparation of this volume. Both Tony and I are also very grateful to one of Nick’s last PhD students, Antonio di Biagio, who helped with the organization of the St Andrews colloquium. Thanks also go to John-Harmen Valk with whom I organized a couple of British International Studies Association (BISA) panels on Nick’s work in 2019. Caroline Kennedy-Pipe was always there to share delightful stories of Nick’s mischievous and playful nature along with moral and intellectual support. Nick Wheeler, Kate Schick, John-Harmen Valk, Noël O’Sullivan, Sophia Dingli, Richard Whatmore, Adham Saouli, and especially Ian Hall, offered their invaluable feedback and good humour during the process of putting this volume together and I am grateful for that. Finally, I would like to thank the BSIT series editors for pushing me to refine the volume as well as Stephen Wenham and Lorna Blackmore at Bristol University Press for their efficiency and support. Nick gained his first permanent academic post at Bristol, and so publishing this volume with BUP is a particularly fitting tribute.

Nick was not given the time to complete his work, but this book is a testament to the fact that what he left behind is worth preserving and engaging. This is a book about civility as an ethos of conversation between individuals, not necessarily between cultures. Conversation not merely for the purpose of understanding one another – since communication is not a panacea and often leads to misunderstanding and conflict, as Augustine knew all too well – but for the sheer joy of sharing thoughts, sentiments, stories, and even jokes. Nick believed in the power of thought and goodwill between well-meaning persons but had no illusions about the dominant tendencies in our cultures that keep us suspicious and contemptful of one another or plunge us into fear and despair. Yet, he insisted that such uncivil passions remain a choice, not a destiny. In the turbulent pandemic and post-pandemic years that seem to lie ahead, this is a lesson to be heeded.

Vassilios Paipais

Edinburgh, September 2021