British liberal internationalism, 1880–1930: Making progress?

By Casper Sylvest

This book explores the development, character, and legacy of the ideology of liberal internationalism in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain. Liberal internationalism provided a powerful way of theorising and imagining international relations, and it dominated well-informed political discourse at a time when Britain was the most powerful country in the world. Its proponents focused on securing progress, generating order and enacting justice in international affairs. Liberal internationalism united a diverse group of intellectuals and public figures, and it left a lasting legacy in the twentieth century. This book elucidates the roots, trajectory, and diversity of liberal internationalism, focusing in particular on three intellectual languages – international law, philosophy and history – through which it was promulgated. Finally, it traces the impact of these ideas across the defining moment of the First World War. The liberal internationalist vision of the late-nineteenth century remained popular well into the twentieth century and forms an important backdrop to the development of the academic study of International Relations in Britain.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Jul 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781847797377

Casper Sylvest

Casper Sylvest is Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Management at the University of Southern Denmark

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

When I speak of Idealism I mean not that blind faith in the certainty of human progress which was engendered fifty years ago by the triumphs of applied science and the prosperity they brought, but rather that aspiration for a world more enlightened and more happy than that which we see today, a world in which the cooperation of men and nations rather than their rivalry and the aggrandizement of one at the expense of the other, shall be the guiding aims…. The sensible idealist – and he is not less an idealist, and a far more useful one if he is sensible, and sees the world as it is – is not a visionary, but a man who feels that the forces making for good may and probably will tend to prevail against those making for evil, but will prevail only if the idealists join in a constant effort to make them prevail. (James Bryce, 1922¹)

Among the central ingredients in any history of the twentieth century are the recurrence of massive, bloody and frightening wars, hot or cold, and the pursuit of peace, inspired, partly at least, by visions of liberty and order in a world of nations. The ending of the Cold War and the development of the human rights regime have contributed to the seemingly unequalled position that liberal ideas about freedom, democracy and the economy now enjoy – a hegemony that has profound and sometimes violent implications for international politics. In such circumstances, it is easy to forget that liberalism, like any ideology, has evolved through time. Indeed, there are no vacuums in history and liberal ideology has a past that is not always easy to reconcile with its contemporary manifestations. The alluring liberal rapport with democracy is an obvious case in point: while the two seem natural and inseparable allies today, the majority of nineteenth-century liberals blended their acceptance of, even support for, more democratic practices with apprehension about its consequences. Liberal political thought has always been in part a vision of international relations, but this is similarly not fixed: intuitively it is often thought of in terms of peace and prosperity, but as the post-Cold War era has demonstrated, liberals are perfectly capable of endorsing a bellicose approach to international politics. Although the inability to break the vicious cycle of anarchy and war has made this domain of social and political activity a prime site of liberal failure, liberal visions of international politics are still both popular and powerful. Any attempt to underwrite or understand a liberal project beyond the boundaries of states and nations builds on historical interpretations of the liberal spirit, its aims, means and ideals. Judgements about the status of these interpretations, which (like any other interpretation of history) can appear convincing, distorting, or eye-opening, spurring approval, critique or revision of beliefs, are inescapably made against a background of existing knowledge and prior interpretation. In short, history, politics and ideology cannot be separated.

This book seeks to recover central elements in the liberal jigsaw puzzle of international politics by exploring the development, character and legacy of the ideology of liberal internationalism in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain. It is a study of a way of theorising and imagining international relations that dominated well informed political debate at a time when Britain was the most powerful country in the world. Liberal internationalism – which grew out of the amorphous ideology that was Victorian liberalism and became one of its hallmarks – united a diverse group of intellectuals and public figures. Apart from shaping debates about global politics at the time, it left a lasting legacy in the twentieth century. For a number of reasons, it is important to revisit these ideas. Firstly, our current understanding of liberal internationalism is wanting; secondly, liberal approaches to war and peace make up a crucial, but unpredictable, force in contemporary world politics; and thirdly, current liberal theories of international relations are based on a highly selective reading of the liberal tradition. Recapturing a particular manifestation of liberal international thought enables critical analysis of current contemporary liberal ideas about international politics and their deployment in practice. Against this background, this book sets out to uncover the multifaceted nature of the British liberal internationalist tradition through an analysis of its roots, trajectory and ideological resources.

