British liberal internationalism, 1880–1930: Making progress? 9781847793508

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British liberal internationalism, 1880–1930

British liberal internationalism, 1880–1930 Making progress?

CA SPER SY LV EST

Manchester University Press Manchester and New York distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan

Copyright © Casper Sylvest 2009 The right of Casper Sylvest to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9NR, UK and Room 400, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk Distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010, USA Distributed in Canada exclusively by UBC Press, University of British Columbia, 2029 West Mall, Vancouver, BC, Canada V6T 1Z2 British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN  978 0 7190 7909 2  hardback First published 2009 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset in Sabon by R. J. Footring Ltd, Derby, UK Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin

For Suzette, Carla and Halfdan

Contents

Acknowledgements

page  ix

1 Introduction Liberal international thought: explaining the blind spot Liberal internationalism: ideology and context Limits and remits Outline of the book Part I – Beginnings 2 Victorian liberalism and the roots of liberal internationalism Victorian liberalism The roots of liberal internationalism Delineating internationalism Part II – Languages 3 Legal evolution and the redemption of international law The spectre of Austin and British international law   before 1870 Legal evolution and the march of civilisation Positivism, naturalism and the development of   international law The hidden hand of international law The drawbacks of gradualism 4 Philosophy and internationalist ethics A note on philosophical idealism War, evolution and internationalism: Herbert Spencer Between principles and power: Henry Sidgwick’s   liberal internationalism Conclusion vii

1

25

61

101

Contents 5 Liberal internationalism and the uses of history A note on the British historical tradition Nationality and empire: Bryce and the search for peace John Morley, internationalism and the ‘great man’ theory   of history Acton’s ethics and the view from nowhere Conclusion Part III – Traces 6 Into the twentieth century Law in the face of anarchy Philosophy and the future of international politics The internationalist appetite for history Conclusion

148

197

7 A postscript

235

Bibliography

242

Index

271

viii

Acknowledgements

In researching and writing this book, I have incurred debts to many institutions and individuals, and it is a great pleasure to be able to express my gratitude. While I was in Cambridge as a PhD student, Clare Hall and, in particular, Emmanuel College provided shelter, comfort and a superb environment in which to live and work. I also enjoyed the congenial, if occasionally daunting, atmosphere at the Centre of International Studies and the Faculty of History, both excellent institutions in a magnificent university. My time in Cambridge was generously sponsored by the Committee for Education of Researchers under the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation. The grant was competently admin­istered by the Danish Political Science Research School and the University of Copen­hagen. After my return to Denmark, the Department of Political Science at the University of Southern Denmark offered me not only an office when in Denmark but also (it turned out) a job. Numerous librarians – the true saints of historical scholarship – at Cambridge University Library, the Royal Library in Copenhagen and the Library of the University of Southern Denmark helped me track down dusty material and provided invaluable hints and advice in the process. My doctoral research, on which this book is based, was skilfully super­vised by Charles Jones. Understanding my amphibious predicament of being suspended between different disciplines and between diverse commitments in Denmark and Britain, he granted me freedom, made his wide-ranging knowledge available and managed to send me in the right directions whenever I needed help or inspiration. The two examiners of my thesis, Gareth Stedman Jones and Nick Rengger, were excellent in providing a good atmosphere in which to critically discuss my research, which helped me identify the strengths of my project and, more importantly, areas for improvement. Over the years many scholars, some of ix

Acknowledgements them good friends, have helped me by reading work in progress and/or generously offering criticism and advice: I warmly thank Jennifer Pitts, Martti Koskenniemi, Robert Cryer, James Crawford, Zaheer Kazmi, Jude Browne, David Kennedy, Benedict Kingsbury, Ian Hall, Stefan Collini, David Weinstein, Jeanne Morefield, Mark Mazower, Martin Ceadel, Peter Clarke, Ole Spiermann, Paul Corthorn, David Palfrey, Peter Wilson, Lucian Ashworth and Ole Wæver. I also want to thank my new colleagues at the University of Southern Denmark for their way of welcoming an outsider and for providing a friendly atmosphere in which to finish a book. In particular, I have benefited from the advice and encouragement of Michael Baggesen ­K litgaard, Rens van Munster, Klaus Petersen, Jens Ringsmose, Sten Rynning and Nils Arne Sørensen. Jens Bartelson, my former teacher, and Vibeke Schou Tjalve, a fellow student at the University of Copenhagen in the late 1990s and a great friend, have taken a persistent interest in my research, tolerated my seemingly strange interest in British political and intellectual history, and provided a fresh, critical perspective when I needed it most. My biggest debt is owed to Duncan Bell, who read, ­criticised and improved countless versions of the text. I regard it as a great fortune that I met Duncan, first in cyberspace and later in person, back in 2001; if I had not, this book would have looked very different and the process of researching and writing it would have been an altogether more solitary and less enjoyable experience. Prodigious, hard-working, critical, honest and good-humoured – I doubt one can ask for more of a friend and colleague. In preparing the manuscript, I benefited from Tina Guldbrandt Jakobsen and Karoline Bang Lindegaard’s expertise and meticulousness. I would also like to thank the staff at Manchester University Press for their advice and support. Chapter 3 draws on material from two previously published papers of mine: ‘International law in nineteenth-century Britain’, British Yearbook of International Law 2004, vol. 75 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 9–70, and ‘The foundations of Victorian international law’, in Duncan Bell (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order: Empire and International Relations in Nineteenth-Century Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 47–66. I thank Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce some of this material. For a social animal, academic research and writing can occasionally be challenging. I am greatly indebted to my best friends – in England and Denmark, on and off the golf course – who kept me sane by reminding me of life’s other aspects. My entire family has been supportive throughout and kept up with my absence (including that of mind) over the years. In particular, I thank my parents for always insisting that I follow my x

Acknowledgements instincts and interests. My essential source of life and happiness is my treasured companion, Suzette, and our wonderful children, Carla and Halfdan. They are the shining stars in my universe, and this book is dedicated to them. CS Nyborg, Denmark

xi

CH APTER 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 develop­ ment 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 1

Introduction 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 nineteenthcentury 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 ­t wentieth 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 water­ shed of the First World War is wanting. A parallel problem here is that 2

Introduction 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 histori­ ography 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 3

Introduction latter referred above all to the development of a public morality in inter­ national 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 disci­ pline, 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 4

Introduction 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 fastgrowing 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 understudied.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. 5

Introduction 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 historic­ ally 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 6

Introduction 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 inter­ national ideals of nineteenth-century figures like Richard Cobden, W. E. Gladstone or John Stuart Mill and twentieth-century international­ ists 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 character­ istics. 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 7

Introduction 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 inter­ nationalism 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 8

Introduction il­legitim­ate nor uncommon.25 One way of identifying liberal inter­national­ ism 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, 9

Introduction 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 10

Introduction narrative of discontinuity should be qualified. Firstly, very few inter­ nationalist 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 11

Introduction 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 12

Introduction 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 inter­ national 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 inter­ nationalist 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 13

Introduction 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 of statesmen, politicians, men of letters, clergymen and many others (invariably men) theorised about politics more or less as a hobby. Moreover, the ideological orientations of many of these figures were even more multifarious than their professions. This book deals primarily with the liberal intelligentsia and investigates the various ways in which its members studied and theorised international politics. Defining ‘liberal’ is a complex task, as we shall see in chapter 2, and the term ‘intellectual’ is also thorny. I use it as shorthand intended to encompass an amorphous group of figures who, chiefly concerned with intellectual pursuits, participated in public and/or scholarly debate 14

Introduction about international political questions. Their blend of science, ethics and politics was characteristic of the ‘public moralist’, to use Stefan Collini’s apposite term. Although ‘intellectual’ straddles a number of contemporary ­categories, such as the university professor, the man of letters, the scholar politician and the sage, it conveniently identifies a group of persons from which the figures under study have been drawn. Deploying the term with reference to the late nineteenth century is slightly anachron­istic, but if we vigilantly check the ever-present Procrustean tendency involved in doing history, it is not illegitimate (and sometimes helpful) to use concepts and terminologies of more recent origin.42 The final qualification concerns the identification of the period covered by the book. It is certainly true, as Collini has remarked, that ‘In intellectual history more perhaps than in many other kinds, defining a period by specific dates is artificial and may even suggest a misleading precision’.43 This study cannot escape this problem: the dates on the title page are intended roughly to convey the range of the study but are not rigidly adhered to. In order to do justice to the various languages of internationalism, the dates must be somewhat relaxed. For example, an account of the study of international law in Britain in the late nineteenth century would hardly make sense without venturing, however briefly, into the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The gaps in the literature identified above and the fate of British liberalism have motivated the primary focus on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Partly as a result of global political and economic competition, the conviction that the heyday of liberalism was about to end was widespread in the 1880s, and the Home Rule crisis only exacerbated this belief. The clearest transmissions of ideologies, as well as the most interesting innovations and extensions, are often found in periods when intellectual implosion or rival ideologies threaten. This is also true of liberal internationalism. Many liberals demonstrated a propensity to what I term defiance, that is, a propensity to redouble their ideological efforts in times of crisis. This did not necessarily involve ideological inno­vation or a search for new foundations (although it sometimes did) but mainly consisted of a fiercer insistence on core elements and the truthfulness of internationalism. The half-century covered by this book, with its international rivalry, imperial frenzy and liberal discontent, provided ample opportunity for defiant internationalists and, consequently, for students of their ideology. Outline of the book The book is thematically organised within a broad chronological frame. Following this introduction, the second chapter identifies and demarcates the ideology of liberal internationalism and its main characteristics 15

Introduction by analysing it in the political and intellectual contexts of mid- and lateVictorian liberalism. The bulk of the analysis is concentrated in three chapters (3, 4 and 5), each of which examines a key language of liberal internationalism: law, philosophy and history. Chapter 6 brings the analysis into the twentieth century by focusing on the traces and wider resonances that late nineteenth-century liberal internationalism left in the early twentieth century, including its impact on the emergence and consolidation of IR. Chapter 2 explores the political and intellectual background to the rise of internationalist ideology in the second half of the nineteenth century by providing a brief analysis of Victorian liberalism and the visions of international politics that grew out of and were important for the ascendancy of internationalism, particularly at the popular and party political level. This discussion leads to a characterisation of liberal internationalist ideology as concerned with transferring progress, order and justice on to the domain of international politics and thereby reforming the conditions of international politics by curbing the consequences of the inter-state anarchy that had hitherto defined this domain. As the first of three chapters dealing with different languages of internationalism, chapter 3 provides an analysis of the character and intellectual infrastructure of the emerging discipline of international law during a key period of its institutional and intellectual development. British debates about the importance and effectiveness of international law during the nineteenth century hinged on a jurisprudential problem identified in the 1830s by John Austin, the father of analytical jurisprudence: was international law really law or merely a system of positive morality? While international lawyers could for some time sidestep this problem by referring to divine and natural law, such arguments lost much of their force during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. It is argued that international law came to be dominated by legal evolutionary arguments that allowed international lawyers to defend their profession and their subject as meaningful and properly academic. The evolutionary logic provided more than scientific credibility: it simul­ taneously allowed international legal scholars to continue furthering their internationalist project. As the final section of the chapter makes clear, however, evolutionary gradualism also had drawbacks. Chapter 4 is a close examination of the internationalist ideology that, in different ways, emerged from the political and social thought of Herbert Spencer and Henry Sidgwick, two of the most important ­philosophers and liberal intellectuals of the late nineteenth century. Follow­ing a discussion of the role of philosophical idealists, including T. H. Green, D. G. Ritchie and Bernard Bosanquet, the chapter interprets the inter­ nationalist dimensions of Spencer and Sidgwick’s thought by locating it in the context of the wider social, moral and political philosophies 16

Introduction which the two thinkers defended. It is demonstrated that international peace and order were crucial aspects of their intellectual projects, as they ­attempted to systematically theorise international politics from a liberal perspective. Spencer championed social evolutionary arguments structurally similar to those advanced by international lawyers, but the scope of his philosophy was much wider and included the future organisation of societies and a projected development of human ethics that had straightforwardly internationalist implications. By a different route, guided by a few fundamental principles and a utilitarianism sensitive to the opinions of civilised ‘mankind’, Sidgwick reached an internationalist ideology that paid homage to similar values but was less radical and more ready to compromise with the demands of practical politics. While Spencer and Sidgwick had much in common, they also provide a telling illustration of the variation possible within an overarching internationalist ideology. Chapter 5 analyses the historical language of internationalist ideology as it was displayed in the writings of three prominent liberal historians who, each in their own way, informed and augmented liberal inter­ nationalism: James Bryce, John Morley and Lord Acton. The thrust of the chapter is that history – replete with grand ideas, important individuals and ample illustrations of political and moral failures and triumphs – provided a highly useful reservoir for the agile ideological agent. Bryce turned to the great ideal of diversity in unity heralded by the Holy Roman Empire and anxiously watched the darker sides of modern nationalism destroy the ideal of a common humanity. History, from this perspective, contained many important lessons for the modern world, which Bryce duly (and ineffectively) tried to revive. Morley was preoccupied with liberalism’s longstanding battles, internally as well as externally, over the best foreign and imperial policies, and he deliberately used his canonising biographies of personal heroes to pursue the internationalist cause. Lord Acton was absorbed with exposing the follies and crimes of history, and he exploited these to crystallise a spirit of moralism which refused to accept arguments from necessity and which led to practical lessons that matched his peculiar liberalism and his deeply moral(istic) internationalism. Thus, this triumvirate brought their politics into the practice of doing history, but they also used history in their politics. The internationalist articles of faith were, accordingly, validated and romanticised by history. The purpose of chapter 6 is to connect the three foregoing thematic chapters with liberal international thought in the twentieth century and existing literature on this subject. This period is much better under­stood (particularly from 1918 onwards), but what has so far not been adequately grasped are the resonances of late nineteenth-century liberal inter­nationalism. A three-stage analysis demonstrates how ideas and arguments emerging within the legal, philosophical and historical 17

Introduction languages were exploited by a new and younger generation. While the focus is primarily on the continuity within these languages, the chapter also points to examples of important cross-fertilisation and inspiration between them. The main import of the analysis is that while inter­ nationalist ideology in the twentieth century, and particularly after the First World War, acquired a stronger public profile and was driven by a more impatient attitude that informed the turn towards institutional arguments, it was greatly indebted to a world-view that flourished in the late nineteenth century. This is illustrated by a reading of prominent twentieth-century liberal internationalists that traces many of their central visions and modes of argument to their ideological predecessors. Finally, a short postscript summarises the arguments of the book and discusses their wider implications for, in particular, the historiography of IR, contemporary liberal IR theory and British intellectual history of the period. Notes 1 James Bryce, International Relations (London, 1922), pp. 261–2. 2 Although most liberal international thought in Britain in this period was English in origin – a fact that is undoubtedly linked to the ‘Oxbridgisation’ of intellectual activity – I shall throughout refer to British ideas. Deviations from this terminology indicate that there are differences within Britain with regard to the theme or scholars discussed. 3 Internationalists often made use of the ‘domestic analogy’, on which see Hidemi Suganami, The Domestic Analogy and World Order Proposals (Cambridge, 1989). 4 For the original argument, see E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London, 1939). A later and influential historiographical analysis is Hedley Bull, ‘The theory of international politics, 1919–1969’ [1972], reprinted in James Der Derian (ed.), International Theory (London, 1995), 181–211. See also John Mearsheimer, ‘E. H. Carr vs. idealism: the battle rages on’, International ­R elations, 19 (2005), 139–52. 5 For various discussions of this problem, see David Armitage, ‘The fifty years’ rift: intellectual history and International Relations’, Modern Intellectual History, 1 (2004), 97–109; Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘Language, legitimacy and the project of critique’, Alternatives, 27 (2002), 327–50; Gerard Holden, ‘Who contextualizes the contextualizers? Disciplinary history and the discourse about IR discourse’, Review of International Studies, 28 (2002), 253–70; Renée Jeffery, ‘Tradition as invention: the “traditions tradition” and the history of ideas in International Relations’, Millennium, 34 (2005), 57–84; Casper Sylvest, ‘Interwar internationalism, the British Labour Party and the historiography of International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 48 (2004), 409–32. According to Dryzek and Leonard, disciplinary history is often fuelled by attempts to legitimise or ridicule particular theories. See J. S. Dryzek and S. T. Leonard, ‘History and discipline in political science’, American Political Science Review, 82 (1988), 1245–60. 6 See for example Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘International Relations: the dawn of a historiographical turn?’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations,

18

Introduction

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

3 (2001), 115–26; Jonathan B. Isacoff, ‘On the historical imagination of International Relations: the case for a “Dewyean reconstruction”’, Millennium, 31 (2002), 603–23; Geoffrey Roberts, ‘History, theory and the narrative turn in IR’, Review of International Studies, 32 (2006), 703–14. See for example Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge, 1995); David Boucher, Political Theories of International Relations (Oxford, 1998); Beate Jahn (ed.), Classical Theory in International Relations (Cambridge, 2006); Istvan Hont, Jealousy of Trade (Cambridge, 2005); Daniel H. Deudney, Bounding Power (Princeton, 2007); Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society (Cambridge, 2002); Edward Keene, International Political Thought (Cambridge, 2004); Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (Oxford, 1999). From a long list, see for example Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan (New York, 2003); Jonathan Haslam, No Virtue like Necessity (New Haven, 2002); Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision of Politics (Cambridge, 2003); Michael C. Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International ­R elations (Cambridge, 2005). For a good overview, see Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘Under an empty sky: realism and political theory’, in Duncan S. A. Bell (ed.), Political Thought and International Relations (Oxford, 2008), 1–25. The revisionist literature includes Lucian M. Ashworth, ‘Where are the idealists in interwar International Relations?’, Review of International Studies, 32 (2006), 291–308; David Long and Peter Wilson (eds), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis (Oxford, 1995); Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy (New York, 1998); Sylvest, ‘Interwar internationalism’; Peter Wilson, ‘The myth of the “First Great Debate”’, Review of International Studies, 24, special issue (1998), 1–17. Recent studies include Derek Drinkwater, Sir Harold Nicolson and International Relations (Oxford, 2005); Peter Lamb, Harold Laski (Basingstoke, 2004); Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations (Oxford, 2006); Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords (Princeton, 2005); Peter Wilson, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf (Basingstoke, 2003). See also Andrew Williams, Failed Imagination? (Manchester, 1998), chs 1, 2. Schmidt, Political Discourse of Anarchy. See also Lucian M. Ashworth, Creating International Studies (Aldershot, 1999); David Long and Brian C. Schmidt (eds), Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (New York, 2005); Morefield, Covenants without Swords; Casper Sylvest, ‘Continuity and change in British liberal internationalism, c. 1900–1930’, Review of International Studies, 31 (2005), 263–83; Casper Sylvest, ‘Beyond the state? Pluralism and internationalism in early-twentieth century Britain’, International Relations, 21 (2007), 67–85. The literature in this field is mountainous and growing. Some of the best studies include Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology (Cambridge, 1979); Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford, 1991); Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and J. W. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge, 1983); Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism (Oxford, 1978); Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided (Oxford, 1985); Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2002); Christopher T. Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism (London, 1976); H. S. Jones, Victorian Political Thought (London, 2000); James Meadowcroft, Conceptualizing the State (Oxford, 1995); Julia Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850 (Manchester, 2001). Two studies that offer more sustained analyses of the international thought of the period are P. F. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978); Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire (London, 1968). See for example F. R. Flournoy, ‘British liberal theories of international relations

19

Introduction

14 15

16

17 18

19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26

27

20

(1848–1898)’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 3 (1946), 195–217; F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge, 1963), chs 5–7; Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (New Brunswick, 1978); A. J. P. Taylor, The Trouble Makers (London, 1957). On the peace movement, see Martin Ceadel, Semi-detached Idealists (Oxford, 2000); Paul Laity, The British Peace Movement, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 2001). See for example Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003); Peter Mandler, The English National Character (New Haven, 2006); J. P. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism (Cambridge, 2006). See for example Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago, 1999); Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire (Princeton, 2005); Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis (eds), Utilitarianism and Empire (Lanham, 2005). For wider analyses, see David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge, 2000); Duncan S. A. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain (Princeton, 2007). See Duncan S. A. Bell (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order (Cambridge, 2007); Duncan S. A. Bell and Casper Sylvest, ‘International society in Victorian political thought: T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Sidgwick’, Modern Intellectual History, 3 (2006), 207–38. See also the discussion in Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘Empire and international relations in Victorian political thought’, Historical Journal, 49 (2006), 281–98. For a similar argument in relation to political science as a whole, see Robert Adcock and Mark Bevir, ‘The history of political science’, Political Studies Review, 3 (2005), 1–16. The most recent formulation of Skinner’s approach is set out in his Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge, 2002), I (Regarding Method). See also James Tully (ed.), Meaning and Context (Princeton, 1988); Kari Palonen, Quentin Skinner (London, 2003). Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, pp. 149–50. Skinner, Visions of Politics, I, p. 6. See also Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberal­ism (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 118–9; Kari Palonen, ‘The history of concepts as a style of political theorizing’, European Journal of Political Theory, 1 (2002), 91–106. James Tully, ‘The pen is a mighty sword’, in Meaning and Context, 7–25, at p. 13. See Michael Freeden, Ideology (Oxford, 2003); Aletta J. Norval, ‘The things we do with words – contemporary approaches to the analysis of ideology’, British Journal of Political Science, 30 (2000), 313–46. Michael Freeden, Ideologies and Political Theory (Oxford, 1998), p. 3. Michael Freeden, ‘Intermezzo’, in Liberal Languages (Princeton, 2005), p. 133. See for example John H. Herz, ‘Idealist internationalism and the security dilemma’, World Politics, 2 (1950), 157–80; Peter Cain, ‘Capitalism, war and internationalism in the thought of Richard Cobden’, British Journal of International Studies, 5 (1979), 229–47; Michael Joseph Smith, ‘Liberalism and international reform’, in Terry Nardin and David R. Mapel (eds), Traditions of International Ethics (Cambridge, 1992), 201–24. For an example of the former, see Micheline R. Ishay, Internationalism and Its Betrayal (Minneapolis, 1995); an insightful example of the latter is Jens Bartelson, ‘The trial of judgement: a note on Kant and the paradoxes of inter­ nationalism’, International Studies Quarterly, 39 (1995), 255–79. The word ‘international’ was coined by Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, in the late eighteenth century. See Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London, 1970 [1789]), p. 296. See also Hidemi Suganami, ‘A note on the origin

Introduction

28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40

41

42

43

of the word “international”’, British Journal of International Studies, 4 (1978), 226–32. The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘internationalism’ as ‘International character or spirit; the principle of community of interests or action between different nations’ and also notes that with a capital I (and without the liberal adjective) the term can refer to the principles of the International Working Men’s Association. It records the first use of the term in 1851. See for example F. S. L. Lyons, Internationalism in Europe 1815–1914 (Leyden, 1963); A. C. F. Beales, The History of Peace (London, 1931). Owen Chadwick, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1975), p. 21. See also Sylvest, ‘Continuity and change’. Edward Dicey, ‘War and progress’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 16 (1867), 167–76, at p. 176. J. A. Hobson, Towards International Government (London, 1915), p. 6; Norman Angell, ‘Popular education and international affairs’, International Affairs, 11 (1932), 321–45, at p. 343. Leonard Woolf, The Journey not the Arrival Matters (London, 1969). For helpful comments on this theme, see the essays in Dario Castiglione and Ian Hampsher-Monk (eds), The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge, 2001). Richard Cobden, Russia [1836], in The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, fourth edition, 2 vols (London, 1903), I, 121–272, at p. 196. J. A. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism (London, 1909), p. 252. Leonard Woolf, International Government (London, 1916), p. 89. Norman Angell, The Fruits of Victory (London, 1921), pp. 203, 101. See Robert Adcock, Mark Bevir and Shannon C. Stimson (eds), Modern Political Science (Princeton, 2007), chs 1–3; Collini et al., That Noble Science, especially p. 343; Jack Hayward, Bryan M. Barry and Archie Brown (eds), The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2003 [1999]); Julia Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 2. For some excellent studies of political economy and free trade, see Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement (Oxford, 1986); Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997); Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation (Oxford, 2008). On psychology, see Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology and International Politics, 1870–1919 (Basingstoke, 2006). For a discussion of the history of the term ‘intellectual’, see Stefan Collini, Absent Minds (Oxford, 2006), part I; Peter Allen, ‘The meanings of “an intellectual”: nineteenth- and twentieth-century English usage’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 55 (1986), 342–58. For use of the term ‘intellectual elite’ similar to mine, see Julia Stapleton, ‘Citizenship versus patriotism in twentiethcentury England’, Historical Journal, 48 (2005), 151–78; Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities. See also T. W. Heyck, The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England (London, 1982); Martin Daunton, ‘Introduction’, in M. J. Daunton (ed.), The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2005), pp. 1–28. Collini, Public Moralists, p. 6.

