723069

research-article2017
IRE0010.1177/0047117817723069International RelationsBain and Nardin

Article

International Relations
2017, Vol. 31(3) 213­–226
International relations and © The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0047117817723069
https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117817723069
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William Bain
National University of Singapore; Yale-NUS College

Terry Nardin
National University of Singapore; Yale-NUS College

Abstract
The history of international thought has traditionally focused on a limited number of canonical
texts. Such an approach now seems both naive and parochial. International Relations scholars
often read their own ideas into these texts instead of getting ideas from them – ideas that if
properly understood have the potential to undermine theirs. By ignoring non-canonical texts, we
overlook resources that are not only necessary to establish the historical contexts of canonical
writings but that can also help theorists of International Relations to understand their subject
better. Judgements of what is and is not canonical are in any case themselves context-bound
and contestable. Intellectual history can help us understand how the International Relations
canon was constructed and for what purposes. It can also counter the abstractions of theory
by reminding us not only that theories are abstractions from the activities of people living in
particular times and places but also that our own theories are embedded in historicity. In these
and other ways, paying attention to intellectual history expands the repertoire of ideas on which
International Relations theorists can draw and against which they can measure their conclusions.
The articles in this issue illustrate these points in relation to a wide range of texts and contexts.
They suggest that whether one approaches international relations from the angle of description,
explanation, policy or ethics, knowing how past thinkers have understood the subject can lead to
better informed and more robust scholarship.

Keywords
contextualism, domination, empire, hierarchy, history of international thought, intellectual
history, international law, international political theory, International Relations theory, Kant,
Quentin Skinner, race, Vattel

Corresponding author:
William Bain, Department of Political Science, National University of Singapore, AS1, #04-43, 11 Arts Link,
117570 Singapore.
Email: wbain@nus.edu.sg
214 International Relations 31(3)

The articles assembled here explore what intellectual history can contribute to under-
standing international relations. Until recently, this would have meant restricting one’s
attention to the canon of political theory or those parts of it that were believed to have
implications for international affairs.1 For many, to study the history of political thought
meant reading these works and those interested in the history of international thought for
the most part stuck to this programme. The canonical thinkers – Thucydides, Machiavelli,
Hobbes, Grotius, Rousseau, Kant and a few others – were assumed to constitute the pri-
mary source not only for specific arguments but also for fundamental ideas. International
Relations scholars saw their writings as collectively illustrating a distinctive way of theo-
rising the subject. And it can still be said that no theorist of international relations can be
adequately conversant with the subject without having some knowledge of these think-
ers. But we can no longer assume that the history of international thought means inquir-
ies confined to or even primarily engaging their works. This special issue takes up the
project of rethinking the canon with a view to pushing it forward, while identifying ways
that intellectual history can make a significant contribution to the field.

The problem stated

We know that common interpretations of classical works were often historically insensi-
tive and therefore misleading. And we are perhaps more aware than earlier generations
of the diverse, politically charged and sometimes eccentric considerations that confer or
deny canonical status. These insights suggest that the contribution of intellectual history
to the study of international relations can be decidedly ambiguous, if not positively prob-
lematic. Even those who have argued for more sophisticated and dispassionate readings
of the past have been uncertain about what this might actually entail. Martin Wight
famously observed that unlike political theory (which, he thought, does have a canon),
writing on international theory is scattered and unsystematic, in no small part due to its
intractable subject matter. There is no agreed body of classics in international theory, and
this, he argued, is symptomatic of an intellectual and moral poverty rooted in the domi-
nance of the state and its privileged place in the literature of political theory.2 Wight’s
pessimism is ironic, however, since it is he who bequeathed to the discipline the so-called
three traditions that have come to be identified with Hobbes, Grotius and Kant.3 Wight
seems to have confused the question of whether there are classics of international theory
with the question of whether there should be, and, if so, which works should be put in this
category.
This ambivalence aside, a deeper problem is that many in the field of International
Relations have found intellectual history easy to ignore. Those with a theoretical bent are
not intellectual historians or even likely to be conversant with its ways. If they pay atten-
tion to ideas at all, they are likely to turn to canonical thinkers in an effort to diagnose the
problems that persistently afflict the practice of international relations and to find solu-
tions.4 Those thinkers are still invoked as sources of a trans-historical wisdom that con-
temporary students of international relations ignore at their peril. Machiavelli is a theorist
of necessity and reason of state. Hobbes is the quintessential theorist of anarchy, Grotius
of international legal order. Rousseau has a structural realist theory of war, Kant a pro-
gressive theory of the democratic peace and global confederation and so on.
Bain and Nardin 215

