Scott M. Thomas
Wight was sometimes considered to be ‘something of an odd man out both
as an historian and as a student of international relations’. At time when ‘social
scientific’ and ‘positivistic’ methods were increasingly fashionable, particularly
in the United States, the main questions that concerned him most were ethical
and theological, and he saw the study of history and of international relations as
13
one of the most important ways these kinds of questions could be examined.
Wight was not as isolated a figure as he is sometimes portrayed in the English
school. Roger Epp has gone some way in indicating how ‘Wight’s thought was
worked out in the larger, intersecting debates about human history, war and
peace, that engaged historians, philosophers, theologians, and others before inter-
national relations became the domain of specialists in fragmented universities’.14
What he has not indicated is the extent to which these debates, and many of the
individuals involved in them, were often part of larger social and theological
groups and movements going back to the 1930s, which set the stage for the
revival of English Christianity during the 1950s, when Wight was most influ-
ential as a teacher, scholar and a public, as well as a Christian, intellectual,
15
although this term has to be handled carefully.
This article attempts to show how Wight was knowledgeable about, although
not directly a part of, a tradition in Britain of ‘Christian thinking’ about society
and politics going back to the interwar period, one that was deeply concerned
about the possibility of war and the future of Western civilization. These
thinkers formed a tradition, not as Alasdair MacIntyre, or even Wight himself
used this term, but only in the loose sense of forming a community of discourse
because they all agreed it was important for Christians and the Christian churches
to be engaged with the pressing issues of culture, society, and politics.16
This Christian social tradition contributed to an intellectual revival of Chris-
tianity during the 1950s. Although it did not bring to an end the convinced
1
3
4
Bull, ‘Introduction: Martin Wight and the study of international relations’, p. 14.
1
Roger Epp, ‘Martin Wight: international relations as realm of persuasion’, in Francis A. Beer and Robert
Hariman, eds, Post-realism: the rhetorical turn in international relations (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State
University Press, 1996), pp. 122–3.
Apparently Wight, on occasion, described himself as a Christian intellectual, and used this kind of
language. He wrote an unpublished article entitled ‘Jacques Ellul and the predicament of the Christian
intellectual’ after reading one of Ellul’s books Présence au monde moderne (MSS, 24 April 1953, LSE Archive).
Ellul, was a French, Christian and sociologist at the University of Bordeaux, who wrote many widely
regarded books on sociology as well as books on ethics, theology, and commentaries on books of the
Bible. See David W. Gill, The Word of God in the ethics of Jacques Ellul (Metuchen, N.J and London,
1
5
6
1984).
1
It is a matter of public record that the same names keep reappearing in Wight’s correspondence, at the
conferences he spoke at and the ones he attended, and in the footnotes of his published and unpublished
writings: Katherine Bliss, Herbert Butterfield, Donald MacKinnon, J. H. Oldham, Christopher Dawson,
C. H. Dodd, T. S. Eliot, H. A. Hodges, Reinhold Niebuhr, O.C. Quick, Marjorie Reeves, Arnold
Toynbee, R. H. Tawney, A. R. Vidler, and Sir Alfred Zimmern. Most, although not all, of these people
were associated with The Christian News-Letter, edited by J. H. Oldham, and published for the Council of
the Churches on the Christian Faith and the Common Life (London). The first issue appeared on 18
October 1939, less than six weeks after Britain declared war on Germany, and the last in 1948. Marjorie
Reeves, ed., Christian thinking and social order: conviction politics from the 1930s to the present day (London and
New York: Cassell, 1999). During the early 1950s Marjorie Reeves and Martin Wight led a Christianity
and History Reading Group in Oxford.
908