research paper on political thought

Berkley Center

The relevance of political thought to contemporary global challenges.

By: Natasha Vincent

December 20, 2019

I write this post as a follow-up to my first post titled “ An Uncomfortable but Pertinent Introspection into Privilege .” During my first eight-week term at Oxford, I took the Advanced Paper in Theories of Justice as one of my two tutorials for the term. The bespoke course, typically taken by philosophy and/or politics undergraduates, aimed to examine the principles of justice as established by philosophers such as John Rawls. Each week, we examined how these principles applied to different themes and various groups of individuals, from the disabled to future generations.

Academic learning at the undergraduate level at Oxford entails much more individual learning than at Georgetown. I don’t have structured classes here per se, but instead, I have one tutorial a week for each of my two courses in the term. For each tutorial, I had to produce an essay of around 2,000 words, and I spent most of my time reading books and journal articles, delving into different arguments before writing my essay. 

Spending most of my time reading required a lot of discipline to stay focused and, more often than not, my mind drifted off to other passing thoughts. A recurring one, however, was wondering why I was studying the theoretical aspects of justice, which then led to a sort of frustration upon a superficial realization that this would have limited utility in real-world policy. My reasoning went something like this: “If politicians neither quote Rawls nor appeal to his principles of justice when dealing with injustice, then what use is this stuff, really?” 

Then came the tutorial in which my tutorial partner and I went to our tutor’s room at Balliol College, one of Oxford’s oldest colleges. There, our essays for each tutorial were critiqued and our tutor pushed us to probe deeper. I felt somewhat uncomfortable sitting in this room at Balliol which had an old charm to it, discussing these principles of justice without focusing much on their application to contemporary politics. I subconsciously put a limit on how much effort I put into truly understanding justice through the lens of philosophy. Simply put, if these principles of an ideal society did not apply in the real world, I was not buying it.

Admittedly, I lost interest in the tutorial for a good three weeks. In an effort to save myself from further embarrassment, I started reading about the methodology behind political philosophy and began to realize how relevant the field actually is to the real world. Political philosophy offers normative insights on what government should be and how we can apply those principles to create a just society. Just because a chasm exists between political philosophy and actual politics does not mean that political thought exists in its own bubble or that it should be relegated to the past. 

Another of my initial critiques is that political philosophers hail from predominantly privileged, western European backgrounds. The discipline also has inherent institutional and cultural biases, but to dismiss it by virtue of not being entirely representative of global demographics and inclusive of other cultures does not change the status quo; it simply neglects the fact that there is a rich body of scholarship that can be adapted to today’s context. 

I say this as a person of color. One of the themes we discussed was colonialism; my ancestors from India certainly encountered historic injustices during the age of the British Empire, but I do think that we need some nuance when discussing postcolonialism. Too often, postcolonial dialogue engages in an oversimplification and a generalized condemnation of “white people,” without critically analyzing the intricacies of history—which instead gives way to the popular rhetoric of contemporary social movements in postcolonial societies that fails to achieve institutional reform.

Things changed for the better after I had a more positive outlook on the tutorial, and I began to truly enjoy what I was studying. I am intrigued to integrate these philosophical insights to my next tutorials at Oxford and my courses during my senior year at Georgetown—in the hopes of learning more about how the gap between political theory and actual politics isn’t as far as we think it is.

About the Author

Natasha Vincent

Natasha Vincent (SFS'21) graduated from the School of Foreign Service in Qatar in 2021, with a major in international politics and a minor in Arabic. Natasha studied at St. Catherine's College in Oxford for the 2019-2020 academic year and shared her insights on British culture through the Junior Year Abroad Network.

Beyond the pendulum: situating Adam Watson in International Relations and the English School

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• Published: 16 October 2023

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• Filippo Costa Buranelli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-2447-7618 1  

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He was a diplomat, a theorist, a teacher, a writer, a commentator. He was even more than that. He was a sponge, who absorbed everything He found interesting (Polly Watson Black)

Among the founding figures of the English School of International Relations (ES) and the British Committee (BC), Adam Watson is perhaps the least studied and researched. How, for example, did his past as diplomat informed his Weltanschauung and his understanding of combining theory and practice? How did his academic relationship and friendship with other members of the BC and colleagues shaped his outlook on international politics? What was his political theory and philosophy? And what have his contributions been, not simply to the ES, but to IR writ large? This paper offers an intellectual portrait of Adam Watson and his persona , making use not only of his published written production, but also of so far unexplored archives and materials. Specifically, the paper situates Adam Watson within the ES and the broader IR panorama, taking into account the professional, academic, and human material that the extensive research for this paper has uncovered.

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Of all the founding figures of the English School of International Relations (ES), John Hugh ‘Adam’ Watson is perhaps the least known and scrutinised. The reason for this is difficult to pin down. Is it because of his non-academic background, as diplomat who turned to theory at a later stage in his life? Or is it because his disparate interests, which ranged from history to diplomacy, from international political economy to morality, from theory to practice, make it difficult to categorise him? After all, not only did Adam Watson chair the British Committee of International Relations (BC) (1973–1978) alongside three founding figures of the ES such as Herbert Butterfield, Martin Wight, and Hedley Bull, but his contribution to that group, and even more so to the theory and the wider IR discipline, has also been pivotal.

As has been recently noted, ‘the major protagonists [of the BC] were Butterfield, then Master of Peterhouse College, Cambridge, Adam Watson, former diplomat and historian who followed Butterfield closely in thought and method, and Martin Wight, a medieval historian who had been teaching a course of the theory of international relations at the London School of Economics […] The junior was Hedley Bull’ (Navari 2021 : 144). The description then goes on, maintaining that ‘all were people of extraordinary talent, but quite different intellectual orientation’, before analysing the ‘talent’ and ‘intellectual orientation’ of Butterfield, Wight, and Bull. And Watson? He is simply not featured in the list. It is telling that in the paragraphs subsequent to this encomium, Watson disappears. The above passage epitomises how, like Schrodinger’s cat, Watson is often easily acknowledged among the founding members of the ES, but at the same time his contribution is often not subject to deep engagement.

Of Watson, thanks to existing research, we know that he was interested in hegemony and hierarchical structures of international society across history (Ruacan 2018 ; Clark 2011 ) as well as in diplomacy (Watson 1984 ); that he was a comparativist and worked with Bull on The Expansion of International Society (1984); that he was and still is ‘the pendulum guy’, Footnote 1 one of the first to have provided the ES with a refined analytical tool to organise and describe different structural configuration of international orders across history, from anarchic to imperial—in Navari’s words, ‘the first typology of international systems (or societies of states)’ ( 2021 : 149; see also Diez and Whitman 2002 ). Yet, much is still left unearthed. How, for example, did his past as diplomat inform his Weltanschauung and his understanding of combining theory and practice? How did his academic relationship and friendship with other members of the BC and colleagues shape his outlook on international politics? What was his political theory and philosophy? And what have his contributions been, not simply to the ES, but to IR writ large?

Contributing to those few works engaging directly with Watson’s life and his production (see, for example, Buzan and Little 2009 ; Waever 1996 ; Diez and Whitman 2002 ), this paper seeks to provide an intellectual portrait of Adam Watson and his persona , making use not only of his published written production, but also of so far unexplored archives and materials to bring to light his philosophy and approach to theorisation, as well as his less acknowledged contributions and reflections, such as those in International Political Economy (IPE), imperialism, and decolonisation; the ideological as well as political importance of the Soviet Union/Russia and its implication for pluralism and great power management; and the theorisation of sub-systems as well as their underlying cosmologies.

What is important to note from the very beginning is that all the above-mentioned themes and the archival materials supporting them are indeed linked to Watson’s most famous production, especially his works on hegemony and systems of states across history, but add a level of depth, complexity, and intellectual curiosity that were typical of his ‘elasticity of mind’ (Buzan and Little 2009 ). Footnote 2 Alongside the other papers contained in this Special Issue, this article thus intends to do justice to a pioneering character, and a true humanist, within the ES, without of course neglecting the aporias, idiosyncrasies, and tensions within his own work—something that will be thoroughly explored in the subsequent articles. The additional task is thus that of situating Adam Watson within the ES and the broader IR panorama, taking into account the professional, academic, and human material that the extensive research for this paper has uncovered.

The reader should know from the very beginning that this paper is ultimately the product of a journey, both real (across Virginia, Chatham House, King’s College London, and the University of Cambridge) and metaphorical (across Watson’s archives, papers, and books), and is also the product of encounters, for I was lucky enough to meet and converse with Watson’s daughter and one of his two sons. These encounters have helped me to understand that, behind the most-known productions of Adam Watson, there was much more—diplomatic memos, theatrical productions, radio programmes, journals and letters, friendships, travels, and plenty of lecture and personal notes. If this paper manages to shed light on even just a fraction on the complexity—and the depth—of Watson, then that will be in itself a success. Also, this contribution is based on a strongly inductive research strategy by which the large amount archival material is organised—inevitably slightly artificially—in separate sections on the basis of the themes that progressively clustered in my analysis, which also justifies the focus on the above-mentioned themes. As a matter of fact, they are the subjects which the archival material sifted during the research revealed and are also those more neglected as mentioned above.

The paper is structured as follows. The first section provides the reader with an analysis of the complexity of the theory–practice relationship in Watson’s work and intellectual persona as well as his position and positionality within the BC, taking into account his different identities: historian, theorist, practitioner. The second section, which builds directly on the first one, tackles the way in which Watson considered the system–society distinction within the ES canon, thus not only anticipating later scholarship on the subject, but also being in direct intellectual contrast with Hedley Bull. These first two sections, it should be noted, are divided for clarity purposes and better organisation of the text considering the amount of archival material consulted but should be seen as intrinsically interlinked as both rely on matters pertaining to science, knowledge, and theory. The third section looks at his contribution in terms of IPE, imperialism and decolonisation, while the fourth section considers his interest in ideology, Russia, and communism. The fifth and last section takes into account Watson’s production and thoughts on sub-systems and regions, offering also some thoughts on his still unpublished cosmological work titled God, Government, and Science . The conclusions sum up the various aspects of Watson’s persona identified in the paper and make the case for considering him a true embodiment of what the ES was and is, as well as a prolific thinker who contributed directly to several of today’s pressing questions within IR.

Theory, practice, and philosophy of science in Watson’s thought

This first section intends to shed light on Watson’s philosophy of science, as well as his methods and his different types of knowledge which, rooted in history, theory, and practice, were both inductive and deductive (Buzan and Little 2009 ). Adam Watson was officially invited to join the BC on 10 March 1959. In a letter from Herbert Butterfield (who was still addressing him as ‘John’), we read that the BC was looking for ‘a representative of the Foreign Office’ and that he, alongside Martin Wight, ‘thought that you [Watson] were just the person to be interested in the deeper principles as well as the larger historical aspect of the whole question [of international order]’ (Butterfield 1959 ). It is interesting to note here, from the very beginning of the relation between Watson and the BC, his identity as a ‘representative of the Foreign Office’ for it will create a musical-chair-like pattern of perceived identities (official, diplomat, historian, theorist, practitioner) which will impact on how Watson’s and his production have been received and interpreted to a large extent.

In fact, Watson was a representative of the Foreign Office, but he was first and foremost a historian . As a diplomat who was also disciple of Butterfield, and as a historian in the British empirical tradition also familiar with von Ranke’s historical positivism and Heeren’s work within the Göttingen School, he had direct access to international society as a practitioner within that tradition . This meant that Watson was aware not only of international society per se (understood as rules and institutions between states), but also of its proneness to change, thus approaching international society as a historical subject that could be investigated empirically . As Buzan and Little put it, Watson combined his historical sensitivity with ‘the accumulated lessons of practical experience on top of rules and institutions’ ( 2009 ).

According to the minutes of one of the earliest BC meetings, Watson ‘said he came to the Committee as a student or observer of events who wanted to examine the patterns that were produced, and the correlations that could be made. He liked the idea of going below the surface of and not merely analysing, e.g. the failure of the Suez affair, but seeking an analytical theory of international politics’ (BC minutes 1962 ). This is a crucial statement for two reasons. First, it tells us that Watson was drawn to theorisation, to patterns. He was, after all, willing to make sense of elements of change and continuity across international societies through the centuries, especially with respect to hegemonic and hierarchical rule, alongside understanding the long-term goals of diplomacy. Second, this is where we first read about his philosophy of science, which seems to be very analytical and indeed theory-based. Yet, Watson would soon start struggling with pure ‘analytics’. To understand Watson’s positioning on the matter as to how theory and practice are linked (and which one comes first), it is perhaps worthwhile to look at how he pondered such questions in regard to his teacher and mentor, Herbert Butterfield. In the introduction to Butterfield’s The Origin of History ( 2016 : 7), Watson maintains that

Butterfield was against the Whig interpretation of History, as well as Marx’s, and such personal simplifications and diagrams of the historical process as Spengler’s and Toynbee’s. The trouble was that in all of them the theory or interpretation or diagram came first. They were a priori intuitions. Sometimes, as he once said to me, it was a grandiose and imaginative one, but derived only very partially from the facts and owing more to other beliefs and other purposes in this world.

Watson agreed wholeheartedly with this, especially considering what may be termed the ‘crisis of historicism’ in those years (Buzan and Little 2009 ). He, as we shall see below, was sympathetic to abstraction and theorisation, and he himself adopted elements of methodological analyticism—after all, is not his pendulum an example of the latter? Yet, ultimately, he knew the complexity of reality could not really be captured by any schema or framework, and that his historical pedigree rooted in British empiricism and his years ‘in the practice’ taught him that the world worked differently from ‘the theory’.

As a matter of fact, Butterfield aside, another historian who vastly impacted his way of studying and looking at world politics was Polybius, whose words often served as a guide to Watson. In his notes, one can often find Polybius’s quote, ‘history will never be properly written, until either men of action undertake to write it […], or historians become convinced that practical experience is of the first importance for historical composition’ (Polybius XII, para. 28, undated), which would inform Watson’s writing until his late period. This is evident in his foreword to James Der Derian’s book Post-theory: New Thinking in International Relations Theory , arguing that ‘The process of “holding a society of states together,” of managing change and of providing a mantle of gradual legitimation for adjustments to the rules and institutions, is largely determined by the practice of the member states’ ( 1997a : xvii, emphasis added).