The value of making such claims is elusive, however. The appeal of these canonical
thinkers is that they evoke parallels between past ideas and present problems. But these
can be challenged for being either overdone or simply mistaken on important points.
Take, for example, Noel Malcolm’s searching criticism of the standard interpretation of
Hobbes. The view that international relations can be described as an anarchical realm of
perpetual conflict, on the model of Hobbes’ state of nature, is, Malcolm argues, not only
‘fixed and ossified’ but also perilously close to caricature.5 Criticism of this kind ema-
nates not only from the confines of political theory or intellectual history. As Chris
Brown argues in his article here, although the history of political thought was regarded
as an important source of knowledge for theorising international relations, and therefore
as an integral part of that activity, its treatment was typically crude and caricatured.
Much better readings of the classics are now available. Paradoxically, however, the his-
tory of political thought is no longer regarded as central to theorising the subject.
The conclusion to be drawn is not that canonical works should no longer be read. Nor
is it even that we should also be reading non-canonical writings. It is, rather, that political
and international discourse goes on at different levels and in different registers, and that
we need to read with attention to the contexts these entail. This means that we must be
sensitive to the diversity of ways in which people working in different fields and having
different concerns have approached the subject. It also means paying attention to the
meaning of words in the periods, languages and other contexts in which they were used.
Students of international relations can now be expected to know that Machiavelli used lo
stato and virtù more broadly than we might use ‘the state’ and ‘virtue’. But they are
unlikely to know that Hobbes sometimes used the word ‘obtain’ to mean ‘maintain’
rather than ‘acquire’, or that in seventeenth-century English the phrase ‘reward of his
labours’ more often meant gratitude or honour rather than money.6 Such distinctions can
affect how we interpret even a much-read author. The articles assembled here reflect this
understanding. Only one of them is focused on a thinker who falls clearly within the
traditional canon (Kant), and all give attention to figures outside it and are alert to issues
of context. The contributors do not claim to have settled the question of who and what to
include within the field of international theory. But they do share a broad view of the
relevant literature, and in doing so provide an opening to reflect on the extent to which
the earlier, canon-centric, view is being successfully challenged.
Sophisticated readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings lend themselves
to rethinking such topics as the primacy of the state, the emergence of the ‘states system’,
the consequences of anarchy and the principles of a just international order. Scholarly
activity of a historical kind can be directed towards finding evidence to establish both an
ancestry and a subsequent inheritance. To accept the legitimacy of this activity is not,
however, to be content with an exercise in uncovering sources or illuminating forerun-
ners or followers. It is also to accept that much of what is taken for granted in the field is
incorrect in some important way. Intellectual history unsettles the mythography of the
discipline, at which point we learn that Grotius had no intention of founding international
law, despite his reputation to the contrary, and that Hobbes was not himself a Hobbesian.7
In this sense, international intellectual history is not just an engagement with history; it
also plays an indispensable role in the theoretical enterprise by questioning, shaping and
repositioning what it means to reflect on international relations.
216 International Relations 31(3)

Each of the articles that follow addresses, in some way, the question ‘What can intel-
lectual history contribute to the study of international relations?’ In this introduction, we
sketch the contours of the debate, distinguishing some of the main issues, protagonists
and fault lines, as these are identified by the contributors. Our aims include explaining
why the history of international thought is still a marginal activity within the field of
International Relations, why it is important to read canonical authors in context (and,
moreover, in a variety of contexts), why non-canonical writings need to be recovered and
why past thinking about international relations should be taken seriously by scholars
working in different idioms. In particular, we want to make the case that whether one
approaches the study of international relations from the angle of description, explana-
tion, policy or ethics, knowing something about how past thinkers have understood the
subject can lead to better informed and more robust scholarship. These thinkers, whether
famous or obscure, austerely philosophical or practically engaged, are not limited to
those inhabiting a canon of classic texts. Part of the value of intellectual history is that it
pays attention to neglected figures and to traditions or languages of discourse that oper-
ate with varying degrees of engagement in immediate practical questions.

