The secularism of positivist and post-positivist IR theory

The modern conception of religion, which views faith as either apolitical or politicised, is part of a secularist logic that has dominated IR theory since the 1950s and 1960s. The turn to positivism has imposed an empirical epistemology that analyses social reality by using natural-scientific methods. Whether Comte's positive science, logic positivism, or deductive-nomological models, all three variants of positivism dismiss unobservable values and practices such as religion by reducing reality to empirically observable facts. As Steve Smith notes, ‘[l]ying at the very heart of value-neutrality was a very powerful normative project, one every bit as “political” or “biased” as the approaches marginalized and delegitimized in the name of science’.Footnote ⁸ Positivist approaches have eschewed grand theory and debates about alternative accounts of ontology and epistemology in favour of increasingly narrow discussions on issues of methodology. In the words of Smith,

Post-positivism is critical of positivism but no less secularist in outlook. Different approaches tend to replace the positivist focus on methodology with a post-positivist emphasis on both ontology and epistemology. But like positivism, post-positivism presupposes that social reality is autonomous and excludes any transcendent horizon, which subsumes religious beliefs and practices under general analytical categories that are secularist.

Mainstream IR theory is characterised by ontological, epistemological, and methodological commitments to secularism, above all subordinating agency to structure and subjecting both faith and intentionality to secular reason. Even the 1980s renaissance of normative theory occurred within the dominant secularist parameters of an academic discipline, which had been Christian in origin but ‘was, by this time, an organized International Relations profession [in which] the question of religion had been firmly relegated to the private sphere, and mainstream theorists either subordinated agency and motive to structure or else aspired to weave international society with the thin thread of universal optimizing rationality’.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus it is surely no coincidence that grand theory and religion disappeared together from IR.

The discipline's ‘secularist bias’ explains why mainstream IR theory struggles to incorporate the role of faith in international affairs. Most IR scholars theorise religion in one of two ways: either within the existing traditions of (neo-)realism, (neo-)liberalism, (neo-)Marxism and social constructivism or else by positing new paradigms such as the ‘clash of civilizations’, ‘multiple modernities’, ‘the revenge of God’, and the rise of religious fundamentalism or the conflict that opposes faith to secular reason.Footnote ¹¹ The former approach subsumes religion under conventional conceptual units in IR such as power, wealth, interest, social values, or identity. As such, it subjects religious faith to a determinism that is variously more materialist (as in liberalism and Marxism) or more ideational (as in realism and constructivism).Footnote ¹² The latter approach enthrones religion as the central analytical category that underpins cultural sources of conflict and other driving forces of international affairs. In this way, new paradigms claim that religious faith systematically trumps other ideas in the making of international relations. In the first case religion is defined in epiphenomenal terms as a general motivation alongside other factors without any independent, specific import. In the second case it is defined in essentialist terms as an inner impulse and/or an abstract set of beliefs grounding individual and collective identity. Neither conception captures the specificity of religion and the particular ways in which faith shapes politics.

Inventing ‘religion’

Defining religion in either epiphenomenal or essentialist terms is itself a distinctly modern, Western invention.Footnote ¹³ Historically, the sixteenth and the seventeenth century saw the construction of a new category of ‘natural religion’ that coincided with the rise of modern science.Footnote ¹⁴ Accordingly, religion as a concrete practice of faith within a community of believers was gradually supplanted by new notions of religion as a set of abstract, generalisable principles, beliefs or emotions. These could take one of two forms: either ‘inner’ psychological phenomena linked to human nature (rather than the entire cosmos) or ‘outer’ social phenomena tied to formal institutions and general spiritual exercises (rather than specific communities and practices of worship) – or both at once. This modern shift of focus from objective revelation to subjective belief equated religion with ‘a set of propositions to which believers gave assent, and which could therefore be judged and compared between different religions and as against natural science’.Footnote ¹⁵ The dominant modern definitions privilege private faith at the expense of a community of believers, which reduces religion to subjective values and removes faith from its communal embeddedness.Footnote ¹⁶

Closely connected with this critique is the argument that religion is a marker of social identity because ‘religious ideas don't simply express interest, they constitute them’.Footnote ¹⁷ Religious faith precedes the calculation and defence of individual and collective interest or the construction of social identity that is central to mainstream IR theories. Crucially, religion is not just a ‘moral statement to which rational autonomous individuals give their intellectual consent’; rather, it is constitutive of a ‘cognitive script … [that] people internalize … not out of conscious choice … [and] in ways that can override rational choice or utility-maximizing behavior’.Footnote ¹⁸ Belief is part of a broader reason that seeks the public common good. Indeed, faith is neither a sort of innate, natural religion nor a blind, fideistic belief in an external divinity whose arbitrary intervention determines reality. On the contrary, religious ideas and practices constitute distinct visions of the world that are irreducible to any other sphere (nature or consciousness), while at the same time being embedded in narrative and culture. Just as there is no pure reason, so too there is no absolute unmediated faith.