But let us see this in a more diachronic way. Already in Emergent Africa ( 1965 , published as ‘Scipio’) we read several times that ‘in diplomacy’ things worked one way, while ‘in academic pursuits’ they would be different, thus hinting at a dichotomy, a separation that can converge at times, but is mostly to be found as stark. In the preface to The Limits of Independence , we read that the book is about ‘the practice and the theory of relations between states’ ( 1997b : xi, emphasis added), with the practice coming first and in fact ‘outrunning the theory’ ( 2006 : ch. 8). In this book, Watson explicitly draws a very clear line between ‘practice’, understood as ‘the work of diplomats’ and hence the (then) Foreign Office, and ‘theory’, which he identifies with academic and scholarly pursuits, and exemplifies if with a reference to Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society ( 1997b : xii), as will be discussed in the next section in regard to the system–society distinction. He indeed remarked this on multiple occasions, and once again in The Limits of Independence when arguing, for example, that he produced his study ‘in the light of [his] experience in the twentieth century’ ( 1997b : 1). On page 69, Watson’s position is even stronger: ‘The concept that states are sufficiently alike to be treated as members of the same set is more than a fallacy. It is a myth which influences our concept of international reality and distorts our judgment’ (emphasis added). After all, he often identified himself as a ‘practitioner’ (Vigezzi 2014 : 32, fn. 45) and was equally seen as such (see letter from Butterfield to Thompson in Vigezzi 2014 : 170).

Yet, exactly as he did not fully reject abstract theorisation, his identity within the BC was far more difficult to grasp. As Butterfield said to RJB Miller in a letter of recommendation for Watson to get a fellowship at the Australian National University, (W60 1 June 1971 ),

He could have easily established himself as a scholar, but, from the very first, it had been made clear to everybody that he was going to have a diplomatic career. I have never known anyone in our Foreign Service (or in any other of our services) who so managed to add to his practical knowledge of affairs those advantages of perspective, of analytical procedure, and of long-term thinking etc., which historical scholarship can bring. Many of his ideas are perhaps more relevant to the historian than to the political practitioners. His desire to see contemporary events with the eye of the historian.

Historical knowledge, practical knowledge, and analytical knowledge all coexisted in Watson’s production, at times with one privileged over the other two, but constantly informing his thinking, which was never satisfied with anything that looked simple or, worse, simplified.

The theory–practice divide would thus continue over the years, as we can see in both The Limits of Independence ( 1997b : 118, ‘as we move along the spectrum from the theoretical absolute into the realm of practice’) and in Hegemony and History ( 2006 : 57, ‘The actual practice of the contemporary international society is very different from the theoretical legitimacy’). At times, he tried to reconciliate these opposites. In Hegemony and History ( 2006 : 92), he tries to bring theory back. Asking ‘why do we need theory?’, Watson offers two answers:

First, it is impossible to understand any set of connected events without some general idea, a working theory, about how those events relate to one another. And as new facts are established, they either fit the theory or you must modify the theory to accommodate them. Second, in real life, governments and ministries of foreign affairs have assumptions about how international affairs work. If they are wrong, the consequences may be serious.

For him, therefore, a theory was best understood as a way to organise knowledge, as opposed to make it abstract or simple, and he was aware that ‘practitioners’ were not removed from theory. Rather, the question was what theory, on the basis of historical record , best approximates and directs what practitioners do. The relationship between theory and practice was something that interested Watson for most of his life, especially since he strove to make the ES relevant for contemporary policymaking. For example, in one of his last articles on Latin American politics published in a newspaper for the general public (Watson in The London News: 1983 ) he referred to states looking for a ‘modus vivendi’ to stabilise regional politics. ‘Modus vivendi’ was a locution that Watson often used to indicate ‘international society’, as is found also in some of his BBC transcripts of radio interviews. Footnote 3

Finally, another important locus where Watson reflects on the theorist–practitioner dichotomy is in a private document, namely the feedback he offered to Geoffrey Wiseman on his paper Adam Watson on Diplomacy, presented at ISA New Orleans in 2002 (Watson, undated). Footnote 4 In it, Watson argues that he does not have a dedicated chapter in Dunne’s The Invention of International Society ( 1998 ) because ‘while [I] was in the diplomatic service until 1968 [I] did not publish anything on international theory under [my] name’. The same, he argues, was for other practitioners (he actually uses this term) within the BC, ‘such as Robert Wade-Gery and Noel Dorr’. Commenting on how the important work of practitioners is neglected, in the same document Watson remarks that ‘the sherpas do not get the public credit for climbing the mountain’ (Watson, undated; see also Watson 2001 ). The contribution of practitioners to international theory, and the fairness in acknowledging it, would come back later on in Hegemony and History ( 2006 : 10), where he stated that

the contribution of practitioners is less visible because they do not normally publish papers on international relations theory. In selecting future practitioners it will be well to remember that the role of conventional diplomacy…is declining with the development of technology and the transformation to an ever less Westphalian system. Future study groups will need to extend the range of practitioner experience beyond diplomacy to cover economic globalisation and other effects of increasing interdependence.

Once again, what is stressed is experience, human experience, which for Watson—as was for Butterfield—was ultimately the cornerstone of every possible theorisation. Notwithstanding the merits and usefulness of analyticism, which Watson appreciated, the basis of knowledge remained for him direct and indirect observation or experience.

The international system–society distinction

Another consequence of this practice-theory dichotomy, central to the work of Watson, is the fact that he was among the first, if not the first, to question the analytical distinction between system and society within the notorious ES tripartition. Often credited to Alan James ( 1993 ), and later systematised by Barry Buzan in his landmark From International to World Society? (Buzan 2004 , who on page 99 does recognise the pioneering work of Watson in this respect), the problematisation of this stark distinction between the anomic, the physical, the mechanical and the social, the normative, and the reciprocal is to be first suggested in the writings and thoughts of Adam Watson.

This problematisation, in fact, begins all the way back in 1961 when, in the course of a discussion within the BC, Watson, quite imaginatively,

supported [that rules are necessary conditions of all regular human interactions] by reference to relations imagined between present sovereign states and a community of men on the moon. If we suddenly discovered such a community, and sought not to exterminate them […] but to do business with them, then in the absence of any cultural tradition we should find ourselves practising with them rules [of coexistence] (BC minutes, 8 October 1961 : 7). Footnote 5

Once again having issues with the theory-reality gap in Bull’s work, for ‘in the real world nothing except a yardstick is exactly a yard long’ ( 1987 : 147), Watson clearly recollects his conversations with Bull on where to draw the line between system and society, and what exact criteria for membership should be satisfied. For Watson, for example, ‘[the Ottomans] and the European powers they dealt with did conceive themselves to be bound by a common set of rules in their relations and shared in the working of common institutions, while Bull was inclined to regard Ottoman relations with European states as little more than the relations between states belonging to different international system’ ( 1987 : 144).

Watson understood that reality was made of gradients, nuances, uncertainties, and grey areas, all things that a fixed analytical schema would not capture. In looking at the shared understandings and practices that informed relations between Ottomans and Europeans (as well as Persians and Greeks, and even Soviets and Americans) Watson anticipated by a few years the epistemological and ontological debate on the system/society distinction. In his view, which in a way predates also the regional agenda of the ES,

I therefore now think it more accurate to say that the formal rules and institutions of a society of states, and even more its codes of conduct and its unspoken assumptions, are formed within the matrix of a single culture; but states belonging to other cultures that find themselves involved in the pressures of the same system can become members of the society or be associated with it, provided they accept its rules and assumptions, perhaps with marginal modifications ( 1990 : 102).

As discussed in the previous section, Watson was an analyticist (Jackson 2010 ), but with a strong proclivity to diplomatic history and (historical) sociology. Or, as Buzan and Little maintained, Watson understood the need to complement diplomatic history with historical sociology ( 2009 ). It is not difficult to identify in his discussions within the BC, passim in his solo works, and even in his private lecture notes references (‘the theory assumes anarchy, but reality is a hegemony of the leading states’, undated, underlined in the original) to a ‘reality’ out there, which theory was tasked to systematise and explain but certainly not constitute . In this respect, he shared several epistemological positions with Bull, himself an analyticist, but was more aware of (and at times frustrated by) the limits of the analytical tools themselves underpinning theoretical constructs than his colleague and co-editor—most likely because of the large and long experience as a diplomat and practitioner, as well as his training as a historian. As Bull often remarked in conversation with Watson, ‘I am not a historian, I am a political scientist’ ( 2006 : 36). Footnote 6

Differently from Bull, and in close alignment with Butterfield, Watson ultimately saw international society as a historical creation . It is in this framework that his doubts about the tenability of the system–society distinction should be taken into account. The similarity, yet the difference with Bull is visible in the following quote extracted from a letter from Watson directed to Bull: ‘the system approach to our subject […] has helped me to understand certain aspects of it much better, but it needs to be used more critically and with a greater awareness of its limitations’ (in Vigezzi 2014 : 68). Yet, this median way, or at least sympathetic position, morphs into quasi-frustration a decade later or so, when in a paper titled From a European to a Global International Order. Some Comments on Our Theme ( 1979 : 1) Watson argues that ‘this distinction between a system and a society of states is thoroughly discussed in The Anarchical Society ; but it seems to me in formal terms, without resolving the issue Hedley Bull has raised again for us here, how far the formal distinction reflects a significant reality’. In the remainder of that paper, Watson makes the case to substantiate the analysis of the impact of technology and various industrial revolutions and, in a move that very much signalled his willingness to look at actors other than European ones, to pay more attention to the history of indigenous elites, considered to be an extraordinary key to understanding ‘the emerging global order and international society’ ( 1979 : 2–3; see also Vigezzi 2014 : 84). This is more broadly captured by Vigezzi, for whom ‘the scholars of the British Committee […] are not very fond of over-detached theorisation. The “fundamentals” that they analyse imply myriads of “events”. Seen in this light, international life can be shown to have exceptional substance and richness’ ( 2014 : 130–1), and this is where ‘the subjective’ and ‘the objective’ blur (Vigezzi 2014 : 129–130).

A richness and substance that Watson, for all his willingness to rely on abstraction and analytical schemas, is too eager to accept and incorporate in his theorisation. It is at the end of his tenure as Chair of the BC, and at the end of the ‘ethics phase’ of the BC, that Watson stressed his awareness of the limitations of Bull’s analyticism. In his works on ethics such as No Criticism Please: We are Fighting for Justice (January 1976) and Distributive Justice between States (October 1977), he ultimately describes system and society as ‘symbols’ of the ‘various possibilities which, over the centuries, opened up to international life’ (Vigezzi 2014 : 291).

In fact, while he did accept at the philosophical level a modicum of analyticism (with a strong awareness of the caveats that are attached to it), Watson was far more inclusive in his ontological positions, and if we are to understand which of Bull’s analytical categories he mostly embraced, it would not be international system or society, but the far less debated one of ‘global political system’ (Bull 1977 ), which indicated the totality of actors and relations and emphasised the role of non-state actors and technology in world politics—something in which Watson became interested thanks to the work of Desmond Williams. He hints at this position when, publishing The Limits of Independence , Footnote 7 Watson dedicates the book to his friend the Indian scholar A.P. Rana, mentioning his ‘Indian gift for coherent overview of the complexity of the international scene’. Footnote 8 This is even clearer in the above-mentioned paper From a European to a Global Order , in a passage which is worth mentioning in toto :

I should like us to grope for a concept of international order which gives due weight to membership to the UN and corresponding bodies in earlier times, but also to other activities which promote international order. Constituted regional bodies, even if not universal in their region, like NATO, the OAS, ASEAN, the Organisation of African Unity, the Lomé Convention, play their parts in the global order. In trying to discern how the transition to a global order is actually taking place, I should like us to pay special attention to bodies where voting rights or other forms of say-so are linked to capacity or strength in a given field, like the World Bank, the Monetary Fund, and OPEC, in contrast to the gross disparity between the votes of many statelets at the UN and their capacity to deliver anything but their vote ( 1979 : 3).

It is evident that the above is an attempt to build ES theorisation of order in line with the more recent literature on regionalism, international institutions/regime theory, and global governance more broadly. Decades earlier, through his problematisation of Bull’s system–society distinction, Watson was elaborating on the crucial role that constructivism would play in fostering ES research and sharper theorisation (Buzan 2004 ; Adler 2005 ), as well as how regions and organisations played and would play in maintaining and changing world order, anticipating de facto the ES programmes on regions and on the relationship between primary and secondary institutions (Buzan 2004 ; Navari and Knudsen 2019 ). Footnote 9

International political economy, imperialism, and decolonisation

The previous two sections discussed Watson’s different identities and how they impacted on the theory–practice nexus at the heart of his work and on his philosophy of science, with important consequences for the system–society distinction within the ES. We now move to another neglected aspect of his production, that related to IPE, imperialism, and decolonisation, understood in both its political/legal and epistemological meanings. As will be evident, these aspects of international politics are vastly inherent to one of Watson’s major contributions, i.e. the theorisation of hegemony and (informal) hierarchies.

His interest in these subjects began in the late 1950s, and hence even before he formally joined the BC (Vigezzi 2014 ), while he was a diplomat posted in sub-Saharan Africa, an experience which would lead him to be the Head of the African Department at the Foreign Office. In a letter sent to Herbert Butterfield on Boxing Day 1955 (W40), Watson wrote that the evolving dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa, including the impact that the process of decolonisation and the incorporation of new economies within the increasingly global economic system would have on world order, were of ‘great interest’ to him. While, as a matter of fact, one may say that books such as Emergent Africa and The Nature and Problems of the Third World were not written strictly speaking with the jargon and the analytical categories of the ES, still he displayed sharp acumen in foreseeing some of the most defining themes of the future order in terms of structural inequalities, hierarchies, exploitation, and dependency. And later on in his life, it was in The Limits of Independence that Watson fleshed out some of his most radical, and quasi-realist, ideas on international society and the economic dimension thereof. Here, we can see how in fact Watson reflected on one dimension of the ES that Barry Buzan, correctly, lamented as underdeveloped, that of IPE ( 2014 ).

Once again, and linked to the previous section, it was thanks to his experience as a diplomat and his professionalism in the ‘real world’ that he was able to theorise about the above, and to focus on the legacies of imperialism as well as the potential (both economic and epistemological) of decolonisation through the prism of IPE. For clarity purposes, the section is divided into two subsections: the first one about imperialism, inequality, and dependency, and the second one about decolonisation.

Imperialism, inequality, and dependency

It should be noted that Watson’s relationship with imperialism was, at best, ambivalent. After all, he was a civil servant and an employee of the Foreign Office, with important duties and missions which included, as noted above, delicate diplomatic posts in sub-Saharan Africa to oversee the process of decolonisation. In his books, as well as in his personal recollections and cables sent back to London from his missions and in the letters he would send to the Butterfields from, e.g. Senegal, Togo, Nigeria, and Mali (e.g. W45 2 December 1959 ), there is an inherent tension between what he considered to be the positive legacies and heritage of the British Empire in those territories, and the legitimate, overdue, and rightful campaigns for independence of the former colonies.

