The Historian’s Purpose

Abstract

Wight began and ended his academic career as an historian. Late in his life he wrote to a correspondent: “[O]ne of the things that the change from the LSE to Sussex has done is to show me that I am irremediably a historian in my beliefs and outlook … I want to make people aware of the relevance, the topicality of the past.”² He was never truly reconciled to the “discipline” of International Relations (IR). When he moved to Sussex in 1961 he asked for a Chair in History rather than the one muted in “Political Theory,” arguing that “History is wider and less limiting.” ³ He thought, at that time, that his “best work” had been on “inter-war diplomatic history”—that was contained in the Survey of International Affairs for March 1939—and that although he had worked since upon the “political theory of international society,” as he put it, he wanted most to “continue to inhabit the Ernest Barker borderland where classical studies and history and political theory meet.”⁴

A true politics … is above all a philosophy of history.

Harold Laski¹