ALEXANDER HAMILTON (1757–1804), American statesman and first secretary of the treasury in the federal government established by the constitution of 1789. With James Madison and John Jay, Hamilton authored the series of articles, collectively known as The Federalist (1787–8), exploring and defending the republican principles underlying this constitution. When war broke out between Britain and France after the revolution in France in 1789, Hamilton argued that the new American nation should remain neutral. In Letters of Pacificus (1793), he disputes the popular view that the United States should side with France, arguing that the national interest must come before sympathy with the French as fellow revolutionaries against monarchical rule.

From Letters of Pacificus

France, at the time of issuing the proclamation, was engaged in war with a considerable part of Europe, and likely to be embroiled with almost all the rest, without a single ally in that quarter of the globe.

In such a situation, it is evident, that however she may be able to defend herself at home, of which her factions and internal agitations furnish the only serious doubt, she cannot make external efforts in any degree proportioned to those which can be made against her.

This state of things alone discharges the United States from an obligation to embark in her quarrel.

It is known, that we are wholly destitute of naval force. France, with all the great maritime powers united against her, is unable to supply this deficiency.

DESIDERIUS ERASMUS (1466–1536), Dutch humanist, theologian, and religious reformer. Like other Christian humanists, Erasmus aspired to recapture the spirit of early Christianity by placing the teachings of scripture and of the early church fathers above those of Aquinas and the medieval scholastic tradition. Unlike Luther, however, Erasmus sought to preserve the unity of Christianity by reconciling Protestant ideas with those of the Roman church. His essay on the adage dulce bellum inexpertis, “war is sweet to those who have not tried it,” may be read as a defense of pacifism against the Thomistic doctrine of just war.

From “Dulce Bellum Inexpertis”

Among the choicest proverbs, and widely used in literature, is the adage ‘war is sweet to those who have not tried it.’ Vegetius uses it thus, in his book on the Art of War, III, chapter XIV, ‘Do not be too confident, if a new recruit hankers after war, for it is to the inexperienced that fighting is sweet.’ There is a quotation from Pindar: ‘War is sweet to those who have not tried it, but anyone who knows what it is is horrified beyond measure if he should meet it.’

There are some things in the affairs of men, fraught with dangers and evils of which one can have no idea until one has put them to the test.

JOHN of Paris (c. 1250–1306), an independent-minded theologian, philosopher, and priest in the Dominican order. John's promising career as a teacher of philosophy at the University of Paris was derailed when he was denounced to the authorities for defending the then unorthodox views of Thomas Aquinas. Restored to his position in 1300, he was again embroiled in controversy when he defended the claims the French crown in its conflict with the papacy over the king's right to regulate the church in France. Arguing that royal authority is not derived from that of the church, John concluded that the king was superior to the pope in temporal matters within the realm. His arguments for monarchical authority against the claims of the church strengthened the position of all monarchs against both pope and emperor.

From On Royal and Papal Power

What royal government is and whence it had its origins

In the first place, it is to be understood that a kingdom can be defined thus: a kingdom is the perfected government of a multitude by one person for the sake of the common good.

In connection with this definition, ‘government’ is taken to be the genus, while ‘multitude’ is added in order to differentiate it from government in which each person governs himself, whether by natural instinct (in the manner of brute animals) or by one's own reason (in the case of those who lead a solitary life).

THUCYDIDES, who simply refers to himself as “an Athenian,” was born around the fifties of the fifth century bce. He was possibly of royal Thracian descent – he also had political influence in Thrace and business interests there – and was certainly an aristocrat. We know little about his life with any certainty, save what he himself tells us in his History. He served as an Athenian military commander in 424 (and may have done so earlier) but was defeated by the great Spartan general Brasidas, and was sent into exile for a period as a result. The latter half of his life is largely unknown to us, although it is likely he died around the end of the century or possibly (according to some recent research) a little into the 390s. By his own account he began writing his History when the war between the Athenians and the Spartans began, convinced that it would be a unique event and that thus his record of it would be, as he suggests, “a possession for all times.”

From History of the Peloponnesian War

Introduction

However, I do not think that one will be far wrong in accepting the conclusions I have reached from the evidence which I have put forward. It is better evidence than that of the poets, who exaggerate the importance of their themes, or of the prose chroniclers, who are less interested in telling the truth than in catching the attention of their public, whose authorities cannot be checked, and whose subject-matter, owing to the passage of time, is mostly lost in the unreliable streams of mythology.

