Martin Wight was perhaps the most profound thinker in international relations of his generation. In a discipline for too long mesmerized by the pseudo-science of the historically and philosophically illiterate, his work stands out like a beacon. Yet it is only in the decades since his death that his achievement has attained its true recognition.
Of the first volume of posthumously published lectures—
International Theory: The Three Traditions
(1991)—one reviewer wrote: '[it] stands as a classic in the genre of printed lectures stretching from Aristotle to Ruskin... It is exhilarating... for there is nothing quite like it and— which is a measure of Martin Wight's stature—there is not likely to be'.
That volume is here complemented and completed. In these four lectures Wight takes the archetypal thinkers of this three traditions—Machiavelli, Grotius, and Kant—to whom he adds Mazzini, the father of all revolutionary nationalism, and so the prototype of such as Nehru, Nasser, and Mandela, and subjects their writings and careers to a masterly analysis and commentary. The volume also contains an important new introduction to Wight's thought by Professor David S. Yost.