21

Part I – Beginnings

CH APTER 2

Victorian liberalism and the roots of liberal internationalism

One can be a Liberal, and yet believe in tradition. Indeed, I do not see how one can be a Liberal without believing in tradition. (Ernest Barker, 19491)

From the mid-1830s until 1886, or perhaps even 1914, liberalism was the dominant political force of the most powerful country in the world. Part social analysis, part public morality and part political project, the attractions of liberalism were obvious. In its British heyday, liberalism developed into a bundle of assumptions about individuals and society that many besides self-professed liberals came to share. But while British liberalism grew in scope and popularity in the half-century from 1830, it was also diverse and, at times, plagued by inconsistencies. This chapter sets the context for the analysis of the intellectual languages of internationalism that follows. It does so in three stages. Firstly, it demarcates the amorphous yet distinct ideology of Victorian liberalism, an exercise fraught with dangers of oversimplification but nevertheless crucial. Secondly, the chapter fleshes out the various visions of inter­ national politics that grew out of and were important for the ascendancy of the ideology of internationalism, particularly at the popular and party political levels. In doing so, the chapter briefly deals with some of the liberal political icons of the Victorian period, including Richard Cobden (1804–1865), Lord Palmerston (1784–1865) and W. E. Gladstone (1809–1898). Finally, having delineated a continuum of internationalist ideology, the chapter probes internationalism by contrasting and comparing it with the Weltanschauung of its ideological adversaries. Against this background, a brief digest of the main tenets of internationalist ideology and its internal fault lines are provided. It is argued that the languages of liberal internationalism analysed in the remainder of the book formed part of a liberal attitude to international affairs that – just like the liberalism that gave birth to it – was diverse yet broadly coherent. 25

The roots of liberal internationalism It included a basic orientation towards peace and order in international politics and an untiring doggedness in arguing that public morality and rationality should and could be applied to this domain. The chapter sweeps across the early and mid-Victorian decades and touches on subjects on which scholars spend lifetimes. Needless to say, it does not aim to be comprehensive, nor to challenge existing interpretations of such important topics as the peace movement, popular radicalism or the emergence and resilience of the doctrine of free trade. Rather, the chapter supplies the historical, political and intellectual background to the analysis that follows by describing the various ways in which peace and international politics figured in the Victorian liberal imagination. Although the book deals primarily with liberal internationalism as an ideology, this chapter sets the context by indicating how different dimensions of liberalism, including liberal practice, party doctrine and wider liberal ideology, interrelated.2 Victorian liberalism Prelude The terms ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ are of relatively recent origin. Although we often hear iconic figures like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke described as ‘liberals’, the political use of the term was inaugurated in the early nineteenth century and then in Spain, where a party that sought to curb the authority of the king adopted it. 3 From a European perspective, nineteenth-century liberalism can be seen as a response to the French Revolution, embodying support for its ideals but fearing its methods.4 But we should be aware of the differences of meaning (and significance) of concepts like ‘liberal’ and ‘liberalism’ in different European countries. Although British anti-war campaigners in the late eighteenth century occasionally described themselves as ‘liberal’, the term was not used regularly in British political discourse until the third decade of the nineteenth century, when its pre-political and ‘aristocratic’ meaning, tied to social qualities like learning and tolerance, was substituted by connotations such as liberty, openness, purity, reform, morality and atten­tion to the new political watchword, public opinion. 5 Until recently, historians were wary of identifying a liberal party before 1859, but it has been argued that ‘liberal’ became a loose party label within the confines of Parliament as early as the 1830s.6 In terms of wider political and public debate, usage of the term increased in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, and ‘liberal’ began its transformation from ‘Whig attribute’ to political ideology. Yet the nature of Victorian liberalism has been notoriously elusive.7 Less a party programme with specific political 26

The roots of liberal internationalism prescriptions, liberalism was a temperament – consisting of ‘un- or prepolitical predispositions and allegiances which animate the otherwise dry bones of [a] political creed’8 – and a vague politico-ethical doctrine emphasising stability and orderly progress in both domestic and inter­ national politics. In the years between 1830 and the Home Rule crisis of 1886, the house of (what became) British liberalism was slowly constructed. In hindsight, it appeared to stand on firm foundations, which allowed for political and ideological entrenchment and expansion. The golden age of British liberalism was in the period from the early 1850s until the mid-1870s, when continuing economic development coincided with a relatively stable consensus on liberal values such as free trade, receptiveness to public opinion and good, limited and parsimonious government. This mid-Victorian era is often credited with a distinctive nature, character­ ised by relative political calm and optimism; it was the Victorian age of equipoise.9 Looking back, in 1891, James Bryce caught this mood: [In the 1850s and 1860s] there was … a greater confidence in the speedy improvement of the world, a fuller faith, not merely in progress, but in rapid progress, a more pervading cheerfulness of temper than we now discern. Men acknowledged the presence of great evils, but expected them to be soon removed. They saw forces at work in whose power they had full confidence – the forces of liberty, of reason, of sympathy, and they looked forward to, and were prepared to greet, the speedy triumph of the good. To-day in Europe we have by no means ceased to believe in and to value these same forces. They are at work, and their work is visible. But it is slower than the men of 1850 expected; and because it is slower, we are less disposed to wait patiently for the results. We are less sanguine and more unquiet; less resolute and more querulous.10

Optimism was a widespread phenomenon in Europe, but in Britain in particular it underpinned the ideals of liberals. At a time when the Continent was recovering from the revolutions of 1848, British liberals could take comfort in the strength, flexibility and soundness of the British constitution, which allowed for progress of an orderly sort. Accord­ing to Macaulay’s History of England, composed mid-century, it was because ‘we had a preserving revolution in the seventeenth century that we have not had a destroying revolution in the nineteenth. It is because we had freedom in the midst of servitude that we have order in the midst of anarchy.’11 For many liberals, continuous improvement was part of the history and moral nature of the English. The ingredients were supplied by: sturdy, energetic individuals whose potential was seemingly as boundless as the technological innovations of modern society; a set of civil rights that could allow individuals to think and speak freely and, in turn, develop their character; and a small but good government, conducting its affairs in accordance with public opinion, producing the 27

The roots of liberal internationalism much sought-after stability. Considering that providence was often seen to supply the British a helping hand, this formula made light of any politi­cal enigma in modern society. Yet the foundational pillars of liberalism were not as sturdy as they seemed. Indeed, it can be argued that nineteenth-century liberalism is defined by a series of contradictions about the meaning of history, politi­ cal strategies and projects.12 In the British craze of political optimism during the 1850s, some liberals appeared to assume that a tolerable consensus would (eventually) develop on many contentious issues, including the place of religion in society, and there was an expectation of increasing class harmony. That was surely too good to be true. An examination of the rafters high in the neo-Gothic hall of liberalism would have shown that they did not all meet. On central themes such as the vote, land, church, state, class, empire and the wider world, the allegiances of Whigs, radicals, dissenters and intellectuals were divided and volatile. One common, and vague, denominator was the notion of progress. It allowed liberals to agree on ideal ways in which contentious issues could be resolved and also that this would eventually happen. In the short term, however, the liberal mansion with its increasingly heavy roof was less robust. Moreover, liberalism had not yet developed into a formal political party. According to one scholar, it was closer to a political mentality than a formal organisation.13 Another suggests that ‘the notion of Liberalism’, understood as principles finding expression in a party and in legislation, was ‘essentially a retrospective creation’ of the late nineteenth century.14 Yet this is only partly true. Liberalism can be interpreted as both older and more coherent, depending on the perspective employed. If we view it as an ideology operating at different (but cross-cutting) political levels with different audiences and modi operandi, we can see that, although there was diversity and potentially conflicting views both within and across these levels, the totality was still relatively coherent. In conjunction, these layers do, indeed, demonstrate the diversity of liberalism. But they also point to the overlapping consensus that was so important for liberalism’s success and influence. Three layers of liberalism The most obvious liberal layer in Victorian Britain was parliamentary (or Westminster) liberalism. This important strand was more stable than is often recognised. The traditional view of the emerging Liberal Party as composed of cautious Whigs and impatient radicals is too simplistic. While there were certainly diversity and shifting alliances, a coherent liberal attitude to politics developed in the process: at least until 1886, it was dominated by a Whig-liberal tradition that aimed at small but strong government, governance by an open-minded (and often 28

The roots of liberal internationalism propertied) elite and promotion of celebrated Victorian virtues, including the development of character.15 This was, to speak paradoxically, a progressive rearguard action on behalf of an old but fairly tolerant establishment concerned with balance, stability and checks on executive power. Although a certain amount of diversity of interests filtered through, political representation was, in the traditional Whig view, seen as a precondition of moral and political progress, which included the tolerable co-existence of classes and government on behalf of the nation as a whole. In this version, liberal politics were cautious, bordering on the socially conservative: liberals wanted to govern, while only gradually promoting civil and political rights through disestablishment and parliamentary reform. This creed promoted free trade as being in the interest of Britain and the wider world and staunchly defended the interests of the British empire abroad. It was fashioned out of the liberal Toryism of the 1820s and 1830s and developed into a fairly coherent party under Lord John Russell, Lord Palmerston and the Marquess of Hartington, each leaving his own fingerprint. Gladstone could for many years work within this tradition but his Tory background and populist leanings eventually made him part ways with it, which in turn led to the break-up of the party over Home Rule.16 Secondly, popular liberalism and radicalism played a large role throughout the Victorian period. It is remarkable how radicalism in Britain was contained within a broadly liberal framework, which in turn brought it into close contact with organised politics and political influence. Recent scholarship has pointed to the continuity in popular politics during the nineteenth century and has indicated how Chartism, popular radicalism in the mid- and late-Victorian period, and early twentieth-century labour politics were intimately connected. On the other hand, such scholarship has also demonstrated the variety of radical­ism.17 Success­f ul campaigns for the abolition of slavery, the repeal of the Corn Laws, mass agitations in favour of Chartism, religious tropes pointing to minimal government and international peace, and repub­ lican ideas about equality and democracy were just some of the elements of popular politics. Thus, this wing of the liberal mansion was not dominated by one easily identifiable segment of the population that ­possessed a stable political ideology. Rather, popular liberalism was made up of working-class, middle-class and religious elements, and there were many different causes that captured the popular imagination.18 Some sat easily with liberal ideology. The Anti-Corn Law League was in both aims and methods an innovative organisation, which brought into being a new powerful public sphere in Victorian politics, which was later to reach its pinnacle in the Gladstonian crusades.19 And, as we shall see, the primary preachers of this gospel of free trade, Cobden and John Bright (1811–1889), became important icons of liberal internationalist ideology. 29

The roots of liberal internationalism Other elements of popular politics were, however, less easy to square with core liberal values. For example, popular radicalism was often more bent on political equality and democracy than were intellectual or Westminster liberals (or parliamentary radicals for that matter), who tended to focus less on political rights than on representation and good government. Moreover, liberalism’s support for national self-government could lead in ‘republican’ directions: glorification of Mazzini, the Italian patriot who preached that ‘the chief and most essential duty of all is to your Country’, 20 was an alluringly mild variety, but patriotic fervour was also reflected in the movements in support of citizen militias and in Palmerston’s astounding popular appeal, which reached its height during the Crimean War (1853–1856) and spilled over into his premiership.21 Although from our perspective (and from the perspective of some contemporary liberals), such manifestations of patriotism could be said to conflict with core liberal values and contain proto-jingoistic tendencies, they combined fairly easily with the liberal language of ‘muscular ­Christianity’, the notion of Britain as a force for good in the wider world, and the aim of individual and national character formation achieved under the vigilant eyes of the Lord. Moreover, these manifesta­ tions of patriotism or nationalism were compatible with elements of both popular and Westminster liberalism, which has led one historian to emphasise the ‘nationalism, rather than the internationalism, of the Liberal ­tradition’.22 While it is necessary to give the national and patriotic appeals of liberal­ism their due, both nationalism and patriotism were multi-vocal and unstable concepts in the liberal vocabulary. And for the most part, the variants of national allegiance liberals appealed to were modelled on ‘the English national character’, making them compatible with, if not necessary for, a successful internationalist project. Thirdly, there was a liberal layer in the intellectual world. Philosophical radicalism, with its Benthamite foundations, was perhaps not as politically significant as the historical attention of posterity may seem to suggest. Yet utilitarians did manage – in conjunction with evangelical political economists – to provide the intellectual backbone to cries for governmental reform and free trade.23 Whether or not utilitarianism remained ‘the doctrine of a sect’, 24 it provided, notably through the figure of John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), an impetus for intellectual liberal­ism that was to be felt throughout the century. Mill gave the case for reform a firmer ‘scientific’ footing and escaped the generalisations and mechanical arguments that were seen to characterise the writings of his father, James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham. In A System of Logic (1843) he developed a new foundation for utilitarianism and argued that the object of social science was to ‘understand by what causes’ a condition of social affairs had been ‘made what it was; whether it was tending to any, and to what, changes; what effects each feature of its existing 30

The roots of liberal internationalism state was likely to produce in the future; and by what means any of those effects might be prevented, modified, or accelerated, or a different class of effects superinduced’.25 This vision of a reforming science of society – based on deductions and generalisations derived from history – combined effortlessly with the Whig-liberal belief in the power of the intellect.26 Rationalism, understood broadly as a confident belief in the ability to understand and improve social practices and institutions through the application of reason, was a cardinal value of the midVictorian liberal creed.27 Many of the figures we will encounter in later chapters are illustrative of this. It was liberals, including James Bryce, who fought to make the universities temples of rational enquiry rather than relics of the Anglican establishment. In a different vein, Herbert Spencer employed reason and social science to reach (and bolster) his general non-interventionist policy prescriptions, which urged humans to stop meddling in the progressive and perfect nature of things. Part of Mill’s project of understanding social phenomena was an emphasis on historical preconditions and incremental change which matched the incredible expansion of the category of historical time in the nineteenth century.28 The often tacitly held historicist assumption about civilisational progress exploded into fashion following the emergence of specific theories of natural and social evolution in the 1850s and 1860s.29 It is well known that evolutionary ideas could justify almost any political creed, and liberals were certainly not slow in taking advant­age of its appeal. On the one hand, the Whig political history of England post1688, most influentially formulated by Macaulay, had its slowly maturing gradualism reinforced by the social evolutionary framework. On the other hand, radicals and liberals could enlist Spencer on their side: his theory osten­sibly provided a basis for interpreting wider ­historical time and discovering scientific laws by identifying social practices and institutions at different stages of social life. Despite his subsequent enormous influence in Britain, America and beyond, the younger ­Spencer’s impact among liberal intellectuals was indirect at best. This was due not only to his position as an independent scholar but also to his idiosyncrasies. ‘Playing Cassandra in a lab coat is no way to win friends and influence people’, as Collini has pointed out. 30 In developing their social theories, young liberals in the ancient universities took their main cue from Mill’s Logic. This diverse group of ‘university liberals’ shared the liberal gradualist view and was bound together by a particular intellectual moralism, derived from ‘the evangelical impulse of family and home’ that emphasised values such as conviction and responsibility, which should be projected into society in order ‘to further its moral health’. 31 Their relatively moderate political stance was reflected in the understanding of their task as educative, with a particular focus on the rising middle classes. In the end, university liberals had a modest impact on practical politics. They did, however, 31

The roots of liberal internationalism help set the tone for thinking on issues of inter­national politics, which in these circles acquired intellectual standing. In this area, their main interest was with free trade, self-government and the development of nations. Like most liberals, they were nationalists ‘because they saw the nation as a step away from the particular towards the universal, and not because they wished to emphasise their own nation’s particularity in relation to other nations’.32 Many of the figures that play leading roles in the analysis in this book were leading personalities of university liberalism (e.g. T. E. Holland, James Bryce and Henry Sidgwick) or shared its main sentiments (e.g. John Morley). Core elements and major fault lines in liberal ideology Although this listing of three layers of liberalism is by no means exhaust­ ive, it is worth asking about the extent of their compatibility and how they contributed to the amorphous ideological creature called Victorian liberalism. 33 Both within and across these layers there seems to be a set of cardinal values, which is worth identifying. Firstly, the various layers of Victorian liberalism came together in a liberal focus on the importance of the individual and his (sic) liberty. John Stuart Mill was never a straightforward representative of Victorian liberalism – his advanced views on female suffrage is but one example – but his statement that ‘Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign’ does seem to capture an essential liberal value. 34 In its Victorian incarnation, liberalism was primarily concerned with liberty of speech and conscience as preconditions for a grander project concerned with the development of character, often conceived in Christian terms and with pointers to (stoic) virtues such as austerity, strength and independence. The flipside of the insistence on liberty was some measure of tolerance of the beliefs of others. Secondly, for most of these variants of liberalism, the (national) community was included in the attempt to (re)build character. Individualism depended on a well functioning community and the development of character also had a communal or national purpose: with individual rights often went forms of social duty and intellectuals discussed the future of altruism in order to counteract the danger of egoism. As Jonathan Parry has recently argued, ‘[a] successful liberal language had to be ethical: supporters often described the party’s mission in terms of making a nation, or improving the world, by freeing body and soul to do God’s purpose, or creating a spiritual brotherhood of man which would override distinctions of class or race’. 35 Thirdly, whether liberals welcomed it or not, they agreed that the future of politics and good government lay in a close alliance with public opinion. This analysis prescribed openness in politics and led to attempts to educate public opinion (and curb its corruption), an urgent task at a time when 32

The roots of liberal internationalism franchise extension was thought inexorable. 36 Fourthly, in most of these layers of liberalism there was an acceptance of the increasing role that the human intellect would play in devising the politics of tomorrow. This foreshadowing of rational politics was based on the expectation that the laws that governed society would gradually be identified and put in the service of humankind. Finally, one example of these natural (and for some providential) laws was the notion of free trade as not just financially but also morally and politically beneficial. 37 Victorian liberalism was imbued with a widespread consensus on the importance of free trade for Britain and the wider world. As can readily be seen, some of these characteristics must be formulated in general terms to avoid points of strife among liberals. These were many. Foremost among them we find questions about the speed of parliamentary reform and the role of the church in society. Points of possible contact and consensus were outweighed by points of difference that sometimes translated into incompatibility. This does not mean that there was no such thing as Victorian liberalism, but rather that we should be sensitive to the different directions in which it could be taken. This ideological ‘diversity in unity’ is illustrated when we turn to the different approaches to international politics that a liberal world-view could facilitate. The roots of liberal internationalism Liberalism and war Questions of war and peace were never absent from the political or intellectual agenda during the age of equipoise. A glimpse at the Continent, and sometimes at parts of the British empire, reminded the Victorians that revolution and war were the most visible and immediate threats to their domestic peace and prosperity. Observers in the mid-Victorian period did not see themselves as living through a fantasy of peace. In 1867, for example, the liberal journalist Edward Dicey pointed to the ‘indubitable fact that wars, far from ceasing to exist, have been unusually frequent’. 38 Especially among liberals, and not only peace activists, the dread of war co-existed with a determination to end it and to create a more orderly form of politics at the international level. As a first step in attempting to identify the overarching ideological structure of liberal internationalism, this section identifies a continuum of internationalist ideology and illustrates some of the positions on this spectrum through an analysis of some of the iconic figures of liberal politics. It has been argued that there is a ‘fundamental fault-line in the Liberal party throughout its history’, that there exists two liberal traditions of 33

The roots of liberal internationalism dealing with international affairs. 39 Applied to Victorian liberalism as a whole, this Manichean assumption is intuitively compelling: the interests-based pursuit of British advantage only secondarily concerned with the pursuit of peace contrasts with a radical, sometimes cosmopolitan vision of universal peace achieved through the conjoined effects of reason, religion and morals. Where the first is associated with Lord Palmerston’s blunt and coercive diplomacy and the imperial temptation or strategy of some liberals, notably towards the end of the century, the second is associated with the Cobdenite promotion of free trade, a reluctant, if not always openly hostile, attitude to imperial adventure and an isolationist non-interventionism. Such a reading is tempting, but it distorts some of the more interesting and less clear-cut liberal ­approaches to international affairs and, most problematically, it cannot account for the moral vision of Gladstone, an orientation towards European co-operation and consensus as the basis of interventions for the common good. It makes more sense to focus on the middle ground, by thinking of the oppositional attitudes as points on a continuum of internationalist ideology. It is debateable whether extreme positions on either side can be said to form part of a liberal internationalist ideology: a cosmopolitan vision seems to violate an internationalist assumption about the creation of order and peace in a world of states and/or nations, whereas the extreme Palmerstonian position contravenes the internationalist emphasis on avoiding an intimidating style as well as the view that force should be used very sparingly (and preferably not at all). This is not to say, however, that elements of these positions cannot form part of variants of internationalist ideology; only that they, in their pure form, will violate some of its central tenets. Like the liberalism lurking beneath it, internationalism can be seen to exist in different layers that correspond to the party political, popular and intellectual levels identified above. This book is primarily concerned with the intellectual layer and its various languages, but an overview of the (relatively well known) layers more closely connected to practical politics is in order. This is not only important for supplying a depth to the analyses that follow – for example, by introducing major political figures perceived to embody, strengthen or perhaps water down the causes of internationalism – it is also what makes it possible to talk of this ideology as relatively coherent while appreciating its internal richness. A central pre-occupation of liberal internationalism was the creation of order in international politics, which could pave the way for further and more substantial progress, symbolised in calls for international ­relations governed by law and morality. This focus was mirrored in a dread of war and attempts to curb it or avoid its recurrence. War posed a challenge to much Enlightenment thought because it pointed to the fragility of universal rules of justice and to the persistent wickedness of 34

The roots of liberal internationalism human nature, and there is little doubt that the roots of the ideology of liberal internationalism that flourished with liberalism in the early- and mid-Victorian period are indeed to be found in Enlightenment thought. But we should be wary of viewing the Enlightenment in simplistic terms as secular, rational and optimistic; there were several Enlightenments and several, complex ‘Enlightenment minds’, which often continued to draw on earlier, particularly religious, beliefs. In a British context, the most important foreshadowing of liberal internationalism manifested itself in the opposition to Britain’s involvement in the French wars of 1793–1815, which was dominated by a group of so-called anti-war liberals. Their ideology was based on ‘rational Christianity’ and a general opposition to prejudice, superstition and autocracy. During the French wars, they persistently criticised aristocratic misgovernment, narrow-minded patriot­ism and an amoral view of international politics. This group was not pacifist but rather pacificist in orientation: they accepted that defensive war was sometimes legitimate. During the Victorian period, many of the central beliefs of the early anti-war liberals were resuscitated and incorporated into the ideology of liberal internationalism.40 Internationalism and popular politics in the era of Cobden Taking over the mantle of the peace cause from anti-war liberals after the Napoleonic wars, the peace movement was primarily associated with the pacifist and Quaker-dominated Peace Society, which worked for the aboli­tion of war by promoting Christian pacifism.41 But Christian pacifism never exhausted liberal anti-war thinking, which also included calls for arbitration and, less prominently, more ambitious, institutional solutions to the problem of war. Looked at more broadly, the mid-nineteenthcentury peace movement encompassed a variety of political forces that coalesced into an important popular manifestation of internationalist ideals which both contributed to and was preconditioned by the ecstatic atmosphere of new dawns that reached its apotheosis during the time of the Great Exhibition of 1851. An alliance, with many overlapping identities, of different non-conformist groups, intellectuals and a large section of the commercial middle class firmly put peace and its virtues on the political agenda.42 Following the 1832 Reform Act, a larger politi­cal role was played by non-conformist groups. Initially, politically cautious Unitarians and Quakers had dominated the peace movement. Yet increased political participation coincided with a marked shift in theology: the darker pre-millenarian, evangelical mindset of the early decades of the century was substituted by a brighter, post-millenarian evangelicalism which was less conducive to passive acceptance of worldly ills. This in turn led the peace movement in more progressive and radical directions.43 Many of the dissenting religious groups had a strong focus 35

The roots of liberal internationalism on civil liberty and anti-slavery, as manifestations of religiously inspired moral progress or, even simpler, as Christianity in practice. On such issues they could strike a strong ethical alliance with liberal Anglicans. But non-conformist groups were also an important part of the promul­ gation of wider internationalist beliefs. Dissenters agreed on a range of (internationalist) principles, foremost among them the wickedness of war. William Rathbone Greg, Unitarian and Anti-Corn Law agitator, argued in 1853, while stressing that he did ‘not belong to those who consider that under no circumstances can war be righteously undertaken’, that ‘judging from the past history of our race, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, war is a folly and a crime; and … where it is so, it is the saddest and the wildest of all follies, and the most heinous of all crimes’.44 Other central principles included anti-expansionism, scepticism towards (aristocratic) diplomacy and support for arbitration and disarmament. However, there were also two contentious issues: firstly, the principle of non-resistance; and secondly, the effect and scope of the principle of non-intervention.45 But this set of internationalist beliefs should not be confined to religious dissenters. It proved highly compatible with the ideals of middle-class radicalism, spearheaded by Richard Cobden.46 As a young manufacturer, Cobden became enthralled by questions of political economy and moral improvement, particularly through the ideas of Adam Smith and George Combe, the protagonist of phrenology. The popularity of Cobdenite ideas is closely related to their compatibility not only with dissent but also with philosophical radicalism, traditional Whig views about war and peace, and the evangelically inspired, economic arguments in favour of free trade.47 Through the exceptionally active Anti-Corn Law League, which had been founded in Manchester in the late 1830s in opposition to the protectionist Corn Laws, free trade became during the 1840s a popular moral cause, a principle symbolising Britishness rather than sectional interests. Cobden managed to disseminate the view that free trade was a providential instrument (‘the international common law of the Almighty’) and a law of nature (acting ‘on the moral world as the principle of gravitation in the universe’) designed for the peaceful and prosperous co-existence of peoples.48 Only a wicked culture of unreason – often promoted by aristocratic illusions about diplomacy and the balance of power – stood in the way of its beneficent reign. As Cobden’s friend and colleague John Bright famously asserted, the traditional foreign policy and its love for the balance of power was ‘neither more nor less than a gigantic system of outdoor relief for the aristocracy of Great Britain’.49 Through such arguments, ‘peace’ was monopolised by the middle class almost to the same extent that they, with some success, gave the aristocracy an image of bellicosity. But all was not lost: the power of education and rationalism, coupled with the fiscal impact of free trade 36