Today, liberal international thought is often illustrated by reference to canonical political philosophers, most notably Immanuel Kant, or political campaigners, for example Richard Cobden. The views of such figures were obviously important for the ideology that came to dominate attempts to theorise international politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Yet the more immediate contexts from which liberal ideas emerged have so far received little scholarly attention and, in particular, our understanding of the continuities in liberal thought across the watershed of the First World War is wanting. A parallel problem here is that the (pre-war) ideas and ideals of liberal internationalism were the most important influences on the establishment of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR) in the wake of the war, but only the rough contours of this relation are clear. On the one hand, analyses of liberal international thought in IR have, apart from studies of liberal icons like Immanuel Kant or Jeremy Bentham, been confined to ideas emerging in the twentieth century, with a heavy focus on the inter-war years. On the other hand, in British intellectual history, liberal international thought in this period is treated only tangentially, with the exception of studies of the iconic figure of John Stuart Mill. While historians and political scientists continue to benefit from an ever-growing literature on the development of (particularly liberal) political thought in Britain during the country’s remarkable period as a rising, dominant and declining imperial power, wider systematic analyses of international, and to a lesser extent imperial, political thought are curiously absent in this literature. This book attempts to fill some of these lacunae. It starts from the assumption that the historiography of IR and (British) intellectual history needs to be integrated: while IR could potentially gain insights into the contextual preconditions of international theorising, the intellectual history of the period needs a stronger international dimension. Sifting through these literatures, one could be forgiven for thinking both that international politics figured only at the margins of liberal intellectual debate in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and that the period produced little of value or interest for the development of liberal approaches to international politics. Both beliefs are mistaken.

The thrust of my argument is as follows. Throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent liberal intellectuals in Britain grappled with the central conundrums of international politics, including the nature and causes of war, the role and character of ethics and law, and the preconditions necessary for securing peace.² In fact, this liberal elite shared a relatively coherent and overarching ideology of liberal internationalism, which was promulgated in different ways and in different contexts. This book delineates and brings this ideology to life by looking at some of the most important representatives of the liberal intelligentsia it united. I argue that liberal internationalism is best conceptualised as an ideology focused on encouraging progress, sowing order and enacting justice in international affairs. These three objectives, making up the core of liberal internationalist ideology, were interlocking. Political progress, whether seen as a natural (albeit distant) property of history or dependent on volition, would lead to order and justice. Political order in international politics referred not only to stability and the absence of war, but also to an orderly form of politics often associated with the conduct of politics at home.³ Achieving order would represent progress and, partially at least, the achievement of justice. The latter referred above all to the development of a public morality in international politics, the purpose of which was to subject political conduct to considerations of morality, ameliorating the pursuit of power or interests. To realise a public morality in international politics would to some extent depend on order (and vice versa), symbolising political progress.

Understood in this way, liberal internationalist ideology was a strong trait of political argument among the learned echelons of British society between 1880 and 1930 (and beyond). This book seeks to demonstrate how liberal internationalism travelled into the twentieth century, setting the agenda for debates about international politics and infusing the emergence of the academic discipline of IR in the wake of the First World War. This ideology, as elaborated and defended by public intellectuals, was not the outcome of a rapid resurrection of mid-nineteenth-century ideas during the war. Rather, the renaissance of liberal internationalism was facilitated by the existence of a plethora of ideological and scholarly resources already present within a liberal intellectual milieu. The most important of these resources, including theories and rhetorical strategies – legal, philosophical or historical in nature – are investigated in this book. The analysis demonstrates the relative sophistication and resilience as well as the variety and trajectory of internationalist ideology as it was promulgated, in different ‘languages’, by some of the most prominent liberal intellectuals of the day. In sum, investigating liberal internationalist ideology and its commitments provides, firstly, a much needed understanding of the international aspects of liberal political thought in the period and, secondly, an important sketch of the intellectual resources from which an academic, and avowedly internationalist, discipline of IR arose in the wake of the Great War of 1914–1918.