The modern logic of binary opposites

Linked to the secularist definition of religion is a series of binary opposites that underpin IR: the secular versus the religious, immanent nature versus the transcendent supernatural, reason versus faith, unbelief versus belief or the private sphere versus the public realm. As Roland Bleiker suggests, ‘IR theory and Western conceptualising in general have traditionally been based on the juxtaposition of antagonistic bipolar opposites.’Footnote ¹⁹ Like ‘natural religion’, such and similar binaries are a distinctly modern invention. Binary opposites are grounded in the dualistic logic of modern thinking that is often attributed to Plato's legacy of separating things from ideas or to Descartes's division of mind and body. However, modern dualism can be traced to fourteenth- and fifteenth-century philosophical shifts and political changes, as John Milbank, Charles Taylor and others have argued.Footnote ²⁰ In this period, the meaning of ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ changed fundamentally. In pre-modern societies the sacred tended to be seen as a cosmic reality that is diffusely mediated through signs and symbols in the natural and social world. By contrast, modernity views the sacred as an immutable essence and the object of an internal human experience which Durkheim calls ‘religious’.Footnote ²¹ Likewise, pre-modern accounts of the secular accentuated the temporal dimension (for example, the interval between fall and eschaton), whereas modernity defines the secular spatially as an autonomous domain separate from God and the Church.

The dualism that underpins the secularist logic of IR theory is ultimately based on the modern separation of secular immanence from sacred transcendence: in his seminal work A Secular Age, Taylor writes that ‘[o]ne of the great inventions of the West was that of an immanent order in Nature, whose working could be systematically understood and explained on its own terms.’Footnote ²² As such, the notion of a self-sufficient secular order of nature either relegates religion to the supernatural realm known by blind faith alone or else equates religion with a purely natural epiphenomenon of human consciousness or social construct (or both at once).

Moreover, the modern primacy of pure nature reconfigures the sacred as the opposite of the secular.Footnote ²³ Just as ‘the sacred’ is now confined to the supernatural sphere of absolute transcendence that is divorced from the natural sphere of pure immanence, so too ‘the secular’ now institutes ‘the religious’ as its opposite. This reduces religion to a private creed rather than the communal practice of a shared faith within living social traditions that involve metaphysical questions about the nature of the world and the finalities of life in the polity. The secular space of politics is henceforth sundered from faith and governed by reason alone. So configured, both religious faith and universal human virtues or passions (such as sympathy, reciprocity, mutuality, or justice) are subsumed under the purported universalism of formal, procedural and instrumental rationality.

De-sacralising and re-sacralising the public sphere

Secularism is not limited to the functional differentiation of religious and political authority and/or the public settlement of the relationship between church and state that writes faith out of international relations.Footnote ²⁴ By subordinating faith to secular categories, the secularist logic does not merely de-sacralise the public square. It reinvests it with quasi-sacred meaning by sacralising secularity – the king, the nation, the state, the market, the individual, or the collective. As such, secularism does not so much mark the demise of faith or the exit from religion as it represents an alternative sacrality – a secular capture of the sacred.

This twin transformation was neither universal nor exemplary nor normative but instead particular, contingent and in some sense arbitrary, linked to both ideational shifts and material changes. Accordingly the secular does not constitute a naturally given base that determines the sacred superstructure. There is no historical determinism according to which secularism will always remain hegemonic in Europe. Nor does it follow that other parts of the world will necessarily follow Europe's ‘exceptional example’.Footnote ²⁵ On the contrary, the secularist logic in IR theory and other disciplines is linked to a certain kind of historicism that views the peculiar history of religion and politics in Western Europe as an exemplification of a fated and all-determining evolution. This reflects the positivist pathway from revelation via metaphysics to science, as Comte advocated.Footnote ²⁶ Post-positivist approaches in IR challenge the idea that politics and IR are reducible to a positive science but they do not break out of secularist categories, as I have already indicated.

Crucially, the secularism of mainstream IR theory institutes a new account of the sacred. Modernity created a new economy of power and knowledge enforced by the institutions of the modern state and the modern market. By progressively subjecting everything to standards of abstract value, the system of national states and transnational markets did not simply subordinate the sanctity of life and land to a model of central, sovereign power. It also supplanted such older notions of the sacred with a new, secularist simulacrum of sacrality – the ‘glorious reign’ of capitalist market commodities and the disembodied state.Footnote ²⁷ Insofar as they replace real relations among existing things with standards of nominal value to which they nonetheless ascribe quasi-sacred status, both modern commerce and politics can be described as ‘quasi-religions’.Footnote ²⁸

For these reasons, the modern system of sovereignty requires for its very operation (and not just as mere ideological obfuscation) a redefinition of sanctity. The dominant strand of modern theory and practice is ultimately secularist because it invests both the instrumental, economic sphere and the immanent social/political space with quasi-sacred significance. Thus the issue is not so much whether secularism privatises faith. Rather, from the perspective of religious traditions the problem with secularism is that it profanes the sacred and sacralises the profane.