The roots of liberal internationalism and its effect on the rental income of big landowners, could be expected to demolish aristocratic wickedness. The anti-establishment view played well with dissenters and the use of ‘Ricardian’ economic language, stressing the modernity of an industrialised world and the benefits to be expected from free trade, found favour among intellectuals: free trade was defensible on utilitarian grounds as being both economically and morally beneficial. 50 John Stuart Mill argued in his Principles of Political Economy (1848) that it would be in vain to attempt to inculcate feelings of brotherhood among mankind by moral influences alone, unless a sense of community of interest could also be established; and that sense we owe to commerce. It is commerce which is rapidly rendering war obsolete, by strengthening and multi­plying the personal interests which are in natural opposition to it. And since war is now almost the only event, not highly improbable, which could throw back for any length of time the progress of human improvement, it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the greatest permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race. 51

It is always important not to overrate the importance of the philosophical radicals, including Mill. But among younger liberal intellectuals, Mill was, as a political economist and philosopher, a household name. And one need not claim more than that Mill’s statement is symptomatic of the progressive world-view inhabited by various liberal groups such as Whigs and middle-class or philosophical radicals. Such groups owed ‘less to Christian morality than to the secular culture of the day, to political economy, science and pseudo-science, and the passion for improvement’. 52 Many continued, however, to clothe such sentiments in religious robes. Although the prospect of free trade leading to peace, order and civilisation was subject to increasing doubt in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to many Victorians it seemed both real and realistic. 53 Cobden’s ideological crusade went further than free trade. In the late 1840s he allied himself with the peace movement and began campaigning, among other things, for arbitration (he moved the first parlia­mentary resolu­tion on the subject), 54 disarmament, non-intervention, anti-­colonialism and the abolition of war loans as practical steps towards peace. Cobden distrusted permanent international institutions, whether federations or courts, and sought to achieve what he thought was a workable balance in the mid-nineteenth century peace movement. The suspicion towards, typically French, plans for European federation was common. In Britain such ideas were never greeted with the same enthusi­asm or urgency as on the Continent; institutions might be a possible, even a preferable, outcome of historical development but it was often stressed – with reference to the success (and prejudices) of 37

The roots of liberal internationalism British ­gradualism and in line with moral internationalist arguments – that human nature and character and the general state of international ­relations had to improve markedly before such scenarios deserved serious attention. 55 Cobden’s balanced approach within the peace movement foreshadowed his move towards a more pragmatic internationalist position, which culminated in the negotiation of the Anglo-French Treaty of 1860. 56 But whereas the agitation against the Corn Laws in the 1840s was unquestionably successful, his wider programme gained little popular (least of all middle-class) support in the ensuing decades. Yet a belief in the Cobdenite link between civilisation, trade and progress was strong among the liberal intelligentsia. 57 It has been argued that ‘Cobden’s pamphlets were [the Liberal Party’s] Das Kapital: Cobden its Marx’. 58 That is certainly an exaggeration, but for some liberal intellectuals it is undoubtedly close to the mark. For others, Cobden was, by analogy with Marx, too radical but a useful inspiration. The shadow of Palmerston On the popular level, one important reason for the setback for Cobden­ite views of international affairs was the influence and popularity of Lord Palmerston, the notorious pupil of George Canning, who exploited the mid-century environment for other purposes. Cobdenites and large sections of the peace movement were generally sympathetic towards movements for national liberation that followed in the wake of the European revolutions of 1848, sharing the Mazzinian vision of nationalism and internationalism joining together peacefully. But beyond that there was little agreement, and Cobden and Bright came to loathe the general drift of British foreign policy under Palmerston’s sway, despite its emphasis on national liberation. The question of intervention was always a great obstacle to the development of a wider European peace movement. To doctrinaire Cobdenism, any intervention was anathema, but for others sympathy could translate into varying degrees of support and assistance. In contrast, Lord Palmerston appeared much more resolute, even if his policy, in this as in many other respects, made a virtue of necessity and presented pragmatism as liberal principle. His Tory background, his Irish viscountcy and his dogged reputation as a charlatan made him an unlikely candidate for a successful Whig Foreign Secretary and later (in the decade from 1855) Prime Minister. Yet he presided over a crucial period in the birth of the Liberal Party and a prospering society at home, and it was his mastery of foreign policy and diplomacy that made his name. 59 Buoyant, flamboyant and flippant, Palmerston was everything that the provincial Cobden was not. He was a staunch supporter of British national interests and the most difficult task of statesmen and diplomats – making the pursuit of national interests appear universally beneficial – he found 38

The roots of liberal internationalism invigorating rather than daunting. If some anachronism is per­mitted, Palmerston can appear the stereotypical ‘realist’ (to use the language of IR): his understanding of human nature has been described as ­Hobbesian60 and in and out of government he relentlessly pursued the national interest, an idea hovering above party politics. However, Palmerston’s interest-based policy could be trumped by a few principles that ensured his popular, radical appeal: anti-slavery and (less consistently) the promotion of constitutional and national self-government abroad. Even if his methods and style were fairly constant, it was this, essentially unpredictable, combination of principles and pragmatism that made Palmerston a radical and reactionary at the same time.61 Domestically, the years of Palmerston were relatively tranquil, which in turn meant that his complex attitude to domestic reforms received little attention. Internationally, the tumultuous European revolutions made his objective of avoiding a European war (by whatever means) fraught with danger. One reason for Palmerston’s popularity was the fact that he succeeded in keeping Britain out of a major European war, while he appeared to rescue the country from the setbacks of the Crimean War after becoming Prime Minister in 1855. His support was particularly strong in the capital and among the commercial middle class, and his resolute policy seemed to slowly take the sting out of the peace campaign.62 Yet his success cannot be seen apart from his (not always accurate) public image, which blended elements of comedy, shrewdness, provocation and power and was inseparable from his reputation as a womaniser. The image of the successful maverick was most powerful when put in the service of patriotic causes like the Don Pacifico affair, in which Palmerston famously argued that British citizens abroad were under the protection of an anglified version of the Roman principle civis Romanus sum. As a leader, his qualities were many: he could address several audiences with different emphases; he displayed an ecumenical spirit that went some way towards ameliorating politicoreligious divisions in British society; and, particularly by virtue of his resolute foreign policy and ‘gunboat diplomacy’, he managed to appear as the incarnation of a fully English and half-providential purpose in the world. At least from the Crimean War onwards, ‘in the eyes of the world and his country Palmerston was England and England was Palmerston’.63 It is easy to see Palmerston’s reign over foreign policy as illiberal in principle. But that would be too simplistic. There were many liberal elements to his foreign policy: avoidance of war, support for Italian national liberation and support for free trade, to name but a few – even if the last was perhaps the best example of Palmerston’s predilection for attempt­ing to square universal and national interests. Indeed, a hard-nosed position on international politics reminiscent of ­Palmerston continued to attract supporters among liberals at the turn of the century.64 At that time, the young liberal internationalist J. L. Hammond 39

The roots of liberal internationalism spoke for many intellectuals when he reluctantly tried to rehabilitate Palmerston, ‘brawler as he was’, by arguing that he ‘half redeemed his long hours of bombastic passion over Don Pacifico’s broken bedstead and his continual and ridiculous provocation to foreign Powers by a generous support of the cause of independence in Belgium and Italy’.65 As this reading indicates, there were illiberal elements to Palmerston which meant that he occupied the very fringes of liberal internationalist ideology. These included the thinly veiled selfishness of his foreign policy, the obsession with national defence and the opportunistic ‘free trade imperialism’, which sat uneasily with traditional anti-expansionist arguments of radicals and the less pragmatic justifications of other liberals who appealed to a civilising mission (more on which below). But it is worth noting that liberal criticism of Palmerston’s policies was mainly, but not only, a matter of style. The young Peelite and future liberal statesman W. E. Gladstone – whose liberal internationalism would later be praised by Hammond – summed up much of this critique when he argued against Palmerston’s meddling foreign policy and his conception of the English as ‘universal schoolmasters’, his ‘insular temper’ and ‘self-glorifying tendency’.66 For less confrontational internationalists, it was a shock that so many radicals were so supportive of interventionism on the Continent and therefore of Palmerston. But they soon had to realise that ‘Nothing is so bloodyminded as a radical turned patriot’.67 For internationalists living later in the century, this Palmerstonian posture was clearly problematic. While many of his foreign policy goals could be branded internationalist, the cunning and bombastic diplomacy and his concern with prestige and status often proved impossible to incorporate into a coherent formulation of internationalism. Moreover, it was far from obvious that liberty at home could be safeguarded when liberalism abroad was pursued in such manner. Palmerston’s mode of operation mostly left him beyond the pale of internationalist ideology and he was sometimes seen as a precursor of devoted liberal imperialists and their positions on defence and foreign policy.68 This relative absence of Palmerston in internationalist eulogies serves to remind us that liberal internationalism did not exhaust liberal views on international politics. But it also tells us something about internationalism as an ideology: style, and particularly some measure of purported honesty, openness and humility in conversing with and about other nations, became an important element of its configuration. Gladstone and liberal internationalism The government that Palmerston formed in 1859 was remarkable because it reflected a wide liberal coalition, and it is generally seen as the formal beginnings of the Liberal Party. Gladstone became Chancellor of the 40

The roots of liberal internationalism ­ xchequer, and his tight fiscal policies groaned loudly against PalmerE ston’s wish to spend on defence. Despite not being part of the govern­ment, Cobden also played a major role as an ally of Gladstone when he negotiated the Anglo-French Treaty of 1860. It is true, as Anthony Howe has remarked, that ‘Cobdenite foreign policy, ­Gladstonian fiscal politics, and Palmerstonian “free trade imperialism” … all merged in the “Age of Equipoise” as essential, if sometimes discordant elements in a domestic political consensus’.69 In this uneasy troika, Palmerston was the odd one out. He was approaching eighty and, not for the first time, his boasting bluff was called over the Schleswig-Holstein affair in 1864. During the Prussian–Danish dispute over the two duchies Schleswig and Holstein, the Prime Minister had suggested in Parliament that Britain was ready to support the Danish claim with force if necessary, but Bismarck took no notice and Palmerston was left to watch the Austrian–Prussian (eventually purely Prussian) annexation of the two duchies. As a wider liberal consensus on international issues emerged in opposition to Palmerston, Gladstone and Cobden increasingly saw eye to eye. When Cobden died and Gladstone rose to liberal prominence and formed his first government (1868–1874), this ‘Gladstone–Cobdenism’, promoting free trade and minimal government, won the day. Although Gladstone allowed some state intervention, especially of the cheaper kind, he pursued free trade religiously and attached political economy to the ‘central tenets’ of moderate evangelicalism, including ‘providence, sin, conversion, conscience, Atonement, salvation, and Judgment’.70 The Gladstonian rapport with Cobden was a sign of things to come. But, in the short run, the shift from Palmerston to Gladstone as the bearer of the liberal mantle in international affairs was, above all, a change of style and presentation, in that the practice and many of the actual goals of foreign policy were left unaffected. The strongest continuity between Palmerston and Gladstone, and a weighty reason for Gladstone accepting office in 1859, was (a mounting) support for struggling nationalities, primarily in an Italian incarnation.71 This was a cause that (for a variety of reasons) captured the imagination of most liberals, particularly radicals and intellectuals. Italy, with its rich cultural and political ­traditions and an existence as a historical entity, became an important piece of evidence in demonstrating the theoretically assumed harmony of the ideals of nationality (as distinct from aggressive forms of nationalism) and self-government. Within a short space of time, Cavour, Garibaldi and Mazzini became household names and, for some, political heroes. In terms of ideological legacy, the craze for Italian unification represented the basic internationalist belief that national communities could happily co-exist within a larger fraternity of humankind. This was the spirit of Mill’s Considerations on Representative Government (1861), which, from a liberal and broadly internationalist perspective, argued that ‘it is in 41

The roots of liberal internationalism general a necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide in the main with those of nationalities’.72 From 1848, national consciousness was, throughout Europe, manifested (and manufactured), and in the years ahead the insistence on the possibility of creating order in a world of well balanced national communities gave internationalism – in contrast to ‘soulless’ cosmopolitanism – a comparative advantage in the ideological marketplace. Gladstone was to continue his preordained (as he would have it) trajec­tory towards embodying the morality of the people, a journey that took place against the backdrop of a deterioration of the international climate from the early 1870s. His reaction was typical of internationalists: unfavourable circumstances inspired him to redouble his campaign. Gladstone was not the only ‘defiant internationalist’: as we shall see in chapters that follow, the increasing political strain among the European family of nations acted as a midwife to defiant internationalist offspring. But Gladstone’s internationalism was among the most peculiar – it mixed his fundamental belief in the essential sinfulness of humans, a notion of European Christendom forming a natural ‘concert of nations’, and an unsurpassed indignation and moral righteousness. This was a grandiloquent internationalism aspiring to a religious system in which Gladstone performed the role of doctrinal interpreter, laying out ‘the paths of honour and of shame’.73 His notorious involvement in the Bulgarian agitation of 1876 should be seen in this light: unfaltering religiosity combined with a strong humanitarian sentiment produced a force that carried the Grand Old Man of British liberalism back to the ship of state.74 In this process Gladstone produced some of his most explicit inter­ nationalist statements in articles in the periodical press and in his celebrated Midlothian crusade, which, spurred by the Eastern question, led Gladstone to fight the foreign and imperial policies of Benjamin Disraeli (Lord Beaconsfield, 1804–1881). As part of his response to ‘Beaconsfieldism’, Gladstone laid down six (internationalist) principles that should guide British foreign policy. They included good government at home, preserving peace (especially among the Christian nations of the world) and staying aloof from pointless and entangling action abroad. More loftily, Gladstone also argued that British foreign policy should be guided by the love of freedom and that it should further the development of the ‘Concert of Europe’, an institution that the highchurchman conceived of in religious terms. Pointing to the danger of good intentions being spoiled by a clumsy or pushy style, Gladstone asked the electors of Midlothian not to let ‘appeals to national pride’ blind them to ‘the dictates of justice’.75 But this was no isolationist or passive doctrine. The ‘dictates of justice’ could very well entail using force abroad (as part of collective European policy) to uphold a moral code, as Gladstone had threatened during the Bulgarian agitation of 42

The roots of liberal internationalism 1876.76 It was unclear how the leader of the Liberal Party could employ the threat of force on behalf of a highly indistinct European entity – yet the ambiguity of this doctrine undoubtedly helped secure its success. A figure who quickly became all things to most people, Gladstone could join hands with some of the radicals and non-conformists who had been sidelined during Palmerston’s successful reign, while skilfully avoiding thorny issues about the use of force. Even if his policy was not a world apart from Palmerston’s, it reflected a difference in style and method, which irritated some ­traditional Whigs but in turn allowed him to appeal to radicals in foreign affairs. A major part of Gladstone’s success was his strategy of turning liberalism into moralism at a time of international rivalry and economic slump, and in a period when the Conservative Party had appropriated core liberal themes about individualism. When, in 1918, Max Weber wanted to illustrate the charismatic dimension of modern mass politics, it is no coincidence that he pointed to Gladstone.77 Historians have questioned the authenticity of Gladstone’s European outlook and his commitment to internationalism. While his international­ ism was indeed both complex and contradictory, and although most contemporary liberal internationalists and their successors wrestled with his doctrine and its implementation, they exploited the Gladstonian legacy in terms of European and international politics for their own purposes.78 Empire, imperialism and internationalism In Victorian Britain, the relationship between internationalism and imperialism was multifaceted. Gladstone’s position, which displayed a familiar mix of vagueness and popularity, is illuminating. The ­M idlothian programme was formulated in response to the ‘imperialism’ of Disraeli, but Gladstone can nevertheless be seen as embodying ‘contra­dictions latent in a Britain full of faith in Heaven and in capitalism, in peace and power, good neighbourliness and empire’.79 Throughout the period spanning the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857 and the South African War of 1899–1902, the empire, its character, extent and future, was a source of controversy among liberals. The ascendancy of Disraelian imperialism in the 1870s coincided with an economic crisis that left liberals ­bewildered. Many could, however, join in an essentially radical attack on this new expansionist phenomenon. For some liberals, it was disconcerting to realise that capitalism and the new industrial economy might play a large role in bringing about this despicable phenomenon. The many basic differences within liberalism – the trenchant rationalism of Cobden, the blustering assertiveness of Palmerston, and the at once humble and farreaching religiosity of Gladstone – could translate into a variety of views on imperial expansion. No generalisation seems capable of capturing this complexity, but the one that comes closest originates with ­Gladstone, 43

The roots of liberal internationalism who claimed that ‘while we are opposed to imperialism, we are devoted to the empire’.80 This view introduces an indispensable distinction between the empire as a political and moral entity, generally viewed in positive terms, and imperial expansion, which was, on the whole, viewed in negative terms. The distinction cannot, however, capture every aspect of the internationalist continuum, including, for example, the most radical anti-colonial arguments of doctrinaire Cobdenites and softer forms of liberal imperialism such as the Palmerstonian strategy of expanding the British empire in order to encourage trade (while making no secret of the big stick that was supporting this strategy). Moreover, we should avoid talking of the empire as a single, undifferentiated entity. Contemporaries often differentiated quite sharply between the status of possessions in Africa (and other ‘dark places’) and the ‘white’ settler colonies, with India occupying a historically determined special status.81 Nevertheless, there was a common internationalist dislike of what Gladstone termed the Tory ‘creed of aggrandisement’, with its appeal to greatness, prestige, ‘imaginary interests’ and ‘the prostituted name of patriotism’. But Gladstone also conceded that there was in every Briton ‘a sentiment of Empire’, which, if tamed through (religious) self-restraint and character, could act as a force for good in the world.82 Although he accepted colonial expansion, and sometimes spoke of it as a duty, he often saw colonies as burdens, financial and otherwise. Yet stipulating that Britain should accept its duties and provide good government once the expansionist urge had led it to colour the map red was a common liberal argument that appealed to the image of a special British (if not specifically English) capacity for combining liberty and order, as well as to notions of responsibility and atonement. The aim of the (liberal) empire was good government under conditions of relative freedom. This stance went some way towards accommodating classical liberal arguments against imperial expansion, including its material and moral costs, although radicals went a step further and pointed to its negative influence on the British national character and the danger that British rule by force abroad might eventually corrupt liberty at home.83 On the other hand, the Gladstonian view of empire also appealed to liberal arguments for empire, including the commercial benefits of some colonies and the possibility of bringing the light of civilisation to peoples inhabiting the darkest areas of the globe. This paternalist imperialism and its relation to liberalism as a political ideology have been the subject of much recent debate. Many scholars have focused particularly on the writings of John Stuart Mill and provided a critique of his views. While such analyses of particular manifestations of liberal thought can have merit, they fail as a blanket critique of liberalism’s supposedly imperialist tendency, logic or urge, which sometimes seems to be the (more or less) hidden agenda.84 Arguments both for and against empire and imperialism revolved around 44

The roots of liberal internationalism key components of liberal ideology, including trade, freedom, responsibility, character and progress. Mill is hardly representative of Victorian liberalism as a whole, nor of its intellectual layer with respect to empire. The multifarious relationship between internationalism and imperialism points to the irreducible ambivalences of liberal internationalism as a political ideology. In its general, overarching and most superficially attractive version, internationalism disguised such ambivalences. Yet any attempt to flesh out this ideology in more detail had to establish a relationship between internationalism and empire (and by extension imperialism), and this exercise was necessarily constrained by the range of other ideological commitments that internationalism entailed. There is a related point here about the sincerity with which internationalist beliefs are held. It is a condition specific to the popular and party political level that it is often a matter of time before any noble ideals of liberal internationalism are put to the test and come crashing down. Examples abound. For a variety of reasons, Cobden, Gladstone and Palmerston all initially supported the South in the American Civil War (and Palmerston seems to have done so almost to the bitter end) and, immediately after the Midlothian campaign, Gladstone got embroiled in Egypt, appealing to British interests and honour. Such cases are often appealed to in order to prove that populism, hypocrisy and deception lie at the root of internationalist ideology. Yet such questions of hidden or real intention often turn out to be scholarly dead-ends fuelled by (contemporary) political motives. We cannot afford to lose sight of the political implications of internationalist arguments or of the smugness that was frequently involved in advancing them. At the same time, however, it is important to view internationalism not as an ideological straightjacket but as a political vocabulary, which, as a result of its ambiguities, flexibility and commitment to attractive causes such as peace, progress and order, managed to attract a great deal of popular and intellectual support. Delineating internationalism Ideological adversaries A helpful way of delineating the core features of internationalist ideology is to contrast it with its intellectual and political opponents. Such exercises can, however, be dangerous if they relapse into yet another instance of argumentation by straw men. In analysing liberal inter­ nationalist ideology, this danger is exacerbated by uncertainty about to whom vague phrases like ‘men of practice’ or ‘diplomatists’ really referred. Nevertheless, some antagonists of internationalist ideology 45

The roots of liberal internationalism emerge clearly. During the decades bracketing the turn of the century, and culminating during the First World War, much German thought about history, politics and the state were criticised by internationalists for providing a rationale for realpolitik. The historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896), himself a former liberal from Saxony who threw all his weight and writings behind the Prussian-led unification of Germany, became an arch enemy of many internationalists, historians in particular. Many factors contributed to Treitschke taking on the role of primary detractor in internationalist discourse, but among the most obvious were: his perceived influence on the German governing classes and the character of German nationalism; his critique of English policy and its self-interested character; a pugnacious style of writing that left little role for nuances or qualifications; and, most importantly, a view of international politics that was almost designed to infuriate liberals. Treitschke famously argued that ‘the State is power, precisely in order to assert itself as against other equally independent powers’. The state, he reminded the audiences in Berlin’s lecture halls during the late nineteenth century, was ‘not an academy of arts’ and he had little time for the moralising doctrine of liberals that portrayed the state ‘as if it were a good little boy, who should be washed, and brushed, and sent to school, who should have his ears pulled to keep him obedient; he, on his side, is expected to be grateful and good, and God knows how much else’. Moralists had to recognise that ‘the State is not to be judged by the standards which apply to individuals, but by those which are set for it by its own nature and ultimate aims’. From these views, it followed logically that ‘international agreements which limit the power of a State are not absolute, but voluntary self-restrictions’. Treitschke then added injury to insult by glorifying war as ‘both justifiable and moral’. Conversely, ‘the ideal of perpetual peace is not only impossible but immoral as well’.85 Internationalists also identified ideological adversaries at home, although their critique here was less pointed, accommodating the exceptional­ist (and complacent) narrative about Britain’s special ability to combine liberty, order and a (generally) righteous foreign policy. The Conservative Party unsurprisingly played a major role here, particularly following the liberal critique of Beaconsfieldism. John Stuart Mill famously declared the Tory Party to be the stupid party. For some historical figures in that traditional party, the adjective is, indeed, appro­priate – not, though, for Lord Salisbury (1830–1903).86 The most intellectual of all Tory leaders (he became Chancellor of Oxford University in 1869) and the most influential Conservative figure of the late nineteenth century, Salisbury was Foreign Secretary or Prime Minister for almost fifteen years between 1878 and 1902, much of the time holding both offices at once.87 Whereas Disraeli and Gladstone are ­historical celebrities, ­Salisbury is a shadowy and less glitzy character. 46

The roots of liberal internationalism This could be considered appropriate, bearing in mind Salisbury’s personality and political style. But it does little justice to his importance. Springing from a traditional, aristocratic family and educated at Eton and Oxford, Salisbury became an extraordinary and powerful personality in late-Victorian Britain, the incarnation of successful Tory government, especially in foreign and imperial affairs. Salisbury can, by virtue of his political profile, power and subtlety, help to mark out the ideological territory of liberal internationalism. Salisbury was a complex figure, full of contradictions. He was a dogmatic yet relatively tolerant High Anglican, an anti-intellectualist intellectual and a reactionary reformer. His opposition to the indistinct liberal notion of progress made him sceptical of the aims of internationalism. There were, however, some overlaps. For instance, Salisbury’s hatred of jingoism easily matched that of most liberal internationalists, despite the paradoxical fact that many of his policies won the approval of jingoists. Similarly, Salisbury and many internationalists shared a prejudiced and culturally arrogant conception of ‘race’ (or ‘nationality’) that informed their descriptions of and policies towards peoples beyond (and sometimes within) Europe.88 Moreover, Salisbury sometimes expressed himself in ways that made some liberal internationalist contamination of his views seem probable. One example of this is a speech he gave at Caernarvon in April 1888 with a view to reiterate his confidence in the European concert of nations, a central pillar of Salisbury’s (and Gladstone’s) foreign policy: ‘We are part of the community of Europe, and we must do our duty as such’. Although the speech went further and included a speculative passage on a federation of Europe as ‘the only hope we have’, Salisbury’s notion of federation was extremely weak and non-committal.89 Indeed, Salisbury can, on the whole, be described as anti-­ internationalist. From early on, he came to view foreign policy as being essentially about realpolitik and not about ethics. This ‘realism’ was a lifelong belief.90 Also, Salisbury became, rightly or wrongly, the incarnation of secret diplomacy and its related practices of setting up parliamentary smoke-screens. While it has become increasingly clear that Salisbury never pursued ‘splendid isolation’, his high-level, and often secret, diplomatic manoeuvring to create a European political balance conducive to peace was far removed from the internationalist stress on openness and public opinion. Adept practice of diplomacy in the late 1870s made Salisbury a contender for the Tory leadership, but it also conformed to the archetypical, internationalist image of a murky world of diplomacy, as marked by aristocracy, secrecy and an amoral view of European and global politics, a critique that reached its pinnacle in the build-up to the South African War of 1899–1902. Salisbury explicitly challenged other assumptions of internationalist ideology. He was no supporter of arbitration (he nearly resigned office over the proposed 47