Yet, while at times this tension ends up in fairly patronising tones, and in a justification for the presence of imperial forces in the African continent, his thinking over the years morphs into a more pessimistic and critical outlook of what he calls ‘Western imperialism’, in which ‘the restraints [on development] are both economic and political. But they are mainly pragmatic rather than theoretical, and they leave intact the key legitimacy principle of nominal independence’ ( 1997b : 67). He goes on to the extent of claiming that ‘there are growing resemblances between these Western patterns and the Soviet imperial system. They are likely to be obscured by the major differences, especially on the political plane, and by the truly exploitative policy of Stalin’s impoverished Soviet state towards the territories it occupied at the end of World War II’ ( 1997b : 72).

Once again, the influence of Rana is noteworthy here. A student of Martin Wight at the LSE, Rana developed the idea of a New Northern Concert of Powers which informed Watson understanding of collective hegemony, described as benefitting from an ‘unassailable’ homogeneity, enabling them to function collectively as an international hegemon in the wider anarchical system against the ‘Developing South’ ( 1997b : 133). In sum, especially after the end of the Cold War, it seems to me that Watson veers towards positions that, despite crucial differences, resemble those of scholars such as Robert Cox ( 1981 ), in that specific social forces and the structures that they generate lead to hegemonic, when not blatantly hierarchical, relations between the haves and the have-nots, perpetuating in practice the imperial relations that were present only a few decades before. Footnote 10 The following quote may help elucidate this:

The formal legitimacy of independence is a status: a category in diplomacy, at the United Nations and in international law. But it does not describe absolute control of foreign and domestic policy. The interests and pressures of the state system continue to operate. The rules of the international society, and most pertinently the conditions of the assistance which weak states need, are determined by the great and rich powers and the organisations which they substantially control, especially the economic ones ( 1997b , 61).

Crucially, however, and typical of Watson’s holistic view of international relations, these structures and hegemonic patterns go well beyond the state-to-state dimension are in fact perpetuated and supported by non-state actors, in particular economic investors and donors, and élites, thus anticipating crucial research on world society in the ES. In fact,

it has suited both the new ruling elites and the industrially developed donor powers to continue the investment and the administrative and technical underpinning of the newly independent states. The donor states and their corporations have the same interest in the products, the labour and the markets of the new states, the same interest in order and security, and the same humanitarian impulses, as before: but in a more generalised way than when colonies belonged to individual empires. The concern of the developed North for the welfare of the ex-colonies has extended from raison d’état or raison d’empire to raison de système ( 1997b : 76-77).

The passage above resembles in many way the arguments advanced by Gramscian and critical scholars alike, not just like Cox but also Justin Rosenberg and his Empire of Civil Society ( 1994 ) in linking the current form of the international system (or, in ES parlance, international society) to a specific economic configuration that depends very much on interests, practices, and power imbalances between organised communities and transnational actors: ‘The identity of a state, and its nominal independence, can be preserved, while the donors insist on action in areas that particularly concern them, like human rights. They do so directly and through multilateral bodies like the UN or the World Bank: which in practice means the collective hegemony of the great powers’ ( 1997b : 93). Footnote 11

These are all themes that, in several respects, brought Watson closer to the position of scholars like Susan Strange in her States and Markets ( 1994 ). Without necessarily using her notion of structural power (see also Barnett and Duvall 2005 ), on multiple occasions Watson refers to the Bretton Woods system and the international financial architecture as a new ‘standard of civilisation’, markers of insiders and outsiders (Watson in Der Derian 1997 ; see also Watson 2001 : 469).

Decolonisation

At the same time, as noted, Watson held warm and genuinely sincere interest in decolonisation movements and spent a considerable amount of time both as a diplomat and as a theorist to study how newly independent states could play their role in international society without necessarily being marginalised in a position which would be nominally independent and factually subjugated.

In fact, he proposed to the BC a paper titled Anti-Imperialism and the International System for the Project on Second Volume of Essays , which was agreed in January 1965, rediscussed in April 1967, and then ultimately abandoned. Furthermore, in The Nature of The Problems of the Third World , Watson made the bold move of arguing that ultimately, true independence can be achieved only through ‘decapitalisation’ and ‘economic justice’ (Watson 1965 ; see also Watson, lecture notes, undated) by which he meant a detachment from the capitalist system managed by the Global North in favour of the development of regional trade systems, autonomous currencies, and a preferential treatment from the newly independent states.

In a more epistemological and methodological understanding of decolonisation, despite several problematic aspects of his works noted by other authors in this special issue (see also Dunne and Reus-Smit 2017 ) Watson distinguished himself for an attention to local sources and practices which, if not always consistent, nonetheless underpinned several aspects and phases of his work.

Already in his first opus, The War of the Goldsmith’s Daughter , Watson sets out to somehow decentre Europe, by noting how this war ‘began in 1406, nine years before Agincourt’ ( 1964 : 93) and by advocating to pay more attention to Islam and IR: ‘the history of Islam in India, and particularly that of the Bahmani Sultanate and the Vijayanagar Empire, throws a revealing light not only on Ottoman but also on Iberian and even Russian history’ ( 1964 : 226) thus somehow anticipating recent arguments made in IR with respect to Eurasia (see, for example, Zarakol 2022 ) by pointing at the importance of what Watson calls ‘the Indo-Saracen civilisation’ for south Asia and part of Eurasia. He did so by relying on primary sources and even on archaeological material, here too anticipating some of the most recent trends in using sources interdisciplinarily (Neumann and Glørstad 2022 ). It is in fact in this first book that we can see some of the defining features of his work, such as the attribution of importance to context and the crucial character of adaptation ( 1964 : 220) and localisation ( 1964 : 223) of practices, the fact that historically speaking suzerainty was far more pervasive than anarchy as an organisational structure for different polities, and the idea that ‘sovereignty’ and ‘state’ were two conceptual and analytical straightjackets when it comes to analyse historical international systems (see also Costa Lopez et al. 2018 ).

On two occasions, in correspondence with Bull, Watson lamented this, first by stating that he is ‘not sure that the term “sovereignty” as generally used is of much help’ (Vigezzi 2014 : 45, fn 39), and second by arguing that ‘much of our thinking [on IR] is conditioned by our assumptions about the state’ (Vigezzi 2014 ; 58, fn 27). In fact, he argued,

sovereignty […] may be a hindrance to our understanding of societies and systems that did not have such a legal and atomic idea of states and powers as we…terms like sovereignty and systems of states hardly fit the relations between lay princes themselves…How far do we miss the medieval reality if we say that [a prince] was sovereign, or that the lands he held constituted a sovereign state…? (Letter to Bull, 6-9 October 1967 ).

Sometimes these issues led to discussions within the BC itself, for example, when Watson had to remind the other attendees how in Africa there were pre-existing states before colonisation (Butt/29: 2, 19 Sept 1959 ). In this respect, the sensitivity to the tension between idiography and the general pattern, the specific and the big picture continued throughout his life, as we can see from his American lecture notes (Watson undated) in which we read that ‘Clio [the muse of history] is blonde’ and ‘history itself [is] Eurocentric’.

The attention to context, to local practices and local epistemologies would develop in the subsequent years, as can be seen in papers such as The Nature of state systems ( 1967 ) where he reflects on the limits of sate-centrism by elaborating on the Arthashastra (something on which he will develop in his paper on the Indian sub-system, which built much on his Goldsmith’s Daughter ), and The Dark Ages ( 1972 ), a much-neglected work where Watson problematises Western sovereignty as a defining principle to organise inter-polity relations, stresses the importance of local sources and practices, and paints an interesting understanding of ‘order’ based not on necessarily territorial polities but in fact on ‘inter-houses’ relations, again de facto anticipating recent arguments made about Eurasia (Zarakol 2022 ).

He would also stress the importance of the local context and local ideas in Emergent Africa : ‘by African values [it is meant] expressing the generally accepted values of civilisation in an idiom and with an emphasis more acceptable to Africans than the formulations we have evolved for ourselves in the West or others elsewhere’ (1965: 111). And crucially, this ‘idiography of practices’ would take Watson to consider how ‘“international legitimacy” acquires forms and content within distinctly marked historical events. In order to talk about aspirations to “international justice” and its diverse forms […] Watson refers to antiquity, to the values of “dike” and “the king’s peace” in Greece and Persia’ (Vigezzi 2014 : 275).

When in Hegemony and History ( 2006 : 11) Watson argued that ‘by now the battle against ahistorical and Eurocentric limitations on international theory has largely been won’ he was perhaps being optimistic and exaggerated, for Eurocentrism continues to permeate much of the IR discipline. Yet, it is undeniable that, although with mixed results and shortcomings (see also Dunne and Reus-Smit 2017 ), Watson was far more sensitive and attentive to issues pertaining to epistemic and historical pluralism than most of his colleagues and would engage in reflections that would ultimately push ES research on non-Western domains and Global IR (Costa Buranelli and Taeuber 2022 ).

Communism, the Soviet Union and Russia: ideology and great power management

Having delved into Watson’s interest for the economic as well as the (de)colonial aspects of IR, this fourth section moves on to shedding light on Watson’s attention paid to Russia and the USSR not simply in terms of great power competition and balance of power, typical of the years in which the BC operated, but more in terms of ideology, norms and institutions, and international society. Once again, to fully appreciate his thoughts on this matter it is vital to understand that his biography profoundly shaped his outlook on Russia.

Already in the 1940s, Watson was an avid reader of Russian history and politics, and in his correspondence with Butterfield we can find that the latter asked him to renew his subscription to the journal Vopros Historii (W28, 3 March 1947 ) after Watson sent him a volume on Soviet History (W18 1947 ). Even before that, one should not forget that Watson operated in Russia as member of the Foreign Office during the Second World War and had the chance to travel across the Soviet Union from Moscow to Afghanistan across Central Asia in 1946. These experiences placed him in direct contact with the Soviet Union’s rule within societies (Watson Black 2011 [ 1946 ]).

Once he joined the BC, Watson’s interest in communism fit within the sympathetic atmosphere of the group in terms of exploration of the theme, especially in the early years. As a matter of fact, Donald MacKinnon presented the paper What is the attraction of Communism today? in April 1959, preceded by a discussion by Michael Howard on What is the threat of communism in January of the same year, while Geoffrey Hudson delivered The Communist Theory of International Relations in October 1962 (Vigezzi 2014 ). Butterfield himself, when coming up with some titles for papers for common projects within the BC, listed Do the claims of communism suggest that there can be a conflict between two international orders [or between two views of international order]? (Butt/31). Such was Watson’s interest for communism and Marxism that, when wanting to edit a volume on international ethics at the end of his tenure as Chair of the BC, he thought of including a chapter on Marxism. Yet, the volume was then aborted.

His interest in communism gave him even some headaches. As a matter of fact, Watson had to face some rumours within the Foreign Office about him being a communist sympathiser, with Sir Colin Crowe (then Chief of Administration of HM Diplomatic Service) seeking out explanations from Herbert Butterfield. The Master of Peterhouse’s reply, however, was very poignant in case and shed light on Watson’s deep scholarly and intellectual interest for ideologies and regimes other than democratic ones:

though he was interested in the totalitarian systems, it never occurred to me for a moment to think that Adam Watson could be linked with any of the totalitarian parties or theories […] I do not know whether [Watson] has not throughout his career distinguished himself a little by his insistence that the student of international politics should seek an internal knowledge of the formidable types of regime with which business has to be conducted. But all the members of my Committee would find the present misgivings about him very strange (W56, 13 Feb 1967 ).

These comments would then be reiterated to Kenneth Thompson a few years later, when Butterfield recommended Watson’s work to him: ‘I think you will be aware that Adam Watson is an unusually able man—very much given to the academic approach, and perhaps too disturbing intellectually to please everyone in a Foreign Office’ (Butt/28, 13 April 1971 : 3).

Following this brief biographical background, let us now move to the two themes which the interest in Russia/Soviet Union spurred in Watson: the first subsection is about ideology (and its impact on his pluralist approach to international society), while the second one is on great power management, once again inherently linked to his underlying interest in hierarchy and hegemony.

Ideology and pluralism

As noted above, Watson’s interest in Russia and the Soviet Union was not merely a political and diplomatic one, but also ideological and historical. He was a sharp analyst of Russian politics and society, and often disseminated his takes on Soviet society to the public to work towards a larger détente which would involve all sectors of the West (Watson 1953 ).

Watson was always very careful in noting that understanding of ideologies underpinning international societies was crucial, and for him the communist world represented one. Communism was for him a source of threat but also an unavoidable ideological force in international politics, which it was better to study than to reject aprioristically. In a letter to Butterfield, Watson in fact stated very clearly that ‘I have incorporated in my work the political aspects of Russia and that is something that really interests me’ (W33, 27 Apr 1955 ).

In broader terms, Watson was very much concerned about the progressive ‘ideologisation’ of international politics in general, and especially in times of Cold War. Already in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in his epistolary exchange with Butterfield, we read that ideology is not the best case for diplomacy (W23, 2 May 1949 ), and that, in a ‘Burkeian’ fashion, it was mostly ‘the revolution’, and not Russia or communism, the force to fear (W29, presumably 1953 ). Most importantly, ‘if we are out to make an international order the ideological issue must not be allowed to spoil our diplomacy’ (W30, 25 Aug 1953 ). It is perhaps not by chance that, among the post-war leaders that most impressed him, Watson mentioned to Butterfield Jawaharlal Nehru, as an example of a leader guided more by pragmatism than ideology (W24, 2 June 1949 ).

Also during his stay in the US, Watson had the chance to carry forward his conversation with Butterfield on the force and danger of ideology as a spoiler of diplomacy (W25, 4 Nov 1950 ), and seemed to be pleased that in the US ideological thinking was less prevalent than in the UK (although McCarthyism was, ironically, about to start). Here, the influence of his very good friend George Kennan was paramount, Footnote 12 for Watson had the chance to discuss the impact of ideological thinking on world politics with the American diplomat too, who agreed on the ‘danger of the legalistic, moralistic approach to politics’ (see W32, W33, W42).

