This is a book about the power of citations. It is about texts that refract and redeploy and about famous thinkers that become events in and of themselves. Citations are remarkable in that they enable the author and her readers to leap across time; we move between historical contexts seamlessly, sometimes with close to no regard for historicity. Citing past texts allows us to tell stories that connect us to the past, that draw continuities between the world of those we cite and the world we inhabit, between the questions we ask and those they strove to answer. The extent to which these continuities are actually meaningful is an endless source of debate,Footnote ¹ and determining whether this can be settled in absolute terms is far beyond the scope of this book. What matters for our present purposes is how, in the case of Gentili, the connection came to be understood as meaningful in the past, whether the analysis that was made of it can withhold the test of a more rigorous form of historical scrutiny today, and if not, what, then, explains the substance of the narrative we have inherited about him.

As the old saying goes, Habent sua fata libelliFootnote ² – books have their own destinies. The numerous references to Gentili in contemporary works about the history of the laws of war and of the broader development of the states-system show us that the narrative we inherited about Gentili has had a real impact on the construction of collective imaginaries. Beyond assessing the narrative’s accuracy, it is thus essential for us to appreciate what it allowed past scholars and practitioners to achieve. Why was Gentili nearly forgotten? Why was he revived with great fanfare over 200 years after his death? What interpretations of his work became most popular, and why?

Some would argue that analyzing the later trajectory of Gentili’s work regardless of his original intentions in writing it – what would fall into the category of “historical effects”Footnote ³ – should be our sole focus.Footnote ⁴ This chapter seeks to show that the recovery of authorial intention and the analysis of an author’s reception can in fact be made to complement each other. The rest of the book then follows this logic, providing first a synchronic, contextualist examination of Gentili’s De iure belli (DIB) before moving to a diachronic analysis of his uneven posterity, with a particular emphasis on the elements of his reception that gave us the popular narrative about Gentili and the emergence of modern war. But beyond the present study of Gentili’s mythologization, this chapter also seeks to help develop a more systematic methodological basis for the study of “great thinkers” more broadly, particularly within the field of International Relations (IR).

International Relations has a long tradition of analyzing, celebrating, and appropriating the thought of those it considers great thinkers. For much of the history of the discipline, these figures have been considered sources of transhistorical wisdom: “Machiavelli is a theorist of necessity and reason of state … Hobbes is the quintessential theorist of anarchy, Grotius of international legal order,” while “Rousseau has a structural realist theory of war, Kant a progressive theory of the democratic peace and global confederation and so on.”Footnote ⁵ They have also commonly been used as ornaments for relatively ahistorical theories, in order to give a sense of timelessness to the theory being elaborated.Footnote ⁶ Across the disciplinary spectrum, great thinkers thus have been – and continue to be – an important component of IR scholarship.

Intellectual history and IR, however, have had a rather tumultuous relationship. While much of IR was shifting toward more economics-based approaches in the 1960s and 1970s, the English School doubled down on the importance of diplomatic and intellectual history and maintained a connection with historians. This connection, though, was often precarious in light of the English School’s tendency to develop its own idiosyncratic historical narratives. Yet English School scholars did successfully maintain a space for historical inquiry in IR, one which has now developed into a much larger and more rigorous subfield with the discipline’s “historiographical turn” in the early 2000s,Footnote ⁷ a move that signaled IR scholars’ intent to “take both history and the history of political thought more seriously.”Footnote ⁸ After a so-called fifty-years rift between IR and intellectual history,Footnote ⁹ the two fields have thus gone through a significant rapprochement over the past two decades. They now share a particular interest in the history of “international thought,” that is, political and legal thought on the relation between states, empires, and other political entities,Footnote ¹⁰ an area that long remained a blind spot of the history of political thought (HPT), which had generally focused on the state and its internal politics.

With this renewed interest in intellectual history, IR scholars have moved beyond the selective and rather tendentious misreadings of various great thinkers by earlier IR theorists, and particularly those of the English School, whose efforts to delineate some transhistorical “Grotian,” “Machiavellian,” and “Kantian” traditions or “realist,” “rationalist,” and “revolutionist” approachesFootnote ¹¹ inevitably led to “gross abuses” of the HPT.Footnote ¹² There is now a much more careful, historicist engagement with famous texts, much of it stemming from the precepts of “Cambridge School” contextualism, to which I will return shortly.

Along with this move away from preemptively confining famous thinkers to Procrustean categories, IR scholars have come to reflect more critically on the history of the discipline, accounting for the contingent development of certain approaches and theories and bringing to light their respective normative underpinnings.Footnote ¹³ Broadly speaking, historically minded IR scholars have emphasized the value of revealing “the contingency of prevailing conventions”Footnote ¹⁴ and thus of undermining the pervasive tendency in the discipline to elevate “relatively recent structures and orientations to the status of enduring historical essences.”Footnote ¹⁵ More specifically, IR scholars working on the history of international thought have pointed to the way in which a more rigorous engagement with canonical and noncanonical texts enables us to rethink crucial topics in the discipline, including “the primacy of the state, the emergence of the ‘states system,’ the consequences of anarchy and the principles of a just international order,”Footnote ¹⁶ to name but a few important examples.Footnote ¹⁷ At the deepest level, this type of work allows us to challenge disciplinary myths by helping IR scholars “understand how the International Relations canon was constructed and for what purposes.”Footnote ¹⁸

