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Ambrose of Milan is famous above all for his struggle with, and triumph over, 'Arian' heresy. Yet, almost all of the evidence comes from Ambrose's own writings, and from pious historians of the next generation who represented him as a champion of orthodoxy. This detailed study argues instead that an 'Arian' opposition in Milan was largely conjured up by Ambrose himself, lumping together critics and outsiders in order to secure and justify his own authority. Along with new interpretations of Ambrose's election as bishop, his controversies over the faith, and his clashes with the imperial court, this book provides a new understanding of the nature and significance of heretical communities in Late Antiquity. In place of rival congregations inflexibly committed to doctrinal beliefs, it envisages a world of more fluid allegiances in which heresy - but also consensus - could be a matter of deploying the right rhetorical frame.

Pragmatists have traditionally been enemies of representationalism but friends of naturalism, when naturalism is understood to pertain to human subjects, in the sense of Hume and Nietzsche. In this volume Huw Price presents his distinctive version of this traditional combination, as delivered in his René Descartes Lectures at Tilburg University in 2008. Price contrasts his view with other contemporary forms of philosophical naturalism, comparing it with other pragmatist and neo-pragmatist views such as those of Robert Brandom and Simon Blackburn. Linking their different 'expressivist' programmes, Price argues for a radical global expressivism that combines key elements from both. With Paul Horwich and Michael Williams, Brandom and Blackburn respond to Price in new essays. Price replies in the closing essay, emphasising links between his views and those of Wilfrid Sellars. The volume will be of great interest to advanced students of philosophy of language and metaphysics.

Globalization, it is frequently noted, has eroded traditional understandings of state sovereignty. In the words of David Held and Anthony McGrew, it has ‘unbundled’ the relationship between sovereignty, territory and political power and made the ‘proper locus of politics and the articulation of the public interest … a puzzling matter’. Today, this is also the case in the field of security. While frequently seen as the last secure bastion of sovereignty in a rapidly globalizing world, the state’s much-vaunted monopoly of legitimate force is increasingly enmeshed in networks and relations that cannot be contained within the boundaries of the national state. Across the globe, from mega-cities to isolated resource production facilities, security provision and governance take place within assemblages that are deterritorialized in terms of actors, technologies, norms and discourses and are embedded in a complex transnational architecture that defies the conventional distinctions of public–private and global–local. Security, in other words, is increasingly beyond the state. As part of transformations in global governance and shifting social forces, private security has become integral to contemporary power and politics. The key issue is no longer the familiar one of whether or not the state is losing power and sovereignty in a zero-sum game with non-state actors. As we have shown, the new geographies of power cannot be reduced to a simple question of more or less state power or weakened domestic government, in the manner of so much early scholarship on globalization and security privatization. Instead, they demand an investigation of the production of new modalities of power through which the very categories of public–private and global–local are reconstituted and reconfigured.

Spurred by the apparent return of mercenary activities in Africa at the end of the Cold War, and given further impetus and urgency by the substantial involvement of private military contractors in Afghanistan and Iraq, the privatization of security has become one of the most controversial issues in contemporary international politics. Once obscure companies such as Blackwater, Triple Canopy and Erinys have joined with tales of ‘neo-mercenaries’ such as EO in Sierra Leone and Simon Mann’s attempted coup in Equatorial Guinea to become the focus of widespread journalistic coverage, popular books, TV dramas, Hollywood films and increasingly sophisticated scholarly analysis. Yet the privatization of security and its consequences go well beyond the activities of mercenaries and the corporate military. Away from the battlefields, in the day-to-day activities of ordinary life, private security has also become ubiquitous. Less spectacular than the ‘return of the dogs of war’, commercial private security activities, ranging from manned guarding and alarm installation to risk analysis and surveillance, have expanded at a phenomenal rate. Worldwide, the commercial private security market is valued at over $139 billion, and its growth is forecast to continue at an annual rate of 8 per cent to reach a value of $230 billion in 2015. Indeed, what was once described by two prominent criminologists as a ‘quiet revolution’ in security provision has become global in scope.