Liberal international thought: explaining the blind spot

The lack of comprehensive studies of liberal international thought during this period has a number of causes. Here I focus on two compatible explanations. Firstly, IR has for some time now been locked in a number of distorting narratives about its intellectual heritage. As an academic discipline, IR was a product of the trauma of the Great War, the first chair being established in 1919 at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and taking its name from the American President Woodrow Wilson. Perhaps unavoidably, this clearly identifiable birth date has taken on a demarcating role in IR. But academic disciplines are not stable phenomena with clearly identifiable empirical domains – a fact that is particularly pertinent in the period surrounding their birth. Traditionally, pre-war intellectuals or politicians have, with few exceptions, not been regarded as having had much of importance to say about international politics and its conduct. In conventional narratives about the early development of IR and IR theory, the most crucial role is performed by inter-war ‘idealism’. The supposedly naïve and unworldly adherents of an ‘idealist’ school of thought were (and sometimes still are) regarded as occupying an uneasy position between the unscientific world prior to 1918 and the realist(ic) and scholarly world of post-1945 IR: they are credited with giving birth to the discipline, but at the same time they are seen as the politically and intellectually immature offspring of a hypostatised liberal tradition holding sway during the nineteenth century.⁴ The continuing hold of this story is not due to any historical lack of interest in the discipline’s development; rather, it reflects some classic pitfalls of disciplinary history and a poorly developed approach to studying political thought.⁵

Fortunately this is changing as IR is witnessing a turn to history that also involves a focus on historiography and approaches to history.⁶ The history of international thought, broadly understood, is now a fast-growing field. A prominent literature is focused on the international dimensions of the history of political thought, particularly during the early modern period and the eighteenth century.⁷ The modern history of the discipline has also benefited from the historical turn. In particular, realism has been well served, with a plethora of studies of the history and character of realist thought.⁸ Although the conventional narrative of the discipline’s development, centred on the realist defeat of a primitive idealism in a debate taking place in the inter-war years, has been effectively undermined, there is no corresponding interest in the history and character of liberal thought.⁹ The chronological focus on the inter-war years and the negative purpose of the revisionist literature, denying the validity and thrust of the conventional narrative, have arguably diverted energy and attention away from more constructive work on the ideological configuration of liberal approaches to international politics. So while we have a much more sophisticated picture of the variety and subtlety of the ideas of individual internationalists during the fateful interlude of 1919–1939, the ideological and intellectual continuities across the watershed of the First World War and between nineteenth-century liberalism and the British study of international politics remain under-studied.¹⁰ In the most comprehensive history of the discipline available, Brian Schmidt has pointed out how important debates about anarchy and the nature of the state had their genesis in the nineteenth century. But this analysis is skewed towards American intellectual debates and does not pay sufficient attention to the character and strength of liberal internationalist ideology. In general, existing attempts to chart developments between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are either broad and suggestive or concerned with a handful of (albeit important) thinkers.¹¹ The history boom within IR presents a welcome opportunity to explore these themes in more depth.