At the intersection of these two developments, a growing number of works have now carefully analyzed the historical reception of certain “great thinkers” into IR, examining the processes through which their ideas became considered foundational.Footnote ¹⁹ To take just one example, we now know that the coronation of Thucydides as the father of realism was by no means inevitable.Footnote ²⁰ It emerged out of a rather contingent series of moves and culminated “when a group of highly influential scholars in US academia, such as Robert Keohane, Kenneth Waltz, and Robert Gilpin, identified him as a paramount realist thinker in the late 1970s and 1980s.”Footnote ²¹ These scholars did so because Thucydides served a crucial purpose for them: He “could be used to illustrate what they saw as a fundamental underlying continuity in international relations” – a vital point for scholars seeking to develop a general, transepochal theory of international relations – and more specifically, a story could be weaved around his name to support the claim that this continuity “was expressed through the persistence of power politics and the logic of the balance of power”Footnote ²² Ultimately, as Edward Keene puts it, “their reading of Thucydides’s History was, in a sense, an especially juicy cherry to be picked,”Footnote ²³ and they did so with a lasting impact in the discipline. Indeed, although a real cottage industry has developed since the 1990s around identifying realist misreadings of Thucydides,Footnote ²⁴ these works seldom question the reliance on Thucydides in the first place and as such have exacerbated rather than undermined his prevalence in the discipline.Footnote ²⁵ This is despite the fact that, as Keene suggests, “Thucydides needs not be our only contemporary,”Footnote ²⁶ and perhaps even more critically, it says nothing about the need to perhaps consider whether Thucydides – or any other classical figure for that matter – should be our “contemporary” to begin with.

A stronger sensibility to these processes is of the essence in IR. Of course, this study of the reception of ideas pertaining to the international echoes a broader move within intellectual history toward the study of the circulation, transmission, and reception of texts, thinkers, and ideas across time and space.Footnote ²⁷ Yet there is perhaps no intellectual field more in need of these insights than IR’s reconstruction of past thinkers’ ideas. International Relations scholars have had a tendency to substantially overestimate the impact that single thinkers can have on the form and conduct of international relations, seamlessly associating the thought of Grotius with the emergence of the modern states-system, to name but one of the most famous examples. Notwithstanding the delightful anecdote about the King of Sweden going to war with a copy of Grotius’ De iure belli ac pacis under his saddle,Footnote ²⁸ the actual impact of the famed author’s text is often assumed away. The emerging literature on the reception of canonical texts thus seems a particularly productive avenue for the discipline to turn to in order to track the actual impact of great thinkers.

Even more critically, IR scholars have historically – directly or indirectly – provided influential frames of reference for policymakers even though their readings of the past have often been wildly anachronistic.Footnote ²⁹ Beyond the aforementioned case of Thucydides, we now know for instance that the English School built its “traditions” based on “a conflation of nineteenth century appropriations of seventeenth century thinkers, such as Grotius and Hobbes, with the ideas of those thinkers themselves.”Footnote ³⁰ There is thus much work to be done in terms of systematically untangling what these thinkers actually thought – to the extent that it is possible – from what later generations of historians, lawyers, and other practitioners claimed they did. Doing so is what can ultimately enable us to shed light on the actual provenance of our disciplinary narratives and evaluate their political and normative underpinnings.

Existing works open two particularly promising paths for methodologically rethinking the study of great thinkers in IR. The first entails taking stock of the more rigorous approach for studying these figures in their context available in the neighboring field of HPT. This is a now well-established roadmap. Since IR’s historiographical prise de conscience, various efforts have been made to import the methodological insight of HPT into the discipline,Footnote ³¹ and especially the contextualism of the so-called Cambridge School.Footnote ³² The rest of the chapter draws explicitly on this move.

The second consists in developing an explicit method for examining the reception of these authors’ ideas. This is an area where much work remains to be done. Currently, the discipline of IR simply does not provide a method for studying the reception of great thinkers. There appear to be two main reasons behind this lacuna. First, it is partly a corollary of the discipline’s aforementioned misportrayal of great thinkers’ ideas more broadly, and of its longstanding aversion to methodological reflection on this front. Second, and more importantly, it probably stems from the fact that historians of political thought in the Anglophone academy have themselves seldom explicitly theorized the methodologies required to study the reception of authors.Footnote ³³ This is of course not to say that historians of political thought have not studied the reception of authors in practice; to cite but one example, in his main works, Quentin Skinner extensively studies the reception of ancient classics such as Aristotle,Footnote ³⁴ Cicero,Footnote ³⁵ or Quintilian,Footnote ³⁶ as well as the reception of continental rhetorical works in Britain in the early modern period.Footnote ³⁷ The point here is that while reception theory is a well-established subfield in literary studies,Footnote ³⁸ in the not so distant field of the HPT, the method for studying the reception of famous texts and authors has hardly been theorized in any explicit way, leaving little for IR scholars interested in the reception of great thinkers to draw from. As one scholar puts it, “the practice of writing history and the practice of theorizing about it remain two quite distinct activities”;Footnote ³⁹ here I am explicitly concerned with the latter.Footnote ⁴⁰

With contextualism now being the most popular methodological starting point for historians of political thought, the most compelling attempts to develop a more systematic approach to the study of the reception of ideas have tried to merge contextualist insights with a concern for the afterlife of classic works and famous concepts. Two such attempts stand out. The first is the call to pair Cambridge School contextualism with the tenets of Begriffsgeschichte.Footnote ⁴¹ This approach entails “tracing the different meanings and usages of political concepts over time, tracing the shifts and rupture in their employment.”Footnote ⁴² The focus on the history of concepts is presented as a potential remedy to the “temporal problem” of the Cambridge School approach,Footnote ⁴³ that is, the overwhelming emphasis that scholars associated with the Cambridge School label (most notably Skinner and Pocock) are – perhaps wrongly – considered to place on the context of writing at the cost of the context of reception.

This approach shares much with a second proposal, which is what David Armitage has termed “history in ideas”: a new history of ideas based on “a model of transtemporal history, proceeding via serial contextualism to create a history in ideas spanning centuries, even millennia.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Like historians working within the tradition of Begriffsgeschichte, Armitage puts forward a means for doing intellectual history over the longue durée through the study of specific concepts over time, such as the idea of civil war.Footnote ⁴⁵ While Armitage’s call for a shift toward “serial contextualism” is a particularly interesting development for the study of international political thought,Footnote ⁴⁶ to which I will return, both of these proposed approaches are geared toward the study of the reception of specific concepts rather than of specific authors. Conversely, while there is a growing number of studies that examine the reception of great thinkers in IR,Footnote ⁴⁷ they do not theorize their methodological approach explicitly.

