- Unless otherwise noted, all events below were/will be conducted in Japanese.
- This page shows abstracts in English attached to each paper or abstracts translated into English for this website.
Academic Presentations
Martin Wight on Historical Narrative: Power Politics and the Review of F. H. Hinsley Power and the Pursuit of Peace, Japan Association of Global Governance, Ibaraki, Osaka, Japan, May, 2024
Abstract: Martin Wight, a leading scholar of the English School, is both a historian and a theorist, as represented by his International Theory (1991), a bold categorization based on his interpretations of history and the canon. On the other hand, his aspect as a historian has not yet been fully revealed. One of the reasons is that the contrast between the English School and American International Political Theory (IR), not only Wight’s, has brought to the fore the question of history or theory — a question that has sometimes given rise to a polemic in the form of superiority or inferiority — and has not given rise to an awareness of the problem of identifying the characteristics of his historiography. In illuminating the characteristics of Wight’s historical narrative, I will discuss Power Politics (1978), which was conceived before International Theory, and in keeping in mind not IR but his contemporary, the British diplomatic historian Hinsley’s Power and the Pursuit of Peace (1963). The former is a compilation of concepts related to international relations, while the latter is a chronological history. Wight’s brief but provocative review of the latter regards the basis for his historical narrative as Kantianism and criticises his optimistic view of the post-World War II world as ‘as stable as they were” in the nineteenth century’. Wight, on the other hand, urges us to remember ‘how the nineteenth-century system ended.’ History is summoned differently. I also refer to the book review of Hinsley by Masataka Kosaka, a scholar in international politics in Japan.
Martin Wight on the Dominant State: or, Its Historical Narrative, The Research Group on the English School of International Relations in Japan, Tokyo, Japan, Feb, 2024.
Rhetoric in the Age of British Cicero: Two Parliamentary Anthologies in Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century, The Japanese Political Science Association, Tokyo, Japan, Sep, 2023.
Public Lecture & Workshop
Café Philosophique
- Is Success the Result of Luck or Hard Work?: Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit, Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan, Aug, 2024.