1. The Fifth. Whence came our thought?

2. The Sixth. From four great minds that hated Whiggery.

3. . . .

4. but what is Whiggery?

5. A levelling, rancorous, rational sort of mind

6. That never looked out of the eye of a saint

7. Or out of drunkard's eye.

8. The Seventh. All's Whiggery now.

9. Yeats, ‘The Seven Sages’

As I remarked in the Preface, this book is principally concerned with tracing the emergence and character of a particular trajectory in European – and now international – thought, by means of a focus on the relationship between justifications offered for the use of force and certain ideas about the character of modern politics. In using the term ‘modern’ here, I should say that I do not intend to embark on any great discussion of ‘modernity’ – that most protean, and perhaps overused, term in the modern intellectual lexicon – but rather I am simply gesturing towards the fact that my concern will in general be with the past five hundred years or so, the period in which the modern state – and the states system – came to be formed and the period in which, I shall argue, the just war tradition as a doctrinally articulate tradition also came to be formed. But especially I shall be concerned with how the just war tradition and the particular (teleocratic) trajectory of European thought have been related in the past hundred years or so, the period in which, I shall argue, the relationship between those two increasingly took on a particular, and from my perspective particularly problematic, form, however much it may have been prefigured in earlier thought.