This review covers only the fourth volume in a series of books that collect works of Martin Wight (1913–1972), who is often considered to be the most important British theorist of international relations of his generation, and was one of the founders of the “English School” of international relations (ES). The other volumes in the series are International Relations and Political Philosophy (2022), History and International Relations (2023), and Foreign Policy and Security Strategy (2023). Wight’s legendary lectures at the London School of Economics (LSE) were first published over 30 years ago, as International Theory: The Three Traditions (1991). This is where he articulated his famous “3Rs”—Realism (Hobbes), Rationalism (Grotius), and Revolutionism (Kant). Robert Keohane reviewed the book favorably in the APSR Review, hoping it would give all of us historical perspective and humility, and concluded that it was “an important contribution to the literature, which should be read by American students and scholars” (86, 4, 1992).

David S. Yost, the editor of the series, in the Preface to this volume, “Martin Wight’s Scholarly Stature,” discusses aspects of Wight’s personal background, his continuing influence, which stems from his LSE lectures on the philosophy of international relations (1950s), and also from the growing importance of the English School of international relations. Some scholars trace the origins of the English School to the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics in the 1950s. He acknowledges that while there is no generally accepted definition, it broadly signifies an approach to the study of international relations more rooted in history, philosophy, and law than in the social sciences.

What makes this volume in the series unusual, and probably uncomfortable for scholars and students (at least those in the West) is that it directly engages with Wight’s works on religion and Christian theology in relation to political philosophy, the philosophy of history, and the theory of international relations (although these aspects, including other world religions, appear in the other books in the series). Yost says in the Introduction, “The purpose of this volume is to clarify the religious dimension of Wight’s works.” Yost’s chief themes are History and the Presuppositions of the Social Sciences, Christendom and Civilization, the Historical Evolution of Christian Thinking on War, Aspects of the Antichrist Myth, Progress and the Last Things, and Progress and Scripture, Christianity, Suffering, and War.

Something has to be said about the myth of the Antichrist since over 20% of the chapters in this volume deal with this. It is important to see Wight’s interest in the Antichrist, eschatology, and apocalypticism—was part of his deep interest as a Christian, and as a historian, with the nature of history, sacred and secular history, the meaning of history, the philosophy of history, and the modern ideology of progress.

This kind of literature tends to be avoided by liberal Christians and is too easily adopted by fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals. However, what might give liberals pause is that apocalyptic—its visions, symbolism, and its origins, in Jewish—and then Christian apocalypticism emerge at times of empire, oppression, and persecution, as part of theologies of resistance. The chapters on the Antichrist and references to it in other chapters are part of a deep political and cultural criticism of liberal, Western modernity. Wight covers this dimension in “The Church, Russia, and the West” (Chapter 17) memorably. The theologians of KRISIS grappled with Antichrist, eschatology, and apocalypticism. Sure, scholarship has moved on, but already Wight was aware of biblical literary criticism, and he acknowledges that eschatology, apocalypticism “is always the creed of the poor,” and (he says amusingly) the upper classes go for the occult, witchcraft, and demonolatry (Chapter 25). Karl Barth, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the Russian Orthodox theologians Nicholai Berdyaev and Vladimir Solovyov all grappled with the doctrine of the Antichrist, sometimes seen as the extreme of political religion. These dimensions of the Antichrist are engaged with by Oliver O’Donovan, the former Regius Professor of Moral and Pastoral Philosophy, University of Oxford, The Desire of the Nations: Rediscovering the roots of political theology (Cambridge, 1996).

Will Bain’s superb Foreword briefly sets out what for many scholars is the (alleged) “enigma” or puzzle of Wight in relation to the history of international thought, and his intellectual identity, although it does have the whiff of a stale in-house debate. He is celebrated as a profound thinker with staggering erudition and a teacher whose lectures impacted the lives of his students profoundly, but there is no consensus on his intellectual identity. How can Wight, the author of Power Politics, and his early pacifism be reconciled; what about his “paralysing pessimism” that (allegedly) blunted effective political action; did he belong to the Realist or Rationalist tradition, given his frequent references to sin and human wickedness; and, he is considered a theorist of international relations, but he was formed as a historian, and displayed no real interest in social science and explanatory, problem-solving theory, which seeks to explain the present, predict the future, and offer immediate advice for foreign policy.

Wight’s personal faith, Bain says, is a problem and a resource in making sense of his intellectual identity. He clearly sets out the critics and their standard arguments—personal faith is an embarrassment, and no longer part of serious discussions of international relations, forget debates over faith and reason, violence and fanaticism have been part of the origins story of international relations, and the “language of sin, antichrist, and apostasy is jarring to contemporary scholars.” However, Bain, contrary to these views, argues “faith is an essential, indispensable resource for a sound interpretation of Wight’s thought, to know Wight is to know his faith,” and it is the “interpretive key that unlocks the meanings and arguments that have remain buried or have been misinterpreted.”

