Our moment of geopolitical instability and realignment has, at least, had the collateral effect of a renewed interest in the foundational questions of justice in international relations, and major projects of retrieval in the work of politics prior to, or at the origin, of what we today call liberal internationalism. There is a widespread feeling—a “vibe shift” as the very online say—that the old answers need to be refreshed or even replaced with new ideas of history and justice more fit for the times, more alert to our era of poli-crisis in climate, trade, identity, technology, and war. This sense of global crisis can fuel a deep pessimism, one compounded by what Charles Taylor calls a “pitiless ingratitude toward the past” which imagines our current crisis as totally unlike anything ever experienced in history. And in some respects, such as multipolar nuclear deterrence, these times are unprecedented. But in a much more fundamental sense, they are not.  

That is the good news that Emily Lange delivers in her retrieval of Martin Wight in The Deeper Revolution. Any work that presses our political imaginations back into history is welcome, but Lange’s work is especially so for her recovery of Wight’s pathbreaking international theory through which she offers constructive applications for today. Lange seeks not only to “reconstruct” but also “develop, elaborate, and expand Wight’s theory of international history” as Daniel Philpott writes in the Foreword. 

Lange’s small autobiographic encounter with Wight is illustrative. While swimming in the waters of secularism for her politics degrees, she stumbled upon Wight’s magnificent corpus, which offered both historically substantial and theologically rich deconstructions of the international system. Wight offered her a route into international relations through rather than despite history and theology, and in so doing enabled an analysis far more convicting and clarifying than even the trendiest poststructural theory.  

So, this is a book in line with the project of Daniel Philpott’s own Revolutions in Sovereignty. She quotes him as a starting point that revolutions in sovereignty occurred “from prior revolutions in ideas about justice and political authority” (47). But it is also attuned to newer projects like William Bain’s Political Theology of International Order. In her project, Wight becomes our entry for re-exploring the lost religious and historical foundations of international relations.  

I am married to a theologian, so it is always of interest that we both spend a great deal of our time talking about doctrine. Hers, of course, of the theological kind—Christology, Eschatology, so on—mine of the political kind—Monroe Doctrine, Truman Doctrine, Nuclear Doctrine, the list goes on. Lange’s Wightian argument is that this is not simply an accident of history; an archaic leftover from more religious times. It is in fact the case that all doctrinal revolutions in politics are made possible by prior revolutions in religious or theological doctrine. “A doctrinal conflagration,” she argues, “is always an international revolution” (13). 

She lays out a practical roadmap to this inquiry in four phases and four causes of “doctrinal conflagration”:  

1. A calm and stable international society, with a specific dominant doctrine.  

2. A challenge to the status quo. 

3. A violent clash between challenger doctrine and the dominant doctrine.  

4. A return to stability with a different dominant political doctrine. 

Wight identifies three such conflagrations: The Reformation, the French Revolution, and the Russian Revolution. Lange retrieves and expands those arguments and then uses that framework to test whether the American Revolution itself would qualify under Wight’s four-part model (she argues it would not). Of special interest is the care she takes in connecting the (doctrinal) religious/philosophical revolutions to the (doctrinal) political revolutions. These are not causally uncomplicated, but the historical arguments are serious and convincing. Here we see part of the reason why Wight, foremost a historian, is so constructive to retrieve.  

Lange’s final application, and most interesting for the purpose of this review, is to take Wight’s analysis and project it onto not an historical case but a contemporary one: the current fate of liberal internationalism. This picks up the story where Wight left it. 

What follows is a creative and faithful application of Martin Wight. She summarizes the “American led liberal internationalism” as “set within a secular humanist worldview” (the doctrinal revolution). Lange concludes that such secular humanism tends to laicize the church and state (306) and that its excesses “do not only undermine liberal democracy but endanger all planetary life” (310), an argument reminiscent of Wight’s deep concern over “the fundamental problem of spiritual apostasy” (27) in our time. Wight is not often considered a Christian Realist, particularly as compared with friends like Hebert Butterfield; although he shared much theology with Christian Realists, including the doctrine of original sin, he was totally unwilling to endorse the proximate nature of justice which an Augustinian inspired Realism required. We recall, conclusively, that he was a conscientious objector to the Second World War (6). 

What I think this shows us is a certain idealism latent in Martin Wight. I mean this in two respects. 