The roots of liberal internationalism a­ rbitration of the British–American Alabama dispute in 1866) and he was particularly critical of Lord John Russell’s tenure in the Foreign Office, which led him to deny that the conduct of nations could be governed by the same principles as the conduct of individuals. He also countered the liberal belief in the principle of nationality by asserting that nationalism was artificial and aggressive rather than natural and peaceful, and he dismantled the simple equation between increased interaction and peaceful behaviour. Salisbury drew the opposite conclusion: ‘the more the facilities of travelling bring the two nations [Britain and France] into contact the less goodwill is likely to be generated’.91 No fan of small, unnecessary wars, Salisbury was, however, an enthusiastic supporter of the British empire. If most liberal internationalists were opposed to imperialism, but devoted to the empire, their support would rarely be formulated in terms as strong as Salisbury’s. He argued that the integrity of the empire was ‘a matter more important than almost any other political consideration that you can imagine, and we could not regard with favour any proposal which directly or indirectly menaced that which is the first condition of England’s position among the nations of the world’.92 Despite reservations about the public manifestations of patriotism, we thus find a concern with the ‘prestige’ of the British empire foreign to many, though not all, liberals. These considerations blended with strategy and trade in the important phase of the expansion of the empire over which Salisbury presided.93 And in contrast to most internationalists, Salisbury could fall prey to the worst imperial logic of the late nineteenth century. While he was not, perhaps, an instinctive expansionist and while he certainly despised his fellow Britons when they unnecessarily demonstrated their (supposed) superiority in arrogant ways, he was also spurred on by international rivalry. As he is reported to have told Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer) about Zeyla, an area on the Somali coast, this seemed ‘to be a coast without harbours, trade, produce, or strategic advantage. But as everybody else is fighting for it, I suppose we are bound to think it valuable.’94 Salisbury’s starting point was British (and sometimes narrowly English). This did not mean that goodwill could not be extended beyond borders, but to speak of this as a duty was nonsense. It should not come as a surprise, therefore, that Salisbury thought little of Gladstone’s ‘mastery over vague and philanthropic phraseology’.95 Although the oppositions that emerge from such juxtapositions – practice versus theory and politics versus ethics – can suggest a misleading clarity, they do involve important conflicts of ideological principle. Firstly, Salisbury vehemently denied the internationalist mantra that inter­national politics was subject to ethical considerations either identical with or analogous to those prevailing between individuals in society. This does not mean that Salisbury’s conduct as Foreign Secretary and Prime 48

The roots of liberal internationalism Minister never showed signs of being influenced by such con­siderations, but rather that he thought the idea theoretically and politically un­ tenable.96 Secondly, while Salisbury was also oriented towards peace, he entertained no hope of qualitative progress in international politics. The peace he sought was precarious. No matter how carefully planned and well constructed, it was transitory and bound to break down as the recurrent power struggle that was international politics broke loose of its chains. This is summed up in Salisbury’s wry remark that ‘an eighth commandment [“Thou shalt not steal”] for nations would be a very diffi­cult morality to construct’.97 Moreover, considering Britain’s relative military weakness and its extensive trading empire, he viewed peace as a national interest and not primarily as a universal interest. In sum, Salisbury provides a helpful contrast to liberal internationalism. Liberal internationalism as a political ideology In the context of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain, liberal internationalism is most usefully seen as an ideology aimed at grafting progress, order and justice on to international politics, often through explicit analogy to domestic political practice and experience, 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. In this sense, international politics constituted the unfinished project of a universal but gradualist liberalism. In internationalist ideology, the domains of national and international politics were often assumed to be comparable and, potentially, subject to similar forms of qualitative progress. Yet this insistence on the similarity of these political domains did not lead to a claim that the boundary between them was completely arbitrary. Liberal internationalism aimed at co-operation between, not the full transcendence of, states (or nations) and in order to achieve its goals it supported the development of increased interaction and trade between countries and the development of international law, including such mechanisms as arbitration. Thus, liberal internationalist ideology naturalised the nation and the national within a progressive vision of an international society of nations or states developing in more peaceful and inclusive directions.98 In sum, internationalist ideology was underwritten by expectations of intellectual, moral and/or political progress, which would, in the longer term, issue in a public morality and the reconciliation of nationalism and internationalism, ensuring the entrenchment of order and justice in international politics. This conceptualisation of liberal internationalism still leaves room for interesting ideological differences. The commitment to peace and progress in a world of (nation) states left constant contention about other components of internationalist ideology. The four most pertinent areas 49

The roots of liberal internationalism of disagreement concerned the use of force, intervention in the affairs of other states, the value of nationalism and national allegiance, and questions of empire and imperialism. For internationalists, it was a matter of stipulating convincingly, and under the constraints imposed by other ideological commitments, the extent to which and methods by which a country could intervene in another (for example to assist struggling nationalities), establish colonies and markets in other continents, or use force to obtain internationalist goals. To some extent, these areas were interlocking. The mainstream of liberal internationalism was relatively pragmatic, accepting the necessity of defensive warfare, rejecting isolationist non-interventionism and expansionism (in Europe and beyond), while accepting the responsibilities of empire, and judiciously pointing to the positive effects of liberal (and British) forms of national­ism that were seen as compatible with the progress of civilisation. Inevitably, however, central concepts in internationalist ideology were Janus-faced. For example, there emerged in internationalist ideology clear distinctions between moral and amoral interventions and between the harmonious, liberal nation interacting peacefully with other nations and the menacing, aggressive (increasingly German) nation, detrimental to international peace. A similar ambivalence was present in concepts of human nature: humans were seen to be sociable and potentially peaceful, but they also had a negative, latent assertiveness that could be released by the dark forces of unreason, militancy and sectarianism. The importance of such fundamental ambivalences lies in the demand they placed on political rhetoric and their effect on the underlying logic of internationalist arguments. All internationalists had to coherently combine a positive perspective focused on human potential and development and the trenchant, less optimistic perspective leading to critique (and sometimes despair). Both are important and co-existing elements in internationalist discourse, but their relative contribution in particular instances is of importance for discerning two different logics of internationalist argument, moral and institutional. As pointed out in the Introduction, identifying these logics and their relative prominence in different ideological ‘languages’ and at different times is essential for understanding the continuities and discontinuities in internationalist ideology. It is important to stress that these two logics cannot be entirely separated and that they concern the means rather than the ends of liberal internationalism. While a notion of intellectual and moral progress was the most important motor in internationalist arguments at least until the early twentieth century, the turn to humanly devised institutional devices began before, but was greatly accelerated by, the First World War. Crucially, however, the institutional turn did not affect the basic commitments of internationalist ideology, which, below an institutional façade, continued to rely on the moral logic and appropriately modified 50

The roots of liberal internationalism argumentative strategies developed in the late nineteenth century. The remainder of this book explores how this ideology and its fault lines figured in the imagination of liberal intellectuals at the time. As a ­historical phenomenon, internationalist ideology was not unchanging. It was constantly shaped and tested through language, and while internationalism faced difficult times at the popular and party political level, many liberal intellectuals in Britain endeavoured to supply it with some scholarly backbone, firmly believing that they were making progress.

Notes 1 Ernest Barker, Change and Continuity (London, 1949), p. 16. 2 For general overviews of the period, see the recently published volumes of The New Oxford History of England: Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People? (Oxford, 2006); Theodore K. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford, 1998); G. R. Searle, A New England? (Oxford, 2004). 3 See Raymond Geuss, History and Illusion in Politics (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 70–1; Raymond Geuss, ‘Liberalism and its discontents’, Political Theory, 30 (2002), 320–38. 4 Alan S. Kahan, Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Basingstoke, 2003), p. 7. 5 The early use of the term is traditionally associated with Canning and Palmerston. For examples and a good discussion, see Jörn Leonhard, ‘From European liberalism to the languages of liberalisms: the semantics of liberalism in European comparison’, Redescriptions, 8 (2004), 17–51; and, in more detail, Jörn Leonhard, Liberalismus (Munich, 2001). 6 See Joseph Coohill, ‘The “Liberal Brigade”: ideas of co-operation between Liberal MPs in 1835’, Parliamentary History, 24 (2005), 231–6. See also J. P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (London, 1993), pp. 6, 23–4, 43. Much, of course, turns on how the term ‘party’ is defined. The traditional reading is symbolised in the title of a classic study: John Vincent, The Formation of the Liberal Party, 1857–1866 (London, 1966). 7 Indeed, the meaning of ‘liberalism’ in the Western world continues to be marked by inherent ambiguities that cannot be separated from its importance. See for example Michael Freeden, ‘European liberalisms. An essay in comparative ­political thought’, European Journal of Political Theory, 7 (2008), 9–30. 8 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford, 1991), p. 170. 9 Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain (Cambridge, 2002), p. 10; Philip Harling, ‘Equipoise regained? Recent trends in British political history, 1790–1867’, Journal of Modern History, 75 (2003), 890–918. See also the discussion in Hilton, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous, chs 1 and 10. 10 James Bryce, ‘The age of discontent’, Contemporary Review, 49 (1891), 14–29, at p. 15. See also chapter 5. 11 Thomas Babington [Lord] Macaulay, The History of England, ed. H. TrevorRoper, abridged version (Harmondsworth, 1968 [1848–1861]), p. 295. 12 Kahan, Liberalism. 13 Alan Sykes, The Rise and Fall of British Liberalism 1776–1988 (London, 1997), pp. 20–1.

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The roots of liberal internationalism 14 Collini, Public Moralists, p. 181. 15 On the importance of the notion of character in Victorian liberalism, see Collini, Public Moralists, and Richard Bellamy, Liberalism and Modern Society (Cambridge, 1992), ch. 1. 16 Parry, Rise and Fall, pp. 17, 19, 304 and passim. For a discussion of the intellectual preconditions see also John Burrow, Whigs and Liberals (Oxford, 1988). 17 Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 90–178; Eugenio F. Biagini and Alistair J. Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism (­Cambridge, 1991); Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform (Cambridge, 1992), ­especially introduction and chs 1, 2; Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radical­ism, 1847–1860 (Oxford, 1995). 18 Eugenio F. Biagini (ed.), Citizenship and Community (Cambridge, 1996). 19 Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), p. 29. 20 Joseph Mazzini [Guiseppe Mazzini], The Duties of Man [1860], in The Duties of Man and Other Essays (London, 1907), 5–122, at p. 121. On his reception in Britain, see Denis Mack Smith, Mazzini (New Haven, 1994), p. 2; Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment, and Reform, pp. 41–50. 21 Eugenio F. Biagini, ‘Neo-Roman liberalism: “republican” values and British liberal­ism, ca. 1860–1875’, History of European Ideas, 29 (2003), 55–72; Antony Taylor, ‘Palmerston and radicalism, 1847–1865’, Journal of British Studies, 33 (1994), 157–79; Miles Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism. 22 Jonathan Parry, The Politics of Patriotism (Cambridge, 2006), p. 387. See also Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge, 2003), ch. 7; Peter Mandler, The English National Character (New Haven, 2006), chs 3, 4. 23 See Stephen Conway, ‘Bentham and the nineteenth-century revolution in government’, in Richard Bellamy (ed.), Victorian Liberalism (London, 1990), 71–90; Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement (Oxford, 1986), chs 1, 2. 24 Stefan Collini, ‘Political theory and the “science of society” in Victorian Britain’, Historical Journal, 23 (1980), 203–31, at p. 205. 25 John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, fifth edition, 2 vols (London, 1862), book VI, ch. 6, p. 459. 26 On Mill’s conception of history and the notion of ‘inverse deduction’, see Mill, A System of Logic, book VI, chs 9–11. See also Alan Ryan, The Philosophy of John Stuart Mill, second edition (London, 1987), chs 8–10; Christopher Parker, The English Idea of History from Coleridge to Collingwood (Aldershot, 2000), ch. 4. 27 Parry, Rise and Fall, pp. 227–8. See also Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics, p. 63. 28 Generally, see the discussion in Hilton, Mad, Bad, and Dangerous, ch. 7. See also John Burrow, ‘Images of time: from Carlylean vulcanism to sedimentary gradualism’, in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Bryan Young (eds), History, Religion, and Culture (Cambridge, 2000), 198–223; Duncan S. A. Bell, ‘Dissolving distance: empire, space, and technology in British political thought, c. 1770–1900’, Journal of Modern History, 77 (2005), 523–63. 29 For analyses of this phenomenon, see John Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge, 1966); George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987). 30 Collini, ‘Political theory’, p. 211. 31 Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism (London, 1976), p. 48. 32 H. S. Jones, Victorian Political Thought (London, 2000), p. 49. See also Peter Mandler, ‘“Race” and “nation” in mid-Victorian thought’, in Collini et al., History, Religion, and Culture, 224–44. 33 One further potential layer is that of (predominantly non-industrial) capitalists, such as city bankers and lawyers; a layer that, echoing Cain and Hopkins, could

52

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34 35 36 37 38

39 40

41 42

43 44 45 46

47

be termed ‘Gentlemanly liberalism’. Generalising about this group is, however, difficult. Even on the defining liberal issue of the era, free trade, generalisation is hardly possible. For a good discussion see M. J. Daunton, ‘“Gentlemanly capitalism” and British industry 1820–1914’, Past and Present, no. 122 (1989), 119–58. See also P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly capitalism and British expansion overseas I. The old colonial system, 1688–1850’, Economic History Review, 39 (1986), 501–25; P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly capitalism and British expansion overseas II. New imperialism, 1850–1945’, Economic History Review, 40 (1987), 1–26. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty [1859], in On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. S. Collini (Cambridge, 1989), 1–115, at p. 13. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, p. 125. See also Jones, Victorian Political Thought, pp. 2–3. On public opinion, see James Thompson, ‘The idea of “public opinion” in Britain, 1870–1914’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1999). See also Burrow, Whigs and Liberals, ch. 3; Parry, Rise and Fall, ch. 1. See for example Peter Cain, ‘Capitalism, war and internationalism in the thought of Richard Cobden’, British Journal of International Studies, 5 (1979), 229–47. Edward Dicey, ‘War and progress’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 16 (1867), 167–76, at p. 169. See also David Newsome, The Victorian World Picture (London, 1997), p. 107; Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, p. 259. This point is an important qualification to the traditional (and domestically biased) notion of an age of equipoise. Sykes, Rise and Fall, p. 65. See also Vincent, Formation of the Liberal Party, pp. 154–5. On the anti-war liberals, see primarily J. E. Cookson, The Friends of Peace (Cambridge, 1982). On the wider context and the distinction between pacifism and pacificism, see Martin Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention (Oxford, 1996), chs 1–6; Martin Ceadel, Thinking About Peace and War (Oxford, 1989). Recent valuable analyses of the peace movement include Ceadel, The Origins of War Prevention; Martin Ceadel, Semi-detached Idealists (Oxford, 2000); Paul Laity, The British Peace Movement, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 2001). A. Tyrrell, ‘Making the millennium: the mid-nineteenth century peace movement’, Historical Journal, 20 (1978), 75–97; David Nicholls, ‘The English middle class and the ideological significance of radicalism, 1760–1886’, Journal of British Studies, 24 (1985), 415–33; David Nicholls, ‘Richard Cobden, middleclass radicalism, and the peace congress movement 1848–53’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), 351–76; Stephen Conway, ‘Bentham, the Benthamites, and the 19th century peace movement’, Utilitas, 2 (1990), 221–43. Tyrrell, ‘Making the millennium’, pp. 83–5, and, in general, Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous, pp. 524–38. A similar shift can be identified within Quakerism. See George Macaulay Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London, 1913), p. 101. William Rathbone Greg, ‘Alison’s history of Europe’, in Greg, Essays on Political and Social Science, 2 vols (London, 1853), I, 526–66, at p. 562. See primarily N. W. Summerton, ‘Dissenting attitudes to foreign relations, peace and war, 1840–1890’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 28 (1977), 151–78. For good discussions of Cobden’s internationalism, see Anthony Howe and Simon Morgan (eds), Rethinking Nineteenth-Century Liberalism (Aldershot, 2006), introduction and the essays by Keith Robbins, Martin Ceadel and Stephen Meardon (chs 10–12); see also Cain, ‘Capitalism, war and inter­ nationalism’. For a biographical treatment, see W. Hinde, Richard Cobden (New Haven, 1987). Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, pp. 11, 32, 71; Hilton, Age of ­Atonement,

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48

49

50 51

52 53 54

55

56 57 58 59 60

61

54

chs 6, 7; Biagini, Liberty Retrenchment and Reform, pp. 95–100; Conway, ‘Bentham’; R. F. J. Spall, ‘The Anti-Corn-Law League’s opposition to English Church establishment’, Journal of Church and State, 32 (1990), 97–123. The quotes are from speeches delivered at Mansion House, 17 July 1861 – reprinted in Salis Schwabe (ed.), Reminiscences of Richard Cobden (London, 1895), 326–34, at p. 328 – and at Rochdale in 1862 – quoted in Bernard Porter, Critics of Empire (London, 1968), p. 14. On the Anti-Corn Law League, see the analysis in Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, ch. 1, and R. F. J. Spall, ‘Free trade, foreign relations, and the Anti-Corn Law League’, International History Review, 10 (1988), 405–32. John Bright, speech at Birmingham, October 1858, quoted in Trevelyan, Life of Bright, p. 274. See also Cobden to John Bright, 6 November 1851, quoted in John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden, thirteenth edition (London, 1906 [1879]), pp. 567–8. For Cobden’s analysis of ‘modernity’, see Cobden, England, Ireland, and America [1835] and Russia [1836], in The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, fourth edition, 2 vols (London, 1903), I, 3–119 and 121–272, respectively. John Stuart Mill, Principles of Political Economy with some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, 2 vols (London, 1848), II, p. 120 (book III, ch. 17). This formulation changed slightly with successive editions. The seventh edition, published in 1870 (Mill died in 1873), does not include the first sentence, nor the words ‘And since war is now almost the only event, not highly improbable, which could throw back for any length of time the progress of human improvement’. Hilton, Age of Atonement, p. 248. See also Anthony Howe, ‘Free trade and global order: the rise and fall of a Victorian vision’, in Duncan S. A. Bell (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order (Cambridge, 2007), 26–46. See Cobden’s speech at the Peace Congress, Frankfurt, 22 August 1850, reprinted in Schwabe, Reminiscences of Richard Cobden, pp. 114–19; and, generally, M. Robson, ‘Liberals and “vital interests”. The debate on international arbitration 1815–1872’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 32 (1959), 357–80. On the British ‘apathy or antipathy’ towards such proposals, see Nicholls, ‘Richard Cobden’, pp. 362–3, and, more generally, F. H. Hinsley, Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge, 1963), chs 6, 7. See also J. R. Seeley, ‘The United States of Europe? A lecture delivered before the Peace Society’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 23 (March 1871), 436–48, and the discussion in Ceadel, Semi-detached Idealists, pp. 92–5. This is also known as the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty, named after the British and French negotiators. It was a free trade treaty signed in January 1860. See for example Frederic Seebohm, On International Reform (London, 1871), and the discussion of T. J. Lawrence (chapter 3), Herbert Spencer (chapter 4) and John Morley (chapter 5) in part II of the present volume. Vincent, Formation of the Liberal Party, p. 33. The classic study is H. C. F. Bell, Lord Palmerston, 2 vols (London, 1936). See also E. D. Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, 1855–1865 (Cambridge, 1991). A recent biography is James Chambers, Palmerston (London, 2004). Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, p. 42, quotes Palmerston’s belief that ‘The Love of quarrelling and fighting is inherent in man, and to prevent its indulgence is to impose restraints on natural liberty. A State may … shackle its subjects’ (Palmerston to Lord John Russell, 18 October 1861). Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, chs 10–13; E. D. Steele, ‘Palmerston’s foreign policy and foreign secretaries’, in Keith M. Wilson (ed.), British Foreign

The roots of liberal internationalism

62 63

64 65 66

67 68 69 70 71

72

73 74 75

76

S­ ecretaries and Foreign Policy from the Crimean War to the First World War (London, 1987), 25–84; David Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846–1855 (Manchester, 2002). Taylor, ‘Palmerston and radicalism’, pp. 167–8; Brown, Palmerston, p. 45. See also Cobden’s plea in the pamphlet entitled What Next? And Next? [1856], in Political Writings, II, 459–536. G. M. Young, Portrait of an Age, second edition (London, 2002 [1936, 1952]), p. 83. See also K. Martin, The Triumph of Lord Palmerston (London, 1924), ch. 3; Steele, Palmerston and Liberalism, pp. 8–9; Brown, Palmerston, pp. 215–6; Bell, Lord Palmerston, II, pp. 424–9. See for example J. S. Phillimore, ‘Liberalism in its outward relations’, in Essays in Liberalism by Six Oxford Men (London, 1897), 131–74. J. L. Hammond, ‘Colonial and foreign policy’, in Francis W. Hirst, Gilbert Murray and J. L. Hammond, Liberalism and the Empire (London, 1900), 158–211, at p. 166. W. E. Gladstone, ‘Lord Palmerston’s foreign policy. Speech delivered at 17 June 1850’, reprinted in A. Tilney Bassett (ed.), Gladstone’s Speeches (London, 1916), 109–54, at pp. 151–2. See also Eugenio F. Biagini, Gladstone (London, 2000), p. 80. Young, Portrait of an Age, p. 84. See also Taylor, The Decline of British Radicalism, part III. On the liberal imperialists, see H. C. G. Matthew, The Liberal Imperialists (Oxford, 1973). Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, p. 111. Hilton, Age of Atonement, p. 340, and, generally, ch. 9. See also H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1988), ch. 5. On Gladstone and Italy, see D. M. Schreuder, ‘Gladstone and Italian unification, 1848–70: the making of a liberal’, English Historical Review, 85 (1970), 475–501; John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols (London, 1903), I, pp. 389–404. John Stuart Mill, Considerations on Representative Government [1861], reprinted in Mill, On Liberty and Other Essays, ed. J. Gray (Oxford, 1998), 203–467, at p. 430. See also Georgios Varouxakis, ‘Cosmopolitan patriotism in J. S. Mill’s political thought and practice’, in Nadia Urbinati and Alex Zakaras (eds), J. S. Mill’s Political Thought (Cambridge, 2007), 277–97; and, more generally, Georgios Varouxakis, ‘“Patriotism”, “cosmopolitanism” and “humanity” in Victorian political thought’, European Journal of Political Theory, 5 (2006), 100–18. See W. E. Gladstone, ‘The paths of honour and of shame’, Nineteenth Century, no. 13 (March 1878), 591–604. H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1875–1898 (Oxford, 1995), chs 1 and 6; R. T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876 (London, 1963). W. E. Gladstone, ‘Second Midlothian speech. 26 November 1879’, in P ­ olitical Speeches in Scotland, November and December 1879 (Old Woking, 1971 [1879]), 59–94, at p. 94; Gladstone, ‘Third Midlothian speech. 27 November 1879’, in Political Speeches, 95–129, especially pp. 115–17. For good analyses, see Peter Cain, ‘Radicalism, Gladstone and the liberal critique of Disraelian “imperialism”’, in Bell, Victorian Visions, 215–38; E. F. Biagini, ‘Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign of 1879. The realpolitik of Christian humanitarianism’, Liberal History, 42 (2004), 6–12. W. E. Gladstone, Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East (London, 1876), and also W. E. Gladstone, ‘First Midlothian speech. 25 November 1879’, in Political Speeches, 25–58.

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The roots of liberal internationalism 77 Max Weber, ‘The profession and vocation of politics’ [1918], in Political Writings, ed. P. Lassman and R. Speirs (Cambridge, 1994), 304–69, especially p. 343. 78 Gladstone’s lack of commitment to internationalism is hinted at in Matthew, Gladstone 1875–1898, where foreign affairs is not counted among the four great themes characterising Gladstone’s personality and political orientation (p. 89). See also Parry, The Politics of Patriotism, p. 329. For a good discussion that also points to Gladstone’s internationalist legacy, see Martin Ceadel, ‘Gladstone and a liberal theory of international relations’, in Peter Ghosh and Lawrence Goldman (eds), Politics and Culture in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2006), 74–94. 79 V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind, revised edition (Harmondsworth, 1972), p. xxx. 80 Gladstone, speech at Leeds, 7 October 1881, quoted in D. M. Schreuder, Gladstone and Kruger (London, 1969), p. 47. 81 Duncan Bell has explored this aspect of imperial thought. See Duncan S. A. Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain (Princeton, 2007). 82 See W. E. Gladstone, ‘England’s mission’, Nineteenth Century, no. 19 (September 1878), 560–84, at p. 569. 83 Miles Taylor, ‘Imperium et libertas? Rethinking the radical critique of imperial­ ism during the nineteenth century’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 19 (1991), 1–23. For a reading that stresses the economic aspect, see Robert Livingston Schuyler, ‘The rise of anti-imperialism in England’, Political Studies Quarterly, 37 (1922), 440–71. 84 See John Stuart Mill, ‘A few words on non-intervention’ [1859], reprinted in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols (Toronto, 1963–1991), XXI, 109–24, and Mill, On Liberty, especially pp. 13–14. The most elegant analysis is offered in Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire (Princeton, 2005), chs 5, 6, but see also: Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago, 1999); Beate Jahn, ‘Barbarian thoughts: imperialism in the philosophy of John Stuart Mill’, Review of International Studies, 31 (2005), 599–618; and Karuna Mantena, ‘Mill and the imperial predicament’, in Urbinati and Zakaras, J. S. Mill’s Political Thought, 298–318. A qualified defence of Mill is provided in Mark Tunick, ‘Tolerant imperialism: John Stuart Mill’s defense of British rule in India’, Review of Politics, 68 (2006), 586–611. 85 The quotations are from Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics, trans. B. Dugdale and T. de Bille, 2 vols (London, 1916), I, pp. 19, 24, 65, 99, and II, pp. 588, 599. See also Casper Sylvest, ‘British liberal historians and the primacy of inter­ nationalism’, in William Mulligan and Brendan Simms (eds), The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000 (New York, forthcoming). 86 Mill, Considerations of Representative Government, pp. 307–8n. Here, Mill asserted that the Conservatives were ‘by the law of their existence the stupidest party’. After Tory leaders used this passage against Mill in Parliament, the new MP replied that he ‘did not mean that Conservatives are generally stupid; I meant, that stupid persons are generally Conservative’. Mill, Autobiography, ed. J. M. Robson (London, 1989 [1873]), p. 212n. 87 Good studies include Lord [Robert] Blake and Hugh Cecil (eds), Salisbury (London, 1987); Michael Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World (Cambridge, 2001); Andrew Roberts, Lord Salisbury (London, 2000). 88 See for example Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World, pp. 35, 61, 221; Roberts, Lord Salisbury, p. 691. 89 Lord Salisbury, speech at Caernarvon, 10 April 1888, quoted in Roberts, Lord Salisbury, p. 488. 90 David Gillard, ‘Salisbury’, in Wilson, British Foreign Secretaries, 119–37;

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91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98

Roberts, Lord Salisbury, p. 843; Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World, for example p. 40. See also Michael Pinto-Duschinsky, The Political Thought of Lord Salisbury, 1854–68 (London, 1967), pp. 119–39, which is based on Salisbury’s early journalism and demonstrates the continuity of Salisbury’s perspective on international affairs. Salisbury quoted (without date) in Roberts, Lord Salisbury, p. 114. Salisbury, speech at Newport, 7 October 1885, quoted in Roberts, Lord Salisbury, p. 357. See also Bentley, Lord Salisbury’s World, pp. 226–7. Salisbury quoted (without date) in Roberts, Lord Salisbury, p. 480. See also Pinto-Duschinsky, Political Thought, pp. 132–5. Lord Salisbury to Lord Lansdowne, June 1890, quoted in Roberts, Lord Salisbury, p. 508. See Peter Marsh, ‘Lord Salisbury and the Ottoman massacres’, Journal of British Studies, 11 (1972), 63–83. Salisbury [Robert Cecil], ‘Russian views of English policy’, Saturday Review, 4 (1860), 330–1, at p. 331, also quoted in Pinto-Duschinsky, Political Thought, p. 122. See also Duncan S. A. Bell and Casper Sylvest, ‘International society in Victorian political thought: T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Sidgwick’, Modern Intellectual History, 3 (2006), 207–38.

