Lorenzo Cello

IR scholars have always invoked history as a valuable resource for understanding the present. However, the question of how should we go about investigating and interpreting the past is rarely asked, let alone answered. While most IR approaches are anchored to the attempt to situate oneself outside history – reading the past in terms of the present or in terms of a hypothetical future – this article strives to redress the kind of historical perspective adopted, if at all, by IR scholars. It does so by advancing a distinctive historicist approach that emphasises the importance of understanding past practices and discourses in their own historical and intellectual contexts. In order to substantiate this claim, the article goes on to critically engage with recent calls to historicise intervention in IR, arguing that a historicist mode of analysis represents a corrective to presentism as well as an alternative route into present-day debates.

Despite the global influence of his works during and after his lifetime, Jeremy Bentham is a largely neglected figure in IR. While his utilitarian mode of reasoning and his relentless efforts to change British society have received significant scholarly attention, the same cannot be said of his international writings and his vision of an international order of liberal nations. Bentham’s “global intellectual activism” in promoting legal reform abroad during the 1810s and 1820s suggests that the prospect of “exporting” constitutional and representative forms of government was key to this vision. In piecing together Bentham’s mature constitutional theory and his vision of an international order of liberal nations, this paper sheds some light on the historical emergence of a deep-seated assumption that informs much of current debates about the future of the liberal international order: the belief in the moral superiority of liberal democracies and their central role in upholding international order.

IR scholars have always invoked history as a valuable resource for understanding the present. However, the question of how should we go about investigating and interpreting the past is rarely asked, let alone answered. While most IR approaches are anchored to the attempt to situate oneself outside history – reading the past in terms of the present or in terms of a hypothetical future – this article strives to redress the kind of historical perspective adopted, if at all, by IR scholars. It does so by advancing a distinctive historicist approach that emphasises the importance of understanding past practices and discourses in their own historical and intellectual contexts. In order to substantiate this claim, the article goes on to critically engage with recent calls to historicise intervention in IR, arguing that a historicist mode of analysis represents a corrective to presentism as well as an alternative route into present-day debates.

Although Emer de Vattel is widely acknowledged as a pivotal figure in the history of international thought, his legacy remains contested. Scholars struggle to find a comfortable intellectual collocation for what is often seen as an incoherent and contradictory thinker. The present article tackles this interpretation and suggests that the supposed inconsistencies in Vattel’s international thought diffuse once we fully grasp the nature of his intellectual intervention. In order to substantiate this view, the paper focuses on Vattel’s reasoning on the legitimacy of international interventions, as disclosed in his The Law of Nations. It recovers his casuistic mode of reasoning with reference to the historical and intellectual context from which it emerged. The article concludes by suggesting that this long-forgotten mode of reasoning offers a different entry point into current debates on international intervention and the use of force, one that might help us move beyond a merely moralistic approach.

Reasoning over the legitimacy of intervention has always been a focus for international relations scholars and a point of contestation. Contemporary debates are almost always conducted normatively and within a polarised intellectual field, hence little of this work is historical in the sense of recovering past arguments and modes of reasoning. In response to both the normative and unhistorical state of the field, my thesis aims to reconstruct Bentham’s arguments and mode of reasoning regarding the legitimacy of what we today call ‘intervention’. In doing so the thesis lays claim to three contributions. Firstly, by demonstrating the advantages of a historicist mode of analysis and by implementing it with reference to Bentham, the thesis contributes to IR debates on how to historicise intervention. Secondly, it offers a corrective to presentist readings of Bentham in IR, contributing to both literature in the history of international thought and to the specialised literature on Bentham. Lastly, the recovery of Bentham’s mode of reasoning allows us to re-think the terms of our contemporary debates in a fresh way, escaping the ‘normative trap’ into which, I suggest, current perspectives on the legitimacy of intervention have fallen.

The overall thrust of the argument is that Bentham developed a utilitarian ‘moral casuistry’ as the appropriate framework for considering interventions. This ‘moral casuistry’ operated on the basis of a case-by-case evaluation of the different interests at stake in a given situation. Intervention was legitimate solely in those cases where an alignment of interests could be convincingly demonstrated and the dictates of self-regarding prudence adhered to those of benevolence. It emerges that the notion of ‘effective benevolence’ is key to Bentham’s commitment to a cosmopolitan internationalism. These claims are demonstrated through an extensive reading of Bentham’s ‘international’ writings: his 1820s arguments on intervention in Tripoli and Greece, as well as his plans for legal reform abroad. The thesis also advances a broader analysis of Bentham’s utilitarianism. It starts from a contextual reading of Bentham’s view of human nature, his simplified moral anthropology and his utilitarian theory of government, highlighting how the Scottish Enlightenment was an important formative intellectual context for the development of his approach to ethics, government and legislation. It then moves to uncover some unexpected similarities between Bentham’s and Emer de Vattel’s approaches to international law, war and peace. This re-examination of Bentham’s international thought ultimately sets the stage for the unfolding of the central argument of the thesis in the final two chapters, where his reasoning on the legitimacy of intervention – in Tripoli, Greece, British Australia and elsewhere – reveals the nature of his commitment to a cosmopolitan internationalism.

Bentham’s reasoning on Libya’s political situation in the 1820s presents us with a blend of ‘humanitarian’ and ‘geopolitical’ arguments for intervention. Almost two centuries later, we are also faced with justifications for intervention in which arguments for the protection of the Libyan people are entangled with arguments of a different political stripe. On the one hand, today’s arguments share Bentham’s claim that representative democracy stands as the political arrangement most likely to lead to international order. On the other hand, the moral foundations of Bentham’s arguments differ significantly from those held by today’s proponents of liberal interventionism. By focusing on these foundations of Bentham’s thought and his writing on Tripoli, this paper provides a fresh perspective on both Bentham’s international thought and our current reasoning.

As it has become apparent that lines of political, economic, and legal exclusion inherited from the colonial order persist in the present, IR scholars are increasingly turning to history in order to unearth some important genealogical lines of descent of our contemporary civilisational discourses. Much attention has been devoted to recovering those lines of political and legal exclusion bequeathed to us from the nineteenth and twentieth century colonial order in the form of ‘standards of civilisation’. However, less effort has gone into researching seventeenth and eighteenth century European discourses about civilisation, that is, the antecedents of the standards of civilisation.

In this article I provide a preliminary analysis of the idea of civilisation that emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment. I show that it significantly differed from the one that took hold in Europe later in the late nineteenth century and I argue that it was less of a companion to imperialism than it is usually thought.