Unbelief and secular reason

First of all, the post-secular fails to challenge the secularist account of religion that essentialises faith or views it as an epiphenomenon (or both, as I have argued). The work of Jürgen Habermas encapsulates the oscillation between a more philosophical (essentialist) conception of faith as a source of moral intuition or meaning, on the one hand, and a more sociological (epiphenomenal) idea of religion as an archaic mode of political unity or social control, on the other hand. In his recent work, he fuses these two definitions by arguing that faith is socially useful because ‘particularly in regards to vulnerable social relations … [religion] possesses the power to convincingly articulate moral sensitivities and solidaristic intuitions’.Footnote ³² Habermas and other theorists of the post-secular, who have influenced IR theory, cling to conceptions of religion that fail to contest the modern transformation in the nature of belief itself (especially in the Judeo-Christian tradition).Footnote ³³ This applies to the shift away from the cultural mediations of objective revelation and the communal practice of faith towards subjective assent and a private, sacramentally unmediated relationship between the individual and the divine.

Therefore post-secularity accepts uncritically ‘the change … which takes us from a society in which was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believer, is one human possibility among others’, as Taylor puts it.Footnote ³⁴ Implicit in this secularist account is the assumption that enlightened citizens choose unbelief over belief: ‘[t]he presumption of unbelief has become dominant in more and more … milieux; and has achieved hegemony in certain crucial ones, in the academic and intellectual life, for instance, whence it can more easily extend itself to others’.Footnote ³⁵ Unbelief constitutes the default position and the supposedly neutral vantage point from which religion is defined and the impact of faith on international affairs can be analysed. The post-secular implies that the moral intuitions of religious traditions should be included in political debate and be allowed to contribute to the common good, but merely on secular terms and in instrumental ways that serve the purposes of secular politics.Footnote ³⁶

Second, post-secularity fails to overcome the hegemony of secular reason. Despite inflecting his long-standing Enlightenment stance, Habermas still claims that faith is arational or even irrational and that the gulf separating post-metaphysical, secular rationality from religious revelation cannot be bridged.Footnote ³⁷ Furthermore, he assumes that only reason sundered from faith can preserve state neutrality vis-à-vis rival and conflicting religions: ‘the domain of the state, which controls the means of legitimate coercion, should not be opened to the strife between various religious communities, otherwise the government could become the executive arm of a religious majority that imposes its will on the opposition’.Footnote ³⁸ Thus Habermas's vindication of the secular state is more concerned with the clash of fanatical faiths than it is with the violent wars of secular utopias. It is true that his argument in favour of translating the moral sentiments of religious believers into the discourse of secular reason encourages a measure of mutual learning between religious and non-religious traditions.Footnote ³⁹ However, for Habermas the common language in both public debate and political deliberation must be free of any religious references to transcendent principles and governed by secular reason alone. As a result, post-secularity does not transform the secularist terms of debate and engagement between religions and other perspectives. For faith is not permitted to make any substantive or critical contribution to public discussion that could undermine the primacy of formal, procedural reason.Footnote ⁴⁰ Paradoxically, the post-secular uses religion to compensate for an instrumental rationality whose shortcomings are the result of divorcing faith from reason in the first place.

Habermas's post-metaphysical politics

In section four, this article returns to the possibility of synthesising reason with faith, understood primarily as a form of pre-rational trust in the reasonableness of reality. For now, a third point needs to be made about the concept of post-secularity. In his recent work, Habermas has somewhat broadened his model of translating religious intuitions into the secular language of political discourse, which permits faith traditions to contribute to the common life within the shared public square. Contrary to his earlier, Enlightenment rejection of faith as irrational superstition and dangerous belief, he now acknowledges ‘the shared origin of philosophy and religion in the revolution in worldviews of the Axial Age’.Footnote ⁴¹ Likewise, he welcomes the religious contribution to a new, post-secular normativity that provides resistance to the purely instrumentalist reason of both utilitarian ethics and liberal capitalism. However, Habermas's proposed procedure of translation remains residually secularist. He convincingly contests the liberal public-private divide and the exclusion of faith from politics, but rather like Rawls he defends the hegemony of the secularist settlement and the post-metaphysical outlook of the Enlightenment legacy. The transcendent is now permitted within the public square but merely as a source of morality and strictly limited to informal communication among citizens.

In contrast, formal deliberations at the level of the state and its agencies must be protected from religion by an institutional filter, which suspends all metaphysical questions and reduces religious belief to a purely private decision. In this manner, Habermas draws an absolute line between the public square and the state, on the one hand, and communities and groups, on the other hand – a divide that religious arguments are not allowed to transgress.Footnote ⁴² The overriding reason for rejecting metaphysics is to secure immanent, secular values without appealing to transcendent religious principles. This ignores not just implicit metaphysical assumptions that are inherent in supposedly post-metaphysical thinking like, for instance, the nature of justice, the source of rights and responsibilities or the finality of politics. It also leaves unresolved the conflicts between rival, incommensurable non-religious values like freedom, equality, or security that cannot be reconciled by secular rationality.

