Introduction

The late Professor Nicholas John Hugh Rengger (1959– 2018) was a scholar of extraordinary range and voracious intellectual appetite. Rengger may have formally carried the title of Professor of Political Theory and International Relations at the University of St Andrews but, beyond Political Theory and International Relations (IR), his work and research interests spanned the fields of Intellectual History, Philosophy, Classics, Theology, Literature, and the broader Human Sciences. His unusual scholarly breadth and ability to converse across disciplines marked him out as one of the last of an eclipsing species of academics who used to embody the Renaissance ideal of the homo universalis within academia and the world of the intellect, in general. This book is inspired by Rengger’s enduring legacy and impact as a teacher and scholar, and by the way he put his cross- disciplinary talents in the service of bringing the broader social and political theory but also more humanist disciplines, such as philosophy, theology, and the history of ideas, into the study of international politics.

The various chapters in this volume assess the many aspects of Rengger’s work and legacy but focus on three main areas that constitute the driving ideas behind his contribution to the political theory of IR and the problem of world order: his Augustine-inspired idea of an ‘anti-Pelagian imagination’ favouring a sceptical, non-utopian, anti-perfectionist response to the ethico-political dilemmas of the contemporary liberal world order; his Oakeshottian argument for a pluralist ‘conversation of mankind’ that could sustain an ethos of civility in world politics; and his ruminations on war as the uncivil condition in world politics coupled with his critical engagement with the just war tradition as an institution of civil world order. Civility and anti-Pelagianism, two central concepts in Rengger’s work that will be the focus of this chapter, express a poetic re-imagining of world order that transcends both tragic realism and liberal utopianism, denying neither the fragility of the civilizing impulse in world politics nor the resourcefulness and the creativity of the human spirit in inventing new, imaginative ways to contain the modern world’s destructive tendencies.