Introduction

N.J. (Nick) Rengger was one of the most influential figures in British International Relations (IR), and in the global discourse of international political theory (IPT) of the last 40 years, partly through his writings, but equally through his outsize personality and riveting conversation. This last point is important because, now that he is no longer with us, future scholars will only have recourse to reading him, and, as a result, will get a very limited and imperfect impression of the impact he had on those of us who actually knew him and were fully exposed to the Rengger experience in all its Falstaffian dimensions. In this chapter I will, of course, refer to his publications, but I also want to get across some of the impact of talking to him, arguing with him, sometimes being infuriated by him, but always realizing that you were privileged to be interacting with a quite extraordinary man and scholar.

In the first section, I will examine the way Nick Rengger exploded on the scene in the 1980s at a time when the discourse of IPT was forming, a discourse which he helped to form. His position then was supportive of, to use Richard Rorty’s terminology, an ‘edifying’ rather than a ‘systematising’ account of the role of theory. The second section fast-forwards by three decades to a period when Rengger’s theme was anti-Pelagianism and opposition to teleocracy. Here I set out some of the, in my view, undesirable implications of these themes, and challenge his employment of Augustinian theology to support his espousal of a very conservative account of the possibilities of political theory. In the third and final section I look at some of the practical problems posed by the positions he adopted, in particular his opposition to progressivism and to what he saw as the perversions of modern just war thinking.

As will already be apparent, this will be a critical chapter; I shall have some harsh words to say about his writings in his final years and about the rhetorical language he employed. All I can say in my defence, if I need a defence, is that there is nothing here that I have not said to his face, and I can assure those readers who did not know Nick, that he would not have had it any other way.