This brings us to the second explanation: there is a growing and quite sophisticated literature on British intellectual history in this period, but here international thought is treated only peripherally. This is a shame, as this impressive body of literature is less inclined to adopt a triumphalist perspective on the development of political thought. Here the Great War also acts as a boundary of change, but generally these studies have been able to identify continuities as well as discontinuities between pre- and post-war Britain. Nevertheless, this literature supplies few answers to questions about the interconnections between pre- and post-war international thought or the links between the wider political and intellectual contexts in which liberals moved and their ideas about international politics.¹² The studies of liberal international thought currently available are either dated or focused on the development of the British peace movement, an important and necessary but, arguably, limited context for understanding the character of liberal internationalist ideology.¹³ Nevertheless, just as IR has recently turned to history, there are signs that British intellectual history is gradually abandoning its domestic bias. Recent years have witnessed increasing interest in two areas that have repercussions for the study of liberal international thought in the period. Firstly, a number of important studies of English nationalism or the English national character and their relation to Victorian liberalism have appeared.¹⁴ Secondly, there has been an explosion of interest by political theorists and historians in ideologies of empire and imperialism in Britain during the nineteenth century, with a heavy focus on utilitarianism and the political thought of John Stuart Mill.¹⁵ These developments have produced a nascent interest in the broader international thought of the period. The present volume seeks to add to this development.¹⁶

In sum, the lack of studies of British liberal international thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries can be explained by the conventional foci of IR and British intellectual history. Both fields are, however, witnessing reorientations that make a study of these ideas both timely and relevant. This book aims to bring the insights of British intellectual history to bear on British international thought and to supply IR with a more sophisticated understanding of its own intellectual roots.

Liberal internationalism: ideology and context

Given the ambition to retrieve liberal international thought and its most prominent manifestations in the period from 1880 to 1930, a historically sensitive, methodologically sound and thoroughly interdisciplinary approach is needed.¹⁷ Although not all liberal international thought can be reduced to liberal internationalist ideology, the latter is clearly the most important and pervasive manifestation of the former. This section provides a brief discussion of the analytical and methodological framework deployed in the book and introduces the main characteristics of liberal internationalist ideology in the period.

On an abstract level, there is much continuity between the international ideals of nineteenth-century figures like Richard Cobden, W. E. Gladstone or John Stuart Mill and twentieth-century internationalists like J. A. Hobson, L. T. Hobhouse, Leonard Woolf and Norman Angell. Despite many interesting differences, these individuals shared a perception of international politics as a domain deprived of features like progress, order and justice, as well as an ambition to reform the international domain in a way that would supply it with these characteristics. In this sense, these figures were all internationalists. Yet such intellectual links can scarcely be substantiated without contextualising particular manifestations of internationalist ideology. There were many different components to internationalist transformations – legal, moral, historical, to name just a few – and there were ever more liberal intellectuals engaged in these questions. It therefore makes little sense to assimilate every internationalist into a single and uniform tradition. Both the discrepancies between and the underlying ideological unity among internationalists are important. Again, such details can be grasped only by studying particular manifestations of internationalist ideology. Methodological decisions of this nature, it should be stressed, rarely fall from the sky: they emerge, rather, in an iterative interaction between the judgement of the scholar and the character and demands of the subject. The basic principle informing the analysis that follows – that social and political ideas need to be studied in the context(s) from which they originate – transpired from such a process. The conceptual tools with which the narrative has been constructed are based, largely, on the work of Quentin Skinner and Michael Freeden.

The main feature of the contextualist approach to the history of political thought (and intellectual history in general), developed by Quentin Skinner, is that utterances should be analysed in their proper intellectual and political context in order for the analyst to grasp the intention behind them; the contexts in which (speech) acts are conducted is the key to our understanding of the meaning of these acts.¹⁸ What contextualism assumes, therefore, is that utterances have a purpose: they are tools of persuasion. This makes it possible to assess the ideological implications of texts: how do they contribute to the (re)production of meaning in a given context and with what consequence? Contextualism therefore also focuses on rhetorical strategies in processes of ideological change. The basic contention here is that we act by speaking or writing in a particular manner. Often, agents wanting to change an ideology must (re)describe (positively or negatively) certain actions or qualities in order to have them accepted or rejected by their audience(s). This means that any given change, however groundbreaking, must take existing practices and conventions into account. Or as Skinner puts it, ‘All revolutionaries are … obliged to walk backwards into battle’.¹⁹ The purpose of practising history of this sort is not only to meet a concern with accuracy and a deeper understanding of political thought, broadly understood, but also to employ the past in an effort to make us rethink our values and political commitments.²⁰