Fourth, the secularist bias against metaphysics also reinforces the dominance of immanentist reasoning that characterises both positivism and post-positivism in IR theory. With few exceptions, they are united in ruling out a teleological ordering of politics towards a substantive, plural unity such as the common good or the duty to uphold the dignity of the human person, which goes beyond notions of utility, happiness, or individual human rights.Footnote ⁴³ In turn, the denial of shared ends serves to disallow the particularity of universal religious principles in the name of a secularist universalism for which everything is an expression of immanence that cuts out the possibility of a transcendent outlook.

As such, both positivism and post-positivism rest on a grounding in the pure immanence of nature or culture (or both at once), which on closer inspection turns out to be a transcendental foundation. For example, positivist theories of IR, which rely on empirical epistemology as the sole path to progress, elevate the empirical into the sole transcendental term and seek to enthrone humanity as the measure of all things.Footnote ⁴⁴ Similarly, post-positivist theories of IR, which reject all meta-narratives, view the particular as the only permissible form of universality and deny meaning and perennial principles in the name of perpetual flux.Footnote ⁴⁵ Most world religions, by contrast, reject any absolute separation of immanence from transcendence. Various faith traditions suggest that the immanent order of politics and international relations benefits from transcendent reference points (not a transcendental grounding, as in Kant) that can uphold normativity beyond power, wealth, instrumental interests or constructed values.

Sacralising difference or converting the ‘other’ into the ‘same’

The fifth argument against the post-secular relates to notions of difference and alterity. The appeal to the diversity of difference, which underpins the post-secular pluralism advocated by figures such as Habermas or Connolly, is but an intensification of modern positivism and transcendentalism.Footnote ⁴⁶ For postmodern philosophy elevates difference into the sole transcendental term, which overrides any notion of normative unity or substantive shared ends that embed the legislating reason of citizens and states. Difference so defined either sanctifies the power of Kant's transcendentally regulative reason or else it sacralises the ‘other’. Neither conception works on its own terms, and both are ultimately secularist. The use of reason requires and involves some form of trust in the reasonableness and regularity of reality, which is neither reducible to the forces of unalterable nature nor the power of human artifice (the social contract or the will-to-power) nor pre-rational moral sentiments (empathy or the ‘invisible hand’ of the market).

Rather, to trust that reality is to some extent reasonable and regular implies that the natural and the social world are endowed with some intelligible meaning and that they are governed by some knowable finality. Rationality appeals to something beyond the individual mind that links us to symbols, signs, and narratives, which we all inhabit and which embed the exercise of reason itself. Seen from this perspective, the post-secular turn of theory that has influenced IR theory is in reality ‘intra-secular’, as Gregor McLennan has argued.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, the purported neutrality of political reason that now admits religion into the public square must also be questioned. As Milbank contends against McLennan,

According to Kant's Opus postumum, reason gives us access to reality insofar as we always already trust that reality is reasonable and that rationality is linked to a real, objective order – not just to our nominal, mental categories. Thus, reason properly configured seems to point to a transcendence that is somehow present in immanence. To restrict rationality to regulative reason is to impose a secularist limit of finitude on the human desire for transcendent infinity that finds its expressions in both religious and non-religious traditions. Such a limit means that ‘[e]verything is to be negatively tolerated, but nothing is to be positively allowed’,Footnote ⁴⁹ an account that favours the empty formalism and proceduralism of secular reason over religious faith embodied in communal practice.

Moreover, the shift in emphasis away from the modern dialectics of positivism and transcendentalism towards post-modern difference (however spelled) merely reinforces the sacralisation of the secular, which is the mark of secularism. By enshrining difference as the new ‘absolute’, post-modernism elevates alterity or otherness into the sole transcendental term that rules out any substantive, plural unity which might bind together the national polity or the international system. Thus post-secular pluralism involves one of two positions. Either difference is absolutised, in which case incommensurable values and violent conflict become self-fulfilling prophesies that can only be settled through the use of power. Or else the only mode of attaining unity or at least some form of peaceful coexistence is to convert the ‘other’ into the ‘same’ through ahistorical, supposedly universal but in reality modern, Western categories. The most prominent examples are perhaps the values of ‘liberation’ or ‘emancipation’ linked to the political left or the values of ‘freedom of choice’ and ‘opportunity’ associated with the political right. Both variants of liberal progressivism are part of the Whig interpretation of history that Herbert Butterfield rebutted in his eponymous book.Footnote ⁵⁰ In this sense the post-modern diversity of difference, which is celebrated by post-secular pluralism, is akin to the modern promise of boundless, linear progress that secularism purported to provide but failed to deliver.

