Alan James makes a noble effort to rescue me from my puzzlement concerning Martin Wight, but I confess myself still confused. As he implies, probably the root of the matter lies in differences of temperament and experience. This being the case, it then becomes the task of the academic to pursue the argument back to the basic point at which one party asserts one set of premisses and the other another, but neither side can offer further justification of these premisses, or at least not in terms which would be acceptable to the other. This I shall endeavour to do at the end of this note. Where Alan James's article is particularly helpful is that it makes it a little clearer that Wight was a part of an intellectual tradition and that this sort of ‘private pacifism’ may be less uncommon than I had supposed, partly, presumably, becauseit is private. Nevertheless, it seems to me that it rests on, at best, a curious set of premisses; but about this later. There are some initial points to make.