ABSTRACT
Why include Vincent in a book on major figures in International Relations? There is, first, the inherent interest of his main themes, which were intervention, culture and human rights, and more specifically humanitarian intervention. These are two important test cases of the importance allocated to state sovereignty in world politics, and therefore two important indicators of the ground rules and shape of the modern international system. As the Cold War came to a halt, this issue found its way to the centre of the political and theoretical debate, and thereby also gave Vincent’s work a renewed push in the direction of master status (Roberts 1993; Wheeler 1992). Furthermore, Vincent was a card-carrying member of what is often referred to as the ‘English School’ of International Relations. There is quite a number of people in the discipline who have received their training in, or have otherwise been inspired by, the English School (hereafter referred to simply as ‘the School’). The inclusion of a member of the School thus strengthens this book’s claim to representativeness, and particularly so since the School actually embodies the only fully fledged research programme in the field outside the United States. John Vincent did his doctorate with Hedley Bull, who was a strong and lifelong influence and the outstanding exponent of the English School after the death of
Martin Wight (the two other central names are C.A.W. Manning, to which Wight and Bull responded, and Adam Watson). Vincent explicitly declared himself a ‘member’ of the English School (1983:69), and consciously decided to plough his academic furrow in this corner of the field of International Relations. This he did so well that, at the end of his life, he headed the largest IR department of any European university, as Montague Burton Professor at the LSE. For the hierarchically inclined, his institutional success in British and for that matter European academia may be one more reason for including him in a book on figures on International Relations. Vincent himself, however, typically played down having reached the top by quipping that he would still be the ‘Anti-Pope’ of British IR, with the Montague Burton Professor in Oxford, whence Vincent migrated to take up his chair, remaining the unhyphenated ‘Pope’. The quip was typical of the School, and typical of the man. The drawing of a parallel between a present-day situation and the fourteenth-century wrangling between candidates for the apostolic succession to Peter based in Avignon and Rome respectively brings out the English School penchant for, some would say obsession with, putting things in historical perspective. And the partly self-deprecating, partly impish quality of the quip was a trade mark of Vincent the tutor and lecturer, roles in which his claim to mastery was also considerable, but which will not be further pursued here.