Therefore, what I seek to do in this chapter is to build on the existing methodological reflections put forward by historians in order to offer an alternative form of “serial contextualism,” focused on the reception of an author rather than of a concept and anchored in that author’s original context of writing. In doing so, I am also building on existing studies of actual reception processes in IR, history, and international law, but my aim is to give a more systematic account of how one might go about studying the reception of a famous author and what this type of inquiry can contribute.

The approach is based on a two-part method. The first part entails what may be termed a conventional contextualist analysis, based on a synchronic understanding of context. It is geared first and foremost toward attempting to recover the original intention that the author had in writing the relevant text, and particularly her intention in making one or more conceptual moves within that text. The second part takes stock of the recent shift in intellectual history toward a diachronic understanding of context and seeks to understand the impact of that author’s move by tracing the reception of her text over time. In doing so, it parts with concept-based methods that stem from the history of ideas and draws on the precepts of what is broadly known as “reception theory,” focused on analyzing the reception of a specific author. The serial contexts that are examined are therefore not those in which a concept appears, but those in which the author – or one of the author’s most famous texts – is explicitly drawn on, reinterpreted, and reused. The book puts this methodological approach to work, examining Gentili’s conceptual moves in his original context before analyzing the main receptions of Gentili’s treatise on the laws of war.

In developing this approach, I will make the case that, rather than constitute two separate and potentially irreconcilable forms of methods, namely a classic contextualist analysis of an author’s idea versus a diachronic study of the reception of the said author, these two paths can actually be combined in highly productive ways. There is nothing in the contextualism associated predominantly with Quentin Skinner that precludes the study of reception; on the contrary, contextualism does in fact provide some theoretical and conceptual resources for addressing the issue of reception. The main issue is that its adherents – whether in HPT or in IR – have not discussed them adequately or utilized them explicitly in their work. In this chapter, I therefore bring together some of the methodological insights of Skinnerian contextualism and of reception theory, developing an explicit method for the study of great thinkers in IR and beyond that aims to be eclectic while avoiding the pitfalls of indiscriminate association.

In the first part of the chapter, I begin by outlining the core insights of a conventionally contextualist approach, before highlighting both the possibility and the current limitations of contextualism when it comes to understanding the reception of a particular thinker’s ideas. In the second part, I turn to reception theory and I argue that the latter can be effectively paired with a more conventional contextualist methodology in order to better evaluate the journey of an author’s ideas over time. I ultimately put forward an approach for the study of great thinkers in IR that is both synchronic and diachronic, but that, unlike recent attempts to reinvent the history of ideas based on the return of the longue durée, is focused not on the reception of a particular concept but on that of a particular author. While this approach is relevant to the study of political thought in general, it is particularly potent within IR, where the tendency has been to think about great thinkers diachronically, if without articulating a specific methodology for doing so and resultantly falling into various traps. Using IR’s reliance on Kant and Thucydides as brief examples to illustrate my claim, I show the extent to which a more systematic use of this approach would benefit the discipline’s engagement with historical works. Importantly, this book does not take a stance on the question of whether or not IR scholars ought to draw any philosophical insights from classical texts without extensive concerns for historicity. The aim here is merely to take into account the very concrete consequences of the frequent anachronistic readings of texts and to consider these moments of rediscovery and reinterpretation in their own historical right, teasing out the stories they tell us about our constructions of the past.

1.1 Taking Context Seriously: Tracking the Aims of Innovating Ideologists

Considering the numerous critiques of IR’s abuse of the HPT in the construction of its canon and its traditions,Footnote ⁴⁸ the value of contextualist methodologies seems fairly self-explanatory. This avenue is particularly promising in light of the recent surge of interest in international political thought, both from IR scholars and from historians.Footnote ⁴⁹ In its broad commitment to historicism, contextualism urges scholars not to consider great thinkers as taking part in perennial debates across time and space, nor to consider them as speaking a common language and providing insights into solving timeless problems, including those of our own period.Footnote ⁵⁰ More specifically, contextualism emphasizes that texts must be “regarded as extremely complex historical objects, which were written with a purpose in mind” and thus as “a form of action.”Footnote ⁵¹

What exactly this entails in terms of conducting research has been the subject of fierce methodological battles. Skinner is of course the most famous of the Cambridge School contextualists, and his brand of contextualism, sometimes called “Skinnerian contextualism” or “Skinnerian linguistic contextualism,”Footnote ⁵² is often associated with the broader label. However, as Bell notes, “not all contextualists are Skinnerian.”Footnote ⁵³ In fact, Skinner himself seems to have evolved quite significantly over the course of his career and is now rather difficult to place in terms of his own commitment to his initial methodological claims as well as his evaluation of more recent alternatives, most notably postanalytical historicism.Footnote ⁵⁴ Much of the problem here stems from the incredibly demanding character of Skinner’s original methodological recommendations, which resulted from his stark philosophical stance and which even he struggled to accommodate in his own historical research.Footnote ⁵⁵ Despite these unresolved tensions and debates, some broad principles for investigation can be drawn out. Indeed, these issues around Skinner’s original philosophical position notwithstanding, contextualists virtually all agree with the general aim of Skinner’s project, that is, “the historicisation of political thought and the attempt to locate texts within their original terms of reference.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Studying texts with no regard for the context in which they were written, they argue, is bound to lead to gross errors of interpretation.Footnote ⁵⁷