This would make him closer to Wight and Butterfield than to other exponents of the BC and the ES more in general. Watson was, ultimately, a pluralist, influenced by the pessimism of Wight and Kennan, and very much a proponent of order over justice, despite his focus on ethics and normative politics during his chairing of the BC. As he had the chance to say later in his life, ‘what is right and reasonable is more preferable than justice and adjustment’ ( 2006 : 45). He would be interested in voices advocating for progressivism, liberal developments, and cosmopolitanism, but would maintain a sceptical outlook. When American scholar Miriam Camps, a liberal internationalist, contemplated presenting a paper to the BC with her husband, William Anthony Camps, about the positive role of the UN in restraining ‘the disruptive forces coming from the superpowers’, Watson argued that ‘I cannot help thinking that the sort of things our committee has sometimes talked about…would be very useful to the Camps team, if only as irritants to make them think afresh themselves. But they tend to think of the experience of the past as junk, and that a fresh start needs to be made. A way of thinking that I always associate with classical Greece’ (W66 15 June 1972 ). Footnote 13

Russia/Soviet Union and great power management

Watson linked his interest in hierarchy and hegemony—a fundamental aspect of his research and indeed legacy—to his passion for Russia and the Soviet Union. As he recollected, ‘I first grasped the idea of a collective hegemony operating behind a façade of multiple independences when serving as a junior member of the British team in the long US/UK/Soviet preparatory negotiations for Yalta in the Kremlin in 1945 on, among other things, a new international order—or as Bull would put it, reshaping the rules and institutions of international society’ ( 2006 : 107).

Furthermore, such was his desire for knowledge about the communist world that he would secure a visiting period at the Imperial Defence College to study Russia’s capabilities, and this was only a few years before he would go to Cuba, on which more will be said below (W38, 17 Oct year missing; W55 30 March 1966 ). Building on Kennan’s approach to the Soviet Union, ‘we need not to be enemies, we cannot be friends’ (quoted in Watson, ‘New Lights on Russian Foreign Policy’, undated), Watson endeavoured to understand the motivations, the workings, and the goals of Soviet’s foreign policy in the most analytical way possible, trying as much as he could to stay away from ideological considerations and to build those bridges, however short and small, which would facilitate détente and open up avenues for cooperation to guarantee a smooth functioning of great power management and hence of raison de système.

For example, while in Cuba, Watson lamented the destabilisation of the balance of power in the area and the ‘loss of stability’ because of the tensions between the great powers and started working on Palmiro Togliatti’s idea of polycentrism for the Foreign Office (Letter, 20 May 1965 ). Footnote 14 This approach found its professional embodiment in the position of diplomatic advice to the British Leyland Motor Corporation and in his publications on sharing technological know-how with Moscow, where Watson would even argue for ‘Anglo-Soviet friendship’ (Watson undated, 4). In the above-mentioned feedback sent to Wiseman, Watson argues that ‘not only I but many members of the British Committee and other pluralists thought and still think that the richest and strongest powers are capable of solving the problems if they act responsibly, but fear they may not do so’ (Watson, undated), thus sharing his reflections on how great power management would contribute to raison de système.

Watson remained interested in Russian and Eurasian affairs until very close to his death, especially to the extent that they pertained to great power management. In particular, he commented on Russo-Ukrainian relations, especially the 2005 election, right before the Orange Revolution. For him, the persistent problems between Russia and the US were lack of respect, of consideration and, as put when talking to Alexander Vershbow, US ambassador to Moscow, ‘lack of reciprocity’ (Watson 2005 ). In his analysis, we can find once again the arguments and the reasonings that informed his talks for Personal View thirthy years earlier, where the justification for a concert of great powers in détente was to be upheld ‘in the interest of order and peace’ (BBC Personal View 1973a ). What Watson was mostly interested in, and frustrated with, was the fragmentation of a pan-European security architecture that, in his opinion, should have included Russia.

In more analytical terms, the study of communism and the incorporation of Russia/Soviet Union into his thinking about great power management brought Watson to studying Latin American regional politics, the importance of social movements, of political parties and revolutions, and the relationship between great powers and continental states, in particular how the US and the Soviet Union were carving out different spheres of influence according to different principles and norms (Keal 1983 ). It is exactly the regionalisation of great power management that led Watson to theorise more about sub-systems.

Sub-systems

The previous section on ideology and great power management as studied through the prism of Russia/Soviet Union, especially in its consideration of a distinctive international society among communist states, leads to the fifth and last one, that on Watson’s theorisation of sub-systems. Again, for the purpose of clarity, this section will be divided into two subsections: one on past and present sub-systems, and one on cosmologies.

Historical and contemporary sub-systems

It was in his initial work on the USSR and communism, as a matter of fact, that Watson started observing differences in obligations and reciprocity between states. In a BC discussion on 7 October 1961, we read that for Watson ‘all Western politics is based on morality, [while] Russia does not recognise some obligations to bourgeois states’ which was the point of departure to theorise about different logics of socialisation. The day after, on 8 October, he develops this position in crucial terms by stating that to him, while Grotius spoke of ‘concentric societies’, it was more accurate to speak of ‘ eccentric societies’, all situated within ‘a global, common system ’. This is then exemplified, once again, in his reflections on the communist world, when he argued that the disagreements between Russia and Yugoslavia were ‘an internal quarrel on what the common interest is’ (BC discussion, 6 October 1962 ).

As was typical of his polymathic interest and openness to dissemination, Watson discussed several times the importance of communism in structuring and defining not simply European relations (BBC Personal View 1972 ) but also Latin American ones (BBC Personal View 1973b ). The latter was in particular entrenched by his experience as an ambassador to Cuba, where he was able to meet in person several times with Castro.

The interest in the communist world was brought more substantially into the BC through a paper on Cuba, which Watson delivered upon his return from that diplomatic mission (Butt/31). Footnote 15 Although perhaps not in the full theoretical and academic style of other papers delivered within the BC, being more a diplomatic report and synopsis of Castro’s Cuba, the paper by Watson emphasises very much how mutual expectations, norms of coexistence and cooperation, shared principles, in other words an international society, were developing between Cuba, Central and Latin America, and the USSR. Plus, it allowed him to elaborate further on his first thoughts on hegemony and ideology, for in the paper there are interesting comparisons between the forms of ‘imperialism’ of the US and the USSR (Watson 1997b ). And it was in those years that Watson, in correspondence with Hedley Bull (6–9 October 1967 : 2), makes a reference to George Modelski’s essay The Communist International System and the influence that it has had on his thinking about communism in IR, to the point of identifying the ‘Communist Internationale’ as a sub-system on its own. Watson did want to come up with a volume about Russia and the Soviet Union as a system in itself in international relations and even discussed the matter within the BC (Watson undated) but in the end the project was abandoned for lack of in-depth knowledge on what happened behind the iron curtain.

Watson understood that even within a global international society (the birth thereof Watson traced with Bull in The Expansion , 1984 ) one could identify several sub-global international societies (Vigezzi 2014 : 66). In other words, Watson found ‘that all in all it was right to talk about one great international system and various international societies, each with their own different cultures: “the Western, the Communist, the Afro-Asian”’ (ibidem).

Here, a few things are noteworthy. First, the fact that once again the intellectual proclivity seems to be towards Wight, despite the co-authorship with Bull. Footnote 16 Not only did Watson share with Wight the importance attributed to the idiographic, the 'sub-' in terms of international societies, but also one may notice how in the quote above particular importance is accorded to culture, something that was pivotal in Wight’s analysis of international relations and that informed Watson’s interest for cosmological beliefs, as will be discussed below.

Second, and in line with the objective of this paper, Watson’s attention to the sub-global was de facto a pioneering insight into the importance of the regional level within ES scholarship. Once again, far from seeing the Cold War setting of international politics in pure bipolar terms, thanks to his experience as a diplomat and to his sensitivity to non-Western scholarship, history, and materials, Watson elaborated and reflected on several issues—theoretical and epistemological—which would be at the heart of the regional turn of the ES which would happen a few decades later (Costa Buranelli 2014 ), as evident in his paper Sub-Systems within State-Systems (April 1967 ).

These interests were so much developing over the years that Butterfield, at the beginning of the 1970s, wrote to RJB Miller about them:

I think it would probably be true to say that a basic study of the European States-Systems has had the principal part in the shaping of his [Watson’s] mind. But his classical interests and his concerns for non-European fields – as well as his practical preoccupations as ambassador in recent years with the newest forms of agglomerations between states – enable him to envisage the problem of the very existence of such a thing as a states-system from a wider and more radical point of view (W60 1 June 1971 ).

In this quote, we see the two main drivers behind Watson’s interest in sub-systems. First, the ‘concerns for non-European fields’, both historically and contemporarily. Second, ‘the newest forms of agglomerations between states’, which refers to sub-global international societies and regionalist projects—in Latin America, as discussed above, but also in Africa and in the Middle East. And in fact, a year later, Watson would announce his book project on states-systems to the BC (22–24 Sept 1972). In it, he would emphasise the ‘distinguishing characteristics’ of past and present systems, elaborate on the role of culture in defining systems and societies of states, examine whether the ‘communist world is both a single and a separate society’, and offer a Marxist interpretation of states-systems. At the heart of this project there was, ultimately and once again, a certain dissatisfaction with Eurocentrism.

This research project would also ultimately form the basis of The Evolution and draw the basis for a comparison across areas and across times to highlight unique peculiarities of specific sub-systems as well as to underline those similarities which, perhaps, were not immediate. As Watson had the chance to reflect in his Hegemony and History ( 2006 : 15), ‘The European states system, leading to the present world-wide one, is not unique…The opinion of some scholars, that no other system is comparable to the European one, seemed to us to be based on too narrow and parochial a concept of what constitutes a state, and of what constitutes a system’. As an example of this is the analysis of the debates over European integration offered by Ole Wæver ( 1996 ), in which Watson’s work on the Sumerian sub-system is convincingly used to shed light on the hierarchical tensions idiosyncratic within the European project, which he labels ‘neo-Sumerian’ ( 1996 : 246; 250) in light of its ‘socially constructed centre which emerges from the political will to have a centre’.

In his final years before passing, Watson went back to his work on sub-systems to add an additional dimension to it, the cosmological one. Watson was not simply an historian, IR scholar, or a practitioner, or an unusual hybrid of the two. He was, most of all, a humanist, understood as somebody who is interested in the fundamental aspects of humanity and human societies, drawing avidly from history and politics, but also from sociology, religion, and anthropology. All his academic and intellectual production was, after all, concerned with the crucial role that human interactions played in informing culture, ideas, morality, and philosophy. This late work, which is an unpublished manuscript called God, Government, and Science , builds naturally on his previous work on sub-systems, on culture and on history, as is evident already in The War of the Goldsmith’s Daughter that cosmological elements were considered important in his analysis of the ‘Indo-Saracen’ order (or ‘civilisation’, in his words).

In his typical interdisciplinary fashion, in this work Watson also reflects on deep structures, on ideology, on the link between religion, knowledge, and order in what is perhaps the utmost synthesis—an incomplete one as he passed away before completing it—of his lifetime work. As he often maintained, again in a position closer to Wight than to Bull, the most resilient international societies across history were those with shared assumptions and theories about how the world works (Buzan and Little 2009 ), a clear nod to the importance of cosmological beliefs, which somewhere else he called ‘the intangible’ of international societies ( 1997a ).

As a matter of fact, the book seeks to study ‘the relation between the belief that the universe has a purpose, and the ways in which men organize and govern themselves and explore their own nature and that of the world around them’ (Watson undated). He then proceeds by writing that ‘if such beliefs, when sincerely held, were useful at a certain stage of human development, it is reasonable to ask how far this is still the case for us today and how we should relate our belief in purpose to government and to the sciences’. The reference to ‘the case for us today’ is an adamant sign that Watson believed that to-day international politics and societies are still based on cosmological understanding of order and ‘the good’, and more broadly that change in such cosmological views in the past generated changes in the corresponding orders. The same is reiterated in a handwritten note at the end of the introductory chapter, where we read that ‘the introductory chapter will then explain the place of the four central and historical chapters in the enquiry, and their relevance to our assumptions and conduct today . Government of human societies as the reflection of a cosmic order. The understanding of the environment and of ourselves as understanding of that order’.

It is therefore in this work that Watson started grappling with one of the sources (if not the source) of variety of orders across history, the theme that had been of interest to him since the 1960s. Also, it is not by chance that this work mirrors in several respect the sequence of themes and line-up of chapters of the very project he first developed, and that one would then find partly in The Expansion and partly in The Evolution years after. For example, God Government and Science begins with a review of the cosmological beliefs of the Egyptians, the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Hebrews and the Greeks, with strong echoes of Toynbee and Curtis. Yet here the focus is very much on the constitutive beliefs that would underpin the very institutions, practices, and norms of the above-mentioned orders. Moreover, what this manuscript shows is that by relying on the British internationalist tradition, Watson started to reflect on themes which would then be the object of scholarly enquires in IR, such as the recent works on cosmology by Bentley Allan ( 2018 ), Will Bain ( 2020 ), and Milija Kurki ( 2020 ).

Perhaps most ironically, God, Government, and Science is a work about order and ethics, thus bringing Watson back to that short parenthesis of ethics-driven activity within the BC with him as Chair. In the introduction one reads ‘in symbolic language we can say that I have opened Pandora’s box of Purpose, or bitten the apple of knowledge of good and bad’ (Watson, undated). Overall, although perhaps not as epistemologically and methodologically sophisticated as the new agenda on cosmology in IR, Watson’s work on the topic was—in his typical fashion—an attempt to grand theorisation deriving from a synthesis of all his previous interests.

Conclusions

This paper had a precise goal, that of bringing to light the less known contributions and interests of one of the less known founding figures of the ES. By sifting the archival documents at my disposal and reading his personal writings, the picture that emerges is that Adam Watson was a polyhedric, multifaceted, organic and enthusiastic pursuer of knowledge, broadly understood. His work, while perhaps not always theoretically sophisticated or elaborated when compared to today’s disciplinary standards, contained important and original reflections on many of the trends in IR which would become important in the following decades, such as the problematisation of state-centrism and sovereignty, the emic-etic distinction in epistemology, the uncomfortable legacies of colonialism, the importance and the dangers of ideology, the rise of regionalism and international organisations, the increasingly hierarchic character of IPE, and much more.

On top of this, Watson elaborated on current affairs relying on his decade-long expertise acquired ‘in the field’, while also elaborating on the cosmological fundamentals of historical societies and, as one does, writing scripts for theatrical productions (Watson 1968 ). This enthusiasm, hunger, and desire for understanding, for getting ‘beyond the surface’ of things, for finding connections between all the aspects of the international (the ‘world political system’ which Bull, unfortunately, did not expand on) derived from life experiences and encounters, from trips and discussions, which shaped and informed his Weltanschauung . This is nothing exceptional, for it can be said for any scholar. Yet, the point here, and more broadly of this paper, is that the richness and complexity of thought of Adam Watson is far less credited and far less engaged with than perhaps he deserves, beyond the pendulum and the Expansion/Evolution .

