David Armitage is a leading figure in the emergence of “international intellectual history,” a discrete and increasingly fertile strand of academic inquiry. This volume cements his pivotal role in this burgeoning field, which has challenged one of the last academic vestiges of state hegemony—the relative neglect, among intellectual historians, of reflection on political thought beyond the nation-state. Up to now, the project of international intellectual history has largely been more an insular conversation among historically inclined IR scholars than an inter-disciplinary dialogue, much to the detriment of nuanced treatments of such central figures as Thomas Hobbes in IR theory. While this lamentable state of affairs in IR is now much improved with more sophisticated treatments of historical thinkers emerging, the revitalisation in recent decades of global, or world, history has to some extent also remedied the neglect of the international as a category of historical study. However, this has tended to privilege the material over the ideational. It is the dual paucity among intellectual historians of an “intellectual history of the international,” concerned with international law, relations among states, nations, peoples, individuals, and other corporate actors, and an “internationalized intellectual history,” concerned with the global circulation, transmission and reception of “texts, ideas and thinkers,” which Armitage redresses in his latest book, Foundations of Modern International Thought, an important disciplinary milestone in the study of world history and the history of ideas (p. 7).

The book brings together revised versions of several essays that Armitage has previously published over the past decade. Interweaving insights on methodology, historiography, and reappraisals of key modern thinkers—principally Hobbes, Locke, Burke and Bentham—the book is an ambitious work of impressive depth and scope. With admirable concision, Armitage demonstrates a rare ability to elucidate complexity, educate a broad, multi-disciplinary audience, and engage the reader with provocative, though not polemical, insights. His three chapters on Locke in particular, a neglected figure in studies of international thought, are exemplary. They display an interpretative iconoclasm bringing meticulously researched and neglected archival sources into view, tracing holistically the continuities and disjunctures in Locke's varied thought over time, and contextualising him in relation to his own world, one in which, startlingly perhaps for students of political theory and IR alike, Locke “had more extensive international experience and diplomatic opportunities than any British political thinker before David Hume” (p. 76).

Arranged into four chronological sections, from the early modern period to the present, the book also traces the contours of the sporadic evolution of modern international thought in relation to the twin contexts of globalization and empire. Perhaps the most striking implication for dominant understandings of space and time within contemporary political thought in this regard is Armitage's corrective to the Westphalian “myth” that a world of states materialised in 1648. As he contests, this has largely been true only of “the last two centuries and, especially, of the last fifty years” (p. 48). But it is not only in demonstrating the persistence of empire and the concomitant longue duree of state formation as categories that are fundamentally processual rather than fixed in space and time that he confounds conventional binary narratives. For, if Armitage's approach can be considered radical in its interpretations of hallowed figures of political thought and forms of political community, it also echoes, though does not adopt wholesale, postmodernism in method. This is reflected in the analytical preoccupations of the book, which bring an underlying coherence to the work and expose the historically contingent nature of conceptual dichotomies that have come to be reified in the present.

This deconstruction is most clearly addressed in relation to four conventional binaries: the domestic and the international; morality and politics; natural and positive law; and war and trade. The first, “domestic—international,” while undergirding his whole intellectual enterprise, is addressed explicitly, for example, by relocating parliamentary history in Britain within the orbit of international history, revealing the intimate relationship between parliamentary debates and the development of international law. The second, “morality—politics,” is made explicit in Armitage's treatment of Burke whereby he demonstrates that reason of state in Burke's thought should be understood not as private “expediency” without morality, but as public “necessity” born out of a neo-Stoic conception of natural law. Burke is to be understood within the historical frame of early modern conceptions of reason of state, epitomized by Vattel, where consequentialist ethics were not opposed to natural morality, rather than in terms of the “confused taxonomies” of post-hoc traditions of “realist” international theory. In his essay on Bentham as a global thinker, Armitage dismantles the third dichotomy, “natural—positive law,” arguing against the dominant view in the study of international law that there was “a smooth transition from naturalism to positivism in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (p. 187). He instead posits that “‘synthetic natural law’ remained remarkably robust in the age of liberal nationalism” (p. 187). Finally, in his insightful discursive analysis of land and sea empires, the former identified with rapacious acquisition of territory, the latter with the quest for pacific commerce, he unearths the “evaluative distinction” inherent in such seemingly descriptive typologies (p. 54). In tracing the oppositional language of land and sea empire narratives to the ancient world, he exposes its ideological deployment, as in visions of the British empire of the non-territorially bound sea being coterminous with liberty, and in its influence on contemporary conceptions of world history.

Armitage offers more, however, than an aimless exercise in postmodern deconstruction. He is, after all, interested in foundations, not anti-foundations, even if these may be contingent or, as he states, more “symptomatic rather than systematic” (p. 9). It is in this light that potential limitations of his research agenda also come to view, prompting two questions only partially answered in his book: first, how is his quest for foundations ultimately any different from the myth-making of other “traditions” of international thought? And second, how can international intellectual history be truly global if still anchored to such Anglo-centric foundations? The answer to the first question is perhaps answered most succinctly in Armitage's self-conscious quest for symptoms rather than systems: in this view, international intellectual history is a modest scholarly home overlooking a sprawling vista. It remains to be seen whether making sense of the sheer magnitude of this global enterprise will increasingly necessitate ever-greater degrees of conceptual typology. The second question concerns the vital unfinished business, not only of intellectual history, but also of the humanities and social sciences in general. It is not surprising, for a scholar of Atlantic history, that Armitage concludes his book with the legacy of America's Declaration of Independence. As with much of the rest of his book, such legacies remain very much within the vicinity of the Anglo-American world, in this case, the independence movements of Spanish America. While acknowledging the invaluable contribution of postcolonial studies to the globalization of intellectual history, he intimates also to the limits of his own enterprise, implicitly, in his chapter on Bentham. In it, he makes a distinction between the “international turn” in history which has made great inroads in the discipline, and the “global turn,” or the “globalisation of the history of political thought,” which is far less developed (p. 172). It is hoped that in time, the magisterial account of international thought he has begun to mine in this impressive volume will help lay the foundations in which a truly global history of ideas emerges.