Outlining all the theoretical underpinnings of this broad contextualist project is beyond the scope of this book,Footnote ⁵⁸ but it is important here to note a few essential aspects of a contextualist approach. While Skinner’s early methodological writings were part of a general intellectual wave now known as “interpretivism” (written in dialogue with scholars such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Clifford Geertz) that made claims about society as a whole, and while Skinner would hardly have considered his early methodological writings to be solely aimed at instructing readers about how best to read old texts, Skinnerian contextualism is now associated first and foremost with the objective of recovering the intention of the author, and with the idea that the author’s intention is necessarily suited to achieving a particular objective in a particular context. This entails acquiring a deep understanding of the socio-political context as well as – very importantly – the linguistic context of the author. There are some broad guidelines for achieving this understanding, mainly the study of “both minor and major texts that existed at the time of writing of the particular text under examination, in order to gain an understanding of the various political languages employed, and the links between them,” and the attempt to relate them to “the general historical environment.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Furthermore, in reading the text of interest, it is essential to grasp both its locutionary and its illocutionary force. This distinction, drawn by Skinner, separates the mere lexical meaning of words (locutionary force) from what the author was actually doing in using them (illocutionary force). The two are deeply intertwined, and capturing the intention of the author ultimately depends on being able to distinguish them and truly grasp the illocutionary force of the text. In order to achieve this aim, Duncan Bell suggests that it is “highly advisable” to use “a dose of methodological pluralism”Footnote ⁶⁰ rather than strictly follow Skinner’s original methodological precepts, as suggested by Skinner’s own practice in Liberty before Liberalism and even more strikingly in his “Genealogy of the Modern State.”Footnote ⁶¹

Crucially, to the extent that one can recover authorial intention through a contextualist methodology,Footnote ⁶² the purpose of doing so is not mere antiquarianism. In Skinner’s words, it enables one to speak to contemporary concerns by showing “how the concepts we still invoke were initially defined, what purposes they were intended to serve, what view of public power they were used to underpin.”Footnote ⁶³ Here, it is important to note that if Skinner has expressed a certain skepticism toward the history of concepts, and particularly the study of unit-ideas as advocated by Lovejoy, he does not reject the study of concepts altogether. In his own words, the argument is simply that “there can be no histories of concepts; there can only be histories of their uses in argument.”Footnote ⁶⁴ This caveat does not mean that it is impossible to write about concepts altogether; ultimately, Skinner himself finds it sufficiently manageable to write about concepts such as liberty or the state. Simply, he reminds us that “concepts must not be viewed simply as propositions with meanings attached to them; they must also be thought of as weapons (Heidegger’s suggestion) or as tools (Wittgenstein’s term).”Footnote ⁶⁵ As a result, one can only understand a particular concept and the text in which the concept occurs if one knows “who is wielding the concept in question, and with what argumentative purposes in mind.”Footnote ⁶⁶

Skinner provides some specific tools for analyzing the use of concepts under this specific angle, two of which are of particular importance for our purposes: the idea of an “innovating ideologist” and the related notion of what Skinner calls “evaluative-descriptive terms.” The innovating ideologist seeks “to legitimate a new range of social actions which, in terms of the existing ways of applying the moral vocabulary prevailing in his society, are currently regarded as in some way untoward or illegitimate”Footnote ⁶⁷ The innovating ideologist does so through speech acts centered on “evaluative-descriptive terms,” that is, words that are used both to describe and to either commend or condemn certain actions. These terms are of particular importance because, as Skinner puts it, “it is essentially by manipulating this set of terms that any society succeeds in establishing and altering its moral identity.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The innovating ideologist thus seeks to manipulate the meaning of concepts (and/or their application) with the aim of modifying political behavior. In my analysis of Gentili in his context, I identify the Italian jurist as an innovating ideologist and take the concept of the “enemy of mankind” to be an evaluative-descriptive term that Gentili sought to manipulate in his writings on war in order to redraw the boundaries of “public war” and defend an absolutist position.

The insights provided by a close analysis of innovating ideologists and of their use of evaluative-descriptive terms, and by a contextualist approach more broadly, present a real potential for critique in IR. This potential has been laid out in some detail by scholars such as Duncan Bell,Footnote ⁶⁹ Beate Jahn,Footnote ⁷⁰ Gerard Holden,Footnote ⁷¹ as well as Darshan Vigneswaran and Joel QuirkFootnote ⁷² and to some extent Richard Devetak,Footnote ⁷³ and I will not restate their arguments here. Suffice it to say that this approach can shed significant light on the role of language in the constitution of political and social life, particularly in terms of how the vocabularies of a given time can both enhance and constrain political legitimacy, and how they can be consciously manipulated in attempts to impact political behavior. As Alasdair MacIntyre puts it, “since to possess a concept involves behaving or being able to behave in certain ways in certain circumstances, to alter concepts, whether by modifying existing concepts or by making new concepts available or by destroying old ones, is to alter behavior.”Footnote ⁷⁴

There are, however, two broad types of limitations to this contextualist approach. First, as mentioned earlier, Skinner has not always been consistent in applying his own methodological precepts, and various critiques have been made of Skinner’s original philosophical stance, most notably by Mark Bevir.Footnote ⁷⁵ These are part of an ongoing debate on the modalities of textual interpretation, the details of which stem from disagreements about the philosophy of history that are beyond the scope of this book. Second, and more urgently for our purposes, Skinnerian contextualism currently presents some limitations when it comes to analyzing the reception of texts. Once they have been published, texts take on a life of their own – sometimes for centuries – which often leads them to be understood in novel ways and used for purposes that have little to do with the author’s original intention so carefully unearthed by a Skinnerian approach. In other words, there is often an important divide between the context of writing and the context of reception.

Skinner has repeatedly come under fire for what is perceived as his overly restrictive understanding of context, focused almost exclusively on the immediate context of the author at hand, and for his resulting failure to address the reception, transmission, and translation of texts.Footnote ⁷⁶ This is not so much inherent to Skinner’s methodological approach, as merely the result of his deliberate prioritization of the recovery of authorial intention over other pursuits, a point which Skinner has made explicitly.Footnote ⁷⁷ Though his methodological writings have focused predominantly on the question of how best to recover authorial intention, in his substantive works Skinner has in fact analyzed processes of reception and the multiplicity of contexts they call upon. In examining, for instance, the revival of Aristotle’s Politics in the second half of the thirteenth century or in qualifying its impact through an emphasis on the weight of Roman moralists and historians (especially Cicero and Sallust) decades earlier,Footnote ⁷⁸ Skinner makes it very clear that classical texts were participants in a range of different debates across time and space.

