Conflict, War and Revolution

Front matter

= AR and an ae gg Paul Kelly |

EY

The problem of politics in international political thought

Contents

Extended contents

Preface and acknowledgements

1. Introduction - Conflict, war, revolution and the character of politics

Part I - Conflict, war and government before the state era 29

2. Thucydides - The naturalness of war 31 Explaining the Peloponnesian War 37 Periclean liberalism 42 Thucydidean realism 45 Democracy, war and stasis 53

3. Augustine - The problem of peace in a violent world 63 Divine order - Jerusalem to Rome 65 Augustine of Hippo 66 Sin and evil 74 The two cities: an Augustinian theory of government and politics 80 Justice and the Empire 84 Peace and political order 85 The legitimation of violence and just war 89 Christianity, Augustinianism and international politics 94

4. Machiavelli - Politics and the use of violence 105 Life and times 107 Thought, theory and works 109 Florence, Italy and the wider world 112

“Teacher of wickedness’ - Machiavelli’s new science of politics 116

Violence, war and reason of state 128

The long shadow of Machiavelli 139 5. Hobbes - Solving the problem of conflict 147 Two lives of Thomas Hobbes 149 The theory of human nature 153 The creation of the sovereign 161 Absolutism and the Christian Commonwealth 165 The Hobbesian tradition in international relations 168 Why internationalising Leviathan is not possible 171 Part II - War, revolution and competition between states 179 6. Locke - Liberalism and the externalisation of conflict 181 Living in interesting times - Locke's political life 183 The state of nature, natural law, punishment and war 186 Property, territory, colonies and conquest 193 Political society, consent and revolution 198 Locke's legacy in international theory 204 7. Rousseau - The threat of the international order 213 The life and writings of an ‘extraordinary thinker’ 216 The Enlightenment and the 18th-century international order 221 The Discourse on the Origin of Inequality and the ‘evil contract’ 230 The Social Contract 236 Rousseauean international relations - Corsica and Poland 246 Rousseau’s complex legacy 249 Conclusion 257 8. Clausewitz - The professionalisation of war 261 Life and career 264 Prussia and political theory: On War in context 266 The problem of Clausewitz’s On War 271 The object of enquiry - what is war? 277 The two versions of the trinity? 283 The means - the practical conduct of war 292

The legacy of On War 295

9. Lenin and Mao - Revolution, violence and war

Two revolutionary lives

Marx: the essentials

Lenin and the party — ‘what is to be done?’

Capitalism, imperialism and the nation

“The state and revolutiom - Lenin and violence

Revolution and the challenge of imperialism - the development of Maos Leninism

Violence and the conduct of revolution Guerrilla wars Leninism and Maoism in the modern era

Conclusion: imperialism, party politics and war 10. Schmitt - The danger of the international liberal order

Schmitt: life and work

Anti-liberalism

The Concept of the Political

The Nomos of the Earth and International Law ‘The Partisan

Schmitt in contemporary international theory

Conclusion 11. Conclusion - Realisms in international political theory

The Westphalian system

International political theory as critique The realist turn in political theory Legitimacy, violence and the site of politics Conclusion

LSE Press - Suggestions for finding open access texts for the major authors covered in Conflict, War and Revolution

Index

308 314 319 326 332

340 349 355 359 363

410 416 420 423 426

441 445

Preface and acknowledgements

All books have a story and the acknowledgements provide the opportunity to tell it. For much of my career I have worked on and published political theory in a broadly liberal-egalitarian idiom. This book is rather different and needs an explanation. After nearly a decade as a department chair and then pro-director at LSE - both roles I loved and where I got to work with some exceptional people - I returned to a regular academic role writing political theory and teaching brilliant students. But a decade without major writing is a long time, and I did not want to spend my sabbatical in the library reading for a project that would only see the light of day many years in the future. I needed to begin writing something quickly, so I thought of writing up a course I had been teaching for years, as a possible textbook. When Nicola Scally, LSE’s librarian, suggested I write a book for the new LSE Press she was setting up to publish online and open access books, I could not but rise to the provocation. I had had a long-term interest in online publication but was sceptical of online open access books. I am grateful to Nicola for that invitation and to Patrick Dunleavy, the subsequent editor in chief of LSE Press, who made sure the ambition turned into a reality and that I delivered it. I had had the pleasure of working with Patrick before, editing a journal, and he remains one of the most entrepreneurial academics at the LSE and in UK social science.