The contextualist approach is well suited to the study of ideological change, but unfortunately (and paradoxically) its concept of ideology remains very elusive and under-theorised, as it only refers loosely to vocabularies used to persuade others of the legitimate character of a given action.²¹ While ‘ideology’ had a chequered history in the twentieth century, frequently being seen as the manifestation of something else, in the shape of material, social or psychological traits, it is at present undergoing a revival in the human sciences, which should encourage us to explain our understanding and use of the concept.²² The work of Michael Freeden is compatible with contextualism and complements it by providing a more sophisticated and thoroughly theorised understanding of ideology. According to Freeden, ideology can be defined as ‘systems of political thinking, loose or rigid, deliberate or unintended through which individuals and groups construct an understanding of the political world they, or those who preoccupy their thoughts, inhabit, and then act on that understanding’.²³ Ideologies can, therefore, be studied as a dimension of political thought. The fundamentals of Freeden’s ‘morphological’ approach are that we should, firstly, study how certain central concepts within ideologies are ‘decontested’, that is, interpreted or framed in a particular fashion that seeks to exclude other understandings, and, secondly, ascertain how these concepts are related to each other in different manifestations of a particular ideology. This understanding of ideology escapes stasis and closure, allowing us to see ideologies as ‘blurred’ at the edges. Following Freeden, we could argue that the boundaries of internationalism ‘are permeable because its mainstream is negotiable at its edges and occasionally, closer even to its core’.²⁴ These insights are important for the study of internationalist ideology. Freeden’s approach provides tools for understanding how different versions of the same ideology coexist and change over time and enables a differentiation of contexts or ‘languages’ in which liberal internationalism was promulgated by ideological agents.

The historical components and emergence of liberal internationalism as a political ideology are dealt with in detail in chapter 2, but by way of introduction a sketch of the general understanding deployed is in order. At the outset, it should be stressed that, like liberalism, awareness of internationalism as an ideology postdated the employment of the term. But deploying the term with reference to a liberal ideology of international affairs existing in Britain from the mid-nineteenth century is neither illegitimate nor uncommon.²⁵ One way of identifying liberal internationalism as a system or tradition of political thought is to enlist thinkers of the historical canon – Kant and Bentham are likely contenders – but by such moves internationalism becomes either an unwieldy post-hoc construction or an easy target for philosophical criticism.²⁶ Such analyses are valuable, but in order to understand the subtleties and attractions of liberal internationalism in Britain and during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, more attention must be paid to historical context.

Mid-Victorian Britain was infused with a moralising, progressivist and reformist sentiment, which extended to the political in its widest sense. In terms of international politics, this sentiment is illustrated by the coinage of the term ‘internationalism’ in the mid-nineteenth century.²⁷ While it initially had a broad range of reference, describing transnational relations of almost any kind, the term came gradually to refer to an orientation towards peace, co-operation among individuals, nations or states, increasing trade and its beneficial results as well as support for the development of international law.²⁸ This duality persists today, in both academic and colloquial use: internationalism is both a process – referring to social, cultural and economic transactions across national borders and increasing interdependence – and a political programme.²⁹ The latter sense is often dependent on the former; politicians and intellectuals (then as now) proclaiming that we are moving towards an internationalist world often harbour an ideological agenda about the desirability of this development. Although there are exceptions, it is generally assumed that increasing interaction among nations is a positive development, leading to understanding, increased co-operation or, in a more ambitious vein, perpetual peace. So, while we often encounter internationalism as a process, it can also be viewed as a political ideology.

