1. Little children have known always

2. What Plotinus taught the wise,

3. That the world we see, we are:

4. Kathleen Raine, Living with Mystery

The main argument of this book has been that the intertwining of the teleocratic conception of the modern state and the post-sixteenth-century just war tradition has produced, in the modern reworking of the just war, a conception of ‘legitimate force’ that, at least in principle, is much more permissive than is usually supposed. It is permissive to the extent that, rather than acting as a restraint on the use of force by states, or indeed by other agents, it can act as a facilitator, even a driver, for such use. In the specific context of international order after the Cold War, and especially after 9/11, I have suggested that such a permissive conception of force has had extremely malign consequences and that, notwithstanding the always changing contexts of international politics in the twenty-first century, such malign consequences show every sign of remaining in place and perhaps becoming ever more parlous as the century continues.