If anything, questions of reception and transtemporal transmission have long been staples of Cambridge School contextualism, both in Skinner’s famous Foundations of Modern Political Thought and, even more conspicuously, in the works of another Cambridge historian, John Pocock, who gradually came to place “much more emphasis upon the historical significance of reception, reading, and the modes of interaction among author, text, and reader,”Footnote ⁷⁹ and whose concerns for Kuhnian “paradigms” and competing “languages” speak directly to these issues.Footnote ⁸⁰ As such, the claim here is not so much that the study of the reception of texts constitutes an addition to Cambridge School contextualism, but rather that it is an immanent possibility within this form of contextualism that has not been sufficiently theorized as a methodological approach for studying great thinkers in IR and beyond.Footnote ⁸¹ In order to further develop and systematize this approach, I therefore turn to the tenets of what broadly falls under the label of “reception theory.”Footnote ⁸²

1.2 From Context to Contexts: The Diachronic Lives of Great Thinkers

First, it is worth noting that, within the study of international political thought, an important attempt has already been made to address the perceived shortcomings of Skinner’s brand of contextualism: David Armitage’s notion of a history in ideas, based on the notion of “serial contextualism.” Echoing the usual line of critique, Armitage argues that since Skinner’s famous 1969 piece,Footnote ⁸³ intellectual historians who identify as contextualists have “construed context synchronically and punctually: that is, defined with a narrow chronology and implicitly discontinuous with other contexts.”Footnote ⁸⁴ By contrast with this approach, Armitage suggests “deploying the distinctive procedures of Anglo-American intellectual history, but by doing so diachronically as well as synchronically.”Footnote ⁸⁵ His method entails “the reconstruction of a sequence of distinct contexts in which identifiable agents strategically deployed existing languages to effect definable goals such as legitimation and delegitimation, persuasion and dissuasion, consensus-building and radical innovation.”Footnote ⁸⁶ As I have noted, in practice, this approach is actually hardly different from what historians associated with the Cambridge School label – including Skinner – have done in their own work. And indeed, Armitage concedes that Cambridge historians have pursued this approach to a certain extent, pointing to Pocock’s Machiavellian Moment,Footnote ⁸⁷ Tuck’s Rights of War and Peace,Footnote ⁸⁸ and Skinner’s “Genealogy of the Modern State.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Ultimately, he seems to suggest that what is revolutionary in his approach is not the practice of studying series of contexts, but the fact of explicitly theorizing context in diachronic terms.Footnote ⁹⁰

Generally speaking, the renewed focus on longue durée intellectual history is a promising move for IR scholars who share with intellectual historians an interest in international political thought. Constructing diachronic histories of “big ideas,” that is, “central concepts in our political, ethical and scientific vocabularies,”Footnote ⁹¹ based on serial contextualism is certainly a fruitful enterprise, if also a tremendously challenging one in light of the knowledge of each context required for a rigorous application of this method. This book, however, is concerned with the impact that a specific author can have as such, in light of the reception of his texts, rather than with the broader impact he may have once a concept he has contributed to shaping travels and is applied by others, with the author’s name receding into the background. As a result, this book also takes stock of the potential of diachronic histories, but it does so from an altogether different angle. Concept-based diachronic approaches, whether those like Melvin Richter’s stemming explicitly from Begriffsgeschichte or those like Armitage’s that seek the “reinvention” of the history of ideas altogether (hence the “history in ideas”), do not provide an explicit methodology for the study of how a specific author – rather than a specific idea – travels. In order to outline such an approach, it is necessary to turn to reception theory and examine the value of combining its insights with those of contextualism in the study of great thinkers in IR and beyond.

Though it initially struggled to travel from its German bases to the Anglophone academy,Footnote ⁹² reception theory has now been used extensively across numerous fields,Footnote ⁹³ but it has not had much success in IR despite the existence of a handful of works that directly examine the reception of certain great thinkers.Footnote ⁹⁴ These few forays have emerged in the context of the aforementioned turn toward the study of international political thought, but they remain the exception in a field that continues to acclaim and appropriate original texts without examining how these texts came to form part of the disciplinary canon in the first place. The neighboring field of HPT has a longer and more sustained tradition of engaging with these questions in practice, but as Armitage argues, it has not explicitly theorized how to study context in diachronic terms either. The extensive literature on the reception of classical thinkers in the medieval and the early modern periodFootnote ⁹⁵ – with Aristotle and Tacitus being two of the most famous cases – is an obvious testament to this substantive engagement, while the literature on the reception of late medieval and early modern thinkers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, though noticeably slimmer, is another promising avenue of research in the discipline.Footnote ⁹⁶ In another closely related though much younger field – the history of international law – some work has notably emerged on the revival of Vitoria by James Brown Scott in the early twentieth century,Footnote ⁹⁷ with Anne Orford making an explicit call for the wider study of the reception of great thinkers in international law, a call that is now being answered.Footnote ⁹⁸

Examining the reception of great thinkers is an obvious – if, in IR, insufficiently exploited – means of assessing the actual impact of their ideas by evaluating the way their concepts were used, reused, and misused in their intellectual afterlife. While IR scholars can draw some insights from the way the reception of various authors has been analyzed in HPT, it is essential to develop a clearer, explicit method for doing so systematically. In what follows, I thus draw two core insights from reception theory that allow for a more rigorous study of the reception of particular authors and then highlight two crucial payoffs of applying these methodological precepts.