In the context of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain, then, liberal internationalism aimed to reform the conditions of international politics, which in modern times had been defined by anarchy due to the central role of sovereign states and the lack of an arbiter between them. The purpose was to graft progress, order and justice on to the domain of international politics (often with explicit analogy to domestic political practices) in order to make possible the full realisation of liberal values, including freedom, individual and national improvement and good government based on the rule of law. The logic behind this creed was distinctively modern insofar as it presupposed that this process was assisted by progress (as the logic of history) or that politics could be moulded by deliberate reform. Internationalism only gradually became a political catchword, but as an overarching ideology it was pervasive, particularly among liberal intellectuals. As we shall see in chapter 2, internationalism grew out of a liberal mindset, and its status was not unlike that of liberalism itself. As Owen Chadwick once commented, the popular, hazy and occasionally contradictory idea of liberalism was ‘more a motto than a word’ during the nineteenth century.³⁰

This book seeks to provide a thorough analysis of manifestations of liberal internationalism in some of the languages (or vocabularies) available at the time in order to gain a better understanding of this ideology’s character and influence. It also aims to discuss and shed light on the relationship between liberal internationalist ideology before and after the First World War. To this end, the analysis is informed by an important, underlying analytical distinction between moral and institutional modes of internationalist argument.³¹ Moral internationalist arguments are based on a relatively benign view of human nature and the human potential for moral development over time. Here it is often assumed that internationalist goals will be reached with a minimum of institutional interference or constraint. It is important not to conflate such arguments with naïve optimism. For example, the liberal journalist Edward Dicey, writing in 1867, aired the almost sacrilegious view that war and progress were not necessarily antithetical in the short run, because war, its horrors notwithstanding, produced larger and better nations. Yet, like other predominantly moral internationalist arguments at the time, Dicey’s pessimism concerning the present did not impair his faith in the larger tendencies at work in social life. The indirect effects of material and moral progress associated with civilisation, increasing interaction and the teachings of Christianity, although they were slow and tardy, tended to produce a general (as opposed to local) patriotism and a state in which war would become impossible. However slowly, Dicey argued, things were moving ‘progress-wards, and therefore peace-wards’.³² In contrast, institutional arguments are based on a relatively pessimistic, though not fatalistic, view of human nature or a dim view of the unassisted progress in the political relations among humans and point to the necessity of institutional transformation, for example through the creation of sanctions or other forms of supra-national political or legal authority. This is seen as essential to secure moral development and progress in international politics. Clear-cut examples of this logic abound during and after the First World War. J. A. Hobson maintained in 1915 that ‘public opinion and a common sense of justice are found inadequate safeguards. There must be an executive power enabled to apply an economic boycott, or in the last resort an international force.’ Writing in 1932, Norman Angell was equally forthright: human institutions, such as the League of Nations, existed for the purposes of ‘disciplining the anti-social instincts of man’ and ‘dealing with the shortcomings of human nature’.³³

As these examples indicate, the period from the mid-nineteenth century through to the inter-war years witnessed a gradual change from primarily moral to primarily institutional arguments, a development that markedly accelerated during the First World War. Nevertheless, this narrative of discontinuity should be qualified. Firstly, very few internationalist arguments were purely moral or purely institutional; mostly, they reflected a particular mix that gave priority to one logic over the other. It was, in short, a matter of emphasis. Secondly, we should be wary of accepting the self-proclaimed newness of liberal internationalists writing during and after the First World War. Often these figures singled out the most obviously moral arguments – Cobden’s doctrine of non-intervention and free trade was a favourite example – to present their own ideas as innovative, realistic and superior. While there was a development from primarily moral to primarily institutional arguments, in terms of world-view, ideological goals and argumentative strategies, the internationalists rising to prominence during the First World War were heavily indebted to an older generation of intellectuals and their legal, philosophical and historical ‘languages’ of liberal internationalism. This blend of continuity and change in the development of British liberal internationalism I have sought to highlight in the subtitle of the book: Making Progress? refers not only to the underlying conviction of all liberal internationalists that their analyses, as well as the success of their ideas and efforts, were essential for achieving an orderly, peaceful and civilised world; it also plays on the active–passive ambivalence in ‘making’: one can make progress both by riding a train and by constructing a locomotive. Although a prominent internationalist was later to claim that ‘the journey not the arrival matters’, his historical and contemporary fellow travellers had the same destination engraved on their ideological itinerary.³⁴