ARISTOTLE was born in Stagira, in northern Greece, in 384 bce. His father, Nichomachus, was court physician to Amyntas III, king of Macedon, and thus Aristotle was brought up mainly in Macedonia. At seventeen, however, Aristotle was sent to Athens, the cultural centre of the Greek world, to pursue his education. Very quickly he became primarily associated with Plato's Academy, where he remained for more than twenty years. Plato himself was nearly sixty when Aristotle joined the Academy yet he clearly recognized the young man's precocity and very soon Aristotle became a favored pupil – and leading disciple. However, on Plato's death in 347 bce Aristotle left Athens. It is often supposed he left Athens because Plato's nephew, Speusippus, was appointed Scholarch – head of the Academy – when he thought the position should have gone to him. However, as a metic – a non-Athenian-born resident of Athens – Aristotle could not own property in Athens and since the buildings and possessions of the Academy were transferred to Speusippus as well as the headship, it is unlikely that Aristotle had any expectations in that regard. By all accounts, he also got on well with Speussipus, at least personally. In any event, there were more personal reasons for leaving Athens. This was the time when Philip II of Macedon was gradually bringing all of Greece under the Macedonian sphere of influence and anyone with a strong Macedonian connection was likely to be suspect, especially in Athens.

MOSES MAIMONIDES – or to give him his Jewish name, Moshe ben Maimon – was born in Cordoba in Spain in 1135 ce. His father, himself a Jewish scholar of considerable repute, educated him to begin with, though he also studied philosophy and the natural sciences with local Muslim scholars. After having to flee Cordoba in 1148, the family settled in Fez in 1160 where Maimonides continued his studies. However, persecution forced them to flee again in 1165. Eventually settling in Old Cairo, Maimonides embarked upon a career as a physician, while continuing to write in various fields, finally serving as court physician to the great Muslim leader Saladin. He was also, however, a leading member of the Jewish community and much of his time was taken up in responding to questions from the wider Jewish Diaspora. Maimonides published in many areas of thought, although perhaps his most celebrated text is the Guide to the Perplexed, an attempt to address the challenge posed by Greek thought to Jewish faith. He also wrote a small treatise on Logic (excerpted here) which gives a clear statement of how he saw the character of the political and international realms. He died in Cairo in 1204.

From Logic

Political science

Political science falls into four parts: first, the individual man's governance of himself; second, the governance of the household; third, the governance of the city; and fourth, the governance of the large nation or of the nations.

The classical distinction between civilization and barbarism is replaced in medieval Europe by a religious dichotomy dividing Christians from non-Christians. The distinctions are cultural, but where the cultures they privilege are spatially bounded these distinctions can be interpreted geographically. The earliest Christians were scattered and oppressed, their faith divorced from the temporal world and therefore from its rulers and their territories. But as Christians grew more numerous and rulers were converted, Christianity came to be understood not only as a faith but as a realm of Christians and their lands. The church itself was organized into territorially defined bishoprics and Christian kingdoms distinguished collectively from the outer wilderness of paganism. With the expansion of Islam in the seventh, eight, and ninth centuries, Christian communities in Asia Minor, Persia, and Africa were destroyed or (as in the case of the Ethiopian church) cut off from European Christianity. The threat posed by Islam to Christian communities everywhere probably reinforced the developing sense of Christian unity (Hay, 1968: 24). By the high middle ages there had emerged the idea of a concrete Christian society: the spiritually defined, ecclesiastically organized, and geographically delimited Christendom.

One concern of medieval Christian thinkers is to articulate the laws governing this society, a problem made difficult by the diversity of kinds of law recognized within it. In treating what we have come to call international relations, these thinkers articulate principles to guide Christian princes in their relations with one another and, occasionally, with non-Christians.

ABU NASR MUHAMMAD AL-FARABI was born in Transoxania around the year 870 ce. Although we do not know much for certain about his life, we do know that as a young man he studied in Khorsan and Baghdad, two major centers of learning in the Islamic world and it was in the latter city that he established his reputation as a writer. Although based there for much of his life, he traveled widely to other major centers of Islamic civilization, for example, Aleppo and Damascus in Syria and also Egypt. He was versatile in many areas of study and although the claim that he could speak seventy languages is hardly likely there is no reason to doubt the breadth and range of his learning. His most famous political works are usually called The Political Regime and The Virtuous City, though he also wrote many influential commentaries on ancient texts such as Plato's Laws. He was the first major Islamic thinker to found a “school” and was a major source of the manner in which Islamic civilization absorbed and adapted Greek thought. He died, at the age of eighty, in Damascus, loaded with honors.