First, recipients are not passive followers, and what is received or inherited is not necessarily what was given or handed over.Footnote ⁹⁹ In other words, those who “receive” the texts of great thinkers have a considerable amount of agency, and they may alter the text in significant ways, whether they directly add elements to it or simply reinterpret it for their own purposes.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Aquinas’ famous formulation is often cited on this point: Quidquid recipitur, ad modum recipientis recipitur: whatever is received is received according to the manner of the receiver.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It is thus much more useful to think of the process of reception as one of translation rather than transmission. This is a crucial point in thinking about the impact of a specific author’s ideas, but as Peter Burke remarks, “[a]lthough the famous epigram attributed to Karl Marx, ‘I am not a Marxist,’ has been circulating for a long time, the implications for intellectual history of the distance between founders and followers have rarely been made explicit.”Footnote ¹⁰² A particularly useful tool for further conceptualizing these differences is the concern with the “horizon of expectations” (Erwartungshorizont), found notably in the works of the aforementioned Hans-Georg Gadamer and his student Wolfgang Iser. The underlying idea here is that different readers will approach a specific text with different expectations – including different questions and concerns associated with their own environment – and that this will shape the way they understand the text in various respects. The results can be conceptualized through terms such as “appropriation” (Ricoeur) or “re-employment” (Certeau), or as a form of intellectual “bricolage” (Lévi-Strauss) that turns consumption into a form of production in itself.Footnote ¹⁰³

Second, and relatedly, this emphasis on active/creative rather than passive/faithful reception suggests that in order to understand the importance of an author’s text, we must examine it not just in its original context but in the various contexts in which it came to play an important role. In other words, it is crucial to examine not just the “reception” of a text, but its multiple receptions, across different groups, countries, and epochs. Through this process, one may conceptualize the multiple embodiments of the same author, used for different purposes under different circumstances – or, for example, under the same circumstances but for different political purposes. For instance, Kinch Hoekstra speaks of “multiple Thucydides” in the early modern period and highlights the gap between Alberico Gentili’s Thucydides and Thomas Hobbes’ Thucydides.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The impact of a particular text can thus become kaleidoscopic, refracted through the many contexts in which it is creatively put to use. In analyzing this process, two related avenues of investigation seem particularly fruitful. On the one hand, one should compare the original reception of the text, the impact the author had in her original context, with later receptions, which may have altered the author’s reputation quite drastically.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On the other hand, one should pay particular attention to the impact the text will have when it is seized on by influential individuals who actually have the means of giving the text a renewed importance and of redefining what is in fact important about it.

Applying these two methodological tenets opens the way for a number of productive intellectual moves, two of which stand out as especially fruitful payoffs. First, studying an author not just in her original context but through her different receptions over time is a methodological approach that answers David Armitage’s call for a return to longue durée intellectual history, though in a different way from his own application of it.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ It is an approach that is deeply committed to examining the author and her work diachronically, sacrificing some of the depth of traditional contextualist investigations for the breadth of transepochal comparisons. This seems a particularly useful approach within IR, a discipline in which scholars almost invariably analyze great thinkers diachronically despite lacking an explicit methodology for how to do so adequately. Of course, the point of a diachronic approach based on reception theory is not to study authors in a decontextualized manner, applying their categories and concepts indiscriminately across time and space, but rather to pay close attention to the various contexts in which they were explicitly received, potentially stretching the story of their impact over continents and centuries. As such, it distances itself from the English School’s concept of traditionsFootnote ¹⁰⁷ as well as from the broader practice of diachronically examining the history of a concept through a long collection of great thinkers.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Second, reception theory provides a particularly useful set of tools for analyzing the construction of intellectual canons.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The importance of “canons” and “traditions” has not escaped IR scholars,Footnote ¹¹⁰ and indeed, Bell points out that while Skinner is right to be suspicious of “claims about easily delineated transhistorical ideational bodies,” we must also “recognize the vital role of perceived traditions,” that is, “the relationship theorists sustain with those they consider to be their intellectual progenitors.”Footnote ¹¹¹ As Freeden explains, “[i]nasmuch as people come to attach importance to reified traditions, however erroneously conceived the latter are, they become factors in the formation of human thought and in the explanation of human behavior.”Footnote ¹¹² Perceived traditions can of course be based on various elements, including concepts, as in the case of liberalism,Footnote ¹¹³ or authors, as in the case of a “Grotian tradition” of international law and political thought.Footnote ¹¹⁴ With respect to the latter, an approach that focuses first and foremost on the reception of the author’s text(s) appears essential and fulfills a distinct purpose from one focused on the transformation of concepts. As such, for author-based traditions, it becomes essential to track the complex story of the reception of the author, particularly as, in the case of a discipline such as IR, the interpretation of an author will have been shaped and reshaped many times before entering the field. Ultimately, the novel interpretation put forward by the receivers “may have shaped core concepts in the discipline,” in which case “a historical recovery of their roots is one way of opening up these concepts for critical reflection.”Footnote ¹¹⁵

If one wishes to understand the emergence, evolution, modification, and reproduction of a canon and ultimately the development of perceived traditions or legacies based on particular authors, it thus becomes imperative to examine the context(s) of an author’s reception, closely examining the shifting representation(s) of that author over time and space. The attribution of “greatness” to a thinker, her enshrinement into a disciplinary canon, is an active, conscious process. Forgotten thinkers are unearthed and branded as great by those who want to claim them for their own camp, while the rightful legacy of an established “great thinker” can be a source of extensive debate.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Inventing a tradition linking one’s ideas to those of a long-dead, respected, famous mind is one of the many ways in which one can defend something by giving it “the sanction of perpetuity.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ As a result, once an author is placed in the category of “great thinkers,” her name comes to bear a certain weight, to provide a certain degree of legitimacy to those who invoke her as their forerunner. Since reception theory is explicitly geared toward understanding the factors that “shape” the reception of a text,Footnote ¹¹⁸ it is thus particularly relevant for shedding light on the dynamics behind the canonization of an author. It is notably attuned to the role of political agendas in shaping reception,Footnote ¹¹⁹ a factor that is likely to be found at play in the construction of disciplinary canons.