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Part II – Languages

CH APTER 3

Legal evolution and the redemption of international law

The dilemma of international law is that of ecclesiastical dogma. Elastic interpretation adapted to diverse needs increases the number of the faithful. Rigid interpretation, though theoretically desirable, provokes secessions from the church. (E. H. Carr, 19391)

It has become a commonplace to note that the modern body of inter­ national law, shared by a society of civilised nations, has its roots in the classical tradition of jus gentium and in a ‘law of nations’ applicable to a family of Christian and European peoples. However, not much resemblance remains; as with most other intellectual activities, the pressing questions and the more or less well argued answers unremittingly change in the course of history.2 The traditional portrayal of the nineteenth century casts formalism and notions of absolute sovereignty in central roles; apparently, it was a time when legal positivism defeated legal natural­ism and paved the way for twentieth-century legal pragmatism. 3 Not only is this narrative too schematic, it perhaps also serves a wider, self-justifying purpose within the contemporary discipline of international law.4 However, no alternative, convincing account of the development of British international legal thought in the late nineteenth century exists. On the one hand, this is perhaps unsurprising, as there is generally a ‘lack of an adequate intellectual history of modern legal education and thought in England’. 5 On the other hand, it is curious that no such account exists: in Continental versions of the history of international law, which are premised on a close interrelationship between political and intellectual power, the nineteenth century is often delineated as ‘the British era’.6 A further weighty reason for examining international legal thought in Britain is the close link between the study and promulgation of international law and the ideology of liberal internationalism. Many legal scholars displayed a professional faith in concepts like ‘civilisation’ and ‘the rule of law’ and shared the ambition, almost integral to inter­national law, to bring progress, order and justice 61

Legal evolution and international law to international politics. A recent (and extremely valuable) account of the rise of international law identified a ‘late-Victorian reformist sensibility written into international law’, but the specifically British aspect of this sensibility has received less treatment than it deserves.7 And in the literature on British intellectual history in the late nineteenth century, moreover, international legal thought is virtually absent. The aim of this chapter is, therefore, to provide an analysis of the emerging academic discipline of international law in the late nineteenth century and the legal language of liberal internationalism that underpinned it. Apart from providing a crucial element in our understanding of liberal internationalism in Britain between 1880 and 1930, the analysis also contributes, on the level of history, to the rapprochement between the academic pursuits of International Relations (IR) and international law.8 It should be stressed at the outset that the primary focus of the analysis below is the theoretical aspect of international law, primarily the justification of international law in academic, legal and ethico-political terms. The chapter can, needless to say, make no claim to be comprehensive. The theoretical focus is warranted by the insights it provides into British liberal international thought more generally, but other aspects of international law are in want of further study, including the ideas of contemporary practitioners. Moreover, the chapter touches on, but offers no sustained analysis of, the problems that colonialism and imperial expansion presented for international law or the practices of exclusion in which international lawyers engaged. Although this aspect of international legal thought is not at the forefront here, it is an important theme that scholars (including myself) have accorded much attention in recent years.9 Victorian international lawyers formed part of the ‘well-connected intellectual-cum-political stratum’ in British society and, consequently, their intellectual activity reflected the preoccupations of the Victorian liberal elite.10 Their liberal internationalist beliefs should make us suspicious of the conventional account of a burgeoning positivism succeeding an outmoded naturalism in the nineteenth century. Indeed, as the chapter demonstrates, there clearly was a positivist challenge to naturalism but, in attempting to solve the problems that arose from this challenge, both naturalism and positivism underwent profound changes.11 The main import of the analysis is that there is no clear distinction to be discerned between legal positivism and legal naturalism in late nineteenth-century British international legal thought; for most of the century the two coexisted, but especially in the later decades they did so in a distinctive fashion that secured the coherence and respectability of the study of inter­national law. Specifically, it is argued that, during the closing decades of the century, international law was made compatible with positivism through an empiricist focus on the observance of international rules. 62

Legal evolution and international law Natural law – understood as an extra-legal structure or agency – appeared outdated in its traditional transcendentalist, religious or unhistorical guise, but it was supplanted by a similarly external entity in the form of ideas about legal evolution. The appeal of legal evolutionary ideas was strengthened by their compatibility with the self-understanding of many British liberal intellectuals and their beliefs in civilisational progress, the English capacity for combining liberty, law and order, and the gradual growth of the common law in accordance with the needs of historical development. Legal evolution, underpinned by this liberal world-view, presented yet another ethereal variant of natural law: it could be invoked to explain the current problems of international law as well as its future redemption. In short, it offered scientific respectability and a sense of direction. But these advantages came at a cost. The chapter is structured as follows. The first section provides a backdrop to the argument by outlining the positivist (or Austinian) challenge to international law and identifying some broad developments in the subject prior to 1870. The second section presents the idea of legal evolution as it was formulated by Henry Sumner Maine. The next two sections make up the bulk of the chapter. The third section surveys international legal thought in the late nineteenth century by introducing a continuum of positivist and naturalist understandings of international law, and the fourth section demonstrates how the mainstream of this body of ideas was informed by and put to use doctrines of legal and social evolution. While the deployment of legal evolutionary arguments entailed a number of advantages for international law – as legal system, intellectual enterprise and carrier of liberal internationalist ideology – it also had drawbacks, which are briefly discussed in the final section of the chapter. The spectre of Austin and British international law before 1870 This section briefly sketches the history of British international legal thought prior to 1870. It does so by distinguishing two approximate periods, 1835–1855 and 1855–1870. Before proceeding to these periods, however, it is essential to point to three general intellectual precon­ ditions for international legal thought in the nineteenth century.12 First, ‘the spectre of Austin’ is a vital component of any attempt to understand the trajectory of British international legal thought. It arose against the backdrop of Benthamite analytical jurisprudence, which, during much of the nineteenth century, was an inspiration for legal and political reform. In fact, it was Jeremy Bentham who coined the phrase ‘international law’ and tried to put the subject on a new footing, partly as a reaction to the perceived lethargy of William Blackstone’s jurisprudence he ­encountered 63

Legal evolution and international law at Oxford. As with most of Bentham’s jurisprudential distinctions and innovations, this euphemism was aimed at establishing a conceptual and legal clarity that could provide a basis for reform.13 While it is possible to find rudiments of positivist challenges to natural law in the late eighteenth century,14 the analytical jurisprudence developed in the 1830s by a friend and neighbour of Bentham, John Austin (1790–1859), proved most influential. Although Bentham and Austin were largely in tune in terms of jurisprudence and politics (at least during the 1820s and early 1830s), it is important to stress a crucial difference between them. As one scholar has recently argued, ‘Bentham distinguished is and ought for the sake of ought. Austin made the same distinction for the sake of isolating law as it is for detached study’.15 The central contribution of Austin’s The Province of Jurisprudence Determined (1832) was a positivist conception that dispensed with the mystical foundations of law and, underlying this, a firm statement of the centrality of authority and sovereignty in enactments of law.16 For the dry and systematic Austin, who was interested in placing law on a firmer footing, this starting point left a major task of conceptual clarification, as it was necessary to distinguish between (in a character­ istic formulation) ‘laws properly so called and laws improperly so called’. To Austin, proper laws were of three types. Both the laws of God and positive laws were proper laws, because they were established directly by command and/or originated from a determinate source. Finally, Austin’s otherwise rigid system did allow that some positive moral rules (e.g. rules set by people to govern people in a state of nature) were to be regarded as proper laws, due to their imperative character. Austin conceded that this involved ‘an analogised extension of the term’ ‘law’, but the scheme still left many ‘laws’ improperly so-called and, significantly, he pointed to inter­national law as the foremost example. International law, which at the time was a collage of natural law, treaties, custom and convention, was relegated by Austin to positive moral rules ‘imposed by general opinion’.17 At the heart of the matter, according to Austin, was the fact that international law did not emanate from any command or other determinate source. Thus, positive law was closely connected to the Austinian idea of sovereignty, which in turn implied a notion of hierarchy, as laws were ‘set by political superiors to political inferiors’.18 The lack of such notions in the intercourse between states left the inflexible Austin with no other option than to dismiss inter­ national law. We should not infer from these arguments that Austin was uninterested in peace among states or in the moral (not legal) rules that were to obtain in the intercourse between them. Yet it is certainly true that few professors appointed to a chair of ‘Jurisprudence and Law of Nations’, as Austin was in 1832 at the University of London, would start their career by destabilising their subject in this fashion. At any rate, the 64

Legal evolution and international law spectre of Austin was to haunt international legal scholars for the rest of the century, as it prejudiced any attempt to form an academic discipline of international law by denying it the authority of the term ‘law’.19 The second and third preconditions of the development of inter­ national legal thought can be dealt with more briefly. They concern legal education and the understanding of natural law. The state of legal education in early nineteenth-century England was poor; it was simply unclear how a science of law could contribute to a system of law which was essentially directed by practitioners. Thus, prevailing ideas about ‘liberal education’ and the English common law were mainly responsible for there being no legal education ‘worthy of its name’, as the Select Committee on Legal Education of 1846 phrased it.20 Nevertheless, follow­ing much debate on the question, legal education was increasingly structured along Continental lines, and law acquired a relatively safe haven in the newly revived universities, even if its status as a separate academic subject remained precarious. As part of this process, the subject of international law slowly secured a place at the ancient universities, with professorships established at Oxford and Cambridge before 1870.21 Finally, it should be pointed out that the concept of natural law was a constant source of confusion during the nineteenth century, a point widely acknowledged among legal scholars by the end of the century. Naturalism in law can generally be defined as the idea of justifying, founding, or supporting law by reference to some extra-legal structure or agency, but in the Victorian era it was unclear to what extent the natural law under attack based itself on religion or hypothetical speculation in the contractarian tradition (or both). This confusion with regard to natural law is longstanding, and it is arguably present in the writings of Hugo Grotius, who acquired a central standing in international legal discourse.22 Various degrees of hostility towards and bewilderment over Continental jurisprudence and its potential political consequences (as epitomised in the French Revolution) also added to the perplexity.23 It is possible to delineate two periods of international legal theorising from the mid-1830s to around 1870. From the late eighteenth century, when there was some theorising about the ‘law of nations’, until the 1830s there was little scholarly activity with regard to international law. Yet the subject arguably underwent a renaissance between 1835 and the mid to late 1850s, a period that witnessed the publication of the first English treatise on international law.24 Scholarship in this period was to a large extent characterised by an attempt to legitimate the existence and explain the growing acceptance of international law by reference to religion. This approach posited a strong connection between law and morality, and the morality in question was, ultimately, derived from religion, whether this was made explicit or not. When approaching the Austinian challenge, it was conventional to argue for the existence 65

Legal evolution and international law of international law by pointing to the fact that international law was observed and recognised by states and that many European countries had incorporated international law into municipal law. But above all, this approach maintained that, even if international law and justice were not always observed, this did not mean that they were unnecessary. Theology and jurisprudence were conjoined – God willed international law and therefore it had to exist.25 Between the late 1850s and the early 1870s, British ideas about international law were transformed: the traditional, religiously based notion of international law co-existed with other, no less moralistic but more secular notions of the subject. While religious reasoning in international law did not suddenly become impossible, there was a gradual move away from justifying the subject in terms of religion and/or natural law, and this concession to analytical jurisprudence entailed the paradoxical argument that international law operated like law but without being law.26 On the face of it, that left the aspiring subject in disarray. Yet if appeals to natural law now seemed unconvincing, many liberal legal scholars were to discover the forces of progress in the development of civilisation and public opinion, which came, partly at least, to substitute for Christianity. As the Oxford professor Montague Bernard argued in 1868, ‘less is to be hoped from any direct endeavours to abolish wars or diminish their frequency than from the silent growth of interests, habits of life, modes of government, and a public opinion, favourable to peace’.27 This turn in international legal thought had equivocal consequences. On the one hand, there was a drive to turn international law into a science to be studied at the universities; on the other, a price had to be paid for respectability. No longer could its promulgators define the subject in the terms of ‘natural law’, although they often appealed to some form of extra-legal standard. This ‘defence’ of international law apparently stripped it of all its legal characteristics, except for the term ‘law’ itself. From the 1870s, when new hopes were invested in international law, a way round this dilemma had to be found. How this was accomplished, and how the moralistic sentiment survived in a more respectable and ‘scientific’ form, is the subject of the remainder of the chapter. Legal evolution and the march of civilisation Although international law was generally conceived of as (legal) relations between independent sovereign states, in the late nineteenth century these states were seen as forming part of a larger if indistinct whole, defined in terms of a society of civilised nations. An evolutionary-­progressive perspective came to define the intellectual space of an activity which had seen the option of defining its subject matter as deriving from a 66

Legal evolution and international law moral, ethical standard rooted in religion sealed off.28 Although many of the central figures in this development – as well as many later commen­ tators – gave the impression that an unrepentant positivism supplanted an outmoded naturalism, the two continued to co-exist; but they did so in a fashion that was useful for maintaining the coherence and respectability of the subject, while investing it with an assurance of civilisation. This section demonstrates how this combination came about and indicates why it remained powerful well into the twentieth century. The development away from religious justifications for international law was noted in the preceding section. Of course, no clear break can be identified, and in the writings of British international legal scholars the evaporation of this line of argument was slow; while mostly absent, it sometimes re-emerged unexpectedly at crucial stages in arguments for the importance of international law. Therefore, this development in international legal thought should not be overestimated; nor would it be wise to attribute it to one single cause. This can be illustrated if we look at a prize essay written in 1855, entitled The Influence of Christianity upon International Law, by C. M. Kennedy, a Cambridge student. Like many prize essays, it paid tribute to the local master of the subject (in this case the polymath William Whewell, 1794–1866) and it conformed to the spirit of existing writings. Kennedy’s main argument was that the ‘improvement of international law is one, and certainly not the least, of those many blessings which Christianity has conferred upon mankind, and is, indeed, the necessary result of its principles’.29 If we take a step back and ask, allowing for some measure of anachronism, whether the young Kennedy could have won an essay prize advancing the same argument twenty years later, the answer is far from straightforward. On the one hand, Kennedy’s argument about how the legacy of Christianity was generally seen as peaceful, moderating the calamities of and even preventing war, would not – as a historical claim – have disturbed later scholars. Interpreting all other sources of international law as having been influenced and positively furthered by Christianity – for example, Roman law, the spread of commerce, the general progress of civilisation – was an assumption that, although often implicit, seemed to stick. 30 On the other hand, later scholars would have distanced themselves from Kennedy’s attempt to ground international law in Christianity. This is not due to any sweeping process of secularisation taking place in the course of Victoria’s reign. In nineteenth-century historiography, secularisation constitutes a minefield; recent studies indicate that it has been overestimated, especially as a social phenomenon, and Frank Turner has reminded us that although there was such a thing as secularisation, it was ‘anything but inevitable, unproblematic, or systematically steady’. 31 One has to be careful here. Religious reasoning in international law did not suddenly become impossible. Victorian society and politics were always 67

Legal evolution and international law saturated in religious language and images. Yet the 1850s and early 1860s witnessed, after all, the publication of biblical criticism and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859). One consequence of this development was that it became less fashionable, and perhaps also less convincing, to ground science (including the aspirations of the sciences of ethics, politics or international law) in religion. 32 At the same time, the concept of the law of nature continued to pose problems in the vocabulary of late nineteenth-century legal scholars. Apart from being derived from divine law, the law of nature could also refer to scientific laws (of nature) or laws arrived at by speculative reasoning in the fashion of natural right theories. 33 Therefore, it would be idle to imagine that it disappeared from international legal discourse, but, as I will attempt to substantiate below, the fact that it was accorded a lesser role in justifying international law points towards a new phase of how the subject was conceived. In this phase, the foundation of international law was, above all, located in existing rules and the habitual obedience to them, which to some extent signalled a positivist attempt at accommodation with international law. It allowed international jurists to carve out a proper ‘scientific’ role for themselves: they became empiricists who should identify and codify (or rewrite) these rules as civilisation developed. It is not insignificant that this idea enabled its scholars to present international law as a dynamic and progressive subject, with an enormous potential for human life, tones that were in harmony with the dominant, moralistic public idiom of the day. This heterodox and contradictory discourse to a large extent found the impetus for moral change in the predicament of civilisation. It has become commonplace to stress how the concept of civilisation was central for nineteenth-century political and social thought, but it is worth taking a closer look at the ramifications it had in international legal thought. 34 According to one recent analysis, it performed two roles: ‘it defined the border between the two patterns of modern international order, and it described the ultimate purposes that the extra-European order was for’. 35 That the identity of civilisation was supplied by ‘savages’ and ‘barbarous life’ in general is indisputable, as John Stuart Mill’s breathtaking oppositions in the first few pages of his seminal text on the subject testify. Also, it is clear that most international legal scholars were willing to take responsibility for civilising these barbarians. Yet the importance of civilis­ation is not exhausted by these two roles. As Mill plainly stated, ‘the present era is pre-eminently the era of civilization…; whether we consider what has already been achieved, or the rapid advances making towards still greater achievements’. 36 Thus civilisation was conceptualised as a process, and that often a unilinear process, which left little scope for inherent cultural or national differences but which also – Britain apart – had far from reached its murky destination. Although Mill was more 68

Legal evolution and international law alert to the negative consequences of civilisational progress than many of his contemporaries and later followers, it is significant that he referred to peace, co-operation and the laws and conduct of war when defining civilisation. 37 This argument foreshadowed the ‘civilisational perspective’ on human development, which came to be shared by liberals and intellectuals more widely. In the context of international legal thought, however, Mill exemplifies how ‘civilisation’ could supply a teleology; a historical framework that proved useful when one externally derived supporter of international law, the discredited law of nature, could no longer be enlisted on behalf of the subject.38 Yet this connection became fully established only when the concept of civilisation was coupled with social and legal evolutionary ideas, which became fashionable not only because they seemed to offer scientific certainty but also because they provided reassurance at a time when neither ‘cynical’ utilitarianism nor traditional religious belief could muster the support it once had. 39 Moreover, it is worth stressing that ideas about evolution partly caused and were caused by a general shift and extension in Victorian conceptions of time, which in turn sparked a remarkable appetite for history and a re-orientation towards locating origins within a greatly extended time-scale.40 While legal evolution cannot be reduced to social evolution, it can be regarded as a species of social evolutionary theory. According to John Burrow, the attraction of those theories in Victorian Britain was that they offered a way of reformulating the essential unity of mankind, while avoiding the current objections to the older theories of a human nature everywhere essentially the same. Mankind was one not because it was everywhere the same, but because the differences represented different stages in the same process. And by agreeing to call the process progress one could convert the social theory into a moral and political one.41

In terms of international legal thinking, these theories offered a number of possibilities, but in the analysis below I will focus on one of these: the possibility of surveying the historical development of international law and speculating about its future. The spectre of Austin continued to haunt international law. It was never absent; indeed, it could not be. By strict standards of Austinian positivism, international law was not law. On the other hand, every modification of positivism seemed to introduce an element of ‘natural law’, understood as some standard external to the will of the states producing international law.42 The evolutionary idea acquired a place in international legal argument that was not far removed from that formerly occupied by ‘natural law’: it became the strongest extra-legal foundation for international law. Not only was legal evolution a useful tool for countering the recurring challenge that 69

Legal evolution and international law ‘international law is not law’, but it also offered intellectual reassurance, scientific respectability and, because it was premised on a set of broadly liberal internationalist values, a crucial sense of direction. International legal thinking in this period was neither uniform nor unequivocal. In fact, the constant shift between fact and judgement has led one scholar to argue that it is ‘pointless to class these writers … as “positivists” or “naturalists”’.43 While there is much truth to be found in this warning, it is not, perhaps, entirely convincing. Firstly, how the subject was defined often imposed restraints on what it was possible to argue in substantial terms. For example, the empiricist attitude to international law often had the consequence of lessening the ambitions of international jurists. After all, their job was to detect and codify rules actually obeyed in the intercourse of nations, not to engage in hypothetical speculation about an order that might be.44 Moreover, the oscillation between positivist and naturalist ways of arguing need not be random; if some order in chaos can be identified, it is not futile to look for an explanation of this regularity. I want to suggest that there is such a pattern in how these modes of arguments were put to use, and that this pattern makes sense in the general context of mid- and late-Victorian discourse about law, jurisprudence and international politics. In order to spell out this argument, we must look closer at Henry Sumner Maine (1822–1888). In 1847, Maine was appointed Regius Professor of Civil Law at Cambridge. Following the success of Ancient Law (1861), he became the legal member of the Governor-General’s council in India.45 Maine returned to England in 1869 and became Corpus Pro­ fessor of Jurisprudence at Oxford. In 1877, he went back to Cambridge as Master of Trinity Hall. In the closing years of his life he occupied the Whewell Chair of International Law. Not only is Maine important as a jurist and the author of Ancient Law, but he was also an intellectual giant of his time, whose influence among the intellectual class ‘would be hard to exaggerate’.46 As part of many (ultimately unsuccessful) attempts to strengthen legal education at the Inns of Court, Maine delivered his lectures on Roman law, which were later reworked and turned into Ancient Law. The book proved immensely popular and made Maine’s name. Far from being a systematic treatise on jurisprudence, Ancient Law provided a synthesis of the themes that preoccupied Maine: the pitfalls of nonhistorical a priori reasoning, the advantages of ­historical knowledge for the science of jurisprudence, and the conditions and benefits of progress and reform.47 The contribution of Maine to jurisprudence is today often remembered as being first and foremost a critique of Austin, but that is unfortunate. Although Maine was critical of ­analytical jurisprudence, he shared with Austin a number of assumptions and arguments about the necessity of establishing jurisprudence as a science, and the two were also generally seen as compatible by contemporaries.48 What Maine did 70

Legal evolution and international law in Ancient Law was more complicated and could be taken in a number of directions. The most famous of Maine’s sweeping generalisations was the evolutionary idea that ‘the movement of the progressive societies has hitherto been a movement from Status to Contract’.49 Behind this maxim was Maine’s analysis of legal change and legal evolution, which was ­flavoured by the ideas of Friedrich Karl von Savigny, the founder of the historical school in Germany, whose Of the Vocation of Our Age for Legislation and Jurisprudence had been translated into English in 1831. By no means an unconditional optimist on behalf of humankind, Maine often stressed the normal, ‘stationary’ condition of human society. What he identified were the situations in which favourable circumstances had made progress possible by means of three agencies of legal change: fictions, equity and legislation. If the process was hurried, it could yield negative results. The analysis was informed by an admiration for Rome and its ability to gradually incorporate into civil law the laws of nature, thereby preserving order, and a corresponding disapproval of Ancient Greece and its tendency to codify recklessly. (The modern counterpart of the Greek tendency was French thought and particularly the ideas of JeanJacques Rousseau, a Genevan!) The fact that some parts of civilisation, including England, had been fortunate enough to reach the level where ‘contract’ rather than ‘status’ defined its legal system, and where legislation was the means of legal change, instituted not only a beginning and an end of a historical process but also a moral compass. Contract, codification and written law were all ethically superior to status, myth and fiction. In its view of, for example, natural law thinking or the use of fictions, this argument mixed arrogance with elements of veneration. 50 No matter how imprecise or unscientific these ideas appeared to Maine, he recognised that they were necessary steps towards the future in which he found himself. The conclusion was inescapable: natural law theory (of which Benthamite analytical jurisprudence and arguments based on a state of nature were modern variants) might have served its purpose at a particular time (e.g. in classical Rome), but it had no place in the modern world. It was unhistorical and a priori: to a Victorian era obsessed with evolution and progress, such historical notions might be important for understanding a trajectory of evolution, but they were incapable of guiding civilisation in its advanced stages. Maine’s contribution to international law has generally been neglected or, perhaps, overshadowed by his other writings. 51 This is surprising considering that Maine appears to have been interested in international law and its historical connection to natural law throughout his life. In 1855, Maine read a paper on international law to the Juridical Society. Moreover, Ancient Law and an early essay, ‘Roman law and legal education’, contained discussions of international law. Maine also appears to 71