Marginalisation
But this raises a question. If intellectual history has the potential to open up new avenues
to understanding, why has the study of earlier writings, canonical or non-canonical,
remained marginalised within the field of International Relations? There has been a
renaissance of sorts in the study of the history of political thought, as well as in the
broader field of intellectual history, spurred in part by the influence of Cambridge School
contextualism, and this has spilled over into the study of international affairs. David
Armitage’s book, Foundations of Modern International Thought, might be picked out as
emblematic of recent attention to international relations among intellectual historians.8
Its premise is that intellectual history, as a kind of inquiry aimed at understanding past
ideas in their own terms, is uniquely equipped to interrogate the ideas that shape current
understandings of international relations and the vocabularies commonly used to express
those ideas. As a consequence of some of the excellent scholarship in this mode that has
appeared in recent years, the treatment of political thought by International Relations
scholars can no longer be described as crude or caricatured. But the study of ideas about
international relations, whether we call it ‘the history of international thought’ or ‘inter-
national intellectual history’, remains largely the preserve of specialists who have found
a common, if loosely defined, area on which their disciplinary inquiries converge. It has
not, as yet, noticeably affected mainstream studies of international relations, especially
in the United States, and this raises the question of why, despite the fact that it seems to
be flourishing, the subject remains marginalised within the larger field.
Brown frames his answer to this question primarily in terms of the sociology of disci-
plines. In the Britain and Europe, the field of International Relations is not a sub-field of
political science, and this explains, at least in part, why the history of international
thought has played a bigger role in that part of the world. By the same token, it is less
influential in the United States because International Relations there is still organised as
a sub-field within the discipline of political science and must contend with the
Bain and Nardin 217

methodological concerns that preoccupy American political scientists.9 In those debates,

the high ground is occupied by quantifiers. The history of international thought, like the
history of political thought more generally, has become a niche activity as a consequence,
Brown thinks, of having to compete with positivist approaches, formal or empirical, that
show little interest in historical inquiry. The point could be put more generally: intellec-
tual history introduces a dimension of meaning that is absent in scientific inquiries. If
you think of yourself as a scientist, which economists and political scientists typically
do, you will see the history of your subject as different from what you yourself are doing.
Similarly, if you are philosopher you might not be especially interested in the history of
philosophy because you see your enterprise as grounded, if not on science, then on logic,
phenomenology or some other trans-historical source of knowledge. But if, on the con-
trary, you see yourself as engaged in moral or political inquiries that have been going on
for a long time, if you think your questions are in certain ways like those asked by previ-
ous generations or you want to know how your questions are different, you are more
likely to see those earlier discussions as bearing on your own.
But this explanation, even if sound, does not answer the question of whether a mar-
ginalised sub-field devoted to the study of international thought presents a problem.
Those who are not intellectual historians will reasonably ask, ‘Why should we read
Hobbes or Kant, or try to understand this or that debate? Does it have anything other than
historical interest?’ There is an unfortunate tendency among theorists working within the
frame of empirical social science to see this kind of scholarship as little more than ‘back-
ground’, that is, as information that, however interesting it might be in its own terms,
falls short of contributing to the substance of the subject – its theories, methods and
practice. Against this, Brown argues that International Relations scholars turned to the
history of political thought to say something that was difficult or impossible to say from
the starting point of mainstream work in their field. Another answer to the question of
what sorts of knowledge intellectual history can provide is that it opens the door kinds of
knowledge that science cannot supply. Inquiry modelled on the natural sciences cannot
by itself furnish all there is to know about politics or international relations. Scientific
inquiry is, in particular, ill-equipped to explain the thoughts and actions of agents whose
choices are shaped by their ideas. Intellectual history makes a contribution to the study
of international relations in guiding us not only towards a better grasp of past debates but
also towards a better reading of actions, present as well as past, whose meaning is illu-
minated by the ideas, practices and traditions of the agents performing those actions.
International intellectual history, then, contributes not only to our understanding of his-
tory; arguably, it also supports the theoretical enterprise by questioning, shaping and
repositioning what is involved in thinking about international relations.

Texts and contexts

One way that intellectual history makes this contribution is by problematising the history
of international thought. Theories (of whatever sort) are historical productions: they have
both contexts and causes. Theorists claim that theories can nevertheless be true or false,
and that their truth is independent of their historicity. Even theorists who treat ideas as
ideological rationalisations claim this for their own theories. The claim is that theory, by
218 International Relations 31(3)