However, if to know Wight is to know his faith,’ it is also to know how that faith was worked out in communion with others, to have a thick description of how the volume’s key themes relate to who he was is dialogue with, and especially why they were important—the people, authors, conferences, and organizations, which appear in the chapters on these themes, even if some dates, and venues are not known. The chapters show how deeply engaged he was, with varying degrees of intensity over the years, with the ecumenical movement—the whole array of mainline Protestant churches and their related organizations, including the British Council of Churches, WCC’s Ecumenical Institute, Bossy, Geneva; the Student Christian Movement (SCM); and World Student Christian Federation. These mainline Protestants saw the founding of the WCC as a religious counterpart to the new United Nations. Wight also engaged with the ideas of the main Catholic thinkers of the day and was fully aware of the debates in the Catholic Church. He was also fully engaged with some of the key thinkers in the Russian Orthodox Church—in exile in Paris and London from Bolshevik Russia. My article, “Faith, history and Martin Wight: the role of religion in the historical sociology of the English School of International Relations,” International Affairs, 77, 4 (2001), and Marjorie Reeves (ed.), Christian Thinking and Social Order: conviction politics from the 1930s to the present day (1999), are helpful to understand the significance of these people and organizations. Reeves and Wight led a Christianity and History Reading Group in Oxford. Ian Hall’s The International Thought of Martin Wight (Palgrave, 2006) is an essential reading.

The answer to the enigma or puzzle regarding Wight’s intellectual identity in (Western) international relations, and the key to the importance of this volume, may be straightforward. Wight saw himself—and what he should be doing—as a “Christian intellectual” (how his faith, life, calling, or vocation fit together), as a historian, and being a Christian historian (like Butterfield), and so the variety of chapters that deal with the nature of history, history and the social sciences, sacred and secular history, the philosophy of history, Christianity and the philosophy of history, and being a Christian scholar of international relations, which included at times the need to bear public witness to his faith, even if he often considered himself unworthy of this vocation. Unfortunately, this book does not include Wight’s unpublished essay on Jacques Ellul, Wight’s contemporary (1912–1994), “Ellul and the Predicament of the Christian Intellectual” (April 24, 1953). Ellul was a French Reformed Protestant philosopher, sociologist, and lay theologian who was a leader of the French resistance. He was a professor of History and the Sociology of Institutions at the University of Bordeaux. His book, Violence: Reflections from a Christian Perspective (1969), can helpfully be read alongside Wight’s “The Development of Christian Thought on Violence” (Chapter 10).

Wight’s life—and his whole generation—was bound up with what E.H. Carr called “the twenty years’ crisis” (1919–1939) and the Second World War. What his generation clearly recognized at the time was that they were living through a fundamental “spiritual” crisis and political crisis—war, dictatorship, totalitarianism, nihilism, unreason, rationalism, secularism, and economic collapse. They may not have all seen this crisis in the same way, including politicians and theologians, but what connected this generation was the inevitable choices that confronted all of them. This problem of decision, choice (going back to Kierkegaard), was expressed in what came to be called “KRISIS,” and Wight was very interested in the choices, the response of politicians, and also theologians. This volume shows his great theological depth and breadth—Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Reinhold Niebuhr—and his deep engagement with the ideas of Russian Orthodox thinkers who influenced theology and philosophy in the early twentieth century (Nikolai Berdyaev and Vladimir Soloveyov).

Yost says in the Introduction, “The works in this volume do not fall into neat categories of secular or religious. Theological convictions sometimes visibly inform Wight’s works written in a more temporal vein” (p. 1). Wight is doing what he thinks a Christian intellectual should be doing—he is engaging with others, everyone has a worldview (secular, liberal, conservative, socialist, Marxist, etc.), whose values and assumptions influence how they see and interpret the world. In these chapters, on each of these key themes Yost sets out, Wight is offering a narrative, an interpretation, which seeks to “out-narrate” competing narratives—in his times, and potentially our own. Perhaps, the potential audience for this book is quite beyond those initially interested in the English School. The majority of Christians in the world, the majority of religious people in the world, are now non-white, non-Western, and part of the colonized world rather than the colonizers. Is this a volume for them? We are living in the first global, multipolar, multireligious, and multicultural international society. It is up to the readers of this volume to investigate the key themes of this volume, how Wight’s scholarship relates to recent research and to recent narratives, and to decide the volume’s relevance for interpreting and engaging with the impact of religion, culture, and theology on some of the main issues in the global South and in contemporary international relations.