As he himself said in his feedback to Wiseman, the sherpas do not often get credit. Yet, as Butterfield said to RJB Miller more than half a century ago,

Watson is eminently the historian, excited by the kinds of questions that interest the historian—his practical experience having the effect sometimes of keeping him close to earth, close to the reality of things, though at the same time there is something electric about his mind, and our historical colleagues find him almost more stimulating than anybody else (W60 1 June 1971 ).

The hope is that this paper and this special issue will prompt more attention, consideration, and engagement with a theory-practitioner who, ultimately, contributed to planting the seeds for the big picture that many IR scholars are looking at today.

This is actually how a colleague of mine referred to Watson when I first mentioned the project for the Special Issue. Crucially, however, Watson mostly refers to a ‘spectrum’ of systems (1992: 13–18), forming the arc through which the pendulum swings.

Interestingly, ‘elasticity of mind’ is a compliment that Watson himself paid to Butterfield. See Watson’s Introduction to Butterfield’s The Origins of History (Butterfield 2016 ).

Interestingly, ‘modus vivendi’ was the expression used by Herbert Butterfield in his presentation at the ‘Theory of International Relations meeting’, held at Columbia University on 12 June 1956 (Butt/28). Hence, we cannot exclude that Watson borrowed that expression from Butterfield himself, especially given how close they were personally and intellectually. Yet, there is no archival confirmation for this hypothesis. Incidentally, the rapporteur of that meeting at Columbia was a certain Kenneth Waltz.

The document was given to me by Polly Watson Black while meeting her in Blacksburg, VA, USA, 4 April 2023.

The reader may note that the argument of ‘extermination’ as litmus test for the absence of any social rule within interactions is exactly the one used by Buzan in his theorisation of different kind of international societies ( 2004 : 100).

Yet, quite ironically, we know that Watson received Heeren’s seminal Hanbuch der Geschichte des Europaeischen Staatensystems from Bull himself ( 2006 : 31).

Which, incidentally, was the title of a paper offered at the BC by Robert Wade-Gery, another practitioner and friend of Watson (September 1972).

Unfortunately, it was not possible for me to find public or private archival material on the intellectual friendship between Rana and Watson. Yet, more research should be done in this respect, especially to trace the influence that the ES started having abroad already during the Cold War. Bharti Chhibber ( 2007 : 171) clearly depicts Rana as an ES scholar, stating that ‘Rana’s understanding of international society is based on the theorisations of the English School of International Relations represented by Adam Watson, Hedley Bull, Barry Buzan and Timothy Dunne’.

Surely, the notion of a regional international society is of course implicit in the very concept of a European international society that goes global in The Expansion ; and ‘the regional’ was anticipated by earlier international thought on civilisations. What is meant here is that Watson foresaw the regional level of analysis as fundamental within ES theorising, and not just historically, but very much in present days, too, as coexisting with global dynamics. I am grateful to Thomas Bottelier for suggesting this point.

Yet, it is important to note that Watson seems to take a top-down view (Great Powers and great corporations v. ‘weak states’), while Cox took a bottom-up one (social forces). This is on top of their different background and IR outlook. Again, I am indebted to Thomas Bottelier for raising this point.

Once again, Watson spoke in both theoretical and practical terms, for he worked for influential NGOs such as the Association for Cultural Freedom and The Swiss Foundation pour une Entraide Intellectuelle Europeénne .

Once more, the trait d’union between the two seems to have been Butterfield, albeit indirectly. Kennan and Watson became particularly close after the latter gave the former a copy of Butterfield’s ‘Christianity and History’ in the course of a seminar at Princeton University in the early 1950s (W26, 27 Feb 1951 ), which Kennan reviewed for the New York Times in 1951. Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, Watson wrote enthusiastically to Butterfield about Kennan, stating even that the latter presented ‘several similarities’ (presumably intellectual) with the former (W42).

Yet, in the same document, Watson shows deep appreciation for Miriam Camps’s work, ‘directed at modifying US policy so as to produce a more moderate and more polycentric world’. For an excellent overview on Miriam Camps, see (Seidel 2023 ). On ‘polycentrism’, see footnote 14 below.

According to Togliatti, ‘polycentrism’ meant that ‘communist parties with geo-political affinities should reinforce their links […] and coordinate their strategies’. This was clearly a line of reasoning that brought Watson close to the identification of communist states as belonging to a sub-system on its own.

Yet, the paper was written while in Cuba, precisely during the winter 1966–1967.

Whom, however, Watson defined as ‘perhaps the brightest [among us in the Committee]’ (Watson’s undated lecture notes).

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Acknowledgments

I would like to warmly thank Polly Watson Black and Alaric Watson for their generous and kind support, as well as for granting me access to personal materials belonging to their father. I am also grateful to Thomas Bottelier, Barry Buzan, and Cornelia Navari for numerous conversations about Adam Watson, which helped to inform the background of this paper. Yannis Stivachtis, Chris Price, Robert Hodges, and Jay Burkette deserve a special mention for their friendship and generosity in hosting me as Visiting Professor at Virginia Tech in April 2022. In the same vein, my deep gratitude goes to Tristan Naylor for facilitating my stay as Visiting Researcher at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, in May 2023 so that I could consult the archives at the Cambridge University Library. Finally, staff members at the Cambridge University Library, Chatham House Library, the Miller Centre, King’s College London Library, and at University of Virginia in Charlottesville offered invaluable help and suggestions as to where to find the necessary sources for this paper. Finally, I would like to thank all the authors in this Special Issue, as well as Mike Williams at International Politics, for their thought-provoking and constructive comments on previous drafts of this paper as well as Delaney Flanigan for excellent research assistance in the initial phases of this project.

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Costa Buranelli, F. Beyond the pendulum: situating Adam Watson in International Relations and the English School. Int Polit (2023). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41311-023-00518-9

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Political Science Research

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Political Thought

The foundations of the way in which people think about political life can be reconstructed and assessed through three primary models of foundations of political thought. These include the classical antiquity model, the medieval model, and the modern one. Contemporary perspectives in political science continue to question the foundations of political power, and sustain relevancy in modern society.

Political Thought in Greek Classical Antiquity

It is often stated that both philosophy and democracy were born in ancient Greece between the seventh and the fifth centuries BCE. In particular, the city-state of Athens in the fifth century BCE presents a model of democracy that continues to exercise its influence today. Although the thesis of the Greek birth of philosophy and democracy has recently been subject to much criticism by pointing toward the existence of multiple civilizations, the political thought then elaborated has nevertheless been highly influential in Western thinking. It, legitimately, laid the foundations for Western political thought.

The classical model is based on a strong conception of the common good. Against the challenge of the Sophists, who argued that politics and language result from mere conventions, the major thinkers of the classical antiquity argued that political life aims to attain the good within the community. The good of each human being was not seen as opposed to that of the community, but as homogeneous with it. This is because the political life was conceived as the natural condition for human beings, as the result of their specific place in the cosmos. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) famously argued that the human being is a political animal by nature. Living in common is so innate that Aristotle stated that those who can live outside political communities are either beasts or gods.

Plato (427–347 BCE), Aristotle’s master, had put forward similar views. In his Republic, living in common is the result of the very nature of human beings, who are not enough to themselves and need the collaboration of others to provide for their own needs. The society derives from a division of labor, with each person doing only one thing at the time, according to natural disposition, and relying on others for the necessities of life. Politics is thus the supreme and most important art, and its task is that of orienting all the other arts and therefore also the life of the community as a whole.

This is why Plato asserted that rulers must be philosophers or philosophers must become rulers. A just society is a society where every segment of the society performs its specific task in harmony with the others. Like the soul must be ruled by reason, so the polity must be ruled by philosophers, who are the only individuals who know the common good and can therefore orient the whole society toward its attainment. Philosophers do not seek material goods and honors, but only pursue the good of the community.

Aristotle followed his master in this view and also maintained that the political community aims to attain the common good. Aristotle gave this thesis a strong teleological connotation: since the human being is by nature a political being, the state comes before the individual itself. Conceptually speaking, the whole of a body comes before its parts, because without the whole, it does not make sense to speak of a hand or a foot. In his view, equally natural is the relationship of subordination between slaves and masters, women and men. As within the individual the soul dominates the body, so men dominate women and the most intelligent men dominate those who have only physical force and can therefore serve as slaves.

With the decline of the political system of the city-states and the rise of the large empires and monarchies of antiquity, a new model began to emerge. Greek democracy was based on the systematic exclusion of women and slaves from politics. Stoics argued that every human being is endowed with reason, and thus implicitly criticized Aristotle’s conception of natural subordination. Furthermore, in contrast to the ideal of the city-state or polis, they supported the ideal of a cosmopolis where all people can live in peace because they are all equally subject to the law of reason.

The Medieval Model of Political Thought

The rise of Christianity marked a rupture with the classical model, but an element of continuity also characterized the shift. This continuity occurs because both models are based on the idea that politics derives from the specific place of human beings in the cosmos, and therefore conceives of politics in a teleological way. The major difference is that the ordering principle is no longer a reason immanent to the cosmos itself, but the transcendent will of the God of Christianity. This generates problems specific to the medieval model.

In this respect, the Christian message stands in contrast to the classical model. Whilst the latter emphasized force and intelligence and argued for the superiority of the strong over the weak, the Christian message offers a subversion of these values, by evaluating weakness and the equality of all individual human beings in the face of the omnipotence of God. Although the message has a potentially revolutionary content, Christendom did not fully realize this message in political terms. The prevailing idea is that the full equality is an ideal to be realized in the spiritual world, but not necessarily in the earthly one. Jesus’s saying, “Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s,” became the object of a lively debate about the relationship between Christianity and secular authority.

In particular, after the creation of a sacred Roman Empire, the problem became that of the relationship between the authority of the emperor and that of the pope. Questions arose whether the temporal authority of the ruler was autonomous, or whether the spiritual autonomy of the pope superseded it. For highly religious thinkers, the prevailing idea is that of the superiority of spiritual authority. Differences, however, emerge with regard to the degree of autonomy recognized in the temporal authority and politics.

According to Saint Augustine (354–430 CE), for instance, without the Christian message, there cannot be justice, and, without justice, there cannot be a legitimate polity. As he argued in the fourth book of his De Civitate Dei, without Christian justice there cannot be a union of citizens under law and for the attainment of the common good. As he provocatively puts it, without justice, a political community is in no way different from a mere association of bandits, which are united just to burgle and then share the loot. Although Augustine’s position was more nuanced on this point, his name became associated with the view of the subordination of temporal power to the spiritual one.

After the diffusion of the Latin translation of Artistole’s Politics, a different position emerges. Authors who had been inspired by Aristotle, such as Thomas Aquinas and Marsilius of Padua, recognized the autonomy of political power. Following Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas (ca. 1225–1274) argued that politics is deeply rooted in human nature. In a more radical way, Marsilius of Padua (1275–1343) argued that peace cannot be guaranteed unless political authority is recognized without any superior power. As he wrote in his Defensor Pacis, the law must derive from the will of the citizens or of the prevailing part—both in quantitative and qualitative senses. By rooting the law in the will of individual human beings, Marsilius’s theory anticipates the modern model.

Political Thought in The Modern Age

The modern model stands in contrast to both the classical and the medieval one. While the latter grounded politics in the idea of a cosmos teleological ordered for the common good, where every being is assigned its specific place in the hierarchical chain of beings, the modern model places the foundations of politics in the will of individual human beings. The ancient world is by nature closed and hierarchically ordered, yet the world depicted by the modern science is open and infinite, so that human beings can stand in a position of free equals within it.

Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) offers the clearest view on this. His political philosophy accompanied the emergence of the modern system of sovereign states, providing a powerful justification for its existence. Hobbes’s phrase autoritas non veritas facit legem (it is the authority and not the truth that makes the law) marks the decline of a model of political thought that had prevailed for centuries. The foundation of political power consists no longer of pursuing a common good, but in the will of the citizens themselves. According to Hobbes, and all the other thinkers who endorse the contractarian model, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) and John Locke (1632–1704), a contract that human beings stipulate among themselves—in order to exist in the natural condition of absence of government—justifies political power. Through such a contract, human beings cede part, or all, of their sovereignty to a common power in order to receive from it the protection of their fundamental rights. The conception of such rights varies in the different thinkers, ranging from the mere right to survival (Hobbes), to political freedom (Rousseau), or to private property (Locke), as well as diverge in the forms of government they envisage—an absolutist (Hobbes), a democratic (Rousseau), and liberal one (Locke).

Notwithstanding all those differences, which ultimately derive from their different conceptions of the state of nature, understood as a brutal condition of potential perpetual war (Hobbes) or as a condition where the rights are simply not enough guaranteed (Locke), all these thinkers share the premise that political power derives from the will of individuals. The contractarian model of political order accompanied the rise of European modernity, with its institutions of an emergent system of sovereign states and capitalist economy. While the model did not fail to provoke severe criticism, it also exercised a deep influence on Western political thought.

The criticism raised by German idealists at the beginning of the nineteenth century contributed to the crisis of the contractarian model. In particular, Georg W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) sharply criticized contractarianism for grounding the state in the contract—a category of private law. In his view, grounding the existence of the state in the mere accidental encounter of individual wills amounts to misunderstanding its deeply ethical nature. The state is the reality of an ethical idea, the culminating point of the objective spirit of an epoch. As such, it transcends, in the sense of the German aufheben, not just private law and morality, but also other inferior incarnations of the objective spirit such as the family and civil society.

Hegel thus endorsed the idea of a separation between the civil society and the state—a view that still exercises its influence today. Whilst contractarian thinkers work with the simple opposition between a state of nature and a civil society, thinkers influenced by Hegel maintain a sharp separation between the two. In his critique of the bourgeois society, Karl Marx (1818–1883) radicalized such a distinction by arguing that the state is part of a superstructure which is separated from, but also reflects the relationships of, domination taking place in the economic structure: the exploitation of the proletariat by a capitalist bourgeoisie. In this view, political power is a means for the bourgeoisie to sustain its system of exploitation, and contractarian theories are the mere ideological covering of such a system of exploitation.