Limits and remits

To sum up, this book deploys a contextualist approach to the study of liberal internationalist ideology in Britain between 1880 and 1930. Specifically, this means that the analysis must integrate ‘domestic’ and ‘international’ political questions to a higher degree than is common. Although any proposed integration begins from an assumption of separation, this should not be taken to mean that we could completely detach domestic and international issues. (Moreover, on historical as well as theoretical grounds, we should be careful with hypostatising a divide between a domestic and an international political arena.) The point is rather that any credible study of internationalist ideas must have as its primary locus the social, political and intellectual contexts from which these ideas emerged. Pleading for national histories in the twenty-first century might seem outdated and romantic. It is worth stressing, however, that Britain did produce most of the key thinkers of what became IR in the early twentieth century. Moreover, despite the fact that much intellectual life and stimulus during the nineteenth century (as well as before and after) transgressed national borders, the national context is vital not only for understanding the nature, influence and trajectory of specific ideas but also as a starting point for transnational or comparative studies. ‘Foreign’ influences and concepts were and are domesticated and put to use within national intellectual or political traditions, which is why notions of national culture are often used, to good effect, when discussing or comparing social and political ideas.³⁵ This is not, of course, the only legitimate approach. Yet the wider features of (domestic) political and intellectual debate – including the ethical code(s) of Victorian Britain, the popularity of evolutionary and scientific arguments, political catchphrases like ‘free trade’ and ‘public opinion’, the emergence of a collectivist political alternative to individualism and so on – influenced in important ways what could be argued internationally. Viewing liberal international thought through the prism of British political and intellectual culture allows us to shift the emphasis of existing historiography and take international political ideas as our primary object of analysis, while basing the study on a solid grounding in the public and scholarly discourses by which these ideas were flavoured and to which they contributed.

While this book is primarily concerned with internationalist ideology, a central aspect of any claim to theoretical or ideological distinctiveness is to be found in approving or criticising established views. Despite many differences, a prominent element of internationalist ideology from Cobden to the thinkers of the ‘twenty years’ crisis’ is a critique of a particular, traditional view of international politics, whether this is identified as aristocratic, ‘diplomatic’, capitalist, militarist or expansionist. In 1836, Cobden argued that ‘Our history during the last century may be called the tragedy of British intervention in the politics of Europe; in which princes, diplomatists, peers, and generals, have been the authors and actors – the people the victims; and the moral will be exhibited to the latest posterity in 800 millions of debt’.³⁶ During the early twentieth century, internationalists kept lamenting that, owing to practical men and their Machiavellian and Hobbesian ideas, ‘ethical considerations based on humanity are hardly held applicable to States’, as J. A. Hobson put it.³⁷ More confidently, Leonard Woolf pointed to the ‘curious fact that the practical man of to-morrow almost invariably says exactly what the amiable crank is hanged out or laughed at for saying by the practical man of today’.³⁸

