The centrality of the national interest to Morgenthau's political realism is well known yet often lamented for its lack of clarity. This article offers a grammatical reading in order to highlight the Platonic and Aristotelian roots of the metaphysical assumptions that inform the national interest in Morgenthau's work and to show that, despite his continuous injunctions against the dangers of utopianism, he fails to escape them himself. Ultimately, his attempts to insulate us against the possibility of totalitarianism leads us back into its violent embrace via a ‘mysticism’ that defines a role for the nation-state as the embodiment of eternal moral truths and values.

‘Isolationism’ is a much used and abused term in the contemporary American foreign policy debate. This article seeks to illuminate some of the misunderstandings that surround the use of this term by challenging seven persistent myths about isolationism. In so doing it sheds light on the often unarticulated role that this and other ideas play in the US foreign policy debate. It also seeks to demonstrate the nature of the main ideational cleavages within this debate which the isolationist name-calling obscures, and to show the way in which language is used in the political discourse and how its meaning in this debate changes over time.

This article is concerned with the historical trajectory and legacy of British liberal internationalist ideas in the opening three decades of the twentieth century. Despite this body of ideas being a major force behind the establishment of International Relations (IR) in Britain following the Great War, only scant attention is paid to its pre-war configuration. The article attempts to remedy this gap by focusing on internationalist thought prior to and during the war. It is argued that internationalist ideas during the Great War accelerated a drift towards institutional arguments, which are herein distinguished from moral arguments, and that the concept of anarchy played a major role in this shift in internationalist ideas. While the transformation of liberal internationalist ideas during the war constitutes a central backdrop to the early practices of British IR, it should not overshadow the powerful, underlying continuity in ethico-political convictions entertained by internationalists before and after the Great War.

John H. Herz is a significant, but comparatively neglected, figure in the development of International Relations (IR) as a discipline. Although he contributed to the emergence of realism as the dominant approach to international relations in the United States, his thought is characterised by an insight into the fragility of the international order and the state which stands in marked contrast to the emphasis upon durability and persistence evident in recent surveys of a self-avowed American realism.

This article examines the concepts and practices of global governance as a definitively liberal project. It provides an analysis of how TFCAs intersect with wider neoliberal debates about the efficacy of global environmental governance, and explores the power and limitations of that governance. In particular, this article investigates the complex local contexts which global environmental governance schemes such as TFCAs encounter; in so doing it highlights the ways that local activities subvert and challenge global-level conservation schemes. Through an analysis of transfrontier conservation areas (TFCAs) in Central America, it contends that specific forms of global environmental governance require some rethinking to accommodate their potentially fragile and uneven nature, and that it is more open, opaque or uneven than many theorists suggest.

The support that businessmen and business organisations displayed for the peace processes in Israel and Northern Ireland was open and vocal, underscoring the supposed linkage between globalisation, peace and economic growth, and the supposed leadership role of business. The purpose of this study is to examine the motivations of the business communities in Israel and Northern Ireland in becoming involved in the peace processes, their organisation to promote peace, decision-making processes at critical junctures, and their actual impact on the political outcomes. Study of the business communities demonstrates that their empowerment enabled them to exert political influence but fell short of hegemony that would enable them to set the wider political agenda. The impact of both business communities, for different reasons, was therefore limited.

In his recent article ‘The State as Person in International Theory’, Alexander Wendt advocates explicitly ‘personifying the state’. In his philosophical argument, he opposes a ‘physicalism’ which would reduce states to their individual members with his own ‘thin version of personhood’ derived from social theory. But this approach, neglecting normative criteria, sets up an opposition between false extremes, as well as being false to the full nature of human beings. It is doubtful whether the state is ever, in practice, the perfect corporate agent of Wendt's prescription, and it would be suspect if it were.

It may be that states are not persons, but there is nothing in Peter Lomas' dismissive critique of my article that would help us decide one way or the other. Lomas never engages the central points of my argument, and does not appear to have read the relevant literature. This is too bad, since Lomas' evident passion about the question of whether states are persons is fully justified. At stake empirically is our ability to explain important patterns in world politics, like balancing or the tendency of states to follow international law, which seem to presuppose state persons. And normatively, state personhood has many politically charged implications, whether limiting the possibilities for individual self-realisation, as emphasised by Lomas, or providing a metaphysical ground for claims of group rights, collective responsibility and guilt, reparations, and the like. So the stakes are high, and having been neglected in IR for so long our current understanding of the issue is preliminary at best. Passion, however, is no substitute for clear thinking, and here Lomas muddies the water considerably. As such I welcome the opportunity to respond. Since Lomas concentrates on my easy case – collective intentionality – I shall do likewise, defending the reality of only that aspect of state personhood, thus bracketing whether states are also super-organisms with collective consciousness.

