CRANFIELD UNIVERSITY DAREN BOWYER JUST WAR DOCTRINE

norm, so Woodrow Wilson’s liberal internationalism was an overt rejection of the
imperial power struggles and secret diplomacy that had led to the First World War.
Wight defines revolutionists (also sometimes styled ‘Kantians’) as:
those who believe so passionately in the moral unity of the society of states or
international society, that they identify themselves with it, and therefore they
both claim to speak in the name of this unity, and experience an overriding
obligation to give effect to it, as the first aim of their international policies; they
are cosmopolitan rather than internationalist, and their international theory and
policy has a missionary character. 34
In his analysis of Wight, Hedley Bull 35 draws attention to three distinct groups included
in Wight’s characterisation: the religious revolutionists of the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (both protestant reformers, and Catholic anti-reformers); the
French revolutionists of the 18 th Century and the respondent ‘international legitimism’
represented in the Congress of Vienna; and the totalitarian revolutionists of the
Twentieth Century, together with their opposites, the counter revolutionists exemplified
by Dullesian anti-communism. Further discussion of Wight will be left until the next
section, and for now we will remain with the more traditional understanding of
liberalism.
If we accept Hobbes, albeit with more than a backward glance to Thucydides, as the
father of modern realism, then for liberalism the analogous place is occupied by John
Locke. Even here, of course, there must be acknowledgment of earlier influences.
Indeed, Barker 36 dubs St Thomas Aquinas ‘the first whig.’ For Aquinas draws a
distinction between three aspects of authority: its principium, ordained by God; its
modus or ‘constitutional form’, determined by the people; and its exercitum, conferred
by – and hence also, when necessary, to be withdrawn by – the people. This line of
thought, and his development particularly of the third aspect – that it is the community
that institutes government and therefore the community may restrain or revoke its
authority – was clearly influential on Locke. The principle that a government owes its
position to the people (‘of all the people, by all the people, for all the people,’ as
Theodore Parker and then, more famously, Abraham Lincoln were later to have it) 37 is
pervasive throughout Locke’s political philosophy and the liberal tradition that ensued,
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