interrogating the conditions of its production and therefore its own presuppositions, can
transcend these conditions. Others deny this claim. The disagreement generates a tension
between theory and history that pervades debates about the uses of the past. If, for exam-
ple, the meaning of ideas depends on their historical context, how can they be made to
apply outside it? How can the past speak to us?
For Ian Hall, the history of international thought has become marginal not because it
is in tension with ‘science’ but because of its recent, pervasive and unfortunate embrace
of a simplistic contextualism – the view that the meaning of an idea can be correctly
understood only in relation to the concerns of those whose idea it is, and therefore in
relation to the intellectual vocabularies that were available to them. This follows from
the familiar injunction, rooted in Collingwood’s logic of question and answer, that we
must not look in past texts for answers to present questions, and that to understand a text
we must know the questions its author was trying to answer.10 The advantage of a con-
textualist approach is that it corrects anachronism and, therefore, yields more accurate
interpretations of historical texts. This responds to the problem, identified by Brown, that
readings of texts bearing on international relations were often poorly done. But contex-
tualism, Hall argues, cannot by itself articulate what the history of international thought
can do for the discipline of International Relations. The danger, he thinks, is that by
insisting on the overriding importance of context, it gives us a static world of texts in
their contexts, without explaining how we get from one such world to another. Because
it struggles to explain how ideas change, contextualism consigns itself to antiquarian
description.
To remedy this, Hall proposes a modified contextualism focused on why thinkers
came to believe what they did and how those beliefs changed over time. But this makes
sense only if one wants a one-size-fits-all approach to intellectual history. Contextualism
can teach us some things, but rejecting it enables others. Why head for the middle when
one can have the benefit of several standpoints, each of which brings something different
into view? A contextualist might read Kant’s writings on international relations as those
of an eccentric who made presumptuous claims about the importance of his own thought
in transforming international relations and might end, like Ian Hunter, by defending the
worldly Vattel as the more reasonable and influential of the two.11 Richard Devetak
makes a similar argument in more general terms. Instead of joining Hall in searching for
a compromise, he sides with Hunter to defend history against philosophy. Historical
inquiry provides a distinct intellectual outlook in its concern to illuminate political think-
ing at particular points in time, rather than to assess the truth of what is being thought. In
this, it contrasts with the assumptions that prevail in the field of International Relations,
which is under the spell of ‘philosophy’ – the ontologies, epistemologies and methodolo-
gies presumed in that field to provide grounding and guidance for sound research. The
distinguishing feature of historical inquiry, Devetak suggests, is that it is concerned with
the contingent character of international relations, in contrast to philosophy’s concern
with universal truths.
The specific payoff of approaching international relations from the standpoint of his-
tory, then, is that it can help us come to terms with the discipline’s object of inquiry, the
international, as well as provide insight into its own history. This is well brought out by
Jennifer Pitts, whose article illustrates the importance of contextual history in exposing
Bain and Nardin 219

features – hierarchy and race – that are obscured in the narrative of equality provided by
standard accounts of the international system. These accounts owe much to Vattel’s
influential picture of states as independent and equal moral persons. In making these
arguments, the article illuminates the limitations of conventional ways of thinking and,
by uncovering hidden issues, offers new insights with the potential to alter widely
accepted ways of imagining the subject.
Two observations can be made about these and similar claims for contextualism. The
first is that there are many contexts that can be brought to bear in making sense of a work.
Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals, for example, can be read as responding to Hume’s empiri-
cism and proto-utilitarianism. But Kant was also inspired by Rousseau’s vision of collec-
tive self-government in accordance with the general will, which like Rousseau he
understands to be a presupposition of justice. What Kant has to say about international
justice is illuminated by its relationship to republican ideas he absorbed not only from
Rousseau but also from Roman law.12 But what he writes about it also sharpens our
understanding of republican discourse by making a distinction between material and
moral understandings of freedom as independence that republican theorists often
ignore.13 This is a theoretical contribution. It is also one that is a source of insights into
other debates about exploitation and domination. For a thinker like Kant, who is excep-
tionally able to transform particulars into universals, the context of his thought widens,
as Oakeshott said of Hobbes’ Leviathan, to the history of philosophy itself.14
Terry Nardin’s article on Kant, who despite repeated efforts to dislodge him remains
one of the most prominent theorists of international relations, suggests that authors in the
canon, however it is defined and whatever its limitations, are still properly regarded as
sources for thinking about international relations, and that they can be read in new ways.
It also suggests that intellectual history can offer more profound as well as more accurate
readings. Even if Brown is correct that interpretations of major figures have on the whole
improved, there is still room for novel and sometimes counterintuitive readings. One
example is the suggestion that Kant’s theory of justice supports certain realist conclu-
sions. This runs counter to the standard view of Kant, who is almost always portrayed as
providing an alternative to political realism.15 Such a reading also brings out the impor-
tance of domination in Kant’s theory of justice, which resonates with Pitts’ concern to
make hierarchy, and with it domination, more central to our understanding of interna-
tional order.
A second observation about contextualism is that thinkers – who may be scientists,
philosophers, historians or theorists working in some other genre – provide explanations,
describe phenomena, assess evidence and work out consequences or logical implica-
tions. In short, they make claims to truth. Those claims can be assessed, but they are
assessed in different contexts and different criteria are used in assessing them. A narrow
contextualism, such as Quentin Skinner’s original statement of what became the pro-
gramme of the Cambridge School, would limit our focus to an author’s intentions as
these can be known mainly from the controversies in which that author was enmeshed.16
Such a view misses the insight that arguments can have a logic, an internal coherence,
that those who make them might not fully understand and that could not, therefore, have
been part of their intention. The broader contextualism that Devetak defends, while
resisting the conclusion that knowledge acquired historically must be assessed according
220 International Relations 31(3)

