Medieval foundations of International Relations

Abstract

This is a landmark volume in the history of international thought. It collects together nine chapters by a multidisciplinary team of historians, International Relations theorists and philosophers to consider the debt that modern international society owes to the European Middle Ages and the neglected intellectual resources medieval thinking might offer the present. In his introduction, William Bain challenges the all-too-prevalent views that the Peace of Westphalia dismissed religion from international relations and ‘ushered in the era of organized nation-states’, as Hedley Bull once put it; that medieval and modern political thought are radically different from each other; and that medieval thought has nothing of value for contemporary thinkers. The Westphalian notion of sovereignty was of course drawn from ‘a medieval analogy of God as supreme lawgiver’ (p. 16), while other medieval concepts permeate the practices and rules of contemporary international society. Nicholas Rengger's expansive, thought-provoking chapter reinforces these points. Like Bain, he draws on Michael Allen Gillespie's argument that the social foundations of western modernity are the product of the settlement of a long-running medieval theological debate between so-called ‘realists’ and ‘nominalists’—a settlement mostly in favour of the latter. Arguing that social order was not given by God and revealed by human reason, as the realists argued, but rather created by the application of human reason, the nominalists gave rise to a more expansive conception of human agency as capable of generating new orders. Yet as Rengger notes, the realists and their influence did not entirely fade away as medieval gave way to modern. Their thinking lives on in contemporary humanitarianism, among other commitments, as notions such as universal human rights evolved, at least in part, from medieval realist theories about natural, God-given orders.