In Memoriam: Professor Andrew Linklater (8 March 1949 - 5 March 2023)

- Professor Richard Devetak (University of Queensland)

The intellectual journey exhibited in these RIS articles from 1981 to 2007 showcases Andrew Linklater’s openness to exploring different intellectual resources and submitting his own ideas to critical reflection and progressive revision. They also demonstrate his remarkable command of, and ability to synthesise, complex and diverse bodies of literature. But most of all they display the ingenuity of a theoretical and historical mind.

Linklater’s first article published in RIS, ‘Men and Citizens in International Relations’ (1981), enquired into the conflicting obligations people feel as citizens of a state and as members of humanity. In identifying this conflict between ‘men and citizens’ as the central problem of international relations, Linklater was arguing that the world of sovereign states was also a world of moral tensions and rival ethics. Linklater’s solution was to embrace a philosophical history shaped by German idealism and inflected by the ethical theories of Immanuel Kant and T. H. Green. The purpose was to deliver a cosmopolitan ethic that could reconstitute the modern states-system beyond the prevailing ‘geographical morality’, in the hope of enlarging human freedom.

If ‘Men and Citizens’ embraced a philosophical history formed by German idealism, ‘Realism, Marxism and Critical International Theory’ (RIS 1986) sought to graft historical materialism onto it. Linklater situated this article at the intersection of convergent developments in IR and sociology: the growing interest of historical materialists in diplomatic and strategic interaction in the formation of the modern state and states-system, and the recognition by IR theorists that the states-system could not be abstracted from the structures and processes of the world economy. Technically a review of books by Anthony Giddens (The Nation-State and Violence) and Vendulka Kubalkova and Albert Cruikshank (Marxism and International Relations), this article was a masterful synthesis of theoretical developments in sociology and in IR that set out a research program for moving beyond both by proposing a critical international theory. Linklater would expand fully on this program in his 1990 book, Beyond Realism and Marxism, but this article established the foundations and the purpose of a theory guided by a human interest in emancipation and, in Hegelian style, capable of integrating the insights of realism and Marxism whilst transcending them to develop a critical international theory.

Originally delivered as the eleventh E. H. Carr Memorial Lecture at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, Linklater’s third RIS article, ‘The Transformation of Political Community: E. H. Carr, Critical Theory and International Relations’ (RIS 1997), revisited the writings of Carr in an effort to rethink the principles of association underpinning the modern state. Drawing a parallel between the social crises and steering problems that afflicted modern societies in the 1930s and 1990s, Linklater followed Carr in contemplating the possibilities of less exclusionary forms of political community. ‘Political association would no longer assume the fusion of sovereignty, territoriality, citizenship and nationalism’ (337) in this post-nationalist vision but would afford opportunities to institutionalise transnational ties that were already immanent in existing societies. Prompted by feminist and post-structuralist thought, Linklater argued for greater sensitivity to cultural difference, the diverse struggles to resist domination, and potential to multiply and deepen democratic will formation. This vision, which drew inspiration from Habermas’s conception of the Enlightenment project, formed the basis of the book he published the following year, The Transformation of Political Community (1998), and on which RIS published a special forum (vol. 31, no, 1, 1999).

The critical theory of Jurgen Habermas was a vital element in Linklater’s writings from the 1980s onwards. Indeed, in his contribution to the RIS ‘Forum on Habermas’, ‘Dialogic Politics and the Civilising Process’ (2005), Linklater restated his interpretation of Habermasian discourse ethics as expounded in The Transformation of Political Community and defended it against critiques. An openness to learning from others, reliance on the ‘force of the better argument’ rather than coercive power, and the encouragement to think from the standpoint of others form the basis of Linklater’s dialogic politics. The chief innovation in this article was to bring Habermas into dialogue with Norbert Elias, the great sociologist and historian of civilizing processes. Linklater’s point is to argue that dialogue, especially if it builds on the procedures of Habermas’s discourse ethics, is fundamental to civilising processes in a way that avoids assumptions of moral or cultural superiority. Linklater developed his interest in Elias and the theme of civilising processes further by forming a bridge with the English School’s comparative sociology of states-systems. This culminated in his last published book, The Idea of Civilization and the Making of the Global Order (2021).

In ‘Towards a Sociology of Global Morals with an Emancipatory Intent’, published as part of a Special Issue on ‘Critical International Relations Theory after 25 Years’ (RIS 2007), Linklater returned to familiar themes—emancipation, the boundaries of moral and political community, and the scope of ethical concern—but with a focus on the emotional and psychological dimensions of moral and political conduct at the international and global levels. Kant and Habermas come in for some gentle criticisms here for their rationalist and ‘decorporealised’ ethical theories. Instead, he turns to Simone Weil, Adam Smith, and Theodor Adorno, among others, who addressed the ‘sources and channels’ of sympathy, to make a case for a comparative sociology capable of tracing attitudes to harm, suffering and vulnerability in the history of the states-system. This research program underpinned his projected trilogy on the problem of harm, the first two volumes appeared as The Problem of Harm in World Politics (2011) and Violence and Civilization in the Western States-System (2016).

Linklater’s articles form a powerful statement of the case for a critical theory of international relations; one that presents international theory as political theory, that defends an enlightened universalism whilst respecting legitimate difference, and that grafts a historical sociology (whether informed by Marx, Elias, or Martin Wight) onto a Kantian-inspired and Habermasian-inflected philosophical history. Dialogue was his subject and his method, and while the intellectual tools and conceptualisation varied over time, Linklater’s commitment to enlarging human freedom remained constant. The legacy of his work extends far beyond these articles, but RIS provided an important venue for the discipline to engage with and benefit from a scholar whose relentless pursuit of knowledge modelled an intellectually humble, reflective, expansive, and non-dogmatic approach to the theoretical and historical study of international relations.

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