Post-secular determinism

Sixth, post-secularity is wedded to a historical and materialist determinism that characterises modern secularism. The rise to power of secularism in the West was the product of particular, contingent and in some sense arbitrary processes that were neither exemplary nor necessary nor normative, as the previous section indicated. Precisely because historicism treats history as a fated and all-determining teleological process, the genuine alternative is not to opt for ahistorical, secular categories that are supposedly universal. Instead, it is to embrace history in such a way as to view social and political developments in terms of their specific historical roots and their unfolding over time and across space. Apparently universal ideas and structures such as the global system of national states and transnational markets, which underpins modern international relations, can thus be traced genealogically to particular periods such as the Protestant Reformation or the religious wars in the ‘long sixteenth century’ (ca. 1450–1650). Far from being isolated events or absolute breaks in history, they were part of an era spanning the early fourteenth to the late seventeenth century during which both ideas and practices already nascent during the Middle Ages achieved fuller maturity and developed into the modern model of international affairs.Footnote ⁵¹

That is why, in the well-known words of Martin Wight, ‘[a]t Westphalia the states system does not come into existence, it comes of age.’Footnote ⁵² Certain new ideas such as national sovereignty came to shape the way that international relations were conceived and instituted.Footnote ⁵³ Likewise, new institutions and practices like the national state or inter-state warfare led to changes in conceptions of international affairs that still shape IR theory.Footnote ⁵⁴ Thus, theory and practice influence one another, and intellectual history and the history of actual international relations interact as part of ‘living traditions’ that encompass both action and enquiry, as the work of Wight suggests.Footnote ⁵⁵

Contrary to the historical determinism of (post-)secular thinking, the notion of tradition serves the heuristic function of mediating between theory and practice and outflanking both dualism and monism. Indeed, the English School's appeal to three traditions of international theory breaks with the causal, determinative interpretation of history by rejecting the diametrically opposed extremes of Hobbesian/Machiavellian realism and Kantian/Marxian revolutionism and by embracing Grotian rationalism as a via media – even if this reading of Grotius and classical thinking more generally has been too narrowly focused on the human artifice of modern states and abstract rules.Footnote ⁵⁶ Linked to the actuality of a third tradition is the argument that English School international theory seeks to overcomes the double divide between the historicism of secular ideology and the ‘presentism’ of empirical or rationalist science and also between the empirical and the normative by developing an integrated, historicised account of ‘how states do behave and how they ought to behave’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Based on first-order political questions and a method that historicises perennial principles such as justice, the English School attempts to offer an alternative not only to the dualism of realism and idealism that has characterised the field since E. H. Carr but also to the monism of mainstream IR theory that subordinates international relations to secular standards (which are variously more positivist or more post-positivist).

In contrast, post-secularity locks IR theory into the logic of secularism by treating the modern secularist settlement either as an ahistorical norm or as an example of historical evolution. Accordingly, the post-secular perpetuates the idea that religion is ultimately subordinate to the political authority of national states and represents merely one among many, equally valid voices within the nascent cosmopolitan public square. Thus, post-secularity's claim to pluralism barely disguises the hegemony of secular reason and liberal market democracy.Footnote ⁵⁸ Connected to this is the tendency to reject the traditional universalism of both church and empire while simultaneously defending the modern universalism of sovereign states, free markets, individual human rights, and global civil society that accepts modernity's secularist outlook.Footnote ⁵⁹ Here one can suggest a parallel argument: just as post-positivist approaches have remained trapped within positivist parameters, so too post-secular theory is residually secularist. The dominant schools foreclose the possibility of grand theory in IR because they bracket religion and metaphysics out of the picture, notably debates about the nature of ‘reality’, our knowledge of it and the kinds of things that ‘make the world hang together’.Footnote ⁶⁰

‘Grand theory’, metaphysics, and the foundations of the English School

What stands in the way of renewed grand theory in IR is secularism, notably three specific problems: first, the limits on reason; second, the dominance of secular standards that are variously more empirical or more normative (or both at once); third, a series of ontological, epistemological and methodological commitments that preclude debates about first-order political questions and the possible links between immanent values and transcendent principles. Up to a point, the exception to this has been the English School and those scholars who work at the interface of IR and political/social theory. However, neither approach has so far properly theorised religion in international affairs, and the reason is to do with metaphysical ideas. Starting with social/political theory, one can suggest that the contemporary post-metaphysical project ultimately rests on the very secularism that it purports to overcome, as the previous section has already indicated. For example, Habermas's and Connolly's notion of post-secularity rejects the ideological hegemony of secular liberalism and the dystopia of global capitalism, which are complicit with one another and represent the highest contemporary expressions of secularism. But by the same token, the post-liberal politics of pluralism remains locked in the secularist logic of de-sacralising and re-sacralising the political sphere by investing either the national-republican state or the global-cosmopolitan public square with quasi-sacred significance. In this sense, post-secularity marks an intensification of secularism rather than a new mode of theorising religion in international affairs.