to the timeless standards of philosophy, does allow that historical inquiry is a source of
knowledge. Like the sensibility present in humanist thought in the Italian Renaissance,
contextualism in the study of international relations sees its subject as historically situ-
ated and contingent. Historical inquiry furnishes knowledge of those contingencies, and
in doing so helps identify what has been forgotten or neglected. Historical inquiry,
Devetak thinks, illuminates how current debates about the character and scope of the
field reflect an unfinished intellectual battle.
Different interpreters, bringing a variety of tools to bear, will arrive at different and
not always compatible conclusions. The contextualism debate is not only a methodologi-
cal one, of interest mainly to intellectual historians, about how to practise their craft. It is
also a debate about truth and how to establish it, and therefore one that has implications
for every discipline. Contextualism, if read as making a theoretical claim, seems to con-
tradict its own premise. If history and theory are different ways of seeing the world, dif-
ferent modes of inquiry and understanding, the tension between them goes beyond
disputes about method.

Recovering neglected sources

We often think of history as providing narratives of things already more or less known.
But this is an illusion arising from the fact that such narratives cannot present informa-
tion about what is unknown or only barely known. An important task of historical inquiry
is to reveal, through a careful process of construction from scant, contested and unrelia-
ble evidence, a fuller and compelling picture of pasts about which we know little.17 This
historical impulse can also operate on familiar materials, where its task is better charac-
terised as recovery than discovery. The point is illustrated by David Hendrickson’s arti-
cle on the American founding, which, he argues, has been almost invisible in the literature
of International Relations. This is worth noting because important ideas about interna-
tional relations received full exposition in early American experience. Aspects of this
experience include the Founders’ recognition that war endangers liberty and is a defect
of the European states system that America must avoid. Their answer to this problem –
that the exercise of power must be constrained through law – stressed the connection
between republican liberty and international order. The article goes on to explain how the
American experience provided a model for international order as the ideas of the
American founders made their way into twentieth-century international organisation.
Hendrickson’s article is one of several in this issue that shows how intellectual history
can recover forgotten insights, challenge conventional views, reinterpret canonical fig-
ures (Vattel or Kant, for example) and recurrent issues (law, humanity or domination)
and direct attention to things that are known, but for one reason or another are seen as
beyond the scope of the discipline. In this sense, his article excavates a silence in main-
stream research in the field. Though not especially concerned with method, Hendrickson
notes that dismissing normative concerns excludes an important aspect of the subject.
Nardin makes a similar point. In a way, the renaissance of international political theory
and the turn to history can be seen as reactions against the limitations of positivist social
science. Besides showing how American experience influenced the distinctive character
of subsequent efforts at organising the international community, Hendrickson offers an
Bain and Nardin 221

affirmative argument that rests on the disjunction between the ideas of the founders and
contemporary American thinking about international relations. This is a reminder that
intellectual history reveals paths abandoned as well as those taken.
The importance of recovery and the contribution of intellectual history to that project
is underlined in Edward Keene’s article. Its theme is that the history of international
thought would be richer and more illuminating if more attention were paid to secondary
figures. A related claim is that the nexus of intellectual history and international theory
should move away from the canon. Keene shares with Hendrickson a concern with
uncovering neglected or forgotten aspects of international thought. This engagement in
recovery is one of the aims of intellectual history. But he questions the utility of a
Skinnerian contextualist strategy, which seeks to displace ‘classic texts’ in favour of
‘lesser works’, when introduced into international relations scholarship. Keene’s argu-
ment also offers an interesting contrast with Brown’s. Where Brown suggests that we
now have better readings of classical thinkers than we did before, Keene claims that the
canon, and therefore the range of writings with which scholars are likely to engage, has
actually narrowed. For in the absence of an established International Relations canon,
scholars in the field find themselves confined to a set of texts that are oriented to politics
and law. In other words, attention is focused on philosophers and international lawyers at
the expense of historians and journalists. Theorists who venture into the history of inter-
national thought, Keene suggests, prefer engaging people like themselves to reading
other kinds of writers.18
Whether this is a problem or not depends, in part, on the discourse to be illuminated
by excavating its past. If the discourse is theoretical and explanatory – let us say one built
around the logic of strategic interaction – it is not clear that arguments about ethics or
theology will be especially relevant, at least in comparison to arguments about econom-
ics or diplomacy. The admonition to recover neglected sources implies a question:
sources of what? Given the diversity of things that might be studied under the label of
‘international relations’, and the diversity of conceptual paradigms and methodological
tools brought to bear on these materials, it is unrealistic of suppose that there is a single
discipline of International Relations, intellectually speaking, and therefore a single lit-
erature to be sampled or represented. One must neglect some questions to focus on oth-
ers, and changing the materials one looks at may lead not so much to a better understanding
of one’s subject as to a different subject.