From The Political Regime

Man belongs to the species that cannot accomplish their necessary affairs or achieve their best state, except through the association of many groups of them in a single dwelling-place. Some human societies are large, others are of a medium size, still others are small.

CHARLES DE SECONDAT, BARON DE LA BREDE ET DE MONTESQUIEU, was born in 1689. His life and career were fairly normal for a French aristocrat of his time, save that he was, and remained, a staunch enthusiast for freedom and an equally staunch opponent of despotism. After a good education locally, Montesquieu went to the University of Bordeaux to study law, graduating after three years and then moving to Paris to continue his studies. In 1713, on his father's death, Montesquieu returned to Bordeaux to take up his duties on his estates and in 1716 he became, on his uncle's death, President of the Parlement of Bordeaux. He was thus a local nobleman of considerable consequence with wide commercial and landowning interests, including a special interest in his vineyards and the international trade in wine. His intellectual interests remained, however. On his return to Bordeaux, he had been elected to the Academy at Bordeaux and remained active in it for the rest of his life. His first major work, Persian Letters, was published anonymously in 1721 and was a biting satire on the political and ecclesiastical conditions in Europe in general and France in particular. It was a great success and afterwards Montesquieu began to move in French and European literary circles, becoming a regular in the salon of Madame Lambert and attending the Club de l'entresol, which featured detailed discussion of political and international affairs and amongst whose members was the Abbé de Saint-Pierre.

Although a society of states has been in the making in Europe since at least the fifteenth century, the idea of a distinct body of law springing from and regulating this society remained hazy throughout the early modern period. The term “international law” (and cognate expressions in other languages) did not come into general use until the nineteenth century. Even then, the rules governing international relations were sometimes referred to as the “public law of Europe.” But most writers clung to the antiquated and equivocal term “law of nations” (ius gentium, droit des gens, Völkerrecht, etc.), struggling to describe new modes of diplomacy using a conceptual vocabulary inherited from ancient Rome and medieval Christendom.

The modern debate over whether a law-governed order is possible in a world of sovereign states reflects the growing importance of individualism. Theorists who base civil law on individual interests argue that the sole purpose of government is to protect the lives and property of its subjects. For some, this argument points toward constitutional government and the protection of individual rights. To others it suggests an instrumental conception of government in which laws are tools of rather than constraints on policy. Such a conception threatens individual rights by undermining the laws that define and protect them.

In its most extreme versions, individualism regards human beings as appetitive creatures, driven, in the absence of a superior earthly power, to be their own law in matters affecting their survival.

FRIEDRICH VON GENTZ (1764–1832), Prussian diplomat and advocate for international cooperation to resist the French revolution and the Napoleonic expansion that followed it. Working closely with the Austrian chancellor, Metternich, Gentz played a prominent role in the Congress of Vienna, which brought the Napoleonic wars to an end. In his essay on the European balance of power (1806), Gentz anticipated the post-war system in which the balance operates to maintain the equal rights of states as members of an international society. By enforcing international law, the balance of power functions in international society in a way analogous to the judicial and executive power within a state.

From “The True Concept of a Balance of Power”

What is usually termed a balance of power is that constitution which exists among neighbouring states more or less connected with each other, by virtue of which none of them can violate the independence or the essential rights of another without effective resistance from some quarter and consequent danger to itself.

Many misconceptions have arisen as a result of the similarity with physical objects upon which the term was based. It has been supposed that those who saw in the balance of power the basis of an association of states were aiming at the most complete equality, or equalization, of power possible, and were demanding that the various states of an area which is politically united should be most precisely measured, weighed and rounded off, one against the other, in respect of size, population, wealth, resources, etc.

The emergence of new ideas on state and nation in the early years of the nineteenth century cannot be understood in isolation from the socio-economic changes which were also characteristic of that era. The term “industrial revolution” is no longer widely used by economic historians who, today, point to the slow and uneven nature of change in the period, but, nonetheless, it can hardly be denied that major changes were taking place in the productive capacities of societies and the lives of ordinary people. First the factory system and the application of steam power to production, then, later in the nineteenth century, industrialism and mass production proper, transformed, directly or indirectly, the lives of most of the inhabitants of the planet. Part of this “Great Transformation” involved increasing importance for trade and international financial transactions (Polanyi, 1975). Whereas before the nineteenth century foreign trade in bulk goods such as foodstuffs rarely accounted for more than a small percentage of domestic consumption, by 1900 a full-scale international division of labor had been established, with a number of countries specializing in manufacturing products and no longer capable of feeding themselves without imports. That this became a possibility reflected the revolution in transportation and communication during the period, in particular the development of the electric telegraph, the steam ship, and techniques of refrigeration.