Just as general IR theory took a secular turn in the 1950s and 1960s, so too the specifically Christian terminology of early English School writings was gradually replaced by a discourse that focused on the institutions of international society, ‘leaving many Christians trading in secular currency, where formerly agnostics had quite comfortably used religious coinage’.Footnote ⁶² With the growing influence of Hedley Bull's work, the dominant strand of the English School privileged the formal-procedural dimension of international society over questions of substance such as natural law, community, association, or the common good that constitute the unity of the social world and humankind. Bull and his English School contemporaries offered an alternative to the scientistic dystopia of realism and the idealistic utopia of revolutionism. But the price they paid for making Grotius's rationalist tradition part of the mainstream IR debate was to eschew a metaphysical worldview connected with Christianity in favour of a secular discourse centred on increasingly abstract, vacuous categories such as ‘common interests, common values … a common set of rules … [and] common institutions’.Footnote ⁶³ As with IR thinking in general, the English School's secular, post-metaphysical turn coincided with the decline of grand theory.

It is surely right to view the legacy of Herbert Butterfield and Martin Wight as a better starting point to develop a metaphysical IR tradition that can conceptualise religion in international affairs and revive grand theory. Common to their work is a critique of secularism and an attempt to reintegrate religion into politics. Both men viewed the Cold War as the final destruction of Christendom. In 1951, Butterfield warned of a ‘serious collapse of civilisation’ across Europe and suggested that the violent clash of secular totalitarianism marked a point in history at which ‘the Dark Ages have actually returned’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Three years earlier, Martin Wight had made the point that the modern secularist settlement culminates in post-1945 bipolarity, which licenses absolute power without ethical limits:

Likewise, Butterfield and Wight believed that the modern separation of the sacred from the secular does not reflect the nature the world we all inhabit. On the contrary, heavenly and earthly powers are inextricably intertwined and interact with one another according to certain patterns – in line with the idea that immanent reality bears the trace of its transcendent source and in part reflects the divine warrant. As such, for Christians like Butterfield and Wight the world is not just fallen and sinful but also preserves the original promise of peace and harmonious ordering just because that is what the personal Creator God intends for His creation and has revealed to Israel and in Christ.

Crucially, the two men defend variants of Christian realism that are not dualist but instead emphasise the plural unity of the world. Against the Hobbesian fear of a violent state of nature and the war of all against all (which underpins much of mainstream IR theory), Butterfield and Wight shifted the focus back on the social nature of mankind and the idea that human cooperation precedes the contractual arrangements both within and across nations. Just as national societies are bound together by much more than contracts, so too the international society of states is governed by a set of customs and traditions that are more fundamental than either formal rights or commercial exchange. Precisely in the absence of a single sovereign who wields coercive power, the glue that most of all holds together societies both nationally and internationally is ‘an antecedent common culture’, which is more primary than the rights of individual citizens or sovereign states.Footnote ⁶⁶ Culture so configured rests on a shared ‘cosmic, moral constitution’ that is metaphysical in nature because it links immanent values to their transcendent origin and outlook.Footnote ⁶⁷

Instead of scholastic casuistry, Butterfield and Wight appeal to the principle and practice of love or charity, which complements both power politics and natural law by relating the dignity of all persons to their shared transcendent origin and finality. This metaphysical vision of perfectible unity differs markedly from the dualism between the violent ethic of coercion and the peaceful ethic of love that characterises the thinking of the Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. In his most influential writings, he limits charity to personal piety and justifies warfare as the fulfilment of divine volition.Footnote ⁶⁸ As ‘tutors of mankind in its pilgrimage to perfection’,Footnote ⁶⁹ Christians (according to Niebuhr) have a duty to join America's divinely sanctioned mission of spreading democracy and freedom across the globe. As such, Niebuhr's defence of American exceptionalism is neither Christian nor realist. In contrast, Butterfield and Wight posit the primacy of peace over violence and emphasise the ethical constraints on state action within and across national borders. The legacy of Butterfield and Wight can be developed in the direction of a metaphysical-political realism that centres on the synthesis of reason and faith, the relational nature of the world's ontological structure and various forms of association around notions of the common good, as the remainder of this article briefly outlines.

Towards a synthesis of faith and reason

English School rationalism seeks to outflank the diametrically opposed extremes of realism and revolutionism in favour of an account that stresses the centrality of reason – the rationality of humankind and the divine logos as the ultimate transcendent source of the world. But for all its foundations in Christian realism, the work of Wight and Butterfield tends to view faith as private and morality as a matter of individual conscience. Thus, only reason is universal and can mediate between rival worldviews. This conception does not so much neglect the role of religion in politics as it under-explores the relationship of faith to rationality. On this question, IR theory in general and the English School in particular can learn from debates in political theory on the global religious resurgence and its implications for public reason. In his debate with Habermas in 2004 and his controversial Regensburg address in 2006,Footnote ⁷⁰ Josef Ratzinger (later Pope Benedict XVI) changed the terms of debate on the question of rationality and belief in politics and international affairs. He argued that the modern separation of natural immanence and supernatural transcendence sundered faith from reason and accordingly impoverished both. The former was either ‘positivised’ as an inner impulse or ‘transcendentalised’ as a blind, irrational creed. Likewise, the latter was either enthroned as the sole transcendental absolute or reduced to the positivist rationality of calculus and scientific experimentation. Instead of securing their respective specificity and integrity, this secularist conception pitted faith and reason against each other. The ensuing opposition between fideism and rationalism fuelled the clash of religious fundamentalism and secular extremism that has characterised international relations for much of the twentieth and the early twenty-first century.Footnote ⁷¹

