The Anti-Pelagian Imagination in Political Theory and International Relations
Dealing in Darkness

This volume draws together some of the key works of Nicholas Rengger, focusing on the theme of the 'anti-Pelagian imagination' in political theory and international relations.

Rengger frames the collection with a detailed introduction that sketches out this 'imagination', its origins and character, and puts the chapters that follow into context with the work of other theorists, including Bull, Connolly, Gray, Strauss, Elshtain and Kant. The volume concludes with an epilogue contrasting two different ways of reading this sensibility and offering reasons for supposing one is preferable to the other.

Updating and expanding on ideas from work over the course of the last sixteen years, this collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations theory, political thought and political philosophy.

Preface

Acknowledgements

1. Introduction. Dealing in Darkness? Varieties of Modern Anti-Pelagianism
2. Progress: Kant, Mendelsohn and the Very Idea
3. Bull: A Double Vision?
4. Remember the Aeneid: (And Beware Greek Gifts
5. Human Rights: Emancipation or Incarceration?
6. Dystopic Liberalism: Realism Tamed or Liberalism Betrayed?
7. Progress With Price?
8. Connolly: Ambiguous Pluralism
9. Gray: The End(s) of Progress?
10. Strauss: The impossibility of justice
11. Elshtain 1: Anti-Pelagian or not?
12. Elshtain 2: Violence and the Two Sovereigns
13. Post-Secularism: Metaphysical not Political?
14. Epilogue: Tragedy or Scepticism

Nicholas Rengger is Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at St Andrews and a member of the Academia Europaea. He has held visiting appointments at Oxford, LSE and the University of Southern California and from 2011–14 was a Global Ethics Fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs, New York.