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This short introduction describes the approach taken by the book and gives a brief outline of its contents. The story is about wars and military occupation, and the ideas underlying them, and the search for these ideas is carried out in the domain of the laws of war by addressing the challenge posed by a particular principle in these laws: the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, a concept which has been recognized as the fundamental principle upon which the entire notion of ‘humanity in warfare’ rests (and has also been acknowledged as the most fragile). The forces underpinning this distinction (more precisely, a distinction between the lawful and unlawful combatant) are explored by presenting three ideologies, each representing a distinct political tradition of war, and each rooted in incommensurable conceptions of the good life; the overall argument of the book is that this incommensurability lay at the source of the failure fully to resolve the problem of distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants between 1874 and 1949. The book makes use of concepts and methods borrowed from a range of intellectual disciplines: political thought, history, and the ‘classical’ traditions of international theory. In the case of the latter, it examines the influence of key thinkers on war, such as Machiavelli, Grotius, and Rousseau, but differs from this orthodox approach in two ways: first, it is not seeking to ascertain the ‘true’ meaning of their philosophies, but rather to find how their political thoughts were interpreted and shaped by later generations; second, the examination is not restricted to abstract theorists and philosophers but is centrally concerned with paradigms constructed by practitioners of war, both professional and civilian.

Makes clear its central aim—which is to challenge the predominant attitudes to ideologies and their scholarly analysis. It emphasises that the thinking encapsulated in ideologies deserves examination in its own right, and should no longer be pigeon‐holed as an impoverished and inferior relation of analytical and normative political philosophies. Proceeding from the political concept as the unit of analysis in political thought, the main thesis of the book is that ideologies are distinctive configurations of political concepts, and that they create specific conceptual patterns from a pool of indeterminate and unlimited combinations; that indeterminate range is the product of the essential contestability of political concepts. It is a parallel thesis that the furtherance of understanding of political thinking will be best assisted by comprehending political concepts as obtaining meaning on three dimensions—time, space, and the morphology of their interlinkages—and that these have to be integrated in an overarching analytical perspective. While the first two dimensions are commonly used in interpreting political thought, the third is not, and is a special aspect of the approach offered in the book; this perspective is considered by the author to be long overdue.

Sir Harold Nicolson’s philosophy of international relations is well summed up by the term ‘liberal realism’, a fusion of two key approaches to the resolution of international problems: realism and idealism. It has its origins in ancient Greek and Roman political thought and history, notably, the writings of Aristotle and Thucydides. It also owes much to the contributions to international theory of Grotius and Kant. The liberal realist outlook closely resembles the conception of a via media. Notwithstanding this, it represents one man’s distinctive theorizing (born of his background, education, and experience) about the main issues of international relations.

Comparison between cultures throws light on each one. It helps to explain similarities and divergences. To do so effectively, one needs to compare all relevant genres and periods. There has been no systematic comparison between Western, Islamic, and Byzantine political thought, at least since Weber. Political thought here includes both philosophical argument and everyday beliefs. Each of these cultures was monotheistic and neoplatonic, but they applied these features differently.

The latter part of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of a number of groupings of political thought that attempt to escape from the morphological and interpretative constraints of the older established ideologies. One way of effecting this has been through the processes of redefining the domain of the political, reconceptualizing the ideational elements of the contending ideologies, renaming the components of political vocabulary, and revalorizing marginal political concepts. Another has been through decreased internal integration in comparison to existing ideological families, the outcome being the formation of thin‐centred assimilative ideologies, which then either challenge the relevance of additional ideological baggage, or thicken by ingesting the patterns of other ideologies. This chapter and the next examine two of the more prominent exemplars, and illustrate a potentially deep divide among analysts: are these ideologies extensive but eclectic or unique but truncated? Here, feminism is examined; the eight sections of the chapter are: (a) The feminist core: between critique and prescription; (b) Gender and power; (c) The political domain; (d) Paradigms lost and regained; (e) Postmodernism: an alliance of convenience?; (f) Equality and the feminist traditions; (g) An ideological reading of ideologies; and (h) The role of the concrete.

This introductory chapter begins with a historical perspective of the Islamic world. Islam has grown consistently throughout history, expanding into new neighboring territories without ever retreating (except on the margins, as in Sicily and Spain, where it was expelled by force). It began in the seventh century as a small community in Mecca and Medina in the Arabian Peninsula, led by its messenger the Prophet Muhammad (d. 632), who was eventually to unite all the Arab tribes under the banner of Islam. Within the first two centuries of its existence, Islam came into global prominence through its conquests of the Middle East, North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula, the Iranian lands, Central Asia, and the Indus valley. In 2014, the year 1435 of the Muslim calendar, the Islamic world was estimated to account for a population of approximately a billion and a half, representing about one-fifth of humanity. The remainder of the chapter discusses the evolution of Islamic political thought; foundations of Islamic political thought; and Islamic political thought in the early Middle Ages (750–1055), high Middle Ages (1055–1258), late Middle Ages (1258–1500), early modern period (1500–1800), and later modern period (from 1800 to the present).

