This volume draws together some of the key works of Nicholas Rengger, focusing on the theme of the 'anti-Pelagian imagination' in political theory and international relations.

Rengger frames the collection with a detailed introduction that sketches out this 'imagination', its origins and character, and puts the chapters that follow into context with the work of other theorists, including Bull, Connolly, Gray, Strauss, Elshtain and Kant. The volume concludes with an epilogue contrasting two different ways of reading this sensibility and offering reasons for supposing one is preferable to the other.

Updating and expanding on ideas from work over the course of the last sixteen years, this collection will be of great interest to students and scholars of international relations theory, political thought and political philosophy.