His writings on International Relations comprise one sixty-eight page pamphlet, published thirty years ago by Chatham House for one shilling and long out of print, and half a dozen chapters in books and articles, some of the latter placed in obscure journals as if in the hope that no one would notice them.
It has seemed to me a task of great importance to bring more of his work to the light of day. That the work he left should be published at all was not self-evident. Some of the work is unfinished. Some may never have been intended for publication. If it was his judgement that the work did not meet the very high standards he set himself for publication, should his judgement not be respected?
It is my hope that two and possibly three publications by Martin Wight will in due course appear. The first is a series of essays on different aspects of the modern states system and of other historical states systems, which he wrote in the last eight years of his life for meetings of the British Committee.
The second is a revised and much expanded version of Power Politics , the Chatham House essay of to which I referred a moment ago, the completion of which—unhappily, he did not complete it—he saw as his principal scholarly task.
Thirdly, I hope that it will be possible in some form to make available to others the lectures on International Theory which impressed me so deeply when I arrived at the London School of Economics and are at once the least published and the most profound of his contributions to International Relations. Fortunately the notes of these lectures—detailed and immaculate in his beautiful handwriting—have been preserved. I shall not attempt to provide a survey of his life and thought as a whole.
Such a survey—I have sought to provide the sketch of one in the introduction to one of the forthcoming volumes—would have to deal not only with his ideas about international Relations but also with his ideas about the philosophy of history, about education and about Christian theology. It would have to take account of his close association with Arnold Toynbee, with whom he worked at Chatham House both on A Study of History and on the Survey of International Affairs , and from whom he derived his commitment to universal history and his interest in the relationship between secular history and what he called sacred history or divine providence.
First, I propose briefly to state what some of these ideas were. Secondly, I shall consider some questions that have long puzzled students of his work about the interpretation and assessment of these ideas. This movement had its roots in dissatisfaction with what was taken to be the crude and obsolete methodology of existing general works about International Relations, especially those of Realist writers such as E.
Carr, George F. Kennan and Hans Morgenthau, which formed the staple academic diet of the time. The hope that inspired the behaviourists was that by developing a more refined and up-to-date methodology it would be possible to arrive at a rigorously scientific body of knowledge that would help explain the past, predict the future and provide a firm basis for political action.
But the kind of theory to which he was drawn was utterly different from that which was intended by the behaviourists. He saw the Theory of International Relations—or, as he called it, International Theory—as a study in political philosophy or political speculation pursued by way of an examination of the main traditions of thought about International Relations in the past. Whereas the behaviourist school sought a kind of theory that approximated to science, his was a kind that approximated to philosophy.
While the behaviourists sought to exclude moral questions as lying beyond the scope of scientific treatment, Wight placed these questions at the centre of his inquiry. I felt that they represented a significant challenge and that it was important to understand them and engage in debate with them.
The correct strategy, it appeared to me, was to sit at their feet, to study their position until one could state their own arguments better than they could and then—when they were least suspecting—to turn on them and slaughter them in an academic Massacre of Glencoe. Wight entertained none of these bloody thoughts. He made no serious effort to study the behaviourists and in effect ignored them. What this reflected, of course, was the much greater sense of confidence and security he had about his own position.
The idea that an approach to Theory as unhistorical and unphilosophical as this might provide a serious basis for understanding world politics simply never entered his head. Each pattern or tradition of thought embodied a description of the nature of international politics and also a set of prescriptions as to how men should conduct themselves in it. The prescriptions advanced by the Machiavellians were simply such as were advanced by Machiavelli in The Prince : it was for each state or ruler to pursue its own interest: the question of morality in international politics, at least in the sense of moral rules which restrained states in their relations with one another, did not arise.
For the Grotians—among whom Wight included the classical international lawyers, Locke, Burke, Castlereagh, Gladstone, Franklin Roosevelt, Churchill—international politics had to be described not as international anarchy but as international intercourse, a relationship chiefly among states to be sure, but one in which there was not only conflict but also cooperation.
To the central question of Theory of International Relations the Grotians returned the answer that states, although not subject to a common superior, nevertheless formed a society—a society that was no fiction, and whose workings could be observed in institutions such as diplomacy, international law, the balance of power and the concert of great powers. States in their dealings with one another were not free of moral and legal restraints: the prescription of the Grotians was that states were bound by the rules of this international society they composed and in whose continuance they had a stake.
The Kantians rejected both the Machiavellian view that international politics was about conflict among states, and the view of the Grotians that it was about a mixture of conflict and cooperation among states. For the Kantians it was only at a superficial and transient level that international politics was about relations among states at all; at a deeper level it was about relations among the human beings of which states were composed.
The ultimate reality was the community of mankind, which existed potentially, even if it did not exist actually, and was destined to sweep the system of states into limbo. The Kantians, like the Grotians, appealed to international morality, but what they understood by this was not the rules that required states to behave as good members of the society of states, but the revolutionary imperatives that required all men to work for human brotherhood.
In the Kantian doctrine the world was divided between the elect, who were faithful to this vision of the community of mankind or civitas maxima , and the damned, the heretics, who stood in its way. This Kantian pattern of thought, according to Wight, was embodied in the three successive waves of Revolutionist ideology that had divided modern international society on horizontal rather than vertical lines: that of the Protestant Reformation, that of the French Revolution and that of the Communist Revolution of our own times.
But it was also embodied, he thought, in the Counter-Revolutionist ideologies to which each of these affirmations of horizontal solidarity gave rise: that of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, that of International Legitimism and that of Dullesian Anti-Communism. Having identified these three patterns of thought Wight went on to trace the distinctive doctrines that each of them put forward concerning war, diplomacy, power, national interest, the obligation of treaties, the obligation of an individual to bear arms, the conduct of foreign policy and the relations between civilised states and so-called barbarians.
It is impossible to summarise what Martin Wight had to say about the three traditions without in some measure vulgarising it. The impact of his lectures was produced not only by the grandeur of the design but also by the detailed historical embroidery, worked out with great subtlety, humanity and wit and with staggering erudition. In the hands of a lesser scholar the threefold categorisation would have served to simplify and distort the complexity of international thought.
But Wight himself was the first to warn against the danger of reifying the concepts he had suggested. He insisted that the Machiavellian, Grotian and Kantian traditions were merely paradigms, to which no actual thinker did more than approximate: not even Machiavelli, for example, was in the strict sense a Machiavellian.
Wight recognised that the exercise of classifying international theories requires that we have more pigeon-holes than three and so he suggested various ways in which each of the three traditions could be further subdivided: the Machiavellian tradition into its aggressive and its defensive form, the Grotian tradition into its realist and idealist form, the Kantian tradition into its evolutionary and its revolutionary forms, its imperialist and its cosmopolitanist forms, its historically backward-looking and its forward-looking or progressivist forms.
He was always experimenting with new ways of formulating and describing the three traditions and in some versions of his lectures he suggested a fourth category of what he called Inverted Revolutionists, the pacifist stream of thought represented by the early Christians and by Tolstoy and Gandhi. He saw the three traditions as forming a spectrum, within which at some points one pattern of thought merged with another, as infra-red becomes ultra-violet.
First, as between the Machiavellian, the Grotian and the Kantian perspectives, where did Martin Wight himself stand? This was a question that earnest students would put to him plaintively at the end of a lecture. Wight used to delight in keeping students guessing on this issue and went out of his way to give them as little material as possible for speculating about it.
Although each facet can of course be distinguished analytically and theorized separately, neither is ontologically independent of the other. Survival may be threatened by internal war. The good life may be fostered by external aid. Unable to display preview.
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