TheDe officiis(henceforthOff.) is one of the ‘great books’, but no one today perhaps can read it with fresh eyes. Less obvious aboutOff. is the work's radical nature in its effort to reform Roman ideology. ApproachingOff., as Cicero encourages us to do via his adaptation of Panaetius, interpreters are tempted to read it as Greek philosophy in Roman dress, or — to cite Miriam Griffin — as ‘a fusion of Greek philosophical precepts with the traditional values of the great Roman statesmen of the past’. It is argued that this temptation should be resisted. It is too bland to represent Cicero's existential situation, at the time when he wrote. It is also too bland to register the problems Roman ideology had generated and Cicero's proposed solutions to them.

In terms of political thought, as in so many other respects, Muslims today could be said to be bilingual. On the one hand, they speak the global political language of Western derivation marked by key concepts such as democracy, freedom, human rights, and gender equality. On the other hand, they still have their traditional political idiom, formed over 1,400 years of Islamic history and marked by concepts such as prophecy, imamate, and commanding right and forbidding wrong. The Islamic tradition is alien to most Western readers. This chapter attempts to familiarize them with it to make it easier for them to follow the other entries in this volume. The single most important difference between contemporary Western political thinking and the Islamic tradition is that contemporary thought focuses on freedom and rights whereas the Islamic tradition focuses on authority and duties. This separates contemporary political thought from that of all premodern societies, not just that of the Islamic world.

This chapter explores the advantages of intellectual history in comparison with other approaches to political thought generally, and to British and American conservatism particularly, and it explains why, among all the conservatives writing during these inter‐war and post‐war decades, four British and four American historians have been chosen as central figures in the definition, representation, and propagation of conservative thought. These figures were selected because of their coherent and accessible statement of conservative ideas, and because of their demonstrable success in reaching audiences larger and more varied than the small groups accustomed to rehearsing conservative messages.

This chapter examines conciliar theory and its legacy to 16th- and 17th-century political thought in Scotland, France, and England. John Neville Figgis urged very forcefully the significance of the role he believed the conciliar movement to have played in the history of European political thought. Three main claims are made in this argument: first, that the source of 14th- and 15th-century conciliar theory is to be found in the secular constitutional experiments of the previous centuries; second, that conciliar theory exerted a demonstrable influence on the constitutionalists and resistance theorists of the 16th and 17th centuries; and third, that it did so (and herein lies its historical significance) because of the precision with which it discerned the theoretical principles underlying medieval constitutionalism, the universality with which it formulated those principles, and the clarity and force with which it restated them. Thus, conciliar theory was not only an ecclesiological, but also a political theory.

The strong revival of conservatism in the 1980s, both as a governmental force and as a body of political thought, is frequently portrayed as a flowering of beliefs and attitudes attached to new theoretical frameworks, meriting the designation New Right or neo‐liberal conservatism, as distinct from plain neo‐conservatism. Those frameworks, it is often asserted, have substantially reformulated conservative doctrine and launched a cohesive set of positive ideas matching progressive ideologies in sophistication and breadth. The contemporary study of conservatism is thus confronted with two conundrums: is there now in evidence a new type of conservatism, breaking with its past incarnations and embarking on a programme of change so active that it may no longer be conservatism; and moreover, is there an unbridgeable rift between two concurrent conservative creeds, neo‐liberal and traditional? It is argued here that late twentieth‐century conservative thought occupies fundamentally the same semantic field as its predecessors, granted that the cultural constraints within which its network of concepts is decontested have been considerably transformed; consequently, conservatism appears to be attached to an innovatory range of substantive ideas and policies. The five sections of the chapter are: (a) Thatcherism as conservatism; (b) The subservience of economics; (c) ‘Who is the fiercest of them all?’; (d) Recent American conservatisms; and (e) The unity of Thatcherite ideology.

The growing influence of liberalism in China has made it important to determine the response of traditional Chinese political thought to Western liberal ideas of multicultural citizenship, and the impact of the Western liberal model of minority rights on China’s ethnic minority policy. This chapter begins by discussing the basic characteristics of the Confucian approach to minority questions and minority rights. It examines the influence of Marxism on minority rights, in general, and on Chinese practice, in particular. It then discusses China’s policies on ethic minorities, and compares current Chinese practices with the Western liberal model of minority rights.