When I started writing the book, I realised the project was far too ambitious. This book was already long, and I had planned 24 chapters! As I worked on the book it was clear that my interests were in a particular direction and the xii Conflict, War and Revolution character of the book was becoming more realist in orientation. It turns out that the book ended up bearing the mark of three political theorists: the late Glen Newey, Matt Sleat and Edward Hall, my last PhD student before going over to the ‘dark side, who is now an established political theorist in his own right. Glen had always been a sort of sparring partner as he gently ridiculed my liberal-egalitarianism. Although he is no longer with us, I still hear his realist provocations. Matt spent time at the LSE before going to Sheffield and I had come to know and respect his work. But it was only when I read his Liberal Realism book that I got drawn into thinking more about the problems of political realism. Finally, Ed Hall probably did most to challenge my liberal-egalitarian presuppositions and he finally killed off my plan to complete a book on Ronald Dworkin: I am grateful for that. I still remain a kind of liberal-egalitarian, but I see that position and those values in a very different light: one illuminated by these three former friends, colleagues and students and, because of them, the thinkers I write about in this book.

Beyond them, the list of intellectual debts is so vast that I will just thank all my former teachers and all those who I have worked with or whose work I have read over the last four decades. I should also thank my current LSE undergraduate students. Returning to the classroom to discuss interesting ideas with some of the most talented and brilliant of young people is a priceless privilege only the LSE’s Department of Government can offer.

I need to thank Anne. She is always thanked for her support, but this time around it is different. Over the last decade she has published four books and exhibited and taught all over the world. Following her around with a laptop and my online library made this book possible. The chapters often have an association with a place that is also the story of her travels, with me in tow. The book was conceived in Farindola in Italy, where she had a residency in 2018. Subsequent chapters were written in Limoges, on the beachfront at Newcastle (NSW, Australia), watching surfers and drinking extraordinary coffee whilst writing about Hobbes, or in Nelson and Wanganui (New Zealand), writing about Carl Schmitt. Other chapters have English stories: Harrogate, Lincoln, Salisbury, Ruthin, Mansfield, Cornwall. The book was finished during lockdown, and those memories of travel invisibly imprinted in each chapter have been enormously important to me as our worlds have necessarily closed in. Throughout that time, I have seen and enjoyed what she produced; now she can see what I was doing all that time.

The book is dedicated to my father. He died in the year I started writing it. He was not an intellectual and he worked in a factory, but he read widely and loved politics. When I went to university in 1980, he bought me the Clarendon edition of John Lockes Essay Concerning Human Understanding, edited by P.H. Nidditch. He could have bought me a cheap version. I treasure that book. This one is for him.

CHAPTER |

Introduction

Conflict, war, revolution and the character of politics

We live in interesting times! Apocryphally, this is a Chinese curse, although there is little evidence that the English version, ‘May you live in interesting times, matches any precise Chinese aphorism. Be that as it may, the times we live in are interesting, in that many very recent political preconceptions and trends of history are being turned on their heads, and this is happening in both confusing and troubling ways, the victims and beneficiaries of which are unclear. When Francis Fukuyama published his famous article “The End of History’ in 1989, it coincided with the collapse of the USSR, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War. Although too much triumphalism has been unfairly attributed to Fukuyama’s subtle argument, the title certainly chimed with the age. It was also pretty much clear to everyone who the beneficiaries and losers of that historical moment were. Globalisation (and U.S. military power) defeated ‘really existing socialism, and with the subsequent first Gulf War in 1991 the western military and economic order looked as if it had the blessing of history. This, coupled with what is often called the ‘great moderation, the period of stable and steady economic growth in western developed economies unleashed by economic deregulation and globalised trade during the 1990s and the early 2000s, further vindicated globalised finance and the ‘Washington consensus’ on growth - an economic policy stance that is called globalisation by its supporters and neo-liberalism by its critics. In Europe and the European Union, many of the more enthusiastic EU backers saw a move