Deepening understanding
Keene notes that Vattel is portrayed as the pivotal figure in many accounts of the emer-
gence of the law of nations. An example of how this works is provided by Pitts, whose
article explores the way in which the discipline of International Relations took up the
Vattelian conception of the states system and treated it as an empirical account. As a
consequence of this, the discipline continues to take its conceptual bearing from the idea
that the international order is one based on the coexistence of independent states. This
view of the world makes it difficult to theorise asymmetries between north and south, the
spread of violence within states and transnational issues related to migration, finance or
the environment. Pitts sees the dominant view as relying on a stylised history constituted
222 International Relations 31(3)

by founding fathers and watershed moments. Having established that point, she traces
the intellectual revolution through which historians have transformed the Vattelian state-
centric picture of the international order into one in which that order is organised hierar-
chically, not only as a system with great powers and small states but also in terms of
distinctions between core and periphery, nation states and global empires, civilisation
and barbarism.
In doing so, intellectual history throws a bright light on what mainstream International
Relations scholarship continues to obscure, namely that these and other characteristics of
the modern world are the inheritance of nineteenth-century European practices and
mythmaking. Principal among these was the idea of the European states system as hori-
zontal and in that sense republican, in contrast to Asian despotisms, and therefore a suit-
able model for other parts of the world – a model that the Victorians convinced themselves
European imperialism was helping to disseminate. Vattel’s view of states as moral per-
sons, Pitts argues, played an early but important role in shaping this myth.19 Viewed from
this angle, Vattel looks less like the pragmatic antidote for Kantian idealism and more
like an apologist for domination. Kant is not only clear (as Vattel consciously is not) that
justice and prudence are distinct but goes on to condemn conquest and settlement as a
moral enormity.20 Here, then, we get a reversal not only of mainstream views but also of
an earlier phase of critical historiography. It is a testimony of the power of intellectual
history to continually unsettle what at any moment is taken to be historical fact. In this
respect, intellectual history joins science and philosophy, insofar as the latter are critical
rather than dogmatic, as an orientation that recognises the provisional character of all
knowledge. Far from being something radically different, and so of no use to mainstream
International Relations, intellectual history is one of the tools on which the latter depends
and which it ignores to its peril.
Pitts’ article illustrates how intellectual history can be used to de-mythologise the dis-
cipline. In the case she considers, examining the history of international law brings into
view imperial structures of power that deviate from the Vattelian model and in doing so
helps uncover the hierarchical and racialised nature of the international order. It shows
that international law has a role in structuring and justifying hierarchy as well as in occlud-
ing it. But these tools can also be turned back on the imperial version, for no matter how
important the identified asymmetries, there were also ways in which the symmetrical
picture made a certain sense, not only in Europe but also in North America. There, as
Hendrickson shows, a states system of a decidedly Vattelian character persisted between
the American revolution and civil war. Even here, though, elements of empire were evi-
dent in the suppression of native peoples, continual expansion through converting newly
acquired territories into states and the eventual spill-over into overseas acquisition on the
European model. And if Vattel’s account of international society as an egalitarian one fails
to notice the hierarchical character of the global imperial order, it does capture aspects of
what was (and is) going on. One must conclude, then, as Pitts does, that we inhabit a world
that is in an important way like Vattel’s but is in other respects quite different, and that
intellectual history has a role to play not only in providing a less one-sided account of
international order but also in surfacing ethical concerns that might otherwise remain hid-
den. Each portrait, the horizontal and the vertical, captures aspects of the subject, leading
to a tension that invites continued adjustment and refinement.
Bain and Nardin 223

Using a different selection of texts and contexts, Sinja Graf further clarifies the
power of intellectual history to cast light on received ways of framing international
order. Her article takes as its point of departure the observation that the idea of ‘human-
ity’ remains vague in international relations scholarship. Historical engagement shows
how that idea was used to structure and justify colonial rule and legitimise imperial
orders against one another. But it was also used to undermine the legitimacy of colonial-
ism. Graf argues that looking into the political uses of the idea of humanity, and into the
related proposition that certain acts injure humanity as a whole, suggests that the idea
had uses other than mere rationalisation. It also had a place in explanatory discourses.
Like Pitts, Graf is interested in how intellectual history can illuminate hierarchical rela-
tionships. Reading these articles, one comes away with a better sense of the complexity
and contingency of core ideas in international discourse such as the states system, impe-
rialism and humanity.