Legal evolution and international law have written a book on international law but lost the manuscript. 52 Never­ theless, the one set of lectures Maine devoted exclusively to the subject was written shortly before his death, when he suffered from illness, and there is an argument to be made that Maine’s views on the substance of international law were relatively unimportant owing to their sometimes highly idiosyncratic character. 53 This will not be disputed here. But Maine’s influence on the development of the subject was profound, despite being indirect and subtle. The idea of legal evolution became a central feature of late nineteenth-century British intellectual life and this was clearly reflected in writings on international law. At this stage, some qualifications are in order. In presenting the idea of evolution, I am guilty of some simplification. Firstly, the importance attributed to Maine should not obscure the fact that there existed a receptive audience for evolutionary ideas, and that Maine owed debts to German as well as British scholars. Secondly, although On the Origin of Species (1859) was an immensely influential book, I shall say relatively little about Darwin. This is perhaps problematic, as many Victorians (includ­ing legal scholars) later bundled all evolutionary theories together in a rather uncritical fashion. However, it is worth noting that most forms of social evolutionism were not biologically deterministic, and there is much evidence that the Darwinian influence should not be overestimated. Most social-evolutionary arguments relied on broadly ‘environmentalist’ (often Lamarckian or Spencerian) arguments about inheritance and adaptation. 54 Finally, while Maine was perhaps not the only influential figure to link evolution with jurisprudence and the development of legal systems, he was surely the first Victorian writer closely associated with the study of law to do so explicitly. And Ancient Law quickly proved a success, which ‘Maine’s generation of lawyers and ­historians … viewed … with much the same sort of enthusiasm as natural scientists had received Darwin’s On the Origin of Species’. 55 Maine’s starting point was that Roman law formed the basis of what had become known as international law or the law of nations. To Maine, the neglect of Roman law in England meant that ‘Englishmen … will always be more signally at fault than the rest of the world in attempting to gain a clear view of the Law of Nations’. 56 The modern theory of natural law, associated with Grotius, was virtually taken from Roman law, but in the process a number of important conceptual mutations took place; for example, ‘the confusion between Jus Gentium, or Law common to all Nations, and international law is entirely modern’. 57 Moreover, the Grotian theory required that a determinable law of nature (an idea shared with the Romans) was considered valid among sovereign and independent commonwealths (a conception foreign to Roman law). And this sovereignty was thought of in territorial terms, another aspect unintelligible in terms of Roman law. This led Maine to conclude that 72

Legal evolution and international law The theory of International Law assumes that commonwealths are, relatively to each other, in a state of nature; but the component atoms of a natural society must, by the fundamental assumption, be insulated and independent of each other. If there be a higher power connecting them, however slightly and occasionally by the claim of common supremacy, the very conception of a common superior introduces the notion of positive law, and excludes the idea of a law natural. 58

Although Maine did not develop his views on international law further in Ancient Law, the implication to be drawn from the overall argument of the book was that international law still operated on the basis of natural law. This was not in itself a bad thing, as these rules had a benevo­lent effect on the development of humankind. In 1856, Maine even described international law as ‘that body of rules which alone protects the European Commonwealth from permanent anarchy’. 59 On the other hand, inter­ national law was far from as developed as municipal (and especially English) law. But this lamentable fact did not mean that the road towards a more substantive body of rules of international law was eternally blocked. ‘Ancient jurisprudence, if a perhaps deceptive comparison may be employed, may be likened to International Law, filling nothing, as it were, excepting the interstices between the great groups which are the atoms of society’.60 This likening of ancient law (out of which modern law had grown) to international law meant that the latter could also progress if the conditions were favourable. As one scholar has remarked, we always find that, in Maine, ‘Benthamite rigour and optimism were held in equipoise with a Whiggish sense of the necessary slowness of change’, which involved learning by experience and appreciating ‘the relative value in their day of institutions as ways of thinking which a more advanced age would find useless or pernicious’.61 This ‘pessimistic optimism’ also extended to the development of international law. Of more importance, however, is the fact that scholars of international law soon exploited Maine’s arguments about legal evolution, as well as other evolutionary arguments, for their own purposes. Sheldon Amos, Professor of Juris­ prudence to the Inns of Court and at University College, London, was one of the first to do so. As he argued in 1874, ‘It is the most remarkable feature of international law that it exhibits law in the making’.62

Positivism, naturalism and the development of international law The ten scholars of international law who gathered at the Hôtel de Ville in Ghent on 10 October 1873 all agreed that international law was in want of and could be subjected to progress. To no small extent, this was the reason they met. Among them we find Johann Kaspar Bluntschli of 73

Legal evolution and international law Heidelberg, the American Dudley Field, M. Rolin-Jaequemyns (who had founded the Revue de Droit International only a few years earlier) and Professor James Lorimer of Edinburgh, who luckily decided to record the circumstances and decisions of the meeting, as it was likely to be of ‘historical interest’.63 The idea behind the meeting was to create an international scientific organisation for scholars of international law. The first Geneva Convention (1864) and the signing of the Treaty of Washington (1871), which provided for arbitration of disputes between the United States and Britain, and a widespread sense among international lawyers that a new era of international law was being entered, provided the right context for the establishment of the Institute of International Law. The statutes of the Institute laid bare the most characteristic features of international legal thought in the late nineteenth century. Thus, the beginning of the first article: Art. 1. The Institute of International Law is an exclusively scientific association, and with no official character. Its objects are – (1) To favour the progress of International Law by seeking to become the organ of the legal conscience of the civilised world. (2) To formulate the general principles of the science, as well as the rules that result from it, and to spread the knowledge of it. (3) To give its aid to any serious attempt at gradual and progressive codification….64

Behind this conception of the Institute’s role, we see an uneasy mix of positivism and naturalism, where the notion of a collective, European conscience was, as Koskenniemi argues, ‘understood always as ambiva­lently either consciousness or conscience, that is, in alternatively rationalistic or ethical ways’.65 Although international organisations rarely reflect un­ filtered national intellectual concerns, the Institute and the spirit behind it were spacious (some would say ghostly) enough to accom­modate almost every single British scholar in the field. Thus, among the members or associates of the Institute in its first decades we find James Lorimer (­Edinburgh), Montague Bernard (Oxford), T. E. Holland (Oxford), Travers Twiss (no affiliation), John Westlake (­Cambridge), William Edward Hall (Oxford, no affiliation) and T. J. Lawrence (Cambridge, Bristol, Chicago). Only three prominent figures are absent from this list (Amos, Maine and Phillimore), but this was not due to any ideological estrangement from the Institute. The British contingent was by no means homogenous in terms of fundamental assumptions about and aspirations on behalf of their subject. Yet they all used international law as a vehicle for their liberal internationalist ideology and the pursuit of progress in international politics. To quote Koskenniemi again, the Institute represented ‘an independent stream of historical jurisprudence, linked with liberalhumanitarian ideals and theories of the natural evolution of European societies’, in which Europe – despite its lack of common ­authority – was 74

Legal evolution and international law conceptualised as a political society that had international law as an ‘inextricable part of its organisation’.66 However, Koskenniemi also sets up a contrast between this argument and the idea that the Institute was a reaction against Austin in particular and analytical jurisprudence in general. While there is no need to argue against the importance and influence of liberal-humanitarian ideals or evolutionary ideas, and also no need to quantify that notoriously difficult term ‘influence’, this contrast appears unconvincing in a British context. The political and methodological differences between British scholars of international law did not mean that they saw any contradiction between reacting against (and in some measure accommodating their theories to) analytical jurisprudence and emphasising the ethical force behind international law. Thus, British international lawyers identified what one scholar termed the ‘inherent imperfection which at present clings to International Law, namely, the shadowy line which separates a legal from moral right’,67 but by broadening the definition of law to include ‘law in the making’, we should not be surprised to find that the character of this line remained shadowy in these years. It is more plausible to see these two elements as co-existing. After all, Austin was British and his views on jurisprudence, national as well as international, continued to set the terms of legal debate in Britain well into the twentieth century. This emerges if we scrutinise the views of British scholars. For analytical purposes, they can be located on a continuum of positivist and naturalist justifications of international law. Although a scholar like T. E. Holland displayed clear positivist leanings and although James Lorimer and Robert Phillimore stressed the role of natural law, the mainstream was clearly to be found in a combination of these positions. Those taking this stance often adopted and adapted evolutionary arguments by implying that positivism gradually succeeded naturalism in the development of international law. It is worth stressing that all British scholars defended international law as law, pace Austin. The arguments used were not necessarily identical, but the import was the same. The most positivist perspective was represented by T. E. Holland (1835–1926), Chichele Professor of International Law and Diplomacy in Oxford from 1874 until 1910. As a student, Holland had been a member of the Old Mortality Society, along with other university liberals. In his jurisprudence, he was a product of the Austinian tradition. His most successful book, The Elements of Juris­ prudence (1880), went through thirteen editions in Holland’s lifetime and was partly responsible for the continued popularity of the analytical perspective. Holland’s first incursion into international law was also successful. In his inaugural lecture, he reminded his audience that Albericus Gentilis, not Grotius, had begun the development towards modern international law.68 This reinterpretation revived scholarly interest in Gentilis. Holland’s treatment of international law demonstrated that his 75

Legal evolution and international law ‘morbid hatred for disorder’ (as it says in the Dictionary of National Biography) extended to intellectual systems. Being Austinian and a professor of international law was problematic, but arguably Holland’s problem points to an underlying tension in positivism: to what extent is pure positivism at all possible? If the authority of law can be reduced to the power enforcing or commanding it, any kind of ‘progress’ is hardly possible. On the other hand, if positivism is conceived as codification or institutionalisation of principles or rules actually observed, an element of naturalism becomes hard to escape. For example, which principles are in most need of codification? Who are to decide this and on what basis? And what is the role of custom in this process? It was with these difficulties in mind that Holland admitted that international law was the ‘vanishing point of Jurisprudence; since it lacks any arbiter of disputed questions, save public opinion … and since, in proportion as it tends to become assimilated to true law by the aggregation of States into a larger society, it ceases to be itself, and is transmuted into the public law of a federal government’.69 Holland solved this problem by defining the subject by way of analogy to the domestic sphere and arguing that the law of nations was private law writ large. The international ‘law of persons’ was analogous to an investigation of the nature of the sovereign state; the ‘substantive’ law of nations constituted an inquiry into the nature, origin and cessation of rights; and finally, the ‘adjective’ law of nations dealt with the means of redress for international wrong-doing. Starting from this positivist perspective, the final element, the sanction of international law, was as simple as it was logically necessary: because nations could wage war, international law contained a sanction.70 Holland’s identification and awareness of the defects of international law did not lead to dismissal. Instead, he demonstrated how analytical jurisprudence attempted to redeem international law by loosening the criteria for law. International Law if not all-powerful, is at any rate everywhere present in modern history. Morality is not despaired of because it sometimes gives forth an uncertain sound, and sometimes fails to hold men under the strain of a great temptation. It is not reasonable to undervalue the services rendered by International Law, because it is not precise enough to supply a rule for every new case that arises, or strong enough to restrain from collision nations whose passions are once fairly roused.71

Of course, this should not be taken to mean that Holland ‘ultimately’ defended international law by referring to natural law (although he certainly went some of the way). Rather, it demonstrates how most inter­ national lawyers, and even self-styled positivists like Holland, viewed their subject as having an ethical core and purpose, which in turn made a positivist doctrine, based on a distinction between laws as they are 76

Legal evolution and international law and laws as they ought to be, vulnerable to ambivalence. Taken to its conclusion, this approach could not, as Austin had realised, recognise international law as law. But as a member of both the Institute and a community of ethically high-minded scholars, Holland could not but shift the boundaries and thereby modify the analytical position. On the other hand, consensus among British scholars did not stretch far beyond the underlying ethical purpose of the profession. Holland criticised some of his colleagues for their retrograde or misconceived ideas of the subject. Most important was Holland’s critique of a natural law approach to international law. As we have seen, this approach became less popular in its pure form throughout the period but it still had its defenders.72 Robert Phillimore (1810–1885) never fundamentally revised his conception of the subject after publishing his four-volume Commen­ taries upon International Law between 1854 and 1861. Phillimore was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, where he met and became friends with W. E. Gladstone.73 A product of the High Church environment of his days in Oxford, Phillimore opened his treatise by arguing: The necessity of mutual intercourse is laid in the nature of States, as it is of Individuals, by God, who willed the State and created the individual. The intercourse of Nations, therefore, gives rise to International Rights and Duties, and these require an International Law for their regulation and enforcement. That law is not enacted by the will of any common Superior upon earth. But is enacted by the will of God; and it is expressed in the consent, tacit or declared, of Independent Nations.74

Phillimore was involved in the Association for the Reform and Codification of the Law of Nations, over which he presided in 1879. This organisation, which was established in Belgium at almost exactly the same time as the Institute, was intended as a bridge between the peace movement and legal scholars; as the name suggests, it was largely in tune with the main purpose of the scholars’ organisation.75 In 1879, Phillimore delivered a lecture to the annual conference of the Association, in which we find, firstly, a recognition of the naturalist foundations of international law and, secondly, an argument that codification is the panacea for imprecision and the road to scientific status.76 Yet this positivist indulgence was conceived within the religious framework of the aged Oxonian: Phillimore attempted to contribute to ‘the previously existing proof’ that states as well as individuals had in their collective capacity ‘a sphere of duty assigned to them by God’. Ultimately, therefore, international law had at its root a moral principle, which was weakened by the fact that there had always been, and would always be, ‘a class of persons who deride the very notion of International Law, who delight in scoffing at the jurisprudence which supports it’. It was this predicament that made codification necessary. Thus, from a different perspective we 77

Legal evolution and international law observe the same tendency towards accommodation between a naturalist and a positivist approach: states are sovereign and independent, but they have moral rights and duties, just like individuals, and by honouring these, they are honouring the spirit of advanced civilisation.77 Less conciliatory than the writings of Phillimore were those of James Lorimer (1818–1890), who in 1865 had been appointed to the newly revived chair of the Law of Nature and Law of Nations at Edinburgh.78 Lorimer took his grandiose title seriously. In his lectures, as well as in his Institutes of the Law of Nations (1883, 1884), he drove home the point that international law derived from a theistic law of nature. This was in tune with Lorimer’s views on jurisprudence in general as they had been developed in his Institutes of Law (1872), a frontal attack on Bentham, Austin and Fitzjames Stephen. One obvious alternative to their analytical jurisprudence was the historical method of Henry Maine, but Lorimer stuck to natural law as the foundation of jurisprudence, because it provided a firmer footing than comity and convention. This meant giving more prominence ‘to the ethical element’ and substituting the notion of ‘interdependence of States … for that of their independence’.79 By going this far down the road of natural law, Lorimer parted with the mainstream of international legal scholars in Britain, but in another sense he was very much in tune with the intellectual currents of the day: he conceived of the nation as a mirror of the individual of J. S. Mill’s On Liberty, concerned with the development of their character and freedom. This line of argument happily synthesised the two most important schools in international jurisprudence – the national and the cosmopolitan – by vindicating ‘national freedom of action, not apart from, but in and through the recognition of international dependence…’. To Lorimer, international law existed in three senses: as a fact, ‘known or unknown, and whether jurally enforceable or non-enforceable’; as a fact known to humankind and therefore enforceable; and, finally, as fact recognised by nations.80 Where the first two aspects had their roots in natural law, only the third could be referred to as positive law. Coupled with Lorimer’s pessimistic view of enforcement, this system of international law led him to pursue international order by all means. Not only should the individual legal scholar mould public opinion to make it conform to the rational but, failing that (and the prospects were not good), far more drastic, institutional solutions to the ‘ultimate problem of international jurisprudence’ – defined as the need for ‘international equivalents for the factors known to national law as legislation, jurisdiction and execution’ – were required.81 Indeed, Lorimer’s disappointment with moral progress and institutional solutions like the balance of power and arbitration led him to produce a ‘Scheme for the Organisation of an International Government’.82 When Lorimer presented this scheme in his major treatise it was, in fact, his second attempt. The scheme had earlier been published in the 78

Legal evolution and international law Revue de Droit International in 1877, after which it had attracted heavy criticism from European and British scholars alike. As a sign of how wide of the mark of mainstream international legal theorising this scheme placed Lorimer, he deemed it necessary to distance himself from atheism and pessimism! But Lorimer stuck to his belief in natural law as the foundation for a science of jurisprudence, while recognising that he had no positive audience for this theory in England.83 This divergence might also have been a result of the differences between the Scottish and the English legal systems; in the former, civil law continues to be based on (more or less) generalised rights and duties, with a resulting tendency to argue deductively. At any rate, Holland, who reviewed Lorimer’s book, agreed that there was such a divide between English scholars and Lorimer, whose jurisprudence was ‘likely to appear péche par la base to most international lawyers south of the Tweed’.84 Against the background of this survey, one could be led to conclude that a fight between the (relatively) positivist and naturalist positions continued in late nineteenth-century British thought, until positivism finally defeated retrograde naturalism. This was often the view that contemporaries took. For example, James Bryce argued that ‘we now seldom hear the term Law of Nature. It seems to have vanished from the sphere of politics as well as from positive law.’85 This conclusion is, however, too presentist. In jurisprudence in general, as well as in international law, methodological pluralism was the order of the day.86 More importantly, the mainstream of international law – occupied by scholars like Maine, Hall, Amos, Lawrence and Westlake – did in fact display a mix of (or uneasiness between) positivism and naturalism, which they exploited not only in their attempt to establish the subject as a science but also as they self-consciously adopted the role of moralists, whose duty it was to further the progress, order and justice that international law potentially represented. The ambivalence could be explained by the fact that international law was a dynamic subject that was both lagging behind but also catching up with the general evolution of humankind. At this point, it is appropriate to return to Maine, who, although he does not epitomise any straightforward position, can provide insights into the most widespread mix of positivism and naturalism that dominated international legal thought in late-Victorian Britain. Maine was elected to the Whewell chair in 1887. Dying early in 1888, he left only one set of lectures devoted exclusively to the subject.87 At the end of his life, Maine had grown sceptical of the direction of modern politics – especially its journey towards democracy, which he attacked in Popular Government (1885) – and he appeared largely as a reactionary. Collini has offered the most convincing interpretation of Maine’s political views: he argues that Maine ‘belongs … with that group prominent in if not strictly peculiar to this period, such as Sidgwick, Dicey and 79

Legal evolution and international law the elder Stephen, rationalists with strongly individualist sympathies’.88 Corresponding to the trajectory of his political views, Maine began his lectures with a number of historical reflections on the nature of humankind and the prospects for peace – needless to say, both were bleak. Turning to the discussion of inter­national law, he reiterated (with minor corrections) an argument from Ancient Law: the place of international law in the general development of European jurisprudence and ‘its rapid advance to acceptance by civilised nations’ constituted a late stage of the diffusion of Roman law. This was the great function of the law of nature: giving birth to the law of nations. Thus, the founders of inter­national law, ‘though they did not create a sanction, created a lawabiding sentiment’.89 But how should the subject be conceived of today? Maine plunged into the contem­porary disagreements by denying that either the positivist or the naturalist answer was entirely true. He identified a rudimentary form of positive international law among primitive groups, but while positive law was undoubtedly the most useful and practical part of international law, it could not be entirely separated from natural law and ‘the same principles of right reason, the same views of the nature and constitution of man, and the same sanction of Divine revelation, as those from which the science of morality is deduced. There is a natural and positive Law of Nations.’90 Judging from the remaining lectures that Maine delivered, he saw his own strength in discovering how this predicament and certain inter­ national rules had come about, and to some extent this made a focus on legal thought – in particular that of Grotius and his followers – necessary. Maine thereby extended the critique of analytical jurisprudence that he had provided since the early 1860s. He denied not only that Austin had intended to diminish ‘the dignity or imperative force of international law’, but also that he had succeeded in doing this. Maine additionally rejected the Austinian concept of indivisible sovereignty, which, ‘though it belongs to Austin’s system, does not belong to International Law’.91 International law, in Maine’s vision, should become codified, scientific and reliable, preferably through the involvement of practical men (as opposed to armchair theorists). However, in attempting, as Whewell had stipulated, to discuss measures that could prevent war, Maine pointed his fingers at the ultimate problem of international law: ‘the denial to International Law of that auxiliary force, which is commanded by all municipal law, and by every municipal tribunal, is a most lamentable disadvantage’.92 To Maine, no panacea – neither arbitration nor institutions – was available to prevent war; rather, his preferred solution was for a small number of states to ally on a specific set of questions in order to preserve peace in their part of the world. Much has been made of Maine’s progressive apple going sour towards the end of his life, and it is worth remembering that he always stressed 80

Legal evolution and international law the precarious and fortuitous character of progress. However, even if the problems in the international domain appeared more complicated than those in the domestic realm, this does not mean that Maine’s vision for international law was one of despair. On balance, he appears to have sympathised with most central elements of internationalist ideology, while remaining sceptical of their immediate realisation. Among twentieth-century observers, Maine and the historical school have become almost exclusively associated with stifling conservatism.93 Such a reading underestimates the extent to which (biological, social and legal) evolutionary ideas were used to justify most political positions in the late nineteenth century, and it appears implausible in relation to a number of issues, including international law. Maine’s popularity and the heterogeneous character of his writings, as well as their eloquent, but sometimes less than precise, prose made it possible, perhaps inevitable, that many different legal scholars later adapted and adopted his ideas. The hidden hand of international law Three prominent scholars who rose to prominence in this period – W. E. Hall, T. J. Lawrence and John Westlake – provide further insights into the mainstream of international legal reasoning in this period. William Edward Hall (1835–1894) had a curious existence that never fitted the constraints of academic life. Educated at Oxford, where he received a first in 1856, Hall travelled widely and became fascinated by moun­ taineering and military matters (to the extent that he came under fire in Dybbøl in southern Denmark in 1864). In 1875, he became an associate of the Institute of International Law and in 1880 he published an influential treatise on international law.94 On the face of it, Hall appeared a positivist. Thus, after outlining two principal views of the subject – on the one hand, the attempt to give effect to an ‘absolute right which is assumed to exist and to be capable of being discovered’ and, on the other hand, ‘a reflection of the moral development and external life of the particular nations which are governed by the rules of international law’ – Hall came out in favour of the second view, because it was unclear in what the law of nature consisted and because a moral ideal could not bind a subject, whether individual or state. This led Hall to the empiricist view that the ‘rules by which nations are governed are unexpressed. The evidence of their existence and of their contents must therefore be sought in national acts, in other words, in such international usage as can be looked upon as authoritative.’95 However, Hall’s apparent positivism was based on ‘“fundamental rights” and a “duty of sociability” that are taken as self-evident foundations of civilised behaviour’.96 The tensions in this understanding of 81

Legal evolution and international law international law were brought out when, in the second edition, Hall was forced to confront the by now traditional criticism of international law as being no more than a branch of morality. If Hall’s initial outline was founded on the assumption that international law constituted a body of true law or something closely analogous to it, he conceded that this was commonly (and not unjustifiably) thought – especially in England – to be incorrect. Nevertheless, Hall also argued that ‘it is now fully recognised that the proper scope of the term law transcends the limits of the more perfect examples of law’.97 But Hall did not stop there. In order to defend the authority of international law, he turned his guns on the hallmark of analytical jurisprudence, the idea of a determinate authority. According to Hall, this authority was not always present in the enforcement of munici­pal law. Exploiting the salience of historical arguments about legal evolution, Hall now asserted that there were stages of social organisation in which public opinion – ‘the ultimate sanction of all law, whether municipal or international’ – was ‘often able only to say to the individual that, when the law is broken to his hurt he may himself exact redress if he can’.98 This argument was followed by references to early Teutonic societies and the idea of custom. Although Hall did not mention Maine directly, it is no coincidence that international legal scholars had become more familiar and comfortable with the idea of legal evolution. As Frederick Pollock argued in 1883, Maine’s promotion of evolution amounted to a revolution. As the editor of the most important law journal, the Law Quarterly Review, and the author of influential books and articles on jurisprudence, he was a central figure in late nineteenth-century English legal theory. Pollock did much to further the cause of the historical method, and in this venture he unequivocally spelled out its implications for the ‘science’ of law: The historical method is not the peculiar property of jurisprudence or any other branch of learning. It is the newest and most powerful instrument, not only of the moral and political sciences, but of a great part of the natural sciences, and its range is daily increasing. The doctrine of evolution is nothing else than the historical method applied to the facts of nature; the historical method is nothing else than the doctrine of evolution applied to human societies and institutions.99

With regard to international law, the import of this approach soon became clear: international law was in the infant stage of becoming proper law, and by empirically detecting and codifying those rules that make up international law, legal scholars like Hall and his colleagues at the Institute could help further its progress. This qualified optimism on behalf of international law was based on its broad development through the preceding centuries.100 82