A non-secularist account, by contrast, offers a synthesis through which reason and faith are mutually corrective and augmenting. Without each other's import, both can be distorted and instrumentalised at the service of egoism or state power: ‘distortions of religion arise when insufficient attention is given to the purifying and structuring role of reason within religion’.Footnote ⁷² Likewise, ‘without the corrective supplied by religion, though, reason too can fall prey to distortions, as when it is manipulated by ideology, or applied in a partial way that fails to take full account of the dignity of the human person’.Footnote ⁷³ Just as rationality acts as a controlling organ that binds belief to knowledge, so too faith can save reason from being manipulated by ideology or applied in a partial way that ignores the complexity of the real world. Without each other's corrective role, distortions and pathologies arise in both religion and ‘secular politics’. For example, fanatical believers use faith as a vehicle of hatred and seek to refashion the whole world in their own puritanical image. Similarly, the totalitarian ideologies of the twentieth century were variously more pagan or more atheist, and they legitimated genocide and total warfare in the name of an exceptionalism that was expressed in the language of secularist messianism. The impact of globalisation risks exacerbating existing extremes and marginalising a mediating middle that blends reason with faith.

This synthesis binds together rationality and belief in mutually beneficial ways. Faith can reinforce trust in the human capacity for both reasoning and understanding and also trust in the reasonableness of reality. Likewise, ‘secular’ rationality can help religious belief make sense of its claims and give coherence to its intuitions. Crucially, reason and faith can assist each other's search for objective principles and norms that govern personal and political action. What binds rationality to belief is the shared commitment to universal standards of truth beyond mere logical coherence and empirical validity. As such, the relatedness of reason and faith is not merely a concern for religion but in fact lies at the heart of politics, the economy and society both domestically and globally.

The difference with Habermas and other theorists of pluralism is that they associate religion primarily with moral intuitions and potential for meaning. A more metaphysical approach emphasises the proper cognitive import of faith, especially the idea that faith precedes and exceeds reason – a pre-rational trust in the reasonableness of the world that can direct rationality beyond a purely formal, instrumental focus and open it to the possibility of shared ends, which can unite members of different polities. Crucially, faith does not necessarily impose a set of dogmatic truths on reason, which would warrant accusations of religious fundamentalism. On the contrary, both faith and reason share a commitment to the quest for truth – faithfully and reasonably. Faced with threats to the universal respect of fundamental freedoms and the dignity of the human person, politics, and international relations cannot dispense with notions of truth and goodness, especially in situations where the conflict of rival values provokes absolutist or relativist responses. To uphold genuine pluralism requires standards of truth and goodness that can order conflicting values such as freedom, equality or security, an argument to which I return below. For now, one can conclude that the metaphysical principles and moral intuitions of faith offer conceptual and practical resources to foster mutual understanding and peaceful coexistence among different countries and cultures.

A ‘corporate’ association of nations and peoples

Faced with the global religious resurgence, theorists of post-secularity argue for pluralism either by defending procedural and majoritarian terms of debate (Habermas) that pit secular reason against faith or by embracing an immanent philosophy of difference (Connolly) that is residually transcendental. By contrast with the secularism of both positions, this article argues in favour of a plural search for the shared common good and substantive ends that can mediate between the individual and the collective will and thus help bind together members of diverse bodies and polities. Such an argument challenges the view that the incommensurability of rival values either requires central sovereign power to arbitrate conflict or else leads to a fragile modus vivendi in which peaceful coexistence merely regulates a violent state of nature that rules out the ontological possibility of a just, harmonious order.Footnote ⁷⁴ To suggest that competing values are incommensurable (especially in the late modern context of multiculturalism and the global clash of fanatical faiths) is to assume that different values have equal claim to normative validity and that no hierarchical ordering can command popular assent. In the absence of higher-order universal principles from which particular norms derive their moral character, general values such as freedom, equality, and security constitute their own foundation and finality.

However, no value is valuable in itself or as such, not even ancient liberties or modern human rights. Values are valuable because they originate from an ‘invaluable’ source and because they are ordered towards an equally ‘invaluable’ end – a transcendent principle that provides an intelligible account of what is valuable and how it ought to be valued, blending the empirical with the normative. For example, the sanctity of life and the dignity of the human person underpin the principles of liberality like fair detention, fair trial, or habeas corpus that are central to notions of freedom, equality, and security. Crucially, this argument shifts the focus away from unilateral practices centred on self-interest and individual entitlements towards more reciprocal arrangements that rest on the balance between rights and responsibilities – what Wight called the link between ‘common interest’ and ‘common obligation’.Footnote ⁷⁵ Unlike the rather sterile debate on liberal values that are self-referential, the alternative that this article puts forward helps revive ‘grand theory’ by raising fundamental questions about shared substantive ends, which exceed instrumental reason or arbitrary volition.