Conclusion
The articles collected here allow us to identify many reasons for paying attention to the
history of international thought and to intellectual history as a mode of inquiry.
Canonical thinkers provide a shared vocabulary for discussing international relations.
But their writings have often been read unskilfully and their arguments misjudged. To
grasp those arguments, we must avoid reading our own ideas into them. Too often, we
use words taken from classic works in ignorance of what they were likely to have meant
in the context in which they were used. We condemn textbook simplifications, unaware
in our ignorance that our ideas are sometimes hardly more than that. These dangers point
to the importance of paying attention to what the thinkers we quote were actually saying,
which is part of the admonition to pay attention to context. Better readings of the classics
can help dispel the myths and bromides that populate the International Relations litera-
ture. As theorists, we need powerful ideas, not slogans or cliches.
Non-canonical authors – including the many whose writings fill ‘catacombs … of
forgotten literature’21 that remain to be excavated – may have ideas worth knowing
about, apart from their role as minor characters providing a foil for canonical ones. Even
when what they have to say is polemical, confused or unimaginative, non-canonical
authors helped to shape, and therefore help us understand, languages of discourse used
in discussing or managing international affairs. A related point to bear in mind about
secondary figures is that relative importance is a matter of judgement. Writers who are
seen as secondary today might not have been secondary in their time and when viewed
by their contemporaries. Mazzini was read more often in his day than John Stuart Mill,
yet the latter now garners far more attention than the former. Thus, intellectual history
has an important role in casting light on how a canon is constructed and for what pur-
poses. Who we read and comment on is not without purpose, and intellectual history has
a role to play in illuminating this.
Although canonical authors often merely said better what others were already saying,
they sometimes earn their status for departing dramatically from prevailing views. And
if the views they questioned remain our own, reading them with care can help reveal
prejudices that narrow our vision or weaken our ability to understand and explain. We
224 International Relations 31(3)

turn to the past not only to clothe our arguments with an authority they might otherwise
lack but, with better justification, for resources to use in making difficult arguments or
arguments for which it is hard to get a hearing within the limits of mainstream International
Relations scholarship. By giving us access to those resources, attention to the past can
provide a platform from which to challenge current orthodoxies.
Historical inquiry also provides a counterweight to the abstractions of theory. It does
this by reminding us that theories, whether those of science, philosophy or theology, are
abstractions from something: the activities and ideas of people who were living and
thinking at particular times and in particular places. To know mankind, it helps to know
something about actual people, ideally not all of the same sort. It is also worth knowing
particulars because generalisations or principles are not the only form that knowledge
can take. The world of international affairs is highly particular, highly contingent, and
historical inquiry (which includes ‘current history’) gives us access to particularity and
to contingency. All generalisations about human conduct are rooted in particulars, which
is why, as Devetak argues, intellectual history can disclose the historicity of ideas and
theories, including our own.
Intellectual history is concerned with ideas, and ideas are central to the theories and
explanations of people thinking now as well as those of thinkers in the past. Paying atten-
tion to what has been learned through historical inquiry therefore has the potential to
expand the repertoire of ideas on which the student of international relations can draw.
The intellectual historian is doing something different than the theorist of power transi-
tions or the philosopher of global justice, and for that reason may not contribute directly
to their projects, or ours. But as scholars we benefit from acquiring a more sophisticated
grasp of our own thinking, and we do that in part by comparing it with other kinds of
thinking, past or present.
In a way, the argument for intellectual history is similar to arguments for science, or
jurisprudence, or any other mode of inquiry and understanding. It is also like the argu-
ment for liberal education, which rests on the civilising power of understanding different
outlooks rather than on the immediate payoff for those professionally uninterested in
outlooks other than their own.

Acknowledgements
On behalf of the editors and the contributors to this Special Issue, the authors wish to thank and
acknowledge the very helpful input of 16 anonymous peer reviewers of the articles. Some of these
articles were presented at a symposium held in the Department of Political Science, National
University of Singapore, in March 2015. The authors are grateful for the contribution of all who
participated.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/
or publication of this article: The authors would like to register their gratitude to the Faculty of Arts
Bain and Nardin 225

and Social Sciences at NUS, and specifically to Luke O’Sullivan, for providing financial support
for the event.