First, Wight tends to reject tradeoffs or proximate judgements which include, in his language, an alliance with apostasy. This is consistent with his famous essay on “The Church, Russia, and the West” (1948) in which he offers a theological and historical argument for the apostasy of both Russian communism and Western liberal capitalism. It is a convicting and powerful address. But what Wight does not offer is a relative sense of moral judgement: it is true, as a matter of evidence, that no government or state is just in the absolute sense of the term. But surely it is also true that some governments or states are more just than others? There can be no such thing as a just government in the same idealist fashion in which there can be no such thing as a just war: there are only prudential, proximate judgements to be made. These things are called just compared to, relative to, the alternatives, not because they are imagined as the picture of theological rightness in the new heavens and the new earth. On such a basis no war could ever be just, a traditional conviction of pacifism, and which more or less seems to be Wight’s position. 

Second, this relates to idealism (or idea-ism) in another respect: the overemphasis on the role of ideas and (religious) doctrines in the practice of politics. The intellectual history in Lange’s book is robust, but at times does feel somewhat compressed. On liberalism, Kant, Wilson, and Tocqueville recur, but one is left to wonder to what degree these should be considered broadly representative of the tradition or a tradition of doctrine in liberalism. There are also, it must be said, substantial points of tension within any tradition, such that to conclude Liberalism is set within “a secular humanist worldview” might not be entirely representative. I am left to wonder about Catholic philosophers like Jacques Maritain and his work on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), who said the same year as Wight’s church address of human rights that “we all agree on these rights provided nobody asks us why.” That, too, was a kind of Catholic-liberal democracy. I would not call Maritain a secular humanist. 

I raise this not just to nitpick over the dumpster fires of liberal vs. post-liberal debate, but because while ideas, including religious ideas, certainly have consequences, it is also true that ideas are often lagging rather than leading indicators. Yuval Levin raises this important point in his new book American Covenant, in which he argues that while it’s possible to go through Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau to understand liberalism, one could more constructively think of liberalism as a tradition of embodied political practices, developed organically in places like England and the Netherlands. The theory of liberalism, in Levin’s argument, is a lagging indicator that explains the practices already afoot, at least implicitly. Magna Carta comes along far before Locke. The American Constitution is itself a better snapshot of practical liberalism than graduate seminars in Rawls. Liberal Internationalism is better captured in the UDHR than in the theory train that followed.

Here are how these two complaints about idealism connect: there is an intellectual pessimism in Wight that seems to follow from his argument that ideas produce necessary consequences, even in their worst forms. This is a familiar post-liberal kind of argument, and Lange rightly connects Wight to some of these thinkers, like Patrick Deneen. But is an idea itself morally judged on its most exaggerated form? It would seem that liberalism as a tradition of political practice should actually have a special concern for this, as a tradition defined by limitations on political power, ideological crusades among them. Wight’s idealism seems to preclude him from concluding that it is precisely limitations—checks, balances, transparency, accountability, responsibility—on the competing apostasies of political power that give some proximate form of justice the best odds of emerging. Liberalism read as Levin argues renders us a tradition that feels more like Deuteronomy 17 than Rousseau’s Social Contract. 

These are complaints about Wight. It is a credit to Lange that she has written such a forceful and creative adaption on him that immerses us in his arguments so seamlessly. But I cannot shake the feeling that she agrees with me, not Wight. As Lange describes the emerging new world order, she does not seem to share Wight’s idealist moral equivalency of competing powers. Yes, it is true, that the Beijing Consensus, Russiky Mir, and American-led liberal internationalism offer a “clash of rival apostasies,” but it would take a special cloistering in theory seminars to imagine these were, on balance, morally equivalent visions of international justice. This is not because of the moral superiority of the American people. A more Christian Realist account would say that it is because the American founding, and that very American-led order itself, have within them not only “secular humanism” but also a degree of Old Testament wisdom regarding how justice ought to be amid covenantal law and limitations on political power. Such a conclusion, while admittedly not idealist, and for that reason perhaps not very Wightian, offers us more hope than revolution, and a more constructive guide than critical histories of apostasy. Wight is a giant of international theory from whom there is so much to be learned. But as a guide for our current global moment, we need not only the theological deconstructions of the idealists and pacifists, but also the courageous, proximate work of the Augustinians.