Legal evolution and international law A more explicitly evolutionary perspective, which derived from the writings of Maine and Darwin but glossed over their more pessimistic aspects, was presented by T. J. Lawrence (1849–1919), deputy professor of international law at Cambridge.101 Like other scholars at the time, Lawrence acknowledged his debt to Maine and to the idea of legal evolution, and he started his defence of international law with the assertion that the analysis provided by analytical jurisprudence was only ‘tem­ porarily and provisionally accurate’.102 This was as much a critique of Austin as of James Fitzjames Stephen, who, in his History of Criminal Law in England (1883) (of all places), had reiterated the Austinian position on international law. Here, Stephen wrote about the ‘inexactness and ambiguity’ of international law and stressed its moral rather than legal character. Thus, the a priori character claimed for international law by Grotius had never been properly renounced by his successors: Their theories all rest at last neither upon common usage, nor upon any positive institution, but upon some theory as to justice or general convenience, which is copied by one writer from another with such variations or adaptations as happen to strike his fancy. Moreover, the history of these theories shows how uncertain and variable they are.103

Stephen was not alone in pouring scorn on international law at this time. In 1885, when A. V. Dicey published his successful lectures on the constitution, he was, ironically, presented with a problem similar to that of international legal scholars: could an unwritten constitution properly be regarded as law? Dicey sardonically suggested that if there was no such thing as constitutional law, perhaps the subject should be referred to others: the professor of history, the professor of jurisprudence or to ‘my friend the Chichele Professor of International Law … being a teacher of law which is not law, and being accustomed to expound the rules of public ethics which are miscalled international law’.104 Thus, inter­ national legal scholars still needed to persuade some of their colleagues of the relevance of their subject. Lawrence took on this task by placing the Austinian position within an evolutionary framework that exposed its contingency, while, at the same time, underlining the dynamism of inter­national law. Not surprisingly, this dynamism required an empiricist attitude towards the study of international law. As Lawrence argued in his influential Handbook of Public International Law (1885), ‘the rules of International Law are to be discovered by observation of the practices of States in their mutual dealings, and … its method is mainly historical and inductive. But ethical considerations are not therefore excluded.’105 This mix of positivism and naturalism also informed Lawrence’s later treatise, The Principles of International Law (1895): ‘I have … attempted to trace the development of International Law in such a way as to show 83

Legal evolution and international law on the one hand its relation to a few great ethical principles and on the other its dependence upon the hard facts of history’.106 Taken at face value, this definition of international law left the legal scholar as an observer, not a creator, of the subject. However, Lawrence clearly spelled out the implications of evolutionary thinking for international law, and it is in these arguments that we can discern how the discredited ‘law of nature’ reasserted itself in a different, evolutionary form, but still as an externally directed protector of international law. In a remarkable essay on ‘The evolution of peace’, Lawrence argued that international law followed an evolutionary trajectory similar to that of municipal law. The analogy was perfect: the passions of states would be restrained by civilisational progress, just like the passions of individuals had been. It was seemingly futile for philosophers to attempt to hurry this long, gradual process of development. There is no doubt that Lawrence shared the aspirations of many progressives and liberals before him. For example, he argued in true liberal fashion that ‘We have … three of the greatest forces in modern life – Commerce, Democracy and Christianity – ranged together on the side of peace’. But Lawrence specifically had Kant and James Mill in mind when he argued that their ‘cut and dried schemes are of no value at all, unless as monuments of the mingled simplicity and ingenuity of their authors’.107 This sceptical attitude towards ‘hypothetical blueprints’, common stock among British internationalists, was also demonstrated in 1880 with the publication of Political and Legal Remedies for War. The book was authored by Sheldon Amos (1835–1886), who often sought to bridge the divide between analytical and historical jurisprudence. In the book’s first paragraph, Amos argued that the proper task of the international lawyer was different from that of the ‘International legislator, of the moralist, or of the philanthropist’. Thus, the job was simply ‘to register and expound’ the rules that nations had consented to and which were in conformity with abstract justice. This also meant that the international lawyer ‘is not entitled to impair the simple treatment of a subject, engrossing enough in itself, by speculations on a remote future, or even by benevolently suggested reforms for the immediate present’.108 Within an introduction to a book carrying that title, the statement hardly made the job easier. Yet Amos, like Lawrence, still found a role for the international legal scholar as public moralist. Amos’s way around the problem consisted in an optimistic interpretation of the forces of history: a time when war became obsolete ‘may not be very remote’, which in turn meant that ‘the object of hastening the day when War shall become extinct is a rational and legitimate end (among others) for the reformer of International Law’.109 This prophecy was bolstered by a classic formulation of liberal internationalism: an astounding list of the forces of peace (education, losses involved in war, the press/public opinion, the spread of liberalism, 84

Legal evolution and international law the pacific tendency of modern philosophy, including Hegel, Christianity, although not Judaism, and international co-operation for all sorts of purposes) was lined up against the causes of war (internal develop­ ment of any state outgrowing its external relations, peculiar mutual sensibilities of states, intervention, alliances, the defective condition of international morality, standing armies and so on). The two were then placed within a historical narrative that favoured the forces of peace and, crucially, supplied the argument with rhetorical power as the pessimism of the present became practically the precondition for optimism about the future.110 In a similar fashion, Lawrence argued that legal scholars could be moralists, but he stressed that they had to settle for less than the immediate (and impossible) creation of peace. In international law as elsewhere the process of reform and improvement must be slow and gradual. We cannot expect to attain at one bound the ideal state of perpetual peace, or imagine that we can plan out all the details of institutions which it will be the work of centuries to develop. We must be content to give of our aid in strengthening all the healthy sentiments and popularizing all the practical proposals that tend to make wars less frequent in our own time, leaving to the future the task of bringing the good work still nearer to completion by the means best suited to its own circumstances. The great doctrine of development applies here, as in so many other portions of human activity; and while it narrows the sphere within which we can hope our own action will be effective, it at the same time teaches us to see in the little that can be done in one generation a step in a great march of progress, beginning far back in the grey dawn of history, and having its goal in the distant future. The human race will in time outgrow war; and I think we may even now discern the general outline of the process. Perpetual peace will come as the result of gradual evolution.111

In order to substantiate this hypothesis, Lawrence provided a speculative historical analysis of how, in four stages, private war had been gradually outlawed in domestic politics. International law was lagging behind municipal law but followed the same trajectory. The codification of the laws of war, the advance of public opinion and the contemporary strength of the idea of arbitration were all cast in crucial roles in its development.112 According to Lawrence, then, the outlawing of public war was in the third of the four stages, a stage where courts for the peaceful settlement of disputes were slowly set up. The final stage in the process, whereby public war would be outlawed, was the establishment of a central authority. Lawrence was a firm believer in the Concert of Europe (though not in the perverted form it had taken in the years of the Holy Alliance) and he indicated that this international body would gradually manifest itself as the proper authority in European politics.113 But Lawrence was restrained by his own self-declared cautiousness and 85

Legal evolution and international law supplied only vague speculations on the subject. Again, we see how evolutionary ideas were closely bound up with the concept of civilisation, a typical feature of international legal reasoning. This meant that law developed with civilisation and held out a pledge for the future.114 In the arguments of Lawrence and Amos we can thus discern the implications of evolutionary thinking for international law: the discredited ‘law of nature’ reasserted itself in a different, evolutionary form, but still as an externally directed protector of civilised international law. But, it is worth stressing, the promise of international law was not immediately global or universalist. For a long time to come, ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ – those who provided conceptual identity to the idea of civilised Europeans – could be expected to live and fight in a phase of history that Europe had left behind, and as part of the white man’s burden this predicament required ordering and policing.115 This way of delimiting the area in which proper international law could function, through the concept of civilisation, was a common trait in late nineteenth-century international law. Often legal scholars appeared as no less than apologists for imperial expansion and the heavy-handed methods accompanying this practice. Following the death of Henry Maine in 1888, the Whewell chair was taken over by John Westlake (1828–1913), a Cambridge-educated liberal who was co-founder of as diverse a set of institutions as the Institute of International Law and the Working Men’s College. Like many other liberals at the time, Westlake deserted Gladstone after the introduction of the first Home Rule Bill for Ireland in 1886 but, according to Lassa Oppenheim as well as A. V. Dicey, he remained up to the last ‘decidedly progressive in all his ideas’.116 Westlake was, like most liberals, a supporter of the empire, but he was also an unrepentant imperialist. Under the heading ‘Territorial sovereignty, especially with relation to uncivilised regions’, Westlake argued in his Chapters on International Law (1894) that natives who were subjects of a foreign power possessing (legitimately) the international title to their country ‘have the claim of the ignorant and helpless on the enlightened and strong; and that claim is the more likely to receive justice, the freer is the position of the governors from insecurity and vexation’.117 From the perspective of the twenty-first century, such arguments appear retrograde, arrogant and inexcusable. Yet it is important to stress, once again, that the condition of possibility of many international legal arguments in this period was the notion of European civilisation progressing slowly but surely. This is not to say that Victorian Britain was not anxious about material and intellectual stagnation – in fact, this was a most prominent aspect of intellectual life in this period – but, ­especially when viewed in the longue durée and in comparison with ‘savages’, it proved difficult for intellectuals not to take this slow, civilising force for granted. Its influence is clearly ­discernible in arguments about the relation between civilised 86

Legal evolution and international law and uncivilised portions of humanity, but it also permeates more general discussions of international law.118 In fact, without understanding the intellectual and rhetorical attraction of this underlying historical force, most prophecies about the development of international law at this time would appear inexplicable. Westlake’s influential definition and defence of international law also demonstrates the salient combination of legal evolutionary arguments and belief in the progress of civilisation. From this perspective, almost all developments within the field of international law – codification, arbitration, the Hague Peace Conferences of 1899 and 1907 – could be turned into signposts of a historical process which, paradoxically perhaps, stressed the immaturity and fragility of international law as well as its innate rationale, rationality and resilience. In his inaugural lecture of 1888, Westlake started from the proposition that natural law had ‘retired into the background’. While conceding much to Austinian jurisprudence, he found it too simplistic and exaggerated. The rules of international law were those which were observed in the real world. Westlake was familiar with the legal evolutionary arguments espoused by both Savigny and Maine, but he initially attempted to refute analytical jurisprudence on its own terms. It soon became clear, however, that Westlake needed a hidden hand of international law if he was to succeed. Not willing to claim the title of ‘law’ for any single rule, Westlake teleologically defended international law as a totality: In the gradual improvement of international relations the precision and observance of rules is constantly on the increase, and … therefore those international rules which may already be ranked as law are typical of the subject, in that they are the completest outcome of a tendency which pervades the whole.119

In conjunction with the optimism supplied by this evolutionary logic, Westlake often stressed the fragility of international law. An inter­ national society (and with it a law-abiding sentiment) could not be as easily created as a national society, and the institution of the state was a major stumbling block for progress in international law and international relations. ‘As soon as the boundaries of the state are passed, common action ceases, or is limited to rare occasions.’120 So, while there was no doubt that the rationale behind international law was bringing progress and order to the international domain, it was equally true that inter­ national law was less certain than national law. Yet Westlake offered an ingenious argument for the advantages bestowed by this predicament. There being no legislature and judicature in the international domain could positively help the progress of law, because these institutions were, ‘by the very fact of their fixing the law … sometimes a hindrance to its improvement’. Avoiding the stifling conservatism of these institutions, 87

Legal evolution and international law international law was, due to its immaturity, still able to develop under the influence of public opinion, which in turn meant that ‘the student has the power, and with it the responsibility and the privilege, of assisting in its evolution’.121 In sum, the idea of evolution – despite, or perhaps because of, its indeterminable meaning and wide range of reference, encompassing biological, social and legal forms – supplied international law with a historical framework that explained the current problems of the subject as well as its future redemption.122 This demonstrates how international law was far from an isolated activity in British society; among public intellectuals, the evolutionary idiom was put to use for a variety of ­potentially incompatible purposes. But the wider significance of the idea of legal evolution lies in its ability to fit into the general internationalist objective of creating order in anarchy. Thus, it is no coincidence that the new liberal L. T. Hobhouse at the beginning of the twentieth century voiced non-technical arguments against analytical jurisprudence in order to demonstrate the continuing relevance and validity of British internationalism. Another non-specialist tapping into jurisprudential arguments about the existence of international law was the philosopher Henry Sidgwick.123 At the same time, most scholars of international law during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries subscribed to core elements of liberal internationalist ideology, which in turn ­flavoured, and occasionally fuelled, their analysis of the law. In attempting to understand the increasingly institutionalised and respectable scholarly discourse of international law and the development and character of liberal internationalist ideology, we cannot lose sight of their interplay. The drawbacks of gradualism The period from the early 1870s to the turn of the century found the subject of international law developing along the lines of two credos, positivism and naturalism, which had undergone significant transformations during the nineteenth century. In the course of three central decades in the emerging discipline’s quest for scientific respectability, positivism had been accommodated to international law through an empiricist focus on the observance of international rules, while the traditional ­religious or unhistorical understandings of natural law had been supplanted by a similarly external agency in the form of progressive-evolutionary civilis­ ation. At the turn of the century, therefore, international lawyers could observe this almost Comtean progression of jurisprudence from the supernatural and metaphysical to the positive with complacency and expectation. By way of conclusion, this section offers some exploratory and provisional thoughts on the consequences these developments ­generated 88

Legal evolution and international law for international law and the internationalist project of bringing progress, order and justice to the international domain. Undoubtedly, they held many advantages for a hitherto questionable academic subject in an age of professionalisation. Foremost among these was the ability to combine the scientific with the moral(istic). On the other hand, by the beginning of the twentieth century, British international legal arguments were increasingly unable to comprehend the deterioration of inter­ national relations. On the face of it, this might look like succumbing to the ever-present anachronistic temptation: we know what happened in 1914, and obviously the people we study did not. Perhaps we can never free ourselves from the consequences of knowing what happened, but it is still possible to identify some of the logical problems of international legal argument at this time. Surely, many international lawyers lamented the worsening of the international situation at the beginning of the twentieth century, and I certainly do not want to argue that they were merely naïve idealists without any appreciation of developments in the real world.124 Rather, my argument is that the vocabulary dominant at the time made it difficult for international lawyers to conceptualise their perception of a developing international crisis. Perhaps the function of international law in times of such crises will always and inevitably be limited, but this does not mean that the configuration of the vocabulary available to international legal scholars is unimportant. In short, what I want to illustrate (rather than demonstrate) is how the subject of inter­ national law was caught in a trap of impotence due to the very factors that had carried it to academic respectability. On the one hand, the widespread support for codification operated on an assumption that if only those rules that were generally observed, as well as some reasonable rules corresponding to the stage of civilisation reached by Europeans, were made clearer, the sphere of obedience would be reinforced and extended. This in turn meant that the codification of rules regulating arbitration, the law of war and a number of less important subjects preoccupied international legal scholars more than the preconditions necessary for them to be obeyed. To some extent, this cult of codification might have been caused by the unrelenting spectre of Austinian scepticism towards international law: to many international lawyers, it appeared that they had to defend international law as being almost as good as municipal law. This they often did by employing a number of speculative or empirical arguments which stressed the fact of laws being obeyed as well as their reasonable content, but discouraged detailed discussion of the authority behind these rules or how such an authority could be created.125 On the other hand, international law was caught in a logic of moderation, which is often the consequence of handing over the responsibility for progress to an evolutionary philosophy of history. Every facet of 89

Legal evolution and international law international law – the Alabama arbitration, the establishment of the Institute, gradual codification and so on – was interpreted within an evolutionary framework that hardly allowed for setbacks. If anything did resemble a setback, it was mainly seen as proof of the prolonged course of evolutionary history, but it was rarely allowed to question the progressive, civilising march of international law. Thus, while there was some scope for offering evolution a helping hand, its logic could not be circumvented. This is clearly illustrated in the reaction of Westlake and Lawrence to the Hague Conferences. Westlake’s optimism was always grounded in a pessimism that identified the international as lacking the characteristics of domestic politics. Thus, the change of perspective among those who had transformed the nature of political life within the city or the state seemed ‘to have done nothing for the improvement of international relations’. This was the reason not only why the Hague Conferences were seen as great events in the history of humankind, but perhaps also why people generally expected far too much of them. The causes of wars among nations were often centuries old and could not easily be swept away: ‘The Kingdom of heaven, from which such causes of war shall have been eliminated, will come, not by observation, not by setting up ambitious machinery, but by scarcely perceptible steps’.126 Although the Hague Conferences were definitely invested with hopes of being clearly perceptible and decisive steps, their disappointing results made it possible, retrospectively, to see them as proof of the long, incremental process leading to Westlake’s Kingdom. Compared with Westlake, T. J. Lawrence was more anxious to fulfil the prophecy of a gradually emerging peace. Following the Hague Conferences, Lawrence restated his belief that international law ‘is constantly becoming wider in scope and more definite in expression’. By the early years of the twentieth century, the Concert of Europe had played its part in European politics, and Lawrence now expected the peace conferences to evolve into the authority of international law: ‘After all that has happened in the last nine years no Conference but the Hague Conference can claim any kind of legislative authority over civilised states; and even in its case the authority is rather moral than legal’.127 Not unlike Westlake’s argument, the problematic aspects of the Hague Conferences – having moral rather than legal authority – were transformed into a further prophecy in the long succession of prophecies that by now constituted the ethos of international law. That this was regarded as par for the course points to the inadequacy of the thesis that the nineteenth century witnessed positivism overwhelm naturalism. Surely, legal naturalism had a rough ride in nineteenth-century Britain, as it was increasingly associated with metaphysics, natural rights, Continental thinking and a potential for revolution. But as Otto Gierke once argued, if natural law is denied entry into the body of (positive) law, ‘it 90

Legal evolution and international law flutters about the room like a ghost, and threatens to turn into a vampire which sucks the blood from the body of Law’.128 Faced with this predicament, international lawyers fielded broadly moral (as opposed to more institutional) internationalist arguments, thereby learning to exploit their position as amphibious creatures stranded somewhere between law and ethics. One final aspect of this ambivalent credo of British international legal thought should be underlined. The notion of sovereignty was always central but circumscribed, necessary but dispensable, rigid but flexible. Most scholars of international law in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries defined their subject as consisting of (legal) relations between independent sovereign states. On one level, this turned the notion of sovereignty into a crucial building block of the subject. Yet the ideological inclinations of the newly formed discipline also produced numerous attempts to circumscribe sovereignty, or at least absolute definitions of the concept. This is why international lawyers, from different angles, attacked the Austinian notion of sovereignty. Thus, most scholars at this time fit Koskenniemi’s description of ‘centrists’ who tried to balance their moderate nationalism with their liberal inter­ nationalism. In Europe they saw themselves arguing against the egoistic policies of States and in favor of integration, free trade and the international regulation of many aspects of domestic society, including human rights. Their credo was less sovereignty than a critique of sovereignty.129

It should come as no surprise that the critique of sovereignty proved ineffective. Any (revolutionary) attempt to overthrow the logic of sovereignty was arrested by the guardians of gradual evolution, while every attempt at codification depended on the very exercise of the sovereignty it attempted to circumscribe. Bringing progress to the international was, therefore, returned to the hands of legal scholar-cum-moralist, who persistently tried to engineer and interpret the gradual but potent moral development of humankind, which was seen as the only possible redeemer of an increasingly conflict-ridden world. Notes 1 E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London, 1939), p. 237. 2 See R. G. Collingwood, An Autobiography, ed. S. Toulmin (Oxford, 1978 [1939]), pp. 31–9; Quentin Skinner, Visions of Politics, 3 vols (Cambridge, 2002), I. For substantive arguments that this is also the case in international law, see David Kennedy, ‘Primitive legal scholarship’, Harvard International Law Journal, 27 (1986), 1–98; Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (Oxford, 1999). 3 For a representative account, see Hans-Ulrich Scupin, ‘History of the law of

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nations: 1815 to World War I’, in R. Bernhardt (ed.), Encyclopaedia of Public International Law (Amsterdam, 1995), II, 767–93. David Kennedy, ‘International law and the nineteenth century: history of an illusion’, Qunnipiac Law Review, 17 (1997), 99–138. David Sugarman, ‘Legal theory, the common law mind and the making of the textbook tradition’, in William Twining (ed.), Legal Theory and Common Law (Oxford, 1986), 26–61, at p. 28. See Wilhelm G. Grewe, Epochen der Völkerrechtsgeschichte, second edition (Baden-Baden, 1988), especially part IV. See also Karl-Heinz Ziegler, Völkerrechtsgeschichte (Munich, 1994). Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge, 2001), p. 4. The lack of a British perspective in Koskenniemi’s work is also noted in Robert Cryer, ‘Déjà vu in international law’, Modern Law Review, 65 (2002), 931–49. Existing literature includes John Anthony Carty, ‘19th century textbooks and international law’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Cambridge, 1973); D. H. N. Johnson, ‘The English tradition in international law’, International and Comparative Law Quarterly, 11 (1962), 416–45; and, more recently, J. Crawford, ‘Public international law in twentieth-century England’, in J. Beatson and R. Zimmermann (eds), Jurists Uprooted (Oxford, 2004), 681–707; Amanda Perreau-Saussine, ‘Three ways of writing a treatise on public international law: textbooks and the nature of customary international law’, in Amanda Perreau-Saussine and James Bernard Murphy (eds), The Nature of Customary Law (Cambridge, 2007), 228–55. The American tradition is treated in: Mark W. Janis, The American Tradition of International Law (Oxford, 2004); Francis Anthony Boyle, Foundations of World Order (Durham, 1999). Calls for greater interdisciplinarity include Kenneth W. Abbot, ‘Modern International Relations theory: a prospectus for international lawyers’, Yale Journal of International Law, 14 (1989), 335–411; Anne-Marie Slaughter Burley, ‘Inter­national law and International Relations theory: a dual agenda’, American Journal of International Law, 87 (1993), 205–39; Christian Reus-Smit (ed.), The Politics of International Law (Cambridge, 2004); David Armstrong, Theo Farrell and Hélène Lambert, International Law and International Relations (Cambridge, 2007). See Anthony Anghie, ‘Finding the peripheries: sovereignty and colonialism in nineteenth-century international law’, Harvard International Law Journal, 40 (1999), 1–80; Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (Cambridge, 2004); Edward Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society (Cambridge, 2002); Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, pp. 98–178; Frédéric Mégret, ‘From savages to “unlawful combatants”: a postcolonial look at international humanitarian law’s other’, in Anne Orford (ed.), International Law and Its Others (Cambridge, 2006), 265–317; Jennifer Pitts, ‘Boundaries of Victorian international law’, in Duncan S. A. Bell (ed.), Victorian Visions of Global Order (Cambridge, 2007), 67–88; [Annelise Riles], ‘Aspiration and control: international legal rhetoric and the essentialization of culture’, Harvard Law Review, 106 (1993), 723–40; Gerry Simpson, Great Powers and Outlaw States (Cambridge, 2004), ch. 8; Casper Sylvest, ‘“Our passion for legality”: international law and imperialism in late nineteenthcentury Britain’, Review of International Studies, 34 (2008), 403–23; Gerrit W. Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’ in International Society (Oxford, 1984). Two recent and important studies of colonial law are Nasser Hussain, The Jurisprudence of Emergency (Ann Arbor, 2003), and R. W. Kostal, A Jurisprudence of Power (Oxford, 2006). Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford, 1991), p. 270.