Kelly, Paul. 2022. Conflict, war and revolution: The problem of politics in international political thought. London: LSE Press, pp. 1-28.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.31389/lsepress.cwr.a License: CC BY.

away from the model of nation states as the ‘end of history’ to a post-state order modelled on closer cooperation and integration: again. Although his argument is more subtle and qualified than this, we can see this optimism in the great German social and political philosopher Jürgen Habermas (Habermas 1998; 2005). Books were being written about the rise of ‘cosmopolitan’ democracy, world politics and the new political configurations needed to govern this new order.

Yet all was not quite what it seemed. The terrible events of 11 September 2001 unleashed the most significant attack on the continental USA in its history when a group of suicide bombers weaponised domestic airliners to bring down the World Trade Center in New York City and attack the Pentagon, headquarters of the U.S. Department of Defense. An essentially low-technology attack, by a previously little-known terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, had challenged the most technologically sophisticated military ever seen in history. The U.S.- led response in Afghanistan (where the Taliban gave succour to Al-Qaeda) and then Iraq (where Saddam Hussein did not) unleashed nearly two decades of struggle in the Middle East. A nuclear-armed USSR was replaced as the dominant enemy of ‘the west’ by an asymmetrical struggle against a jihadist enemy indifferent to the fear of death and which had no prospect of victory in any conventional sense. Al-Qaeda is not a military structure with a territory, government or a return address.

Other events quickly followed the triumph of neo-liberal globalism and the rise of global terrorism, with Al-Qaeda and then more recently ISIS/Daesh, ensuring that international affairs became even more ‘interesting’ and urgent. These included the global financial crash in 2007-2008, the rise of China as the default backer of the global financial order (as the largest holder of U.S. debt), the subsequent rise of populism in the U.S. and Europe with the election of a protectionist and nationalist President Trump, and the vote by the UK (one of the largest and most important economic and political players in the European Union) to leave the EU following a domestic referendum (Brexit). The global institutions considered necessary for a stable world order, and which had delivered the great moderation, were now seen to be lacking political legitimacy. They faced a concerted backlash from political forces on a scale that had not been seen since the 1930s, and which threatened the domestic political structures of states that were supposed to be exemplars of democratic stability.

This complex pattern of events spanning four decades thus saw the triumph of the west and the rise of the east; the triumph of globalisation and the resurgence of protectionism and economic nationalism; the end of the Cold War and the launch of the global War on Terror. The pace of change has been bewildering even in a new century that has seen unprecedented transformations in human affairs (to 2021). This shift from an historical trajectory of liberal dominance and global order might seem challenging, and it is, but is it unique? Or is it not just a case of history - which perhaps naively we thought had ended - forcing its way back onto the agenda? International affairs and the thinking about it have always fluctuated between periods of progressive optimism and revolution, retrenchment and irredentism. Whilst there remains much about which we should remain optimistic, the challenges of the present, and the echoes of past crises, raise questions about the ways in which we think about and frame political action and agency, and especially about the adequacy of the dominant paradigms of international political thinking.

In this book, in a timeframe spanning the ancient world to the present, I examine the sources of some of those intellectual paradigms by exploring the ideas of a number of significant figures who illuminate ways of thinking about the challenges of politics and the prevalence of crisis and conflict. By studying 10 paradigmatic thinkers - Thucydides, Augustine, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Clausewitz, Lenin and Mao, and Carl Schmitt - I examine important debates in international political thought. The particular focus here is on those who wish to challenge or qualify the hope of redemption and order in human affairs by overcoming politics, versus thinkers who address the ineradicable necessity and challenges of politics, war and conflict. This may sometimes look like a ‘history’ of what international theorists and international relations scholars refer to as a tradition of realism, but my purpose is different.