Ultimately, while the claim here is that we must distinguish between a study of the reception of ideas based on concepts and one based on authors, it may be said that in the case of the canonization of an author, the author itself becomes, in some way, a form of concept. Invoking the author in question becomes a means to refer to a set of ideas, to a particular understanding of what abstract and contested terms such as “power politics,” “sovereignty,” or “liberalism” might mean. In the broadest sense, Bell reminds us that “[t]raditions are usually constructed around a canon of renowned thinkers, which serves simultaneously as a reservoir of arguments, an index of historical continuity, and a powerful source of intellectual authority.”Footnote ¹²⁰ But more specifically, an author’s name can become associated with a precise position, providing a shorthand for what may otherwise necessitate extensive – and possibly contestable – elaboration. When one invokes, for instance, Thucydides, Hobbes, or Kant within a tradition, the reference is often not so much to the individuals, with their idiosyncratic lives and the specific aims they had in writing their canonized treatises, but rather to the intellectual statement they provide within a debate, to the positions that are automatically associated with their person. Their name entails a set of arguments (or many different sets, if one takes into account the different interpretations of a single author), a collection of assumptions and their associated ramifications, in a way that is not dissimilar to the role played by a concept such as “absolute sovereignty” or “liberalism.” In using great thinkers as such, the receivers of the text come to “decontextualize” the author they are engaging with in order to make her fit their own context and aspirations while nonetheless claiming her historic heritage. In this sense, the emphasis in this chapter on the distinction between the study of authors and the study of concepts is made primarily to highlight a shift in terms of the object of study and therefore of the chosen methodology, keeping in mind that a more diligent study of authors and of their reception may in fact underline the extent to which authors can become concepts, fulfilling similar discursive functions and sharing the same purposes as heuristic devices.

1.3 A Combined Approach

While it is common to read studies of authors in their original context, and possible to find a number of works that examine the subsequent reception of their ideas, contributions that combine the two have remained the exception. In this final section, I wish to conclude by emphasizing the methodological potential of an approach to the study of great thinkers that combines a synchronic analysis based on the methodological insights of Skinnerian contextualism with a diachronic analysis drawing on the tenets of reception theory.

An emphasis on the reception of a great thinker’s ideas may seem at first as a complementary but separate project from the examination of the author’s ideas in their initial context, and particularly from a close analysis of the author’s original intentions. Indeed, reception theory long ignored the question of authorial intention or “authorial intended meaning” altogether, preferring to focus on the issue of “received meaning,”Footnote ¹²¹ and historians of political thought traditionally kept reception theory at bay just as cultural and intellectual historians were engaging with it at length. Yet two main arguments can be made for a unified approach that relies on these two avenues of inquiry at once in the study of great thinkers. First, and in the most obvious sense, any project that seeks to understand both the emergence and the impact of a particular author’s idea will find this methodological approach greatly relevant. In IR, a discipline that has historically paid significant attention to the thought of a few great authors, emphasizing the continued importance of specific concepts within their thought (whether it be Hobbes on sovereignty or Kant on perpetual peace, to name but the most famous ones), developing an approach that encompasses both a rigorous understanding of the author’s context and an analytical commitment to the longue durée would seem a valuable endeavor.

The call for such an approach is reinforced by the fact that the discipline of IR has sometimes erred in its appreciation of authors’ ideas specifically because it remained abysmally unaware of the process of reception. If greater efforts have been made to tease out the normative assumptions of each theoretical approach,Footnote ¹²² surely the fact that IR textbooks continue to propagate a history of the modern states-system and of its presumed intellectual architects constructed by nineteenth-century counter-revolutionary historiansFootnote ¹²³ should be an immediate source of concern. If the study of IR’s “great thinkers” continues to be an important part of the discipline, particularly in light of the turn to international political thought,Footnote ¹²⁴ this untangling exercise can form the basis for a more rigorous approach both to the nature of their thought and to the impact they had through their actual reception over time.

Second, and more specifically, there is a rather straightforward case to be made for the continued methodological relevance of a more traditional, synchronic analysis of an author as a highly insightful component of the study of an author’s reception. Naturally, reception studies encourage scholars “not to limit themselves to the reconstructions of major thinkers, but to ask a much wider range of questions about recontextualizations, responses, uses, and so on,”Footnote ¹²⁵ pointing to “the illusion of perfect communication” and, in that process, “undermining the importance of the intentions of writers.”Footnote ¹²⁶ However, the intention of the author remains an important component of reception for a simple reason: It constitutes a benchmark against which one can measure the extent to which the text has been reinterpreted by the receivers. Burke emphasizes that in studying reception one must “look for what is ‘lost in translation’, or what is distorted,” reminding us of Cervantes’ famous observations that reading a text in translation is “like viewing Flemish tapestries from the wrong side.”Footnote ¹²⁷ In other words, he explains, one has to measure the “degrees of distance from the original.”Footnote ¹²⁸ It is not clear, however, how one might be able to achieve this without some understanding of what the text was originally intended to achieve.

In other words, and to push Cervantes’ metaphor a step further, is it only by viewing both sides of the tapestry that one can appreciate the contrast between the two images. If we only view the “wrong side,” we may well be aware that it is indeed “wrong” to some extent and that the actual image is bound to differ in some way, but we remain within the realm of speculative abstraction; the actual image may be slightly different, or it could be entirely unrecognizable – we will never know. To the extent that one is interested in analyzing the construction of traditions and unveiling the scaffolding of intellectual canons, having a concrete understanding of what the gap between the original and its derivatives entails becomes essential. In fact, an awareness of the original is much more critical within this context than is suggested by Cervantes’ example. If, in the example of the tapestry, the original and its flip side are literally co-constitutive of each other, this is clearly not the case when we speak of the reception of texts. Indeed, the reinterpretations can depart from the original to remarkable extents, as some receivers may use the text with few concerns for the dead author’s original intentions.Footnote ¹²⁹ One particular instantiation of this point is the fact that certain parts of an author’s text can be heavily emphasizedFootnote ¹³⁰ while others are entirely ignored or even concealed.Footnote ¹³¹ As Bevir puts it, speaking of traditions more broadly, “because people want to improve their heritage by making it more coherent, more accurate, and more relevant to contemporary issues, they often do respond selectively to it; they accept some parts of it, modify others, and reject others.”Footnote ¹³² In this context, authorial intention truly has an essential role to play in the study of an author’s reception, and a commitment to the longue durée can thus be paired with a more traditional contextualist investigation.

