Introduction

Nicholas J. Rengger came to International Relations (IR) relatively late, by a circuitous route, and with unorthodox intellectual baggage. His PhD juggled aspects of Enlightenment political philosophy and approaches to the history of ideas. Only afterwards, as a freshly minted political theorist, did he begin to address IR, as he searched for a niche in the unforgiving British higher education system of late 1980s. In various places, he encountered the ‘English school of international relations’ – or at least representatives of what was left of it – not so much in Bristol, perhaps, where he spent most of his early career prior to the move to St Andrews, but certainly in Aberystwyth, Leicester, and the London School of Economics (LSE), during stints as a visiting fellow, and at BISA conferences. At that time, in those places, the English School’s (ES) influence was still clear in curricula and concepts employed. Scholars who had known figures like Charles Manning, Martin Wight, and Hedley Bull still lectured, roamed corridors, or held forth in staff clubs and local pubs. They included people like Maurice Keens-Soper and Phillip Windsor, as well as younger scholars whose work was shaped by the tradition, like James Mayall and Hidemi Suganami. Convivial to a fault, Rengger’s introduction to IR – and to the ES, in particular – was in no small part a result of conversations with all of these people and more.

Rengger’s approach to the field – especially to IR theory – was marked by these early experiences and by the texts to which they led him. He never became a card-carrying member of the ES, of course – he enjoyed buzzing about the field as a Socratic gadfly far too much for that. But the lop-sided dialogue that he started with the ES in the late 1980s continued, on and off, for the rest of his life, shaping the ways in which he framed and engaged with major issues in the field. And from the start, he found the historicist and interpretivist commitments of the early school congenial. He was manifestly impressed with Martin Wight’s byzantine essays on the history of international theory. He was also intrigued by the ways in which the early school handled the apparent tensions between the need for order in international relations (IR) and demands for justice.