Introduction

According to Nicholas Rengger, the study of modern political theory and international relations (IR) is divided between two conflicting views. He terms the more optimistic ‘Pelagian’ and the more sceptical ‘anti-Pelagian’. It will be suggested that although Rengger succeeds in clarifying the assumptions underlying Pelagianism, he is less successful in identifying a coherent form of non-realist anti-Pelagianism. In this chapter we will examine in particular the version of non-realist anti-Pelagianism he claimed to find in Oakeshott. Since Oakeshott has been accused of an idealist methodology which yields a model of civil association open to the charge of being itself Pelagian, Rengger’s reliance on him exposes Rengger’s own anti-Pelagian project to the charge of succumbing to the ‘faint but bewitching glow of ideal theory’ of which he accuses Rawls and other modern idealists and rationalists. Rengger’s project, we conclude, might have been more coherent if he had instead linked it to a theory of prudence and the contemporary debate about the political. First, however, we begin with a discussion of Rengger’s chosen terminology.

The Pelagian and anti-Pelagian imagination in political and international theory

During the last two centuries, Rengger observes, ‘the chief highways of European political thought have been dominated by traffic following directions marked by words such as progress, science and reason’. During the present century, he continues, ‘Alongside such familiar vehicles as liberalism, socialism, Marxism and the like we might now add various forms of critical theory, various forms of environmentalism and perhaps especially cosmopolitanism.’ Perhaps the best-known manifestation of the Enlightenment rationalist heritage to which Rengger points in contemporary Anglophone political philosophy is ‘ideal theory’ represented above all by John Rawls and his followers.

Despite the disasters of the 20th century, Rengger notes, even IR theorizing has succumbed during the past 50 years to the ‘bewitching glow’ of idealist theorizing, in the form of a ‘broadly progressive’ orthodoxy ‘focused on notions such as rights, law, governance, justice and so on’. According to Rengger IR progressivism is manifested in cosmopolitan approaches which see transnational institutions as vehicles for rebuilding the global order as well as in liberal internationalism and radical approaches.