Bringing Culture and Religion Back In: Rethinking the Secularisation of the English School

This paper argues that the early English School - especially Martin Wight, and Herbert Butterfield, but also Donald McKinnon, Adam Watson, and Adda Boseman, from the beginning was concerned with culture, religion, and international order. One of its main contributions to IR theory - at a time when most of the discipline was obsessed with the Cold War, was its concern for how the end of empire, decolonization, independence, and so cultural and religious pluralism, would affect international order. This concern was expressed in it willingness to take religious doctrines, cultures, and civilizations seriously by focusing on their role in different traditions of international thought (i.e. realism, rationalism, and revolutionism), and in different historic states-systems, which showed the importance of culture, religion, and world history for the study of international relations. The paper explores, for example, how the Catholic historian, Christopher Dawson, and his understanding of culture and religion in his historical sociology, presented in his famous Gifford Lectures, influenced Wight’s historical sociology, and his understanding of the three traditions of international thought. Unfortunately, these contributions to IR theory by the early English School have been ignored, marginalized, or lost, as the research programme of the later English School (e.g. Barry Buzan, Richard Little, Tim Dunne, Steve Smith, et. al.), like IR theory generally, came to reflect secularization theory and modernization. When religion was dealt with it was seen as something epiphenomenal, the product of other social, political, or material forces, and sought to explain religion away, rather than to explain its influence. Therefore, the paper seeks to recover, and explain the contemporary relevance of one of the contributions of the early English School - the role of culture, religion, and theology, in its traditions of thought.