No light, but rather darkness visible
Served only to discover sights of woe.
Milton, Paradise Lost
During the last two centuries the chief highways of European political thought have largely been dominated by traffic following directions marked by words such as progress, science and reason. While the kinds of vehicle on the highway have, of course, differed and the speed at which they have travelled has varied greatly â and without denying the obvious fact that there have been some fairly spectacular wrecks along the way â there has been little real doubt that this was the high road and that the destination to which it pointed was the desirable â some even said inevitable â direction of European, and perhaps world, history.1
The experience of the twentieth century brought about, of course, a good deal of handwringing about such claims. And, as a result, some have turned off the highway altogether and others have become far more doubtful about the directions they see along the way, but at the same time it is remarkable in general how resilient such claims have proved to be. It is almost impossible, indeed, to imagine the landscape of European political thought without them. We have even added to the types of vehicle travelling this by now well-worn road. Alongside familiar, if perhaps rather battered and travel-weary vehicles such as liberalism, socialism, Marxism and the like we might now add various forms of critical theory, various forms of environmentalism and, perhaps especially, cosmopolitanism â modern rebirth of an ancient idea.2 Indeed, for many, this latter might be seen to supersede those earlier means of transport: the vehicle of choice, one might say, for those aiming to reach the âPromised Landâ of human progress in the twenty-first century.3
But of course there has been resistance to such claims too. Some have suggested, for example, that none of the chosen vehicles are really roadworthy, others that the road gives out well before reaching any recognizable destination or that, in fact, it was always an illusion to assume it was a road at all. Such relentless negativity â as it is usually seen â has rarely been welcome even when (perhaps especially when) it appears to have been well founded; the tendency has been to dismiss such doubts as unworthy, or unfounded, or simply to ignore them.
Of course, such claims and counter-claims are situated in the complex constellation of intellectual assumptions that have shaped what we usually call the modern age, and in this book I will not say very much about the historical or philosophical assumptions that in general go to make this up.4 In particular, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, as John Burrow, the author of perhaps the most perceptive study of the nineteenth-century intellectual context, has written, such responses drew on
three associated contexts; political, social and cultural ⌠the political was the advent of democracy, in the sense of representative institutions based on wide, though not necessarily universal adult male suffrage ⌠[the social] was the growth of great cities with mass populations ⌠[with the cityâs] excitement, its horrors, its threat to social order and decency, its physical and moral squalor and unhealthiness, its dwarfing impersonality ⌠[the cultural was] the moral and cultural vacuum of an age which was now beginning to be thought of as post-Christian.5
As we will see, each of these features bears on the writers and themes I discuss below in varying ways and to varying degrees, but something else links them as well, or so I shall maintain: something that gives particular flavour to their critique of the dominant tendencies in modern political â and, indeed, more general â thought. Let me turn now to what this might be.
Modern anti-Pelagianism
The subtitle of this book is taken from Michael Oakeshottâs celebrated introduction to Hobbesâ Leviathan. The relevant passage is worth quoting at length.
It is characteristic of political philosophers [Oakeshott tells us] that they take a sombre view of the human situation: they deal in darkness. Human life in their writings appears, generally, not as a feast or even a journey, but as a predicament; and the link between politics and eternity is the contribution the political order is conceived of as making to the deliverance of mankind ⌠. Man, so the varied formula runs, is the dupe of error, the slave of sin, of passion, of fear, of care, the enemy of himself, or others or of both â âO misera hominum mentes, O pectora caecaâ â and the political order appears as the whole or a part of his salvation.6
Of course, as I remarked above, one point to note is that since Oakeshott wrote those words it has been largely uncharacteristic of political philosophers to deal in darkness. By and large academic political philosophy, at least in the Anglophone world, has preferred the faint but bewitching glow of ideal theory, of the building of ever more sophisticated castles in the air. Here, as in so much else in Anglophone political philosophy, the representative figure is John Rawls. The brilliantly orchestrated structure of A Theory of Justice seems almost deliberately designed to keep any hint of darkness at bay, addressing problems, as Allan Bloom accurately, if cattily, described it, âof civil liberties in nations that are already free and of the distribution of wealth in those that are already prosperousâ.7
But however much political philosophy would like to bask in the warming sun of âideal theoryâ, there is one topic to which it has increasingly been drawn â or rather drawn back to, since it was long a concern of political philosophy before the dawn of what Oakeshott, in a different essay, called âthese days of minute dissectionâ8 â where the darkness is hard to avoid. This topic is, of course, international relations.
For much of the twentieth century â and indeed also now in the twenty-first â the realities of international relations have been an extended and grotesque lesson in the appalling ingenuity human beings can practise in their relations with one another; a seemingly endless catalogue of mendacity, special pleading, exploitation, naked self-interest, viciousness and barbarism, usually cloaked in the language of high ideals. Of course, there have been successes as well; real achievements in saving people from degradation or horror, creating new institutional initiatives to strengthen the often fragile blooms of peace or of economic well-being. But an honest observer would have to conclude that, overall, it is the twentieth century that truly deserves the title famously bestowed by the historian Barbara Tuchman on the fourteenth: a âcalamitous centuryâ9 â and that the twenty-first century hardly promises, so far at least, to be any better.
