Nicholas Rengger Research Articles

On the complexities of Christopher Coker and Nicholas Rengger

On the complexities of Christopher Coker and Nicholas Rengger

Nicholas Rengger and two wars

Nicholas Rengger spent much of his career thinking and writing on the phenomenon of war. Eschewing any optimistic view that war could be abolished he also challenged the application of Just War theory to explain and justify the use of military force after the events of 9/11. His intellectual interactions with Jean Bethke Elshtain highlighted his growing unease with those in International Relations who sought to render palatable the use of torture, extraordinary rendition and technological ‘fixes’ in the pursuit of Western interests.

Between faith and scepticism: Nicholas Rengger’s reflections on the ‘hybridity’ of modernity

In this essay, I offer a brief assessment of Nicholas Rengger’s engagement with arguments arising from the theological critique of modern politics and of his take on the relationship between faith and philosophy in modernity. Rengger’s scepticism, a peculiar mix of naturalism and philosophical idealism, combining insights from Oakeshott, Santayana and Augustine, did not cordon off faith but sought to work out its tensive relationship with practical forms of reasoning in modernity, a condition he described as a ‘hybrid’. Rengger’s critique of the hybridity of modernity rests on assumptions that expose some of the unresolved tensions of his anti-Pelagian scepticism.

Conceptualising peace and its preconditions: The anti-Pelagian imagination and the critical turn in peace theory

This article examines the conceptualisations of peace and its preconditions manifested in the critical turn in peace theory: bottom-up approaches which begin with particular contexts and postulate diverse local actors as integral to the process of peace-building. This article argues that the turn is at an impasse and is unable to address the crucial charge that its conceptualisation of peace is inconsistent. To explain the persistence of inconsistency and to move us forward, the article analyses, evaluates and responds to the turn through the lens of Nicholas Rengger’s work on the anti-Pelagian imagination in political theory. This is defined as a tendency to begin theorising from non-utopian, anti-perfectionist and sceptical assumptions. Through this examination the article argues that the critical turn is anti-Pelagian but not consistently so because it often gives way to perfectionism, adopts naïve readings of institutions and postulates demanding conceptions of political agency and practice. This inconsistency with its own philosophical premises makes the turn’s conceptualisation of peace and its preconditions incoherent. Finally, the article sketches an alternative account of peace which draws upon a number of anti-Pelagian scholars and mobilises Rengger’s particular defense of anti-Pelagianism. The suggested alternative, the article argues, provides us with a more coherent theory of peace and a way out of existing dead ends.

Medieval foundations of International Relations

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.

The Just War Tradition: Restraint on the Use of Force or Partner in Crime?

Nicholas Rengger's Just War and International Order: The Uncivil Condition in World Politics is a masterful work of scholarship in which the author develops a counterintuitive argument that the just war tradition (JWT) has become complicit in the expanding use of violence that characterizes the international system. The JWT is widely viewed as a constraint on the use of force because it treats the use of force as just only under particular conditions and only if utilized in particular ways. Rengger's broad and sophisticated intellectual history calls this widely held belief into question with his contention that the JWT has developed in a way that authorizes an expanding scope of violence. Rengger is not the first to claim that the world is gripped by increasing violence. Many others have made similar claims and some have argued that this increasing use of force is just in response to humanitarian crisis or, in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, as part of a crusade against terrorism.

Michael Oakeshott’s political philosophy of civil association and constructivism in International Relations

This article shows the relevance of Oakeshott’s political philosophy for the contemporary constructivist debate in International Relations. First, the article argues that Oakeshott’s perspective stresses that political institutions are based on norms and relationships which result from human understanding. Second, it elaborates on Nicholas Rengger’s recent work and reveals that Oakeshott’s On Human Conduct presents considerations pertaining to international politics that are consistent with his broader political philosophy. These observations concern the nature of war, the historical role of colonialism and the evolution of international society. Third, this article discusses Terry Nardin’s notion of ‘practical association’ and Christian Reus-Smit’s criticism of it. It contends that international civil association is a relationship between states based on understood and socially constructed moral values and practices. Finally, the article claims that customary international law declares and reflects these values and practices. As such, it reveals that Oakeshott’s notion of authority and his theory of civil association illuminate the possibility of an international legal order without a legislative office. This is of particular relevance also because of the Hobbesian influence on Oakeshott. Overall, this article illustrates how Michael Oakeshott’s theory of civil association sheds light on the nature of international society and law.

War

There is a long-standing set of criteria thoughtful leaders have used to helpdetermine when engaging in war is the right thing to do. The criteria havealso been long debated, and Larry May’s collection of fifteen original essaysmakes an excellent contribution to the discourse. Historical background isprovided by Gregory Reichberg’s “Jus ad Bellum” and Nicholas Rengger’s“The Jus in Bello in Historical and Philosophical Perspective,” both ofwhich are astutely concise descriptions of just war philosophical developmentfrom the western perspective. Most just war literature readily availableto western analysts has produced by western thinkers, and international legalstandards on war have been promulgated primarily through western interactions.But the rich Islamic tradition of just war jurisprudence and philosophy could have been included. The ninth-century scholar al-Shaybani, forinstance, wrote about the rules of war and has been called “the Hugo Grotiusof Islam.”Al-Farabi, the father of Islamic political philosophy, directly addressesthe justice of war (although significantly the best he will say of any war isthat it is not unjust), and many of his tenth-century principles are consistentwith western thinking; the lack of discrimination between military targetsand civilians is unjust in both traditions, for example. In his SelectedAphorisms, al-Farabi identifies innocents as illegitimate targets and evenhints that forcibly drafted soldiers might be considered “innocents” when thewar’s cause is unjust, thereby intertwining the ad bellum principle of justcause with the in bello principle of discrimination (Political Writings:“Selected Aphorisms” and Other Texts, trans. Charles Butterworth [CornellUniversity Press: 2002]). Thomas Hurka shares al-Farabi’s idea of interdependence.His superb essay, “Proportionality and Necessity,” poses questionssuch as: “How many enemy soldiers can be sacrificed to save one ofour own soldiers’ lives?” According to him, the right number differs accordingto the necessity and who is doing the calculating; in other words, jus adbellum and jus in bello influence each other ...

Theorizing world politics for a new century

Journal Article Theorizing world politics for a new century Get access NICHOLAS RENGGER NICHOLAS RENGGER 1Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at St Andrews University and Editor of The Review of International Studies. His major research interests lie in the fields of international political theory and intellectual history. His most recent books include International Relations, political theory and the problem of order (1999) and, as co-editor (with Chris Brown and Terry Nardin), International Relations in political thought: texts from the Ancient Greeks to the First World War (2002). He has just completed a manuscript for a book entitled Dealing in darkness? The anti-pelagian imagination in political theory and International Relations and is now collaborating with Caroline Kennedy-Pipe on a book examining the historical condition, normative character and contemporary trajectory of war in the modern world. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 82, Issue 3, May 2006, Pages 427–430, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2346.2006.00542.x Published: 08 May 2006

Evil and Christian Ethics

Books reviewed:Gordon Graham, Evil and Christian Ethics Reviewed by Renée Jeffery and Nicholas Rengger