Linked to this argument about the common good is the reinvention of ‘constitutional corporatism’ in a more plural guise against both market individualism and state collectivism, in particular the principle of ‘mixed government’ and the role of corporate bodies in both politics and the economy. Beyond Connolly's ‘deep pluralism’, this non-statist corporatism diffuses sovereign power away from the institutions of the central state and the free market by promoting the constitutional recognition and political participation of mediating institutions such as professional associations in both the public and the private sector, manufacturing and trading guilds, cooperatives, trade unions, voluntary organisations, universities, and free cities. More so than the formalist separation of powers that ends in institutional stalemate or the primacy of executive power, the constitutionalist principle of ‘mixed government’ can help balance the three branches while at the same time upholding the autonomy of both individuals and corporate bodies within the free, shared social space – the realm of civic institutions and civil society that is more primary than either the national state or the transnational market associated with the modern secularist settlement. This argument develops Wight's recognition that in modernity ‘[s]overeignty had indeed passed to different states, by social contracts, but the original unity of the human race survived’.Footnote ⁷⁶

Taken together, the common good and constitutional corporatism have far-reaching implications for international theory. First of all, the focus on notions of goodness and shared substantive ends can correct the mainstream IR fixation either with instrumental relationships (such as national or international interests) or with procedural ties (such as a commitment to common rules and institutions). A strictly instrumental approach or procedural ethics forecloses the possibility of universal ends that unite individuals, communities, and societies in an ordered relationship towards the realisation of equality and freedom in conditions of security.Footnote ⁷⁷ Second, the emphasis on constitutionalism serves to direct the increasingly hollow debate away from the abstract standards of liberalism and democracy towards substantive ideas and practices such as constitutional rule (as emphasised by Wight),Footnote ⁷⁸ embedded institutions and ‘mixed government’ that can blend the power of the ‘one’ (efor example, nation, parliament, monarchy), the ‘few’ (for example, regions, localities, professions, or virtuous elites) and the ‘many’ (the people or the citizenry). Such an approach can rebalance the growing power of the executive vis-à-vis the legislature and the judiciary and also incorporate the organised but non-state (and non-market) components of national and global civil society.

Third, the theory and practice that links the common good to constitutionalism is association. Ontologically, the idea of association accentuates the relational nature and outlook of the human and social order, which translates into habits of cooperation and gift-exchange (like trust or communication) involved in all forms of exchange. Association begins with the anthropological insight that over time and space, human beings form mutual bonds and build bodies and polities with overlapping membership, which amount to something greater than the sum of their individual parts. However, this argument also acknowledges that such communities, corporations, and societies require legitimate authority, political power, and civilising practices in order to strive for the common good and mutual human flourishing. Accordingly, association points to an ontological account of interpersonal relationships and corporate partnership that are more fundamental than the states-based ontology of ‘international society’ and the individual-based ontology of world society or world community. As such, the alternative of association that this article puts forward is more primary than the pluralist society of states that rests on natural anarchy and the solidarist global community of humankind that is grounded in a rival vision of natural unity.Footnote ⁷⁹

Rethinking religion in international relations

Finally, seen from the perspective of association, the English School (as developed in the work of Wight and Butterfield) gets it only half-right when it suggests that ‘a states-system will not come into being without a degree of cultural unity among its members’.Footnote ⁸⁰ What is underplayed is the role of religious communities in fostering associative ties across the globe. Transnational links among members of the same faith have created bonds even as they are embedded in local communities and overseas diasporas alike. Religious transnationalism has been an integral part of history since the Axial Age and existed long before modern international relations. Perhaps more so than other traditions, different world religions alert us to the existence of a social order that precedes and underpins the modern system of national states and transnational markets, which have become increasingly disembedded from the religious practices, cultural habits and social ties within and across nations. Among the ideas and practices that unite societies nationally and internationally, the flow of religions and religiously framed cultural customs is what most of all integrates individuals into a global community and nations into a global polity.

Such associative models are of course not limited to religious believers. On the contrary, modes of association and corporation constitute neighbourhoods, communities, cities, regions, and states. The possibility of a global public square is linked to the idea that national states are more like ‘super-regions’ within a wider international polity – a subsidiary federation or confederation of nations rather than a centralised super-state or a simple free-trade area. A corporate polity is something like a ‘nested’, interlocking union of various levels of association, which seeks to embed politics and the economy in civic bonds, social relations, cultural habits, and religious practices. These ties embody principles of reciprocity and mutuality that are upheld by different religious and non-religious traditions. Thus, one effect of the global religious resurgence is to promote forms of corporate association among nations and peoples that are beyond the modern dualistic divide between the religious and the secular on which mainstream IR theory rests.