The rise of the capitalist economy was accompanied by a new awareness of the deep economic inequalities and forms of exploitation that sustained it. Radical thinkers such as socialists and anarchists saw in political power a means for domination to be expropriated and put in the hands of the proletariat (communism) or to be abolished altogether (anarchism). Anarchism represents the most radical answer to the question of what constitutes the foundation of political power. In this view, the state always implies a form of asymmetry of power so that a minority of the people—those who are part of the state apparatus—dominate over a majority. Anarchists, therefore, see no possible reform of the system of the sovereign states: it must be abolished. In their place, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865) and Michail Bakunin (1814–1876) proposed a noncoercive political system based on the free federal associations deriving from the specific needs of the society. In their view, only through a bottom-up organization of society can the freedom of individuals be guaranteed.

Contemporary Trends in Political Thought

A useful way to group contemporary approaches is according to the answer given to the question regarding whether there are foundations for political power. Among those who provide a positive answer, and therefore stand in the tradition of modern political thought, is John Rawls. By reviving the contractarian model after a few centuries of decadence, Rawls argued that a just society is the society that people would chose if put in an hypothetical original position. In this place, known as the veil of ignorance, they do not know their specific position in the society, their comprehensive doctrines, and natural talents. In Rawls’s view, such a society would be based on two principles that provide for (1) the maximum freedom for every individual compatible with a similar system for all, and (2) the arrangement of social and economic inequalities so that they are both to the greatest benefit of the least advantaged and attached to offices and positions open to all.

While Rawls’s theory envisages a method for the discovery and the justification of the just form of political power, postmodern thinkers tend to see no possible foundations for it. By criticizing the very attempt to provide rational foundations for the existence of political power, postmodern thinkers argue that the Western canon of political theory is nothing but a myth—the myth of the white man. The very attempt to provide rational foundations for the existence of political power is seen as a result of a logo centric practice, which is the hallmark of Western tradition. Together with questioning the possibility of rational foundations, the merit of postmodernism has been that of casting doubts on the adequacy of the Western models of political thought as a whole. In a world that must accommodate diversity and pluralism of histories and worldviews, there is the possibility that the Western canon is only one among many possible stories.

An intermediate answer is that of authors who work in the tradition of a critical theory of society. Jürgen Habermas’s deliberative democracy attempts to propose a form of democracy that can account for the possibility of public deliberation in a postmetaphysical setting and a condition of pluralism. His attempt to ground democracy in the ideal conditions for speech and deliberation has attracted so much attention that some authors have spoken of a deliberative turn in political philosophy.

The activity of boundary questioning thus deeply contributed to repositioning the foundations of political thought. In a global age, it is not only the possibility of foundations of political thought that is called into question, but also that of its traditional boundaries. Post statist political theory questions the boundaries between the sovereign states by arguing that in a globalizing world, a form of democracy beyond the traditional state boundaries must be found. Feminist political theory questions the traditional boundaries between the public and the private sphere by arguing that this is a means for perpetrating the domination of males in the former and segregation of women in the latter. Finally, there is a variegated set of approaches that point toward a new form of green political theory. Such approaches question traditional ways of conceiving the boundaries between politics and the natural environment, arguing that the latter is not the mere background of the former. In an epoch of artificially induced natural catastrophes, the foundations of political thought must be rethought in order to assure both justice among human beings and their survival.

References:

• Bakunin, Mikhail. Bakunin on Anarchy: Selected Works by the Activist-founder of World Anarchism. New York:Vintage Books, 1972.
• Dryzek, John S., Bonnie Honig, and Anne Phillips, eds. The Oxford Handbook of Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
• Gaus, Gerald F., and Chandran Kukathas, eds. Handbook of Political Theory. London: Sage Publications, 2004.
• Goodin, Robert E., Phillip Pettit, and Thomas Pogge, eds. A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2007.
• Habermas, Jürgen. Between Facts and Norms. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1992.
• Hegel, Georg W. F. Elements of a Philosophy of Right. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.
• Hobbes,Thomas. Leviathan. London: Penguin Books, 1985.
• Lipset, Seymour Martin, ed. Political Philosophy: Theories, Thinkers, and Concepts. Washington D.C: CQ Press, 2001.
• Locke, John. Two Treatises of Government. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
• Miller, David, ed. The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987.
• Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. Selected Writings. London: Macmillan, 1970
• . Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
• Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. The Social Contract and Other Later Political Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
• Tucker, Robert C. The Marx-Engels Reader. 2nd ed. New York:W.W. Norton, 1978.
• White, Stephen K., and Donals Moon. What Is Political Theory? London: Sage Publications, 2004.

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History of Political Theory: Foundations of Modern Political Thought

This course will study the foundational texts of modern political thought, including Machiavelli’s Prince, Bodin’s On the State, Grotius’ War and Peace, Hobbes’ Leviathan, Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, and Rousseau’s Social Contract.  Topics for study and examination will include the theory of the modern sovereign state; the origin of the state (especially the theory of the social contract); the concept of natural rights; theories of political liberty and equality; the permissibility of political resistance and revolution; early modern ideas of democratic and non-democratic forms of rule; religion and politics. 

Please note that this course description is from 2018.

Christian Political Thought Research Paper

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I. Introduction

Academic writing, editing, proofreading, and problem solving services, get 10% off with 24start discount code, ii. christianity’s emergence in the political thought of the classical world, iii. augustine (354–430), iv. john of salisbury (1115/1120–1180), v. thomas aquinas (1225–1274), vi. dante alighieri (1265–1321), vii. marsilio de padua (1275/1280–1342), viii. martin luther (1483–1546), ix. john calvin (1509–1564), x. jean bodin (1530–1596), xi. richard hooker (1554–1600), xii. some contemporary manifestations, a. anabaptists, b. civil disobedience, c. liberation theology.

The classical paradigm of political thought— consisting of Greek and Roman, as well as early Christian, philosophers—is distinct from later philosophical eras because of its communitarian perspective of the state and transcendent source of ethics and morality. Writers in this paradigm argue that the state and political society are necessary for the full development of the individual. For instance, Plato perceives that the state can help men achieve the virtuous life. As with Aristotle, this means that justice and virtue exist only when individuals are fulfilling the societal role for which they are best suited; for Plato in the Republic, this occurs when the state assists in such placement. Aristotle also asserts that the state aids in this development through the enforcement of laws. By being forced to behave legally, people become habitually virtuous. Many of these beliefs and values are sustained throughout the Christian phase of the classical era; for such key Catholic writers as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, the state acts in conjunction with the church for the purpose of sanctifying a sinful and fallen humanity. The state forces the Christian to curb an inherent sinful nature and rest content until the Kingdom of God is fulfilled, even if this control requires the coercion of the heretical into orthodox belief. For classical thinkers, the individual can be fulfilled only within the context of a community.

A second characteristic of the classical paradigm is a shared belief in the transcendency of morals, or a sense of natural law, overriding the authority of positive law (statutes and policies passed by the government) and the claims of the state. Although there is a great difference in belief regarding from whence such values derive, for these philosophers values emerge from an exterior force. For Plato, the source of ethics is to be found in the Forms, and the Forms are accessed through philosophy and the philosopher’s ability to reason, subsequently leading society to understand and pursue these absolutes. Aristotle also views the Forms as the ideal and essence of morals, values, and ethics; he, however, does not believe that they are obtained through philosophy—practical wisdom is the best means of implementing them. Both Augustine and Aquinas perceive that transcendent ethics are based in God as revealed through the Holy Scriptures; however, they too differ as to how humans may avail themselves of these truths. Augustine emphasizes the miracle of revelation, whereas Aquinas places a central focus on the human capacity to reason.

During the medieval era, a transition occurs both in the role of the state and in individuals’ relation to it, as well as in perceptions regarding the accessibility of transcendent morals. One response to this paradigm was unabashed secularism, such as found in some of the work of Machiavelli. In the writings of both John of Salisbury and Marsilio de Padua, the role of the state transforms from one of sanctifying and making people more virtuous to the simpler role of maintaining societal order. A second characteristic of this transition is found in the debate over the source of ethics and values. Whereas for the more traditional writers of the time this source remains firmly centered in God and the interpretation of these values is secure in the hand of the Church, the little individualism discoverable in Augustine and Aquinas regarding freedom of conscience vanishes. The authoritarian state of the medieval era is further strengthened by this power of interpretation and its legitimization by God. Machiavelli, in The Prince, also is a part of this strong authoritarian tradition: Power still resides in the ruler to maintain order in society, and the ruler continues as the purveyor of law and ethics.

The source for the demise for the medieval paradigm was the same impetus that led to the creation of the views of the Reformation—both serving as transitions to the liberal political paradigm. A primary inspiration for this vast change was the writings of Martin Luther; although Martin Luther did not directly apply his notions of individualism to the state—he did not believe Christians needed a state but merely obeyed the secular state for the sake of unbelievers in the community—his work is applied directly to politics by another reformer, John Calvin. Luther challenges the authoritarian medieval paradigm through his argument for the priesthood of believers. Individuals, he contends, do not need the intervention of the Church in the relationship between individuals and God. People can govern themselves in their spiritual relationship without requiring an intercessor. Calvin applies this belief in his Institutes of the Christian Religion in an effort to return to some of the elements of the classical paradigm. The state and its laws still provide for the virtue and needs of humans for sanctification; however, instead of the philosophers, Church, or society interpreting ethics and morals, individuals can interpret these elements for themselves. These values are then made manifest through the congregational rule of the Church, and the Church implements and enforces these rules through the state.

This Reformation paradigm differed from the medieval view primarily because of its emphasis on the importance and role of the individual in society; although stability and order are still important, these roles do not predominate over other functions of the state. The latter half of the Reformation paradigm is the transition from the Christian theocracy of Calvin and others to the beginning of the secular liberal state. The writings of both Jean Bodin and Richard Hooker illustrate this transition. The source of morals and ethics still derives from the transcendent sources of the Christian faith; however, society is not assumed to be inherently a Christian one.Aprimary reason for this change in perspective is found in the fact that the Roman church no longer had religious supremacy. The less centrally controlled Protestant church challenged the perspectives of the Catholic state and frequently struggled for control of the throne, as in the kingdoms of England and Scotland. With the emergence of the Calvinist Huguenots in France and the Anabaptists, who explicitly avoided engagement in politics, tenuous religious equilibrium disintegrated, and the bloody religious wars commenced. The necessity of religious toleration became a key concern of philosophers; with the new world community developing through colonization, a new philosophy of science and new religious and political organizations emerged.

The resulting liberal paradigm emphasizes the prioritization of individual rights over the classical paradigm’s communitarian needs. Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean- Jacques Rousseau, and John Stuart Mill all fit into this paradigm because they concur that the role of the state is to protect individual rights and liberties and they believe that sovereignty is inherently located in the free, male, property-holding citizen and permanently ceded or temporarily loaned to the state. God, in this worldview, created government to ensure natural rights of the individual, but does not place sovereignty directly in the hands of the state. The contributions of Christian thought did not cease with the demise of the medieval and Reformation eras; it is clear that elements of the Christian perspective on political philosophy have influenced political thinking, particularly with the framing of the 20th-century expressions of civil disobedience and in the anticolonialist challenges of liberation theology.

The famed historian of political thought George Sabine (1961) has noted the following:

The rise of the Christian church as a distinct institution entitled to govern the spiritual concerns of mankind in indepen dence of the state may not unreasonably be described as the most revolutionary event in the history of western Europe, in respect to politics and to political philosophy. (p. 180)

While Christianity and classical Roman thought share some basic similarities in their assertions of natural law, human equality, and the necessity for justice, key differences ensured that they would eventually conflict.

First, Christianity makes a claim of egalitarianism that is broader than the Roman assertion of essential human equality. According to the Apostle Paul, in Galatians 3:28, for Christians there could be no distinctions based on ethnicity, the lack of a Jewish heritage, a believer’s gender, or whether one was enslaved or free. Second, according to the Christian Messiah, Jesus Christ, the Christian kingdom is not a physical kingdom but a spiritual one (see, for instance, John 18:36). For the Christian, this results in divided loyalties that are the source of much of the original political thought emerging from Christianity. Paul instructs believing Christians in the Roman Empire to be subject to their government, as the King James version translates Romans 13:1–6:

Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil.Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? Do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath, but also for conscience sake. For this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continu ally upon this very thing.

Christ, however, encourages his followers to give to the political state what it requires while simultaneously remaining loyal to the demands of God. In Matthew 22:17–21, debating with some of the Jewish leadership, Christ responds to the query, “Tell us therefore, What thinkest thou? Is it lawful to give tribute unto Caesar, or not?”

But Jesus perceived their wickedness, and said, “Why tempt ye me, ye hypocrites? Shew me the tribute money.” And they brought unto him a penny. And he saith unto them, “Whose is this image and superscription?” They say unto him, “Caesar’s.” Then saith he unto them, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.”

Unlike Roman philosophy, in which the gods expected citizens to owe loyalty to the Emperor, for the Christian, it was only to the office of the ruler that citizens owed allegiance, not to the specific individual. Although the question of obligation to an unjust ruler is not new (consider, for instance, the Greek playwright Sophocles and Antigone), this tension is embedded within Christianity. For the Christian, unlike the classical pagan, this religion has a higher calling on the individual than merely living a virtuous life as a citizen of the state. In fact, Christianity places a calling on an individual’s life more powerful than merely the duty of civic obedience, demanding commitments from the individual that no earthly sovereign can eradicate. This tension created an inherent conflict with the Roman Empire, resulting in persecution of these dissidents. The attempted destruction of Christianity in the latter part of the 3rd century was justified, not by Christianity’s religious competition with paganism, but by its alleged attempts “to build up a state within a state, its boring from within every social class, and its gradual absorption of the Roman empire by infiltration and ideological appeals without overt acts of force” (Ebenstein & Ebenstein, 2000, p. 182).

Christian persecution ended after the rule of the Emperor Diocletian in 303–305 CE; by 312 CE, the Emperor Constantine personally converted to Christianity. One year later, he endorsed the Edict of Milan, ending the persecution of Christians, guaranteeing the freedom to profess the faith without any fear of state involvement, and formally recognizing the Christian church. This edict resulted in a new political climate in which Roman rulers sought Christian support for their policies. As a relatively newly institutionalized religion, Christianity experienced much internal tension over questions of doctrine and creed. In 325 CE, the Council of Nicaea settled many of these primary conflicts within Christianity. This determination identified which beliefs were to thereafter be classified as heresies and what schisms would emerge in the Church as a result of this delineation of orthodoxy. Although the Council ensured that Christianity survived as a coherent set of beliefs and doctrines, it also resulted in the persecution of many groups that demurred to the orthodox views of Christianity; most particularly, these controversial issues focused on Christology, or the nature of the Christ. By 393 CE, the Emperor Theodosius had declared Christianity to be the official religion of the Roman Empire, resulting in the birth of the Holy Roman Empire; by 410 CE, however, the Visigoths, under the leadership of King Alaric, invaded for the third time, finally looting the riches of Rome.