Positing traditions such as realism already presupposes an answer to the question of how to read these thinkers and assumes that they conform to a single narrative (cf. Doyle 1997), but this is a narrowly circumscribed canvass. This book sets these key thinkers in a wider context, using them to identify and explore different ways of conceiving of the activity of politics as an autonomous way of acting in the world. The concept of realism falls within that domain because some of the thinkers discussed have been seen by some scholars as adherents of versions of this view. But, as we shall see, describing all these thinkers as ‘realist’ in the sense used either by international relations or by international political theory raises questions about the value and scope of that concept (see Chapter 11 for more on this).

The other reason this book is not a simple ‘history’ is that it does not aim to be comprehensive. There are clearly other ways of conceiving of international politics, and other narratives that may better explain the development of doctrines in the western tradition and beyond. To write such a comprehensive overview would be a considerably longer book, and it would also raise questions about the idea of a single history, issues that I mostly deliberately avoid (but see chapter 11). It is sufficient for this book to present a canon of thinkers whose ideas and approaches inform and illuminate some of the central questions of international politics and its contemporary challenges.

Precisely because it paints on such a large canvas, international political thought is a peculiarly valuable approach to understanding some of the most important questions about politics. It also leaves open precisely the sorts of questions, concepts and approaches that the 10 major thinkers here explored. They all tackled fundamental questions about the nature of political activity and the vehicles through which political agency is exercised at different times and places - without privileging the development or priority of any particular mode of organisation, whether polis, empire, principality, multitude, state, nation, class or nomos.

The perspective of international theory helps transcend the narrow confines of domestic politics as the distribution of ‘who gets what, where, when and how’ (Lasswell 1936). Instead, it focuses attention on what might be called a meta-level where the real and fundamental work of delineating political agency takes place. In some standard introductions to political thinking, the explanation begins with human actors, then moves up to the state or political community level, and terminates with the way those communities interact in the international realm. This is the model of the domestic and the international so fundamental to standard international relations theory, but it is also commonplace in political theory courses.

Focusing on international theory allows one to look at the bigger picture out of which much domestic politics emerges. It does not presuppose the primacy of domestic politics and see the international as a problematic remainder. Instead, it conceives of the challenges of the international realm as, if not prior or autonomous, then at least co-present with the challenge of delimiting political communities and sites of political agency. It is not surprising that much political theory and philosophy regards the perspective of international theory as secondary or an afterthought. That is indeed the legacy of Hobbes’s work on political thought and international relations, a legacy that can be seen echoed in the work of the most important late 20th-century political philosopher, John Rawls. But this was clearly not the view of Augustine and Machiavelli, to take only two examples, for whom this distinction between domestic and international would have made no sense.

The narrative in this book deliberately eschews the term ‘history’ because it does not attempt to provide an overview of all the approaches one may find in international political thought courses. Indeed, if one refers back to my list of modes of organisation of political agency above, I deliberately left out organising categories such as the individual, society or economy, all of which would feature in some way in a comprehensive account of international political thought in the western canon. This choice is perhaps controversial, but it is a deliberate attempt to range beyond reductive approaches that reduce politics to morality, or to the economy and society. Too much contemporary thinking about our current global predicament suggests that there is a progressive unfolding of order that culminates in the triumph of the modern Westphalian state system and its international institutions alongside a globalised market economy. These approaches to international politics privilege the individual person as a right-holder or bearer of a unique ethical dignity, or as an individual utility maximiser with a clear preference order. In much academic debate and in much political theory and science, this conception of the person has been taken to be a true account of moral and economic agency, and as the basis of all other political arrangements and groups. This has led to the prevalence of an unchallenged but apolitical cosmopolitanism that has marginalised some of the most fundamental challenges facing contemporary politics.