PLATO was born around the year 428 bce, the scion of a distinguished and Aristocratic Athenian family with known and pronounced anti-democratic sympathies and was expected eventually to play a part in oligarchic politics himself. However, as he himself tells it (in his Seventh Letter, reprinted here), his meeting with Socrates changed his life. Socrates, an artisan by birth, was an enormously charismatic figure, and quite clearly a teacher of genius, gathering around him some of the most brilliant men of his day. Plato became one of his most ardent admirers. The circle around Socrates was characterized by a dedication to the development of true knowledge (as they understood it) and this often took a broadly anti-democratic form: Socrates himself was a man who often criticized the Athenian democracy for its espousal of “mere” opinion over knowledge. It is therefore unsurprising that when Socrates was charged with worshipping false gods and corrupting Athenian youth by the democracy and then sentenced to death by means of ingesting hemlock, Plato should have developed a distaste for Greek democracy that emerges in most of his writings from his early middle age until his death. However, it is worth bearing in mind also that Socrates equally disputed the oligarchs (for example, refusing a direct order of Plato's relative Critias when the latter was one of the so-called “thirty tyrants” who briefly seized power in Athens in 404).

GIUSEPPE MAZZINI (1805–72), Italian patriot, liberal, revolutionary, and nationalist. At one time considered one of the most important thinkers of nineteenth-century Europe, Mazzini is now little known outside of his homeland. His very successful set of homilies On the Duties of Man was originally published in 1840, going through many editions. In the extracts printed below the importance of love of country is stressed, but so also is the compatibility of this patriotism with a love of humanity. Mazzini's is a world in which nationalisms are in conflict with multi-national empires rather than with each other – which perhaps explains why his influence declined in the twentieth century.

From On the Duties of Man

Duties to humanity

Your first duties, first not in point of time but of importance – because without understanding these you can only imperfectly fulfil the rest – are to Humanity. You have duties as citizens, as sons, as husbands, as fathers – sacred, inviolable duties of which I shall presently speak at length; but what makes these duties sacred and inviolable is the mission, the duty, which your nature as men imposes on you. You are fathers in order that you may educate men to worship and to unfold God's law. You are citizens, you have a country, in order that in a limited sphere, with the concourse of people linked to you already by speech, by tendencies, and by habits, you may labour for the benefit of all men whatever they are and may be in the future – a task which each one could ill do by himself, weak and lost amid the immense multitude of his fellow-men.

RUDOLF HILFERDING (1877–1941), Austrian-born Marxist political economist, whose Finance Capital (1910) has some claim to be considered the most important work of Marxist economic theory after Marx's Capital itself. His explanation of imperialism as the foreign policy of finance capital, which is extracted below, clearly provides the intellectual backbone of Lenin's theory of imperialism – although the latter was unwilling to admit this, since Hilferding was a democrat and anti-Bolshevik. An opponent of one tyranny, Soviet communism – and a Social Democrat Minister in the Weimar Republic – he was murdered by another, going into exile in 1933 and being found dead in a Nazi prison cell in Paris in 1941.

From Finance Capital

The purpose of the old protective tariff, aside from compensating for various natural disadvantages, was to accelerate the emergence of industry within the protected borders. It was intended to guard the developing domestic industry against the danger of being stifled or destroyed by overwhelming competition from a well developed foreign industry. It needed only to be high enough to offset the advantages of foreign industry, and in no circumstances could it be prohibitive because domestic industry could not yet satisfy the entire demand. Above all it was not regarded as permanent.

MARTIN LUTHER (1483–1546), German priest and theologian whose defiance of the church in the matter of the sale of indulgences is taken as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Defending the idea of the church as a community of believers, rather than a hierarchy of priests, Luther relegated the existing church to what he saw as the corrupt realm of temporal affairs, radically undercutting its claims to provide spiritual guidance to the faithful. In On Secular Authority (1523), he argues that secular rule is necessary to control the behavior of the majority of human beings who are not true Christians. Luther's defense of secular authority suggests that a multiplicity of secular realms is the necessary and legitimate order of the temporal world.

