Introduction

Rarely does the published work of Nicholas Rengger directly engage the thought of Max Weber, a rather interesting lacuna given the centrality of Weber to the international political themes and thinkers with which Rengger engaged over the course of his career and in response to which he sought to carve out his own unique stance. Weber features in the title of Rengger’s unpublished 2001 inaugural lecture at the University of St Andrews, and a book manuscript on which Rengger was working at the time of his death was to explore the significance of Weber’s ‘Politics as a vocation’ lecture with respect to several present-day dilemmas of ethics and politics. It is only in International Relations, Political Theory and the Problem of Order that Rengger indicates at any length the great significance that he sees Weber’s thought holding for international political theory, and yet even this discussion is rather limited.

This chapter therefore explores Rengger’s notion of the modern anti-Pelagian imagination – a notion that figured prominently in his later work – with respect to Weber’s thought. It traces affinities between Rengger and Weber in their diagnoses of how rationalization and the concomitant loss of an ethic of brotherliness characterize the modern disenchantment of the world. Rengger’s wish to sustain an ethic of brotherliness meets its limits, however, in so much as his delineation of the relationship between theory and practice militates against the desire to root lives within networks of living concern. The chapter thus explores Rengger’s distinction between theory and practice, poetics and politics, in light of Weber’s discussions of the virtuosi of religion which feature prominently in Weber’s writings on the sociology of religion, but which also play a central, albeit more recessed, role in his discussion of ethics and politics as outlined in his ‘Politics as a vocation’ lecture. The chapter problematizes Rengger’s insistence on a staunch distinction between theory and practice, and poetics and politics more specifically, arguing that there is a need to recognize the important influence of the poetic, world-disclosive force of the lives of exemplary figures like Weber’s virtuosi of religion upon politics so as to sustain the sort of politics of limits and the centrality of mercy and charity that Rengger himself so values.