In this book, I do not seek to reject individualism or cosmopolitanism as systems of value. Indeed, elsewhere I have written to endorse a version of this perspective as liberal-egalitarianism (Kelly 2005). But in the current climate, with challenges to the conception of agency that underpins such an approach, I am more interested in the challenges to that world view that are arguably returning to centre stage. This individualistic and cosmopolitan view of the domain of the political has not only shaped contemporary political science and international relations. It has also done so to the exclusion of perspectives that force us to confront different ways of doing politics, exercising power, force and violence, and conceiving of the goals of political activity and its fundamental purpose. This book attempts instead to introduce political thinking and international political theory without indirectly presupposing that political agency and institutions must have a settled character and structure that conform to moral individualism and converge on liberal constitutionalism as the best form of political organisation.

My purpose is to let a set of thinkers speak in their own voices rather than reducing them to a settled historical and cultural narrative, or to preestablished traditions such as realism, or ideologies such as liberalism. So, the linking narrative here must be abstract and general and stay at a high level. Nevertheless, there are important linkages between the chapters that explain the juxtaposition of these particular thinkers, as opposed to an alternative canon or narrative. All of them take as fundamental the role of violence, conflict and coercion. Violence and conflict are either the perennial experience of humanity beneath the thin veneer of civilisation or an aspect of human experience that morality and society attempt to discipline and obscure but which remains the basic stuff of political action and agency. For others still, these experiences are characteristic of life beyond the protections offered by state sovereignty in the anarchic world of international or interstate politics. Some of the thinkers conceive of violence as an ineradicable problem. For others, violence is morally ambiguous as a feature of experience that can be manipulated and channelled to achieve different ends and goals. We tend to think of both violence and conflict as bad things that must be avoided or mitigated. But at a more fundamental level one might also argue that these are merely natural forces that we can condemn under some descriptions whilst also praise under others. After all, is it not the case that order entails coercion (for all except anarchists), as indeed does the law - as indeed (if we follow St Augustine) does peace? Finally, under the headings of war and revolution we find approaches to politics that channel violence into pursuing goals that cannot be achieved by negotiation, deliberation and compromise. In the case of revolution, they use violence to remove the existing order so as to (in theory) make way for a world beyond the violence and coercion of politics.

Discussing and contrasting these paradigmatic thinkers provides a theoretical introduction to international political theory. But what precisely is international political theory and how, if at all, does it differ from the study of international relations, and its sub-division international relations theory, or from the study of the history of political thought? International relations theory and the history of political thought are recognised academic activities. So it is important to show that international political theory is not simply a confused renaming of an already-familiar activity, or a more primitive and less clearly defined version of academic sub-divisions. In the next two sections I make a substantial argument in favour of defending international political theory and distinguishing it from the history of political thought. But, before turning to that argument, I want to distinguish international political theory from international relations theory.

The distinction between international relations theory and international political theory developed over the last few decades as a consequence of the disciplinary development of international relations on the one hand and the growth of normative political theory and applied ethics in political science and philosophy on the other. Chris Brown provided the most compelling account of how international political theory separated out from mainstream international relations theory. He linked it to the development in social science of a dominant turn towards positivism, which is an explanatory form of enquiry assuming that the facts or objects of study are stable and can be examined in ways analogous to the natural sciences (Brown 2015; Brown and Eckersley 2018). This positivist turn is exemplified in the application of formal modelling and economistic forms of theorising (such as rational choice theory) to traditional questions of national and state interaction and bargaining, as illustrated by leading theorists such as Kenneth Waltz (Waltz 1979). According to Brown, international political theorists are authors who see this as an unfortunate departure from humanistic approaches to the study of international relations that characterised its early origins as a distinct form of enquiry.