Within the growing Christian church were two challenges that required addressing. For many citizens of the Roman Empire, especially those who worshipped the traditional gods, the loss of Roman control and authority was traceable to the ascension of Christianity with the Empire. In addition, once the Council of Nicaea had explicitly identified heresies and schisms, intense tensions divided those who followed the now orthodox Christianity and those who retained beliefs now deemed heterodox.

Augustine, one of many African bishops within the Roman Empire, addressed these internal stressors on the Christian Church. His most famous book, Civitas Deis, or City of God, was largely designed to demonstrate that Christianity was not responsible for the demise and invasion of Rome. Instead, he considers how believers can live with the demands of the state while simultaneously pursuing the requirements of an obedient Christian life. Augustine’s philosophy bridged classical Greek and Roman thought with Christianity, particularly integrating Platonic thought and values with a Christian worldview. More specifically, the Platonic understanding of justice was immersed in the ideals and values of Christianity. Augustine believed that Platonic thought was very similar to the Christian construction of the world although there were clear conflicts between the two. In Augustine’s work, classical thought was transformed.

Humanity’s rejection of God in favor of self is the key turning point for Augustine. The badge of sin carried by every newborn child—natural depravity—means that the world is a sinful place, existing outside of God’s original plan; consequently, the ideals of justice cannot be realized on earth. Each person must make a personal decision in response to the reality of original sin. Based on this choice, Augustine divides the citizenry into two groups—those who choose to live in the City of God and those who select the City of Man. Although they are not physical cities and although no one can ever know with certainty where any individual truly resides, these demarcations indicate that people in a sinful world will choose to place their allegiance and priorities either in loving and serving God or in loving and serving themselves. Physical membership in the Church, according to Augustine, is not an accurate indicator of true citizenship. Augustine argues that while ideally an earthly ruler will be a denizen of the City of God, realistically most monarchs will be citizens of the City of Man, even if they claim otherwise. The only way to potentially uncover where a person has chosen to place his or her values is by watching how the person lives, and even then an observer might be inaccurate. This understanding that true Christianity is purely internal would later resonate throughout the Reformation.

Arlene Saxonhouse (1985) notes that because in the City of Man the body, not the spirit, is dominant, women, as others who are politically oppressed, are inferior. In the City of God, woman can be equal—her soul is equal to man’s because both have a direct relationship with God. The City of God removes the need for women to perform within the context of the family, allowing for a more true equality. But in Augustinian thought, this equality was in existence only in the City of God, not in the City of Man. Similarly, slavery is a consequence of the sinful world, not a natural phenomenon constructed by God. For the vast majority of classical and medieval philosophers, women, slaves, foreigners, children, and servants are dependents entrusted to the “citizen” to be protected and used. Therefore, with a few exceptions, as in Augustine’s City of God, they were not considered to be theologically or politically relevant to these philosophical paradigms.

Because of humanity’s fall from God’s grace and humans’ natural depravity, in which humans reject God’s will and embrace their own, Augustinian thought asserts that individuals are wholly incompetent at governing themselves. The only hope of human freedom is found through service to God, manifested imperfectly on Earth through the Church. Consequently, believers require guidance to help them remain obedient to God’s commandments, which are partially communicated through the Church and the Scriptures. According to Augustine, God uses the state to compel obedience. The form of governance is irrelevant; obedience is due to any earthly government because God makes human beings dependent on both the Church and the state. The function of the state is to provide social peace, albeit one that is imperfect and temporary, because the service and obedience required by God are possible only in an ordered and peaceful society. The state protects humans from themselves and assists in their sanctification (the process of becoming more like Christ) and moral maturity. Justice, however, is impossible to achieve on Earth; peace and stability are the best for which we can hope. For Augustine, compelled obedience also helps the heretical become more orthodox. Because God is the source of all truth, reality, and morality, God’s will is best relayed to the people through the Church and, when the state is obedient to God’s commands, communicated through the state. When the Church is obedient, compelling citizens to be obedient to the Church and state, citizens must obey both. But even if the state is disobedient to the rule of the Church and to the commandments of God, believers cannot deny the authority of the state. If Christians are commanded to go against the word of God, however, they should be willing to die as martyrs to the faith rather than be subversive to the state. For Augustine, good, obedient citizens (orthodox Christians) have nothing to fear from the state and therefore no reason to rebel. The state is used by God to aid in the growth and sanctification of the good, punish the evil into reformation or destruction, and move the heretical into orthodoxy. This is one of the earliest statements, endorsed by the Roman Church, as to the proper relationship between Church and state.

Near the end of the 5th century, Pope Gelasius I defined the frequently contested relationship between the ecclesiastical power of the Church and the secular power of the state in a manner that would be later described as the two swords formulation. Although Christ is both the prince and the pope, according to Gelasius I, Christ divided these offices to protect humanity from itself, giving to the Church the responsibility of the spiritual welfare of the people and to the state the administration of secular politics. Both rulers derive their authority directly from God, yet according to this model, each office is independent and sovereign in its own realm. By the 12th century, this cooperative model would be strongly challenged by the papal authorities in the Church, who argued that God had given all earthly authority to the Church, which then delegates political power to the state.

John of Salisbury provides a typical medieval articulation of this papal position and is one of the earliest attempts at a coherent political theory in the Middle Ages prior to the Western rediscovery of Aristotle’s scientific writings in the 13th century. In his work Policratus (The Statesman’s Book), John of Salisbury constructs a sophisticated comparison of the physical body to the republic, in which the different elements of society are identified as equivalent to the body politic. For instance, the military serves as the hands of the body, while the bureaucratic agencies act as the internal organs. The Church is the soul of the body or of the republic—not separate from it. It is the Church that provides the sword to the prince, with the caveat that the Prince not exploit or destroy the clergy. The purpose of the state is to protect the Church and clergy from injury both from itself and from the state and to maintain order within the people. God granted power to the Church, which then delegates physical authority to the state, which must remain responsible to the Church. This does not mean that the papal authority has a veto over the choices of the prince, nor does it require that the Church control the state, but it does require that a governmental statute or ruling be nullified if it conflicts with the teachings of the Roman Church.

A second theme in the Policratus is John of Salisbury’s recognition of the potential for abuse by wielders of both swords and the evidence of said abuse in the contemporary Roman Church. Because he had much practical experience in politics, including serving as secretary of two Archbishops of Canterbury and possibly witnessing the murder of Archbishop Thomas Becket by King Henry II’s assassins, John of Salisbury understood the consequences of this abuse. In the Policratus, he accuses the Church of having greedy priests who exercise duplicity in their agendas, manifest a lust for power, and demonstrate a lack of compassion for those who suffer. Because of the eternal consequences of such abuse by the ecclesiastical authority, he argues that a tyrant in the Church is worse than a secular tyrant of the state.

This work is probably best known for its argument, unique in the Middle Ages and prescient of John Locke’s right to rebellion, that there can be legitimate grounds for citizens to destroy a tyrant. For John of Salisbury, there are laws that even kings can become outlaws for breaking; tyrannicide is acceptable when the ruler violates certain laws, particularly those regarding the authority of the Church. There is a mutual obligation to law binding the ruler and the ruled, so that the distinction between legitimate ruler and tyrant is essential. Although tyrannicide is permissible, it is essential that the citizen pursuing the deed distinguish between the appropriate consequences for crimes and vices, that tyrannicide not be committed by someone who has made a sacred oath to uphold the ruler, that the citizen respect the biblical injunction against poison, and that the citizen realize that tyrants can be used by God to punish those who are evil and to discipline the good. John of Salisbury was one of the few Roman Church authors who legitimate the disposal of God’s ordained, even though he limits this remedy to specific circumstances.

While Augustine is understood as integrating classical Greek and Roman thought into Christianity and in particular connecting Platonic thoughts and values with a Christian worldview, Thomas Aquinas is recognized for applying Aristotelian logic and systemic thinking to Christian doctrine. In Christian political thought, only Aquinas parallels the impact of Augustine, both integrating classical thought into Christian theology. As famously stated by William and Alan Ebenstein (2000), “To be born, the Church needed Plato. To last, it needed Aristotle” (p. 222). Initially understood through early Arabic and Jewish commentaries, Aristotle’s Politics and Ethics were translated from Latin into Greek during Aquinas’s lifetime. Aristotle’s scientific writings had a tremendous impact on medieval political thought. Many Christians, as Jewish thinkers had done centuries earlier, attempted to fit Aristotelian thought into a holistic synthesis of scientific and theological understanding. In this process of synthesis, however, Aristotle is reinterpreted and transformed. Writing in the midst of the rediscovery of Aristotle and the debates over the role of medieval law, Aquinas mediates between the Aristotelian presumption that human reason can help obtain justice and the Church’s assertion that the basis of right is custom and tradition. Aquinas tries to integrate both custom and reason, legitimizing both king and pope. The king can rule, but only where law is supreme and the King pursues justice. The Aristotelian function argument remains in Thomist thought (as the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas is generally referenced)—happiness is the end (meaning purpose) of the state, if all fulfill their societal roles and positions, when this is achieved and the king is subordinate to both the Church and God, Aquinas believes justice may exist. While Aquinas generally holds to Gelasian assumptions regarding the dual authorities of Church and state under the two-sword theory, he asserts that under specific conditions, the Church can remove a prince and release citizens from their political obligations to the ruler. The primary political works in which this analysis is developed are On Princely Government, Of the Governance of Princes, and Of Rulership (also known as On Kingship, which has been historically questioned as to its authenticity).

The Summa Theologica is the best example of Aquinas’s attempt to fully integrate the competing claims of faith—demonstrated by the Roman Church’s theological doctrine—and reason—best articulated by Aristotelian thought. For Aquinas, faith and reason both derive from God, and thus they can never truly be in conflict; faith, however, is a direct communication from God and is therefore closer to truth. Each section of this massive work is presented in a parallel structure beginning with a question under contemporary theological discussion, followed by “objections” reflecting the relevant erroneous answers to the question. Aquinas then provides the doctrinally correct answer to the question, generally supported by quotations from such authoritative sources as the Bible. Additional supportive evidence is included, and each numbered section concludes with a specific response to each of the original objections demonstrating its fallacies. The Summa Theologica provides definitive doctrinal answers to the key questions of the day; although alternative positions are evaluated, reason, supported by faith, reveals the truth. The Roman Church later adopted this massive tome as the authoritative statement of Church doctrine, used to teach young ordinands as they entered the priesthood.

Unlike Augustine, in Thomist thought the individual Christian can seek justice in both this world and the next. Obedience to authority is a virtue; a temporal ruler can legitimately expect the people to obey him; and through this obedience, citizens exchange their skills and talents for security and peace. So while an individual requires a state and is subordinate to it, the individual can expect something in return—security, peace, and, ideally, justice. Contrary to Augustinian thought, the function of government is to create a more just, secure society in which people can find happiness; justice is defined as individuals’ receiving their due by virtue of their contributions to society. According to Saxonhouse (1985), Aquinas believes that hierarchy is a reflection of the eternal order among humans. Kingship is always the best part of government; thus the subordination of the female is part of the order of nature as well. While for Augustine this oppression, like slavery, demonstrates the inadequacies of a corrupt world, for Aquinas it is simply part of the natural world ordered by God.

To prevent tyranny, Aquinas believes, the ruler must govern within the constraints of the law. Consequently, a role of the Church is to remind the ruler of his limitations through the threat of excommunication—for, consistent with the Roman philosopher Cicero, without law, there is no justice. The ruler has the right to expect people to obey him because within obedience to the law, they can expect an imperfect justice. Custom and tradition, however, are subject to criticism through the God-granted facility of reason; if the customs and traditions are unreasonable, they can be questioned and rejected. This freedom to question and challenge marks the early origins of a liberal view of individualism. Although Aquinas recognizes the dangers of tyranny, Thomist thought reflects the assumption that revolution in response to tyranny can result in worse abuses. For this reason, as well as the ruler’s direct appointment by God, Aquinas rejects John of Salisbury’s endorsement of tyrannicide.

For Aquinas, law has multiple manifestations. Because laws emanate from God, they are rooted in the universal and are applicable to all cultures, across time and circumstances. In Thomist thought, there are four types of law: the eternal law of God revealed in the universe, the divine law of God communicated through the Scriptures and the edicts of the Church, the natural law of God understood through the experiences and realities of humanity, and the human law through which eternal values and expectations are translated into legislation. For Aquinas, the key elements of natural law are (a) natural inclinations such as self-preservation, (b) engrained instincts such as procreation and the education of children, and (c) the internal propulsion of human beings to reason, toward knowing God and His truth, as well as to life in community. This formulation of natural law remained constant throughout the European Enlightenment.

Similar to Machiavelli, albeit born 200 years earlier, Dante Alighieri lived in Italy as the numerous Italian states battled for dominance. As feudal society transitioned to a world of independent cities, the Church began losing control over local governance; it is not surprising that philosophers and scholars would seek better, more constant forms of governing. Although his Divine Comedy is better known, Dante’s De Monarchia (circa 1310) is understood to be one of the most important challenges to centralized papal powers in the Middle Ages. His work is interpreted as a unique combination of both Augustinian and Thomist/ Aristotelian thought.

Dante makes three primary arguments in De Monarchia, all regarding the proper governance of society and the ensured thriving of humanity through sustained political associations. In the first portion of his work, Dante argues that in order to have the uninterrupted peace necessary for humanity to develop to its full potential, a universal monarchy is required. Unity is essential to guarantee that states can resolve their disputes without resorting to war. A monarch can best secure the freedom necessary for individual and communal development. For Dante, however, this monarch would resolve only matters that require a common rule; most issues would be reserved for the sovereignty of the local state or community traditions. There is some debate over whether Dante intended to advocate for a worldwide monarch (Ebenstein & Ebenstein, 2000) or simply to unify Italy (d’Entreves, 1952).

In his second argument, Dante recommends that the nature of this universal government should be Roman because the Roman Empire acquired its domination of the world through natural right and its divine appointment by God, ruled based on law, achieved the common good for all, and ensured peace with liberty. It is this combination of peace and liberty that Dante believes will ensure human society can fulfill its potential. His final argument addresses the appropriate relationship of the Church with the state. For Dante, unlike many of his compatriots, the authority of the emperor is delegated directly from God and is independent of the intermediary of the pope. As a human is both an earthly and a spiritual being, possessing both sets of attributes, governing bodies must have both essences. To have a blessed earthly life, reason and philosophy as articulated through human law can be protected by an ordained emperor; to achieve the heavenly paradise, people must move beyond human reason to faith guided by the Church. By necessity, individuals need two guides—the pope to lead the citizenry to eternal life and the emperor to guarantee earthly happiness.