The last thirty years has seen the growth – or, as I should prefer to say, rebirth – of a field of inquiry that for much of the twentieth century was quiescent. That field would now routinely be called international political theory, in part to distinguish it from both political theory in general and International Relations (IR) theory in general, though of course, there are overlaps with both. Roughly speaking that field consists in ethical, historical and philosophical reflection on the manner and matter of international politics. There is a rich body of such inquiries in intellectual history (and not just in Europe) but for a variety of historical and intellectual reasons such inquiries had fallen out of fashion by the late nineteenth century. This situation was reinforced by the simultaneous evolution of the individual disciplines of political science and IR, and in particular by the rise of methodological and epistemological claims in both largely inimical to those earlier sorts of inquiry. Thus, as the story is widely told, ‘political theory’ and ‘IR’, as academic inquiries, followed largely independent paths for most of the twentieth century.

On the face of it, this might seem a somewhat frivolous, not to say over-familiar, title for an essay on the influence of Charles Beitz's Political Theory and International Relations (hereafter, PTIR); Beitz, however, will recognise the implicit comparison between his work and John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, and will accordingly, I hope, forgive the familiarity. But, accepting that this is a title that conveys respect, it might still be argued to be inappropriate on the rather different grounds that it substantially overstates the influence of PTIR. Can it really be the case that this relatively short (under 200 pages) volume with an over-ambitious title ‘changed the subject’ in the way that A Theory of Justice certainly did a few years earlier? Obviously the subject in question – international political theory – is rather more limited than the whole world of at least Anglo-American political theory that was changed by Rawls's work, but such a claim can, I think, be defended.

Among political philosophers, discussion of Charles Beitz's very important book Political Theory and International Relations has focused mainly on Part Three, in which Beitz addresses the issue of global distributive justice, and argues in favour of applying Rawls's difference principle globally: an ideally just world would be one in which the share of income and other primary goods going to the least advantaged group of persons would be maximised, no matter which society those persons belonged to. There has been much debate about whether relationships across the world are cooperative in the sense that this principle is thought to presuppose, how one might construct an international index of advantage and disadvantage, and so forth. Beitz himself has contributed to this debate, and it remains central to contemporary work on global justice.

Charles Beitz's Political Theory and International Relations has had an enormous impact on analyses of the ethical issues raised at the global level. It was the first systematic discussion of such ethical issues in the last 50 years if not more. It remains a landmark for a number of different reasons. First, it stands out for the sophistication of its philosophical argument and the meticulous argumentation throughout. The latter is deployed not simply to provide powerful critiques of other perspectives (such as realism and the morality of states). It also puts forward and defends with considerable ingenuity a cosmopolitan theory of distributive justice. A second striking and impressive feature of the book is that it successfully integrates philosophical argument with a deep grasp of the nature of world politics and the empirical and theoretical literatures on salient aspects of world politics.

The most significant intellectual contribution of Charles Beitz's book, Political Theory and International Relations, was captured by his use of the word ‘and’ in the book's title to connect the previously estranged fields of political theory and international relations (IR). His book constituted a bold challenge to a prevailing realist view in the field of IR, that was sceptical ‘about the status of moral principles’ in a Hobbesian state-eat-state world. Beitz's work also challenged the traditional orientation of contemporary political theory, that took for granted the bounded rather than ‘universal community’ as the locus of inquiry about issues of justice and political morality. The marriage of political theory and IR has produced in the past twenty-five years a rich and diverse body of international political theory that engages, in a direct and rigorous fashion, previously obscured or marginalised normative dimensions of international issues ranging from war and intervention to global poverty and economic inequality.

I am grateful to all five contributors to this Forum for the generosity of their comments about Political Theory and International Relations and their critical interest in the issues taken up in the book. It is a good thing that these issues have attracted the attention of so many talented scholars. This would certainly have occurred even if PTIR had never been written, but I am delighted that the book seems to have been a constructive provocation.