Introduction

It is becoming increasingly interesting to write about Nick Rengger and what I term the business of war. Reading his manuscripts inevitably reveals his (much commented upon) preoccupation with just war theory and his anti-Pelagianism. A careful scrutiny of the written words and a recall (perhaps mistaken) from memories of many conversations, however, yield very little insight into his view of the business of war. This absence is quite remarkable given that Rengger would have agreed that war was both the curse of the international system but also the very stuff from which International Relations (IR) had been created. In this chapter, I want to explore why Rengger had little if nothing to say about the actual conduct of war and how this silence weakens his position as a scholar of war if not, of course, his status as a political theorist of some note. The omission I highlight though is especially puzzling given that towards the end of his life he had grown somewhat impatient with the subject area (he never considered it a discipline) as both too ‘critical’ in methodology and too wedded to a highly partisan view of democracy as a ‘cure all’. Many scholars were for him far removed from appreciating the essential ‘darkness’ of the human condition in all its guises and how the aftermath of 9/11 with its multiple consequences had in his view further darkened politics. In this sense he was infuriated with the ideas, for example, of Stephen Pinker and any claims that the world had become and was becoming more peaceable. But in typical Renggerian fashion, he had no real evidence to oppose that thesis, no facts, no data but merely the conviction, perhaps the hope, that Pinker was quite simply wrong.

Gathering empirical evidence or doing fieldwork was not in the Rengger canon. It did not need to be perhaps, but I think there is in general a problem with discussing war simply in abstraction. So I end this chapter with the thought, perhaps a harsh one, that Rengger often evaded the hard realities of looking at the business of war in favour of a position which seemed to accept that politics ended when the fighting began; that there was little that could be done apart from a reliance on the power of conversation to raise if not resolve the points of contention.