Across the globe, from mega-cities to isolated resource enclaves, the provision and governance of security takes place within assemblages that are de-territorialized in terms of actors, technologies, norms and discourses. They are embedded in a complex transnational architecture, defying conventional distinctions between public and private, global and local. Drawing on theories of globalization and late modernity, along with insights from criminology, political science and sociology, Security Beyond the State maps the emergence of the global private security sector and develops a novel analytical framework for understanding these global security assemblages. Through in-depth examinations of four African countries – Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and South Africa – it demonstrates how global security assemblages affect the distribution of social power, the dynamics of state stability, and the operations of the international political economy, with significant implications for who gets secured and how in a global era.

SEXTUS AND DESCARTES In a ground-breaking paper, Myles Burnyeat brings into focus what is surely, from a contemporary standpoint, the most striking difference between the scepticism found in Sextus Empiricus' Outlines of Pyrrhonism and that which animates Descartes' Meditations : Sextus' failure to pose in full generality the sceptical problem concerning our knowledge of the external world. For while Sextus and Descartes both question our capacity for knowing the real natures of things, Descartes goes beyond this “essential” scepticism to pose an “existential” problem: how do we know that the external world even exists? What accounts for this difference? A tempting answer, in part Burnyeat’s own, contrasts the practical concerns of Sextus with the theoretical orientation of Descartes. Pyrrhonian scepticism is a way of life: the sceptic lives adoxastos (conventionally rendered “without belief”), letting his actions be guided by natural capacities and acquired habits rather than reasoned judgements. Conceiving scepticism as a way of living in the world, Sextus can hardly doubt the world’s very existence. By contrast, Descartes treats scepticism as a mere methodological device, to be taken seriously only in the context of inquiries into “first philosophy,” a context in which all practical concerns are temporarily set aside. Freed from practical constraint, Descartes can push scepticism to an unprecedented extreme.

‘All reification is a forgetting’ Theodor Adorno The preceding chapters have argued that upon closer examination three classic figures of the ‘Realist tradition’ bear little resemblance to their standard portrayals in International Relations. This chapter seeks to explore some of the contemporary theoretical implications of this argument. I will try to show that an appreciation of this legacy not only challenges the role scripted for ‘Realism’ within much of International Relations theory, but poses fundamental challenges to some of the major categorical divides which structure its debates and define its alternatives. To make this case, I look at three such divisions: Realism versus liberalism, rationalism versus constructivism, and modernism versus postmodernism. These divides are not wholly lacking in plausibility, however they are frequently deeply misleading and have led to a reified (and often caricatured) set of oppositions rather than a framework for substantive engagement with the theoretical and political issues involved. In light of recent discussions about the possibilities of, and need for, ‘dialogue’ across theoretical positions, a re-evaluation of the Realist tradition can help to reopen conceptual contrasts which have themselves become ‘traditions’ structuring theoretical debates, and which tend to act as barriers to discussion and dialogue rather than as facilitating structures for it. Liberalism versus Realism One of the primary implications of the argument pursued in the previous three chapters is that one of the oldest and most pervasive contrasts in International Relations theory — the strict division between liberalism and Realism — is fundamentally misleading both in itself, and as a way of thinking about the evolution of Realism.

The experience of the 1960s has dispelled the illusion that truth can show power the way in direct confrontation. But historical experience reassures us that truth can indeed make people ‘see a lot of things in a new light’. And when people see things in a new light, they might act in a new way. Hans Morgenthau Few figures are as closely associated with Realism as Hans Morgenthau. Indeed no assessment of the development of International Relations can overlook the importance of Morgenthau in the intellectual evolution of the field, and his role in placing Realism at the centre of that evolution. Yet despite this centrality, it is difficult to escape the impression that for several decades Morgenthau was more often cited than read, and that in the process he has been reduced by both his supporters and his critics primarily to an implacable opponent of liberalism and an advocate of power politics. In recent years, however, Morgenthau's thinking has become the source of renewed interest, as a series of analyses have sought to recover the depth and complexity of his thinking by locating it within the complex philosophical and political debates and traditions through which it emerged. Focusing in particular on Morgenthau's relationship to the complex legacy of Max Weber, his location within the politics of Weimar Germany, and particularly on his intellectual engagement with the controversial figure of Carl Schmitt, an understanding of Morgenthau's political Realism is now taking shape that bears little resemblance to the conventional portraits that continue to dominate International Relations.