There are, of course, certain limitations to this approach, or at least certain challenges that should be flagged. First of all, in studying the reception of an author, one must address the various silences that can occur around the author’s work. This can be the case when, as I have suggested, certain ideas or elements of the text appear to be central to the original work but disappear during the reception process. Under such circumstances, one is left to carefully speculate as to what might explain the surprising omission. Even more strikingly, one must consider the fact that over the course of an author’s afterlife, there will be periods during which her work may recede into the background or be ignored entirely. This can occur for various reasons, including mere neglect, a controversial reputation, or a falling out of favor of certain types of argument. In light of this, a serial contextualism based on an author rather than on a concept may well be episodic, with important chronological gaps between the different receptions. There is thus an important difference between the longue durée entailed by an author-based serial contextualism and that entailed by a concept-based one, as concepts are more likely to appear under different iterations in the work of various writers. When studying an author and her reception, a longue durée approach is just as much about continuity as it is about discontinuity; the expansive chronological coverage allows one to analyze the moments during which an author’s popularity surged and to trace the construction of a seemingly continuous tradition of thought around that author’s name, but also to shine a light on the various moments during which the author was not in fact considered particularly remarkable. The latter, of course, is a way to problematize the existing stories of continuity and to highlight the contingency of the established canon.

1.4 Conclusion

Though a growing number of scholars have now examined the reception of certain “great thinkers” in IR, there has been little explicit methodological reflection as to what these types of studies entail. The purpose of this chapter has been to dissect the different elements involved, drawing on reception theory to highlight the most significant methodological insights to keep in mind if one is to examine processes of reception rigorously and systematically.

Bringing together various methodological insights from HPT, intellectual history more broadly, and literary studies, I have made a case for the importance of first examining an author in her initial context in order to acquire a benchmark against which the characteristics of the reception process can be measured. This is in contrast to current approaches to intellectual history that focus either on analyzing an author’s thought within her original context, or on examining the reception of the author at various points in time, without explicitly linking the two. The dual contextualization I propose may be applied to a single work, by analyzing it closely both in the author’s original context and in the various contexts of the author’s reception. Alternatively, a study seeking to focus more heavily on the reception process may establish this benchmark by drawing on the more classically contextual (i.e., “Cambridge School,” broadly speaking) secondary literature to acquire a sufficient sense of what the author’s original intentions were, if these are already relatively well established. It is worth noting that while processes of reception have received quite a bit of attention in the case of the rediscovery of classical authors between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, the same cannot be said for the reception of early modern authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The proposed methodological approach will thus be particularly relevant for future studies that seek to account for these understudied, more recent processes – which are of course particularly relevant to the discipline of IR – and its precepts can be applied to authors beyond the specific field of international political thought.Footnote ¹³³

While the growing number of works examining the reception of various great thinkers in IR is a very encouraging development, these processes of reception still remain an under-researched area in the discipline, and this comes with some significant costs. Systematically applying the present method in IR will allow for a better understanding of what great thinkers actually intended to express in their original context, and of the type of interests that shaped their legacies and gave us our contemporary interpretations of their works in the discipline. This is important for three reasons. First, as I have sought to highlight through various examples about the treatment of early modern authors in IR (Grotius, Hobbes, Thucydides), the histories of these authors’ receptions into the discipline underline the extent to which our dominant understandings of their works were produced by later individuals with agendas of their own. As long as we simply accept these narratives, we are condemned to remain bound to these past agendas and to have little understanding of what insights these “great thinkers” can presumably provide us with.

Second, and more importantly still, the approach I put forward provides the tools for investigating the processes of instrumentalization – or even mere unintentional misreading – of famous texts by both scholars and practitioners and to assess the impact of this phenomenon on international relations. As I have discussed, great thinkers are often rediscovered or celebrated anew at opportune moments, when they can be put to various broadly political uses. The glorification of their ideas and the novel forms under which these authors are celebrated in their new contexts often result from a conflation of contingent elements, be they of a personal, institutional, social, or more traditionally political kind. In providing an explicit method for studying these processes, the proposed approach offers a rigorous roadmap for assessing how ideas actually come to have an impact in practice, when they are for instance used as legitimating devices for various political projects.

Third, and relatedly, this approach calls for those interested in “great thinkers” in IR to perhaps turn a more significant part of their attention to the makers of greatness: the intermediaries who select various authors for canonization and seek to use them in particular ways and for particular purposes. Whether as scholars or as practitioners, they might not be particularly well known, but in their choices of whom to glorify, they can indeed have a significant impact both on disciplinary developments and – if they are lawyers or diplomats for instance – on the conduct of international relations. When great thinkers are used as weapons to defend particular projects or ideologies over others, the agency lies with those who wield their name, and the intellectual force of a Hobbes or a Grotius comes to be heavily mediated through the minds of those who claim these authors’ legacy for themselves.

This brings us back to Alberico Gentili and his place in contemporary narratives about the emergence of modern war. Like the other famous figures I mentioned, Gentili’s ideas came to us via the minds of various intermediaries, men who lived in other epochs, who had concerns of their own, and who, through their own priorities and idiosyncrasies, came to shape the Italian jurist’s posthumous journey. Applying the methodological precepts put forward in this chapter, the rest of the book first examines Gentili’s intentions in reshaping the definition of war within his own context before proceeding to a diachronic analysis of his reception across centuries. In doing so, I provide a critical account of the contemporary narratives about Gentili and modern war, unearthing their nineteenth- and twentieth-century origins and shedding light on what their rendition of history ultimately obscured.