Religion and politics: Arnold Toynbee and Martin Wight

Abstract

This yearly commemoration of Martin Wight by means of a lecture is doubly appropriate. An annual lecture keeps his memory green among his friends and pupils. And in the second place, it is a peculiarly fitting celebration because Martin Wight was a teacher whose greatest and most seminal influence was in large measures exercised in lectures tutorials, seminars and discussion groups. Exercised that is by means of the spoken, the living, word transmitted directly person to person, mind to mind. When it is contrasted with, say, a book, mere speech is thought to be something fleeting and evanescent, not to be compared with the tangibility, fixity, durability of the written and the printed word. But this is the merest superstition, for that which is fixed is also dead and inert. If the written word has power to speak to us, to move us, this is because it is the emanation and the embodiment of the living spirit. I am, here, put in mind of a striking passage which occurs in that most moving of Plato's writings, the writing known as the seventh epistle – a passage where Plato describes how his teaching is transmitted. This teaching he declares is not to be found in anything written down. The knowledge with which he is concerned is of the kind which “after long-continued intercourse between teacher and pupil, in joint pursuit of the subject, suddenly, like light flashing forth when a fire is kindled, it is born in the soul and straightway nourishes itself. ”The light of Martin Wight's discourse, its rayonnement, an irradiation now felt by many who never knew or met him – it is this which has brought us together on this occasion, and which illuminates the issues I am about to consider – issues which we have reason to believe interested him closely, and in more ways than one.

Challenge and Response: The Lasting Engagement of Arnold J. Toynbee and Martin Wight

“…36 In the next section, the influence that Toynbee had on Wight's thought is explored. Their religious beliefs, however, are, for reasons of space, not examined in any detail in what follows -these have in any case been discussed at greater length elsewhere, not least in Kedourie's memorial lecture 37 -except where they seem relevant to their wider thought. Their differences in this area were, it should be noted, profound.…”

“…None of Wight's former colleagues and current devotees -with the sole exception of Elie Kedourie 9 -has discussed his relationship with Toynbee in any depth. The references that can be found are short, even terse.…”

“…Kedourie recalls one such informal discussion, and indeed the wedding gift of the first six volumes of the Study. 19 A few years later, in 1954, Wight made a more public and forceful intervention on Toynbee's behalf during the controversy that followed the publication of Douglas Jerrold's The Lie about the West. 20 This book was an intemperate rebuttal of Toynbee's argument in his Reith Lectures for 1952, later published as The World and the West (1953).…”

Un Conservatorismo “Scettico”. Note Su Elie Kedourie

“…La luce e il tepore che offrono è quello del focolare, non quello della grande centrale termoelettrica, la tranquillità che garantiscono non ha il potere di chetare la tempesta del mondo ma ci mette un tetto di legno sopra la testa. Questi 'rifugi' includono le religioni e anche le istituzioni di governo, "che conferiscono protezione e garantiscono le libertà" 57 , modellate dal tempo e dall'esperienza.…”

Faith, history and Martin Wight: the role of religion in the historical sociology of the English school of International Relations

“…112 To preach mere love is to be simply impatient and dismissive of our world, the world which is lighted by the light of common day, is to lose the desire and perhaps the ability to cope with, and understand politics-which is not and cannot be love. 113 Wight, in the certainty of youth, may well have expressed the simplicity of the dove, but unlike Dick Sheppard, he came to recognize 'the church was [also] enjoined to cultivate the wisdom of the serpent' (Matt: 10: 16). 114 On this distinction turned the difference between having high ideals or foolish expectations in international politics.…”