The bridge from discontent with practical international politics to a reconstructed international order could, as we shall see, be constructed on many foundations, but notions of moral superiority, political enlightenment, historical progress and the efficacy of ideas were particularly popular. As Norman Angell argued in 1921: ‘When in the past the realist statesman has sometimes objected that he does not believe in internationalism because it is not practical, I have replied that it is not practical because he does not believe in it’. One objective of internationalism was to overcome ‘tradition’ by discrediting it – or, as Angell phrased it, to ‘create a different feeling about it’.³⁹ Not all internationalists were necessarily as conscious as Angell that words are ideological tools, but the frequent references to ‘practical men’ and their realism (to use the jargon of IR) are important as well as intriguing, and the analysis must, however sporadically, try to identify these practical men and their views on international politics. Although there is no shortage of candidates – from individuals like Governor Eyre or Cecil Rhodes to intellectual currents like ‘social Darwinism’ or Hegelian idealism – it is possible that this purported practical view of international politics was a caricature mirroring the realist distortion of ‘idealism’ in IR. The concern with adversaries should not, of course, detract from the main purpose, but it is an inescapable dimension of the historical study of ideologies.

A book cannot cover everything, and all choices carry with them the exclusion of alternatives. Bearing in mind that the themes under investigation stretch across tumultuous decades of intellectual and political history, it ought to be stressed that this book does not provide a history of British foreign policy, a history of the peace movement, a narrow disciplinary history of IR, or a comprehensive biographical or intellectual treatment of the substantial number of figures invoked in the analysis. The overriding concern is to examine British liberal internationalist ideology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The analysis is structured around three intellectual languages of liberal internationalist ideology, derived from the study of international law, philosophy and history in the period, but before providing an outline of the structure and main arguments of the book, a few remarks on the limitations of this approach are necessary.

The first qualification concerns the three selected fields of enquiry. They were only vaguely discernible as academic disciplines in the late nineteenth century, but they nevertheless provide, if interpreted as ‘vocabularies’, a valuable analytical starting point. These languages or vocabularies provided technical terms, questions concerning or touching upon the nature of (international) politics, conventions for arguing about these themes, and other resources that could be exploited by liberal intellectuals to propagate and develop internationalist ideology. The intellectual world of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain underwent a process of professionalisation, which should make us wary of unreflectively projecting academic boundaries back on the people or period under scrutiny. Even in cases where a professional identity can be established, it often belies the character of intellectual life at the time: many of the figures considered here were polymaths, who, despite having a primary subject, were easily capable of conducting scholarly debates in neighbouring vocabularies. It is also worth remembering that important and influential intellectuals in Victorian Britain – such as John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer – did not hold academic positions. Nonetheless, the rudimentary compartmentalisation involved in the process of academic professionalisation, the legacy of which has become our predicament, is a useful framework for investigating liberal international thought. The British study of politics grew out of but also distinguished itself from the traditional subjects of law, philosophy and history.⁴⁰ It is probable that this is also the case with regard to British IR.

We should also be aware of the differences between these emerging disciplines: boundaries between them were permeable and although some were relatively self-contained, none was comprehensive or clear. For example, while ‘international law’ was the subject of interest to a small but fairly close-knit intellectual community, ‘history’ and ‘philosophy’ had a virtually boundless following. At the same time, the overlaying community of liberal intellectuals was small enough to ensure a web of personal contacts between prominent internationalists that furthered consensus on principal ideological commitments. Finally, it is essential to stress that this tripartite division of languages of internationalism is not exhaustive. They have been selected because they contain some of the most important (and widespread) lines of argument among liberal internationalists. Yet they are not the only languages. Changing conceptions of psychology had an impact on the understanding of international politics during this period, and the vocabulary of British political economy, with its historical emphasis on free trade, was a particularly important dimension of internationalist arguments.⁴¹ These themes are not accorded separate treatment here, although the importance of the doctrine of free trade figures through its influence on the languages that are dealt with.

A second qualification concerns the terms ‘intellectuals’ and ‘intelligentsia’. In late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain, political theorising – understood as an attempt to organise knowledge into patterns or theories that are believed to explain political phenomena, to further someone’s understanding of these phenomena or to assist people in navigating morally in politics – was not the prerogative of academics. A growing number