In 1302, Pope Boniface VIII (1294–1303) issued the papal bull Unam Sanctam, which stated that only the Christian Church provided the means through which salvation and the forgiveness of sins occur. This Church had two swords—one spiritual and one secular—but “both swords are in the power of the church, the one by the hand of the priest, the other by the hand of kings and knights, but at the will and sufferance of the priest.” Unam Sanctam noted that the highest temporal authority could be held accountable by the spiritual power of the Church but that only God could judge the highest spiritual authority—the pope. A culmination of many battles between secular rulers and the Church, this papal bull resulted in outright and successful rebellions by such monarchs as England’s King Edward I and France’s King Philip IV.

Marsilio de Padua’s work, Defensor Pacis (The Defender of the Peace), in 1324, is significant because it makes a “positivistic separation of laws and morals, [establishes] civil power on nontranscendent grounds, and [deposits] political authority in the people as a whole” (McDonald, 1968, p. 176). This work marked the beginning of the secularization of the state, in which citizens— not God—are the source of governing legitimacy; this move toward the modern conception of the secular state is often attributed to Machiavelli but is traceable to Marsilio. Explicitly building on an Aristotelian comprehension of the origin and role of the state, Marsilio is led to a conclusion different from Aquinas’s regarding the authority of the Church, although all three philosophers conclude that the role of the state is to provide the good life. This “good life” has two components for Marsilio: the use of philosophy via reason to secure the good life temporally and to use revelation via faith to have the good life in the eternal realm. Consequently, like Dante, there is a need for both civil and religious government. The citizenry grants authority for this civil government, and many commentators (but not all; see Strauss, 1987, p. 284) perceive this idea as an explicit statement of popular sovereignty, albeit with the exclusion of women, children, foreigners, and slaves. The common will of the people is the source of political authority, and this will is known as the Legislator. The agent of the Legislator—the ruler— is the executive of the government. In Marsilian thought, this ruler is an elected monarch, although not inherently an individual. Although there may be divine law, it is human or positive law that possesses legitimacy. Divine and human law are distinguished from each other by the nature of their penalties when they are trespassed; if penalties are eternal, such laws cannot be enforced on Earth, and if laws are temporal, all are accountable to them, including king and priest. If the king violates the laws, the Legislator (corporate citizenry) is able to hold the King accountable, as with any citizen. In making this distinction between human and divine law, Marsilio de Padua attacks papal power and argues that the Church must be subject to secular judges. He removes all coercive power from the hands of the Church, not, as some assert, to allow for religious freedom, but to clearly distinguish enforceable positive law from the divine law realized only by God.

Marsilian thought is not a devaluation of religion or Christianity. Marsilio argues that the activity of the Christian priest is the most noble act of any believer, but Marsilio also articulates concerns regarding the corrupting influence of the power of coercion on the Church. By destroying ecclesiastical hierarchy, finding no authority for this power in the Scriptures, Marsilio places the individual priest and the corporate body of the Church under the authority of the state, just as every other individual and corporation is under its authority. This destruction of papal imperialism and the challenge to Church corruption anticipate the concerns of the Reformation.

The conciliar movement was an attempt by the Roman Church to address its widely perceived corruption by giving decision power previously assigned solely to the pope to councils that had authority to reform Church structure. Two councils were convened—Constance during the period 1414 to 1418 and Basel from 1431 to 1439— but neither was effective in advancing systemic change. When the ecclesiastical structure was unable to reform itself, a revolt from the membership of the Roman Church was inevitable. While Martin Luther was neither the first nor the last to advocate theological and political reform, he was the most influential in both instigating and fulfilling the Protestant Reformation. His famed declaration in the Ninety-Five Theses (1517) was his initial attack on papal indulgences, which he and others believed had corrupted the Church both theologically and politically. This system of indulgences instilled by elements of the Western Church had guaranteed salvation to those who could afford it, while enriching the priesthood and impoverishing many believers. The Protestant Reformation drew heavily on the theological arguments initially made by Augustine in the 5th century, challenging the Roman Church’s more recent reliance on Aristotelian thought.

Luther’s primary political works are Treatise on Christian Liberty (1520) and Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed (1523). Luther’s religious and political contributions are parallel: Individuals can understand God’s word directly in an unmediated relationship. Instead of the laity requiring a dedicated priesthood to intervene with God, Martin Luther argued for a “priesthood of all believers.” Embedded within this schema is a notion of basic equality of all believers as Christians, but as with Augustine, this equality does not translate into a temporal format. Neither the Church nor the state is required to intervene within the relationship between humans and God. As a corollary, because faith is inherently personal and internal, true belief can never be coerced, only right behavior. Despite the claims of the Aristotelians, believers should not seek religious truth through reason—although individuals have the capacity to reason—but through their capacity for belief.

The question of the best form of government is mostly irrelevant to Luther, because God provides government for the guidance of the sinful person. Luther appears to support a monarchy above other forms because he fears any form of democracy would inevitably result in mob rule and control by the wicked. Christians themselves need no laws because they are governed directly by God; however, they obey and support government for the sake of their nonbelieving neighbors. In the works of Martin Luther, government is not religious in nature (unlike the perspective of John Calvin), and Luther does not perceive a Christian state to be feasible. Following Augustinian thought, government is ordained for a sinful world; therefore, a Christian government is impossible because evil always outweighs the good in the temporal sphere. The purpose of the government is to provide order, and therefore earthly justice should not be expected. While God has ordained two kingdoms, one religious and one temporal, they must be independent of one another. Luther’s key concern is that preaching of the Scripture, offering of the sacraments, and interpreting of doctrine are protected from the power of the state.

God is the source of all ethics and morality, and his will is directly revealed to individuals through faith; this is a process entirely separate from governance. While there is no right to rebellion, the believer does have a right of passive resistance. The individual does not have to obey despite conscience or faith’s dictates; there is no personal necessity to follow an evil ruler’s wrong edicts or to embark on an unjust war. But, for Luther, this view does not legitimate any form of organized resistance. It allows only for passive resistance, a personal response to evil rule. In fact, as Luther’s thought developed, his attitude toward dissenters and rebels hardened. In 1525, for instance, the German peasants who had been heavily oppressed both politically and economically took Luther’s religious theories quite literally and revolted. Luther immediately supported the princes in brutally crushing rebellion. Although he recognized the unfairness of the policies that had been enforced by those in power and that had informed the revolt, for Luther obedience to rulers is still the duty of believers because, as he argues, the world is a wicked place and deserves such harsh governance.

John Calvin was a French Protestant who moved to Switzerland, a newly Protestant country, because of religious oppression. There he wrote Institutes of the Christian Religion (first edition, 1536) and governed Geneva (1536–1538 and 1541–1564) in an attempt to realize his perfect Christian society. The ideal government for Calvin is a theocracy; government is good, provided by God, and the state should support the Church. Obedience rendered to the state thereby equals obedience rendered to God. As with Luther, Calvin perceives two types of government—the spiritual and the political—that complement and assist each other. His city of Geneva was to install this new world order and provide moral guidance for citizens; consistent violators of this order were to be expelled from the community. Geneva brought discipline to people displaced and excluded in the old system, thus creating a larger, better functioning workforce.

Calvin asserts that the function of government is to make people moral by providing order and justice to the larger civil society, believing that obedience to God’s law leads to justice among his people. Laws should not neglect God, but the state’s primary function is to aid the Church by enforcing laws with the objective of making people virtuous. As with other Christian philosophers, Calvin understands that God’s will is revealed to those who have a direct relationship with him, but the Church enacts God’s will through the enforcement of the state. Individuals need to be protected from corrupt societies that avoid teaching morality or reject orienting their members into right values; such societies need reform.

For Calvin, the believer seeks success, which is defined as material benefits to be saved, not enjoyed. Such monetary savings are understood as a social resource, a foundation of the industrial revolution; this expected austerity is a virtue of self-control and prevents the rule of lust in the life of the individual. Calvin is clear that the essence of the work ethic is found in the individual; like Aristotle, virtue is enforced by the law, and people slowly become virtuous through habituation perpetuated by law. This value was possibly best exemplified in the culture of Geneva and in the Puritan societies in colonial Massachusetts. An immense debate exists in the literature over the role of Calvinism in the creation of modern capitalism (see Green, 1959; Weber, 1930) by its removal of theological barriers to a capitalist system.

More than Martin Luther, Calvin recognizes that some resistance is acceptable in the case of tyranny. God is sovereign and will hear the cries of His people and deliver them by a savior. The purpose of the magistrates, for instance, is to check the power of rulers, and the magistrates should exercise this authority. Lesser governmental officials have a duty to protect the political sphere from a tyrannical leader; their right to resist comes from God because the sovereign power is shared. In a good system of government, the prevention of tyranny should be automatic because authority is divided and there are automatic checks on the consolidation of power. While Calvin emphasizes obedience and not direct resistance, his followers transformed this reasoning. Huguenot interpretation of a thread of Calvinist thought led to such essays as A Defense of Liberty Against Tyrants (1579), published under the name of Stephen Junius Brutus, which justified a contractual understanding of government, popular sovereignty, protection of property, and the right of some resistance against tyrants. Similarly, John Knox rejected Calvin’s notion of passive resistance, arguing to the Scottish Protestant church that it is the duty of believers to challenge and resist a king who behaves contrary to God’s word and God’s glory.

In his Six Books of the Commonwealth (1576), Jean Bodin creates a modern notion both of the state and of sovereignty. The family is the basis and the origin of the state— resulting in a strong distinction between public authority of sovereigns and private authority of heads of households. The ruler has been granted absolute and perpetual power under God and thereby has an immense obligation to serve him. Consequently, Bodin believes that divine retribution will fall on evil rulers. Sovereigns, however, do not have to be kings. They may be either individual or collective in their composition. While Bodin prefers a monarchy, he argues that legitimate sovereignty can be manifested in any form of government. The duty of the state has long been to protect property; it is not viable for the modern state to unify public and private happiness because the modern state is big, diverse, pluralistic, and must be ruled by a dominant central power. Bodin provides a mix of the old and the modern, but his work marks the end of the concept of the unified Christian society. While he rejects much of Calvin’s and Luther’s analysis regarding the interrelationship of Church and state, he advances the supposition that religious belief is a personal and not a public concern by explicitly advocating religious tolerance by the state.

Like Bodin’s work, Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of the Ecclesiastical Polity is a link between the medieval and modern conceptions of government. Hooker, although a Protestant, still values tradition, authority, good order, and law but also manifests a high degree of tolerance for religious dissent. The law of nature, however, requires that people have some kind of government or governing structure. At root, the government of the Church and the state are one, but they are not controlled by an all-powerful authority. The sovereign, unlike for Bodin, is not the one whose will becomes law, but instead the sovereign exists to enforce preexisting law. The sovereign is the “King-in- Parliament,” not the king as an isolated, independent ruler. Monarchy is not an absolute form, but if a monarch rules and the society is Christian, then the monarch must be Christian. Ethics and truth still are provided through natural law and God’s revelation through Scripture. Individuals, as in the view of most of the medieval philosophers, are still denied the right to resist tyrants because although tyranny is very destructive, anarchy is much worse.

The contemporary impact of Christian political philosophy has been seen across the political spectrum in Western societies. The vision of the Christian reconstructionist who wishes to return to a literal Old Testament legal system and the perspective of the Black Liberation theologian who views the New Testament priorities of the Sermon on the Mount as providing a systemic definition of legal justice— both derive their impetus from the political philosophies of the past. Contemporarily, there are three political interpretations that have been quite pervasive in Western thought: the vision of the Anabaptists, civil disobedience, and liberation theology.

An additional response to the new theological and political assertions of the Reformation is found in the development of Anabaptist communities in which the response to a personal God central to the believer’s life is a rejection of the corrupting influence of political engagement. Direct descendents from the radical reformers of the Protestant revolution, current denominations that derive their theological stances from Anabaptist premises include the Amish, the Mennonites, the Church of the Brethren, and Hutterites. The term anabaptist derives from the Greek word that means rebaptize, reflecting the understanding of baptism as a sacrament in which only believers could partake and rejecting the pervasive Catholic and Protestant acceptance of infant baptism. Although there are great theological differences among these communities, they also hold some basic premises in common, most clearly articulated in the Schleitheim Articles of 1527. They are generally pacifistic, refusing to bear arms or to serve in the military, and believe in both nonviolence and nonresistance. Anabaptists endorse the strict separation of church and state because they do not believe that the state can supersede the requirements of God’s law and the church must be free to worship independent of state regulations. To different degrees, Anabaptist communities withdraw from the larger secular society in order to be more pure in their relationship to God.

While civil disobedience certainly does not have its roots in the Christian Church, many of its practitioners have justified their participation within their Christian faith. Civil disobedience is an attempt to challenge the legitimacy of a country’s laws and practices without contesting the legitimacy of the nation. By nonviolently disobeying laws and passively accepting governmental consequences, activists hope to call attention to the injustice of the policies they are challenging. Many practitioners, such as Martin Luther King Jr., based their justification of this practice on the scriptural contention that humans are to obey God’s law and disobey human law when it is unjust. In his famed “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” King notes that he agrees with Augustine’s claim that an “unjust law is no law at all” and Aquinas’s distinction that “an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law.”

Liberation theology emerged from impoverished colonized communities in Latin America and was built on such writings as Peruvian Roman Catholic theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation (1971). It insists on the centrality of the praxis (practice) of Christianity. This perspective recognizes the challenging of oppressive political systems as central to the doctrine of Christianity, and it privileges the experiences and voices of the poor as the distinctive of the faith. Because a sinful world is the root cause of poverty, only through the institutional challenging of political and economic systemic oppression does the Church pursue God’s will in confronting and defeating sin. Godly practice requires that social policies grant preferential treatment of the poor. Prior to ascending to the papacy as Pope Benedict XVI, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger wrote a refutation of the aspects of liberation theology dependent on Marxist interpretation of history and economics and that are supportive of social revolutions. He noted that although critiques by liberation theologians of the history and theology of the Catholic Church were often accurate, solutions solely dependent on Marxist analysis border on the heretical and challenge orthodox thought. Despite these challenges, liberation theology’s interpretation of Christianity has been incredibly influential, not only in Latin America but also in Asia and Africa, and particularly outside Latin America within Protestant denominations. In North America, its offshoots include feminist liberation theology and Black liberation theology.

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