The gradual rebirth of philosophical theorizing about the international over the course of the last forty or so years has, of course, reflected on this reality in various ways. One set of approaches, perhaps the dominant set at least in Anglophone circles â and in both moral and political philosophy and the study of international relations more generally â has been some version of the trajectories gestured towards above: a broadly progressive one focused on notions such as rights, law, governance, justice and so on. Of course, there are many different versions of this, some much more radical than others. At one end of the spectrum we have those âcosmopolitan approachesâ (though that word often conceals at least as much as it illuminates) that argue for a complete rebuilding of the global order around transnational â or at least not statist â institutions. Others are more cautious, ranging from a straightforward liberal internationalism to various different forms of radical progressivism. But they are all concerned to emphasize that, problematic and recalcitrant though the world might be, our fate is up to us to determine. Our salvation lies, as it always has done, in our own hands. In that sense, these approaches to political theory and international relations echo the claims of the ancient Pelagian heresy in Christianity â that, rather than requiring Godâs grace for our salvation, we can save ourselves through our own unaided efforts. Indeed, I think that most of the dominant political traditions of the last century and a half, whatever their very real differences in other respects, offer variants of this view and that, in that sense, modern Western political thought, in most of its dominant forms at least, is broadly Pelagian.
But there are also a range of rather different reactions visible, ones that are far less certain that, at least in the relevant senses, we are as much in control of our destiny as the modern Pelagians would like us to believe. These approaches, too, are, of course, various, and it is this particular set of approaches that the essays in this book seek to explore: manifestations, you might say, of what we might call an âanti-Pelagianâ sensibility. As it is a collection it makes no pretence at making a continuous argument. Rather, it is perhaps best seen as a set of portraits of different ways in which this sceptical, non-utopian set of responses to the dilemmas of political theory and international relations might be conceptualized and understood.
The advantages of the term âmodern anti-Pelagianismâ as a general description of this sensibility are many. It is a term that escapes all the usual (and often rather tired) divisions that tend to bedevil contemporary political thought at whatever level, âleft/rightâ, âconservative/radicalâ, ârealist/liberalâ and so on; it allows me to focus on the sceptical, anti-perfectionist, non-utopian assumptions that inform theoretical reflection on human activities (including politics) without being reducible to any particular âtheoryâ (or even a group of âtheoriesâ). Obviously, as I say, there are many different versions of modern anti-Pelagianism, and the essays in this book are designed to set a number of them side by side with one another and to suggest what they offer us, even when I want to dissent from them in important ways (and I shall).
Of course, anti-Pelagianism in a literal sense is bound up with the story of early Christianity, in particular with the ideas of Pelagius himself10 and the response to them by the Latin Church and in particular by Augustine. Pelagius famously denied the doctrine of original sin and argued that human beings were intrinsically good and not condemned by Adamâs sin. As a result, they could, and should, aim for self-reliance and for as much perfection as they could achieve through their own efforts. Augustine, of course, opposed this and asserted that human beings could achieve âsalvationâ only through grace, through Godâs intercession. Despite Pelagiusâ popularity (and notably good life, as even Augustine attested), Augustineâs polemics won the day and Pelagiusâ teachings were condemned, he himself being excommunicated in 418 ce and his followers (most notably Julian of Eclanum) being condemned at the Council of Ephesus in 431 ce.
This was clearly an enormously important debate for the history of Latin Christianity, but how (I am sure many will ask) is it possibly relevant to twentieth-century political and international thought? I should say at the outset that I am not, of course, suggesting any obvious carry-over of Pelagiusâ own ideas into the modern period (though in certain theological circles, to be sure, they are far from dead, as I will discuss briefly in a couple of the papers included here). Rather, I want to suggest that modern political thought, roughly from the seventeenth century onwards, has been marked by an increasingly dominant trajectory that one can characterize, quite straightforwardly, as âPelagianâ.
Iâve already referred to Michael Oakeshott and it is from Oakeshottâs general account that my own explorations in the essays that follow begin (and, indeed, as we will see in the epilogue, finish). I do not intend here to offer a detailed interpretation of Oakeshottâs reading of modern Pelagianism,11 however, except to say that I think it is profoundly indebted both to his own poetic/religious sensibility and, specifically, to his reading of Hobbes. As Tim Fuller has said, in a very perceptive introductory essay to a collection of Oakeshottâs work on religion, politics and the moral life, for Hobbes (and for Oakeshott):
pursuing the highest good, under the natural conditions of mankind, will encourage both Pelagianism and Anti-nomianism. Pelagianism because we are misled into thinking that we can will the human condition to completion, but we cannot; anti-nomianism because we are easily misled into thinking that there must be a âtrueâ or âcorrectâ political order, accessible to our understanding, which is distorted or suppressed by the actually prevailing order.12
In this book I am principally concerned with the former rather than the latter â or, rather, with opposition to the former. For whereas, as I have already remarked, the dominant trajectories of European political thought have adopted that broadly Pelagian stance, there remain those who do not and who seek to resist, challenge, question or oppose it. In that context, it is fair enough, I think (as Oakeshott did), to speak of a âmodern anti-Pelagianismâ.
Of course, this modern anti-Pelagianism is marked by a good deal of disagreement as well as agreement. Modern anti-Pelagians agree only about what they oppose, not about what they propose. But that, too, is interesting in itself. And, as we shall see, it marks out some of the most important problems for the anti-Pelagian imagination in contemporary contexts.
Of course, one co...