Notes
1. See Chris Brown, Terry Nardin and Nicholas Rengger (eds), International Relations in
Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 2–6.
2. Martin Wight, ‘Why Is There No International Theory’, International Relations, 2(1), 1960,
pp. 35–8.
3. Martin Wight, International Theory: The Three Traditions (ed Gabriele Wight and Brian
Porter, New York: Holmes & Meier, 1991), pp. 7–8.
4. Prominent examples include Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1959); Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society: A Study
of Order in World Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Michael Doyle,
Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997);
Alexander Wendt, Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1999).
5. Noel Malcolm, ‘Hobbes’s Theory of International Relations’, in Noel Malcolm (ed.) Aspects
of Hobbes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), p. 433.
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, vol. 1, ed. Noel Malcolm (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2012), pp. 32, 38.
7. See, for example, Martine Julia Van Ittersum, ‘Hugo Grotius: The Making of a Founding
Father of International Law’, in Anne Orford and Florian Hoffmann (eds), The Oxford
Handbook of the Theory of International Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), ch.
4; David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), ch. 4.
8. Armitage, Foundations, ch. 1. A symposium devoted to the book, edited by Knud Haakonssen,
appeared in History of European Ideas 41(1), 2015, pp. 1–130.
9. The distortions that follow from this disciplinary organisation are explored in Justin Rosenberg,
‘International Relations in the Prison of Political Science’, International Relations, 30(2),
2017, pp. 127–53.
10. See R G Collingwood, ‘An Autobiography’, in David Boucher and Teresa Smith (eds), R.
G. Collingwood: An Autobiography and Other Writings (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2013), ch. 5; R G Collingwood, An Essay on Metaphysics, rev. ed., ed. Rex Martin (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1998), chs 4–5.
11. Ian Hunter, ‘Kant and Vattel in Context: Cosmopolitan Philosophy and Diplomatic Casuistry’,
History of European Ideas, 39(4), 2013, pp. 477–502; and for a rejoinder, Terry Nardin,
‘Historian or Philosopher: Ian Hunter on Kant and Vattel’, History of European Ideas, 40(1),
2014, pp. 122–34.
12. This context includes the revival of republicanism in Germany around the time of the revolu-
tion in France. On this, and the context of Kant’s political thought more generally, see Reidar
Maliks, Kant’s Politics in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
13. The disposition on the part of authors using a republican vocabulary to define independence
as a matter of material power (potentia), justified by the consequences of having it, rather than
moral or legal right (potestas), that is, as a juridical status, is evident in works on republican
political theory, e.g. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
14. Michael Oakeshott, ‘Introduction to Leviathan’, in Michael Oakeshott (ed.), Hobbes on Civil
Association (Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 2000), p. 3.
226 International Relations 31(3)

15. The literature provides many examples of Kant as the epitome of liberalism, but there is perhaps
none that is more unequivocal than Michael W. Doyle, ‘Kant and Liberal Internationalism’, in
Immanuel Kant (ed.) ‘Toward Perpetual Peace’ and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and
History, ed. Pauline Kleingeld with essays by others (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2006), pp. 201–42.
16. See Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and
Theory, 8, 1969, pp. 3–53. An extensively revised version of this original statement is found
in Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2002), pp. 57–89.
17. This point was made effectively 40 years ago by Leon J. Goldstein, Historical Knowing
(Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1976). For an exercise in recovering the ideas of
this now neglected figure, see Luke O’Sullivan, ‘Leon Goldstein and the Epistemology of
Historical Knowing’, History and Theory, 45(2), 2006, pp. 204–28.
18. Privileging ‘philosophical’ texts might explain why those who teach the history of political
thought typically neglect the Romans compared to the Greeks. But interest in Roman politi-
cal thought might be reviving in relation to recent interest in the themes of empire, political
realism and the fate of the American republic: see Daniel J. Kapust, ‘Ecce Romani’, Political
Theory, 2016. Epub ahead of print 28 November 2016. DOI: 10.1177/0090591716672404.
19. In this case, as in many others, it is worth noting that Vattel is repeating an idea stated earlier
by Christian Wolff, The Law of Nations Treated According to a Scientific Method, trans.
Joseph H. Drake (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), ‘Prolegomena’, §16.
20. Kant discusses European colonialism in The Metaphysics of Morals, in Practical Philosophy,
trans. Mary J. Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), §62 of ‘The Doctrine
of Right’, pp. 489–90. For current scholarship on the topic, see Katrin Flikschuh and Lea
Ypi (eds), Kant and Colonialism: Historical and Critical Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2014).
21. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’Etat and Its Place in Modern
History (trans. Douglas Scott, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 67.

Author biographies
William Bain is associate professor in the Department of Political Science, National University of
Singapore, and Yale-NUS College. His research interests fall in the areas of International Relations
theory, International Political Theory and intellectual history. He is currently working on a book
entitled Political Theology of International Order.
Terry Nardin is professor of Political Science at the National University of Singapore and Yale-
NUS College. He is the author of Law, Morality, and the Relations of States and The Philosophy
of Michael Oakeshott, and editor or co-editor of Traditions of International Ethics, The Ethics of
War and Peace, International Relations in Political Thought, Rationality in Politics and Its Limits,
and Michael Oakeshott’s Cold War Liberalism.