From On Secular Authority

1. Our first task is [to find] a firm grounding for secular law and the Sword, in order to remove any possible doubt about their being in the world as a result of God's will and ordinance. The passages [of Scripture] which provide that foundation are these: Romans, 12 [in fact 13.1–2]: ‘Let every soul be subject to power and superiority. For there is no power but from God and the power that exists everywhere is ordained by God. And whoever resists the power, resists God's ordinance. But whosoever resists Gods ordinance shall receive condemnation on himself.’

JOSEPH SCHUMPETER (1883–1950), Moravian-born American economist and social theorist. Schumpeter contributed to a number of areas of economic theory, and his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (3rd edn, 1950) is a sustained analysis of the relationship between political and economic forms. In the essay “The Sociology of Imperialisms” (1919) extracted below, he attempts to refute the notion that imperialism is connected in some way to capitalism.

From “The Sociology of Imperialisms”

It is in the nature of a capitalist economy – and of an exchange economy generally – that many people stand to gain economically in any war. Here the situation is fundamentally much as it is with the familiar subject of luxury. War means increased demand at panic prices, hence high profits and also high wages in many parts of the national economy. This is primarily a matter of money incomes, but as a rule (though to a lesser extent) real incomes are also affected. There are, for example, the special war interests, such as the arms industry. If the war lasts long enough, the circle of money profiteers naturally expands more and more – quite apart from a possible paper-money economy.

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI (1469–1527), a minor Florentine official and diplomat, posthumously infamous for the advice to tyrants on how to seize or maintain power contained in his little book The Prince (1532). Machiavelli's political career came to an end in 1512 when he was imprisoned and tortured by the recently restored Medici regime, after which he retired to his farm near San Casciano outside Florence to study the works of the ancient Romans, whose wisdom he revered. Neither The Prince nor his longer and, arguably, more substantial Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (1531) was published during his lifetime. Rightly or wrongly, both books have been read as articulating a doctrine of reason of state, and for that reason are considered classics of political realism.

From The Prince

The different kinds of principality and how they are acquired

All the states, all the dominions that have held sway over men, have been either republics or principalities. Principalities are either hereditary (their rulers having been for a long time from the same family) or they are new. The new ones are either completely new (as was Milan to Francesco Sforza) or they are like limbs joined to the hereditary state of the ruler who annexes them (as is the Kingdom of Naples to the King of Spain).

EDMUND BURKE (1729–97), British statesman and political thinker. After a brief career as an author of philosophical works on ethics and aesthetics, Burke gained prominence as a Whig pamphleteer and then as a Member of Parliament. He wrote brilliantly on the need to conciliate the American colonies, the evils of British rule in India, and – most famously – the dangers to Britain posed by the revolutionary regime in France. Burke presented his case against the French revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), then in Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), and again in four Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796–7). In the Letters, his last work, he argues that the revolution had placed France in the hands of a barbaric regime whose principles were a threat not only to Britain but to European civilization.

From Letters on a Regicide Peace

On the overtures of peace

My dear Sir,

Our last conversation, though not in the tone of absolute despondency, was far from cheerful. We could not easily account for some unpleasant appearances. They were represented to us as indicating the state of the popular mind; and they were not at all what we should have expected from our old ideas even of the faults and vices of the English character. The disastrous events, which have followed one upon another in a long, unbroken, funereal train, moving in a procession that seemed to have no end, – these were not the principal causes of our dejection.

It is a commonplace to allege that ancient thought, especially Greek thought, has little to offer the student of international relations. With the exception of Thucydides, the great political philosophers of the ancient world, it is usually argued, said little about relations between polities since they assumed that the feature that defined such relations – war – was a permanent and ever-present fixture in human affairs and that thus little could be done to change the characteristics of such relations. This view is common to many who otherwise differ profoundly: international relations scholars, historians of political thought, political theorists, philosophers, classicists, and, of course, many others (see, for example, Donelan, 1990; Knutsen, 1992, 2nd edn., 1996; Williams, 1992).

However, this is a misreading. On three issues in particular ancient thought offers a lot for the student of international relations: (1) the way in which the classical period established – and questioned – distinctions between insiders and outsiders; (2) the way in which this distinction is taken to generate, and limit, moral obligations between individuals; and (3) the ways in which this distinction is taken to generate, and limit, obligations between collectivities. In this section classical thought will be taken to consist of the thought of ancient Greece and Rome roughly between the political reforms of the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes in the fifth century bce (which introduced democracy into Athens) and the coronation of Constantine as Roman emperor (after the battle of Milian Bridge in 312 ce).