However, the issue is not just a war of methods between quantitative and formal theory against qualitative or historical approaches. It also relates to the point and style of international relations arguments. The turn to positivism and the primacy of explanation at the expense of normative and prescriptive arguments coincided with a resurgence of normative arguments in political theory and applied ethics under the influence of major theorists such as John Rawls, Michael Walzer and Peter Singer (Forrester 2019). These thinkers launched debates or rekindled questions about distributive justice and state legitimacy, the justification of war and what obligations we owe to distant others in the face of famine or global poverty. All of these questions have an element that links them to the familiar intellectual territory of traditional international relations theory. But they also depart from it because they either challenge its apparent statist assumptions or attempt to provide normative and prescriptive accounts for what states or other international agents ought to do, irrespective of what they may be likely to do in relation to their interests. It is often the case that disciplinary development happens because of the recognition that something interesting and intellectually exiting was happening elsewhere, just beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries - see, for example, the way in which modern behavioural economics has turned to experimental psychology. That is also true with the development of international political theory. Yet, at the same time there is not simply a turn to familiar normative political thought, which is often poorly informed about the reality of international affairs and politics. It is precisely a critical engagement with normative and prescriptive arguments about the international domain that makes the study of international political theory important and vital. It also explains the particular selection of paradigmatic thinkers in this book. International political theory does not merely dismiss, or wilfully overlook, normative and prescriptive arguments as methodologically primitive, in the way it claims that standard international relations theory perhaps does. Rather, it brings them back to the forefront of engagement with the sorts of challenges that shape and unsettle our times. In so doing, international political theory also raises questions about the vocabulary, source and scope of approaches, languages and concepts - precisely what this book considers.

Texts, contexts, thoughts or thinkers?

Studying the work of groups of thinkers from the past is often referred to as creating a canon. The approach has been a recognisable part of the study of politics since the emergence of the discipline of political science in the late 19th century (Boucher 1985; Kelly 1999). For most of that time, a series of great thinkers were gathered together to illustrate the dominant story of the emergence of the modern state. Reflecting on those past thinkers was part of a forwardlooking activity that suggested arguments, principles and institutional models that could then be contrasted with current developments - all with the purpose of legitimating or improving the contemporary liberal state system. Just as in early international relations, many arguments based on this kind of enquiry were both prescriptive and normative. As the modern discipline of political science developed in the post-World War II period, the importance of political thought gave way to the study of political behaviour, political institutions and the development of comparative politics. The broad and eclectic study of political thinkers came to seem intellectually crude as it either lacked the robustness of a method or else followed the dictum of the 19th-century Cambridge constitutional historian EW. Maitland that political science is ‘either history or humbug’ The new field had a method but it was one that already had an intellectual home in the discipline of history. For radical critics of the modern state, history also enabled the critique of the present by showing how contemporary political values and institutions were tainted by their origins in colonialism or patriarchy. With the subsequent development of normative political theory (exemplified by Rawls, Walzer and Singer), the study of past political ideas seemed a distraction. We should instead be ‘doing our thinking for ourselves, to paraphrase Brian Barry, one of the most uncompromising of British normative political theorists (Barry 1965; Forrester 2019).

In this context, the revolution in the methodology of the history of political thought associated with Quentin Skinner and his colleagues claimed the whole terrain of past political thought for historians of thought. In magisterial essays - including ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’ (Skinner 1969) and his now-classic two-volume study The Foundations of Modern Political Theory (Skinner 1978), he set a benchmark for any credible history of political ideas and deprecated any alternative uses of ‘historical’ texts for studying political or international political thinking. Skinner’s 1969 article provides a forceful criticism of both textualism and contextualism as appropriate objects of enquiries.

In his view, textualists are guilty of the mythology of coherence by claiming that a single book or text is the appropriate object of enquiry. This raises general questions about the appropriateness of reducing a writer’s thought to a specific work, especially when many writers (including a number in this book) author a number of works. Not least amongst these questions is that about the coherence between earlier and later work. In the case of Thucydides, I focus on a single authoritative text, but by contrast both Machiavelli and Rousseau developed their arguments over a number of very different books. Does textualism impose a mythical uniformity across very distinct arguments?