Legal evolution and international law 11 The analysis here makes use of, rather than challenges, the conceptual distinction between positivism and naturalism. What is challenged, however, is the chronology and the simplicity of the conventional argument, which holds that positivism replaced naturalism in the late nineteenth century. 12 These themes are all treated in more detail in Casper Sylvest, ‘International law in nineteenth-century Britain’, British Yearbook of International Law 2004, 75 (2005), 9–70. 13 Jeremy Bentham, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (London, 1970 [1789]), p. 296; Jeremy Bentham, A Fragment on Government, ed. J. H. Burns and H. L. A. Hart (Cambridge, 1988 [1776]). See also Mark W. Janis, ‘Jeremy Bentham and the fashioning of “international law”’, American Journal of International Law, 78 (1984), 405–18; Stephen Conway, ‘Bentham on peace and war,’ Utilitas, 1 (1989), 82–101. 14 See David Armitage, ‘Parliament and international law in the eighteenth century’, in Julian Hoppit (ed.), Parliaments, Nations and Identities in Britain and Ireland 1660–1850 (Manchester, 2003), 169–86. 15 William Twining, Globalisation and Legal Theory (London, 2000), p. 21. 16 John Austin, The Province of Jurisprudence Determined, ed. W. E. Rumble (Cambridge, 1995 [1832]). Austin’s jurisprudence was influential well into the twentieth century, although interpretations differed widely. See Neil Duxbury, ‘English jurisprudence between Austin and Hart’, Virginia Law Review, 91 (2005), 1–91; Michael Lobban, ‘Was there a nineteenth century “English school of jurisprudence”?’, Journal of Legal History, 16 (1995), 34–62; Wilfrid E. Rumble, Doing Austin Justice (London, 2005). 17 Austin, Province of Jurisprudence, p. 123, italics in original. 18 Austin, Province of Jurisprudence, p. 18. It was by virtue of this notion of command that analytical jurisprudence became associated with a Hobbesian tradition during the nineteenth century. Cf. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck (Cambridge, 1996 [1651]), chapter 15. 19 Indeed, the spectre continues to reappear at regular intervals. See for example Jack L. Goldsmith and Eric A. Posner, The Limits of International Law (Oxford, 2005). 20 For a good summary of the work of the Select Committee on Legal Education (1846) and of the Commission of Inquiry into the Inns of Court (1855), see Brian Abel-Smith and Robert Stevens, Lawyers and the Courts (London, 1967), pp. 64–6 and 66–8, respectively. Following the demise of the Doctors’ Commons in the 1850s and 1860s – the civilian lawyers’ counterpart of the common lawyers’ Inns of Court – civilian lawyers could use their training in Roman law in the study of international law. Two prominent scholars, Robert Phillimore and Travers Twiss, were members of the Doctors’ Commons. See G. D. Squibb, Doctor’s Commons (Oxford, 1977), pp. 102–10, 201–2; J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, third edition (London, 1990), ch. 10. On the particular problems of jurisprudence, see Richard Cosgrove, Scholars of the Law (New York, 1996). 21 See Abel-Smith and Stevens, Lawyers and the Courts, p. 69; Sugarman, ‘Legal theory’. The Chichele Chair of International Law and Diplomacy at Oxford University was established in 1859, while the Whewell Chair of International Law at the University of Cambridge was first occupied in 1869. 22 See Knud Haakonssen, Natural Law and Moral Philosophy (Cambridge, 1996), p. 6. It was not uncommon to refer to Grotius as ‘the great legislator of the commonwealth of nations’; see Henry Sumner Maine, ‘The conception of sovereignty, and its importance in international law’, Papers Read Before

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the ­Juridical Society, 1 (1855–1858), 26–45, at p. 28. See also Edward Keene, ‘Images of Grotius’, in Beate Jahn (ed.), Classical Theory in International Relations (Cambridge, 2006), 233–52. See for example John W. Salmond, ‘The law of nature’, Law Quarterly Review, 11 (1895), 121–43. Salmond was born in England but lived in New Zealand and Australia before and after studying in London. This was William Oke Manning, Commentaries on the Law of Nations (London, 1839). Manning’s work was anticipated by two American books: Commentary on International Law (1826), by James Kent, and The Elements of International Law (1836), by the influential lawyer and diplomatist Henry Wheaton. See particularly Manning, Commentaries; William Whewell, The Elements of Morality, Including Polity, 2 vols (London, 1845), esp. Bk. VI; William Whewell, ‘Editor’s preface’, in Hugo Grotius, De Jure Belli et Pacis Libri Tres, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1853), I, iii–xvi; Robert Phillimore, Commentaries upon International Law, 4 vols (London, 1854–1861). But cf. also Richard Wildman, Institutes of International Law, 2 vols (London, 1849–1850). There were, of course, important differences between the religious beliefs of these scholars. Tracing the implications of these differences is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter. See Montague Bernard, Four Letters on Subjects Connected with Diplomacy (London, 1868); Montague Bernard, On the Principle of Non-intervention (Oxford, 1860); Travers Twiss, Two Inaugural Lectures on the Science of International Law (London, 1856); Travers Twiss, The Law of Nations Considered as Independent Political Communities, 2 vols (Oxford, 1861, 1863). See also John Stuart Mill, ‘Inaugural address delivered at the University of St. Andrews’ [1867], in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 33 vols (Toronto, 1963–1991), XXI, 215–57, especially pp. 240–7. Montague Bernard, ‘Systems of policy’, in Four Letters, 61–109, at p. 101. Although neither John Burrow nor Peter Stein analyses ideas about social and legal evolution in relation to international politics or international law, I am greatly indebted to both. See J. W. Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge, 1966); Peter Stein, Legal Evolution (Cambridge, 1980). C. M. Kennedy, The Influence of Christianity upon International Law (Cambridge, 1856), p. 150. Kennedy, The Influence of Christianity, pp. 56, 68–80. Frank M. Turner, ‘The religious and the secular in Victorian Britain’, in Contesting Cultural Authority (Cambridge, 1993), 3–37, at p. 35. See also Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit (Harmondsworth, 1994), especially pp. 150–79. For a wider perspective, see C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004), ch. 9. This was never a one-way street. See E. C. Clarke, Practical International Law (London, 1869) for an example of the ambivalence that resulted from trying to argue that natural law was both a thing of the past and the ‘cement’ to positive international law (pp. 5–6). See for example the discussions in John Westlake, Chapters on International Law [1894], reprinted in The Collected Papers of John Westlake on Public International Law, ed. L. Oppenheim (Cambridge, 1914), xix–282, especially p. 4; James Bryce, ‘The law of nature’, in Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 2 vols (Oxford, 1901), II, 112–71; Frederick Pollock, ‘The sources of international law’, Law Quarterly Review, 18 (1902), 420–9. The idea of ‘civilised’ nations is still with us, having survived in Article 38(1) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice. Keene, Beyond the Anarchical Society, p. 6. See also Anghie, ‘Finding the ­peripheries’; Gong, The Standard of ‘Civilization’.

Legal evolution and international law 36 John Stuart Mill, ‘Civilization’ [1836], in Collected Works, XVIII, 117–47, at p. 119; John Stuart Mill, ‘A few words on non-intervention’ [1859], in Collected Works, XXI, 109–24. 37 Mill, ‘Civilization’, especially pp. 120–3. 38 Few questioned this line of argument. A rare example is Henry E. J. Stanley, who claimed that invoking civilisation involved claiming ‘pre-eminence for the speaker who uses it’. See ‘The effects of contempt for international law’, in Henry E. J. Stanley (ed.), The East and the West (London, 1865), 111–38, at pp. 116–17. 39 Burrow, Evolution and Society, p. 97. 40 J. W. Burrow, ‘Images of time: from Carlylean vulcanism to sedimentary gradualism’, in Stefan Collini, Richard Whatmore and Bryan Young (eds), History, Religion, and Culture (Cambridge, 2000), 198–223. 41 Burrow, Evolution and Society, pp. 98–9. 42 See Stephen Hall, ‘The persistent spectre: natural law, international order and the limits of legal positivism’, European Journal of International Law, 12 (2001), 269–307; Perreau-Saussine, ‘Three ways of writing a treatise’. 43 Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, p. 96. 44 A good example of this development is the second edition of Manning’s Commentaries, published in 1875. Here the chapter ‘Of the probability of an improved observance of international justice’ was simply omitted (without any explanation) by the editor, Sheldon Amos. 45 On Maine and colonial law, see Sandra den Otter, ‘“A legislating empire”: Victorian political theorists, codes of law, and empire’, and Karuna Mantena, ‘The crisis of liberal imperialism’, both in Bell, Victorian Visions, 89–112 and 113–35, respectively. 46 Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and J. W. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge, 1983), p. 210; and, more generally, Alan Diamond (ed.), The Victorian Achievement of Sir Henry Maine (Cambridge, 1991). This was also the view of Maine’s successor as Corpus Professor Jurisprudence at Oxford, ­Frederick Pollock. See Frederick Pollock, ‘Sir Henry Maine and his work’ [1888], in Oxford Lectures and Other Discourses (London, 1890), 147–68. 47 For a detailed study, see R. C. J. Cocks, Sir Henry Maine (Cambridge, 1988). Maine applied twice for a readership at the Inns of Court. The second time, one of his references was written by the young Harcourt, Maine’s pupil master, a fellow ‘Apostle’ and, later, the first Whewell Professor of International Law at Cambridge. See R. C. J. Cocks, ‘“That exalted and noble science of jurisprudence”: the recruitment of jurists with “superior qualifications” by the Middle Temple in the mid-nineteenth century’, Journal of Legal History, 20 (1999), 62–94. 48 See for example John Stuart Mill, ‘Austin on jurisprudence’ [1863], in Collected Works, XXI, 167–205. See also Cosgrove, Scholars of the Law, ch. 5; Rumble, Doing Austin Justice, ch. 7. 49 Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (London, 1861), p. 170. 50 See for example Maine, Ancient Law, pp. 73–4. 51 The exception is Carl Landauer, ‘From status to treaty: Henry Sumner Maine’s international law’, Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence, 15 (2002), 219–54. 52 See Maine, ‘The conception of sovereignty’; Maine, ‘Roman law and legal education’, in Cambridge Essays (London, 1856), 1–29; Maine to Henry Sidgwick, 8 December 1886, in George Feaver, From Status to Contract (London, 1969), p. 256. 53 See for example Crawford, ‘Public international law’; Johnson, ‘The English tradition’, p. 440.

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Legal evolution and international law 54 See Burrow, Evolution and Society; Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit; and the discussion in chapter 4. 55 Feaver, From Status to Contract, p. 43. For a more sceptical view of Maine’s influence on English jurisprudence, see Duxbury, ‘English jurisprudence’, pp. 22–9. 56 Maine, ‘Roman law’, p. 13. 57 Maine, Ancient Law, p. 53. 58 Maine, Ancient Law, pp. 111–12. This formulation first appeared in 1855 in Maine, ‘The conception of sovereignty’, p. 39. 59 Maine, ‘Roman law’, p. 12. 60 Maine, Ancient Law, p. 167. 61 John W. Burrow, ‘Henry Maine and mid-Victorian ideas of progress’, in Diamond, The Victorian Achievement, 55–69, at p. 63. 62 Sheldon Amos, Lectures on International Law (London, 1874), p. 1. Amos’s lectures included several references to Maine. For an almost identical formulation, see Frederick Pollock, A First Book of Jurisprudence for Students of the Common Law (London, 1896), p. 13. Another variant of this argument that contained no reference to Maine was C. C. Massey, ‘On the true nature of the rules which regulate the relations between belligerents and neutral states’ [1864], in Papers Read Before the Juridical Society, 3 (1863–1870), 39–59, ­especially p. 57. 63 James Lorimer, ‘The Institute of International Law founded at Ghent’, in Studies National and International (London, 1890), 77–87. 64 Lorimer, ‘The Institute of International Law’, pp. 82–3. 65 Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, p. 51. 66 Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, p. 51. See also Anghie, ‘Finding the peripheries’. 67 Sheldon Amos, Political and Legal Remedies for War (London, 1880), p. 141. 68 T. E. Holland, An Inaugural Lecture on Albericus Gentilis (London, 1874). 69 T. E. Holland, The Elements of Jurisprudence (Oxford, 1880), pp. 263–4. This also explains why Holland rarely referred to an ‘international society’. For a good discussion, see Cosgrove, Scholars of the Law, ch. 6. 70 T. E. Holland, ‘Recent diplomatic discussion as illustrations of international law’ [1878], in Studies in International Law (Oxford, 1898), 151–67. Late in his life, Holland argued that the foundation of international law was public opinion. See T. E. Holland, Lectures on International Law, ed. T. A. Walker and W. L. Walker (London, 1933), especially p. 29. The reliability of these lectures is, however, questionable (see p. vi). 71 Holland, ‘Recent diplomatic discussion’, p. 167. 72 Another area of reproach was Holland’s denial of the existence of private international law. In a review of the literature on international law in 1884, Holland refused to comment on this body of literature as it dealt with issues that did not amount to law. T. E. Holland, ‘The literature of international law in 1884’, in Studies in International Law, 168–75. Holland shared this view with Sheldon Amos, who only reluctantly lectured on the subject (Amos, Lectures, p. 118). But see also John Westlake, ‘On the relation between public and private inter­ national law’ [1856], Papers Read Before the Juridical Society, 1 (1855–58), 173–92; A. V. Dicey, ‘His book and his character’, in Memories of John Westlake (London, 1914), 17–42. On the changing status of private international law in the nineteenth century, see Ole Spiermann, International Legal Argument in the Permanent Court of International Justice (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 280–1. 73 Phillimore’s approach to international politics was a major influence on Gladstone. See H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1875–1898 (Oxford, 1995), p. 19.

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74 75

76 77 78

79 80 81 82

83 84 85 86

87

88

On Gladstone’s Oxford years, see H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1986), ch. 1, and pp. 22, 99, 151 for comments on Gladstone and Phillimore’s friendship. Phillimore, Commentaries, I, p. v. Among international lawyers present at the founding meeting of this organisation we find Dudley Field, Travers Twiss, Johann Kaspar Bluntschli and Montague Bernard. On the character of the organisation, which in 1895 became the International Law Society, see Paul Laity, The British Peace Movement, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 59–60; Martin Ceadel, Semi-detached Idealists (Oxford, 2000), p. 98. Robert Phillimore, International Law (London, 1879). For an almost identical argument for codification, see Leone Levi, International Law with the Materials for a Code of International Law (London, 1887). Phillimore, International Law, pp. 6, 10, 22. On Lorimer, see John E. Noyes, ‘Christianity and theories of international law in nineteenth-century Britain’, in Mark W. Janis and Carolyn Evans (eds), Religion and International Law (The Hague, 1999), 235–58; Johnson, ‘The English tradition’, pp. 418–21. Lorimer had been appointed Regius Professor of Public Law in 1862. See John P. Coldstream, The Development of the Teaching of Law in the University of Edinburgh (Edinburgh, 1884). James Lorimer, The Institutes of the Law of Nations, 2 vols (Edinburgh, 1883, 1884), I, pp. vii–viii. Lorimer, Institutes, I, pp. 12, 15. Lorimer, Institutes, II, p. 186, italics in original. Lorimer, Institutes, II, pp. 279–302. Lorimer’s ideas were full of contradictions. He apparently pursued different courses at different times. Thus, the first volume of the Institutes exuded optimism (e.g. pp. 185–6), whereas a more pessimistic view of human nature and the development of an international morality are presented as the main reason for moving towards more institutional solutions in the second volume. Another proposal to use international law to create supranational institutions (a council and tribunal of international arbitration) was authored by Levi (International Law, ch. 23). It is worth noting that these proposals were penned by the Scottish Lorimer and the Italian-born Levi and not by any of the English scholars of international law. Lorimer, Institutes, II, especially pp. v–vi, viii, 183–5; Lorimer, ‘English and foreign jurists and international jurisprudence’, in Studies, 102–20. Holland, ‘The literature’, p. 169. Bryce, ‘The law of nature’, p. 170. See particularly Frederick Pollock’s defence of this pluralism (and of the existence of international law) in ‘The methods of jurisprudence’, Law Magazine, fourth series, 8 (1882–1883), 25–53 (also reprinted in Pollock, Oxford Lectures, 1–36); James Bryce, ‘The methods of legal science’, in Studies in History and Jurisprudence, II, 172–208. Henry Sumner Maine, International Law (London, 1888). The lectures were edited by Frederic Harrison and Frederick Pollock. On Maine’s election to the chair, see Calvin Woodward, ‘A wake (or awakening?) for historical jurisprudence?’, in Diamond, The Victorian Achievement, 217–37, especially p. 218. Maine had seriously considered standing for the Whewell chair in 1869 and actually wrote to his friend William Harcourt about this. Harcourt was eventually elected over J. F. Stephen, and Maine apparently did not let his name go forward. See Feaver, From Status to Contract, pp. 109, 255–57, 294 (letter to W. Harcourt, 29 November 1868), 329. Stefan Collini, ‘Democracy and excitement: Maine’s political pessimism’, in

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Legal evolution and international law Diamond, The Victorian Achievement, 88–95, at p. 95. See also Collini, Public Moralists, pp. 271–80. 89 Maine, International Law, p. 51. 90 Maine, International Law, p. 32. 91 Maine, International Law, pp. 49, 58. 92 Maine, International Law, p. 221. 93 See for example Stein, Legal Evolution, pp. 113, 122–3. But see also Landauer, ‘From status to treaty’. 94 William Edward Hall, A Treatise on International Law (Oxford, 1880). The book was widely regarded by Hall’s contemporaries as one of the best textbooks on international law. See for example T. E. Holland, ‘In memoriam W. E. Hall’, Law Quarterly Review, 11 (1895), 113–17. 95 Hall, Treatise, pp. 2, 5. In tune with most other scholars of the day, Hall defined international law as having states as its subjects. It was then assumed that states possessed a moral nature identical to that of individuals. 96 Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, p. 82. 97 Hall, Treatise [second edition, 1884], p. 14. 98 Hall, Treatise [second edition, 1884], p. 15. This was followed by a less assured argument, admitting that rules of international law ‘lie on the extreme frontier of law…; but on the whole it would seem to be more correct, as it certainly is more convenient, to treat them as being a branch of law, than to include them within the sphere of morals’ (p. 16). 99 Frederick Pollock, ‘English opportunities in historical and comparative jurisprudence’ [1883], reprinted in Pollock, Oxford Lectures, 37–64, at p. 41. See also A. V. Dicey, Lectures on the Relationship between Law and Public Opinion in England (London, 1905), p. 455 and the accompanying note. 100 Hall, Treatise [third edition, 1890], preface. 101 Lawrence had been the first scholar to win a Whewell scholarship in 1868. Carty, ‘19th century textbooks’, p. 359. 102 T. J. Lawrence, ‘Is there a true international law’, in Essays on Some Disputed Questions in Modern International Law, second edition (Cambridge, 1885 [1884]), 1–40, at p. 6. T. A. Walker was another Cambridge scholar heavily indebted to Maine and the idea of evolution. See Walker, A History of the Law of Nations. Vol. I (Cambridge, 1899). 103 James Fitzjames Stephen, A History of the Criminal Law in England, 3 vols (London, 1883), II, pp. 35, 38. On Stephen’s patriotic liberalism, see Julia ­Stapleton, ‘James Fitzjames Stephen: liberalism, patriotism, and English liberty’, Victorian Studies, 41 (1998), 243–63. Similar arguments were reiterated in 1884 by Stephen’s son, J. K. Stephen, who, on the basis of a positivist critique of ‘international law’, proposed to substitute it with ‘international relations’. J. K. Stephen, International Law and International Relations (London, 1884). This book might have been the occasion for Hall’s defence of international law as law, as he found himself (accompanied by Bluntschli) to be the main target in Stephen’s critique (especially pp. 38–54). 104 A. V. Dicey, Lectures Introductory to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (London, 1885), p. 23. With a slight alteration in the title, Dicey’s textbook on the constitution reached its eighth edition by 1915, where this passage is still to be found. 105 T. J. Lawrence, A Handbook of Public International Law (Cambridge, 1885), p. 4. By 1938 the Handbook had run through eleven editions. 106 T. J. Lawrence, The Principles of International Law (London, 1895), p. v. In 1962, Johnson (‘The English tradition’, p. 432) noted that this treatise ‘immediately became, and indeed still is, an important authority’.

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Legal evolution and international law 107 T. J. Lawrence, ‘The evolution of peace’, in Lawrence, Essays, 234–77, at pp. 240, 248. 108 Amos, Political and Legal Remedies, p. 1. 109 Amos, Political and Legal Remedies, p. 56. 110 Amos’s political and legal remedies were far from revolutionary and the book certainly avoided being a blueprint for a future world government. The book ends with a common internationalist refrain, lamenting that ‘It is only in the relations between nation and nation that it is still believed that brutality, passionate­ness, cruelty, and selfishness may not only riot the uttermost, but may legitimately begin to riot on the very slightest provocation’. Amos, Political and Legal Remedies, p. 356. See also Sheldon Amos, A Systematic View of the Science of Jurisprudence (London, 1872), ch. 16. 111 Lawrence, ‘The evolution of peace’, pp. 248–9. 112 By this time, proposals for the codification of English law had largely faltered and the common law was enjoying a remarkable revival. Nevertheless, inter­national jurists continued to argue for the necessity of codification of international law, particularly the laws of war. See also Mégret, ‘From savages to “unlawful combatants”’. 113 This also led Lawrence to argue that the doctrine of the equality of states in inter­national law was ‘rapidly becoming obsolete’. T. J. Lawrence, ‘The primacy of the great powers’, in Essays, 208–33, at p. 209. 114 Lawrence, Principles of International Law, p. 54. 115 Lawrence, ‘The evolution of peace’, p. 277. 116 Lassa Oppenheim, ‘Editor’s introduction’, in Westlake, Collected Papers, v–xii, at p. x; Dicey, ‘His book and his character’. 117 Westlake, Chapters on International Law, p. 143. See also Sylvest, ‘“Our passion for legality”’ and the references in note 9, above. 118 T. A. Walker, fellow and lecturer of Peterhouse, Cambridge, offered the following justification for Western practice: ‘It may be, in truth, that this system of annexation and absorption is an essential part of the great Scheme of the World’s Progress.’ T. A. Walker, The Science of International Law (London, 1893), p. 161. 119 Westlake, ‘Introductory lecture on international law. 17 October 1888’, in Collected Papers, 393–413, at pp. 401–2. 120 Westlake, ‘Introductory lecture’, p. 409. Westlake occasionally used the terms ‘international law’ and ‘international relations’ interchangeably (e.g. p. 413). 121 Westlake, Chapters on International Law, p. 281. For a similar argument, see Hall, Treatise, third edition (1890), preface. 122 There are some partial exceptions to this generalisation. Among them we find T. E. Holland, F. E. Smith (the first Earl of Birkenhead) and Thomas Baty. See for example T. E. Holland, ‘The new Geneva Convention’, Fortnightly Review, new series, 74 (1907), 229–40; T. E. Holland, ‘Some lessons of the peace conference’, Fortnightly Review, new series, 66 (1899), 944–57; F. E. Smith, International Law, fourth edition, revised and enlarged by J. Wylie (London, 1911 [1900]), especially p. 11. On Baty, see Shinya Murase, ‘Thomas Baty in Japan: seeing through the twilight’, British Yearbook of International Law 2002, 73 (2003), 315–42. 123 See L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction, ed. P. F. Clarke (New York, 1973 [1904]), pp. 198–200; Henry Sidgwick, The Elements of Politics, third edition (London, 1908), ch. 17; and the analysis in chapters 4 and 6 of the present volume. 124 Indeed, as I have argued elsewhere and in a different context, the labels ‘ideal­ ism’ and ‘utopianism’ are inherently problematic. Casper Sylvest, ‘Interwar

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Legal evolution and international law internationalism, the British Labour Party, and the historiography of Inter­ national Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 48 (2004), 409–32. 125 For an early but startling example of this logic, see Leone Levi, International Law, pp. 6–7. See also Frederic Seebohm, On International Reform (London, 1871). 126 John Westlake, ‘The Hague Conferences’ [1908], in Collected Papers, 531–67, at pp. 532, 542. 127 T. J. Lawrence, International Problems and the Hague Conferences (London, 1908), pp. 6, 197–8. 128 Otto Gierke, Natural Law and the Theory of Society, 1500 to 1800, trans. E. Barker (Cambridge, 1958 [1934]), p. 226. 129 Koskenniemi, Gentle Civilizer of Nations, p. 4.

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CH APTER 4

Philosophy and internationalist ethics

Whereas, in the days of early enthusiasm, I thought that all would go well if governmental arrangements were transformed, I now think that transformations in governmental arrangements can be of use only in so far as they express the transformed natures of citizens. (Herbert Spencer, 1903, published 19041)

This chapter examines variants of liberal internationalist ideology ­developed within a philosophical language. It demonstrates that peace and order were central themes among British philosophers, as they ­attempted to systematically theorise international politics. The analysis provides an important component in our venture to understand the anatomy, variety and trajectory of liberal internationalism as well as the preconditions of theorising about international politics in early twentieth-century Britain. Apart from a brief discussion of philosophical idealism, the bulk of the chapter is devoted to a critical exegesis and analysis of the international thought of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) and Henry Sidgwick (1838–1900), two of the most important philosophers of the late nineteenth century. Herbert Spencer was an iconic figure, the creator of ‘synthetic philosophy’, which included works on psychology, biology, sociology and ethics. He was a leading participant in contemporary political and intellectual debate, a self-made man and the champion of science and evolution. Spencer was, in short, a central and influential public moralist. Today, Spencer’s reputation rests on his evolutionary ideas, his responsibility for coining that most pregnant phrase ‘the survival of the fittest’ and his brutally libertarian tract The Man versus the State (1884). His political views appear as much conservative as liberal, and if one adds to that Spencer’s dry style, his dogmatic promulgation of certain core beliefs and his (misconceived) attempt to put natural and social science on the same footing, it is perhaps not surprising that his reputation has suffered. A great philosopher of the late nineteenth century is safely on his way out 101

Philosophy and internationalist ethics of the museum of contemporary social and political theory, heading for the dusty storage labelled ‘specialist interests’. This is unfortunate considering the influence of Spencer’s ideas on the development of British social science. In International Relations (IR), Spencer is rarely mentioned and there is no consensus as to the main thrust of his ideas.2 Moreover, specialist scholarship on Spencer, while generally of a high quality, often refers to his posture towards imperialism and international politics but has provided little by way of sustained discussion of these themes.3 In fact, the meagre interest that this aspect of Spencer’s thought ever generated seems to have been exhausted by the end of the First World War.4 This is surprising, as Spencer often stressed the close link between a society’s internal and external policies and argued that ‘the political truth’ that ‘advance to higher forms of man and society essentially depends on the decline of militancy and the growth of in­dustrial­ism’ made all other truths pale.5 Henry Sidgwick has suffered a similar fate. In IR he is virtually unknown. Only those students with a background in political theory will have encountered Sidgwick and then mainly through the prism of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). In the academic study of philoso­phy, Sidgwick is an important if somewhat archaic thinker, who provided the last grand statement of British utilitarianism and helped lay the foundations for analytical philosophy. In British intellectual history, he has become a central figure, mainly because, in important spheres like university education, politics and religion, he appears to represent something conveniently generalisable for certain segments of the late-Victorian population. Until recently, however, a tendency to slight disdain has been at work in this literature. A very unfavourable view of Sidgwick, rooted in the early twentieth century, has come to dominate our understanding of him as a dry, boring, unprincipled, insecure sophist, whose liberal reformism cannot redeem or outweigh that image. Fortunately, the tide seems to have turned with the recent publication of a bulky intellectual biography.6 Nevertheless, and true to a wider tendency in British intellectual history of this period, the international aspect of Sidgwick’s political thought has been comparatively neglected. Although the general thrust of Sidgwick’s internationalist position can be gathered from existing accounts, many questions are left unanswered. For example, it is unclear what we should take the label ‘cosmopolitan utilitarian internationalism’ to mean and although it is correct to stress that there was in Sidgwick a ‘vision of cosmic unity, of the overcoming of strife and the achievement of a harmony of duty and interest’, this formulation raises a host of questions concerning the structure, origin, continuity and strength of Sidgwick’s internationalist beliefs, as well as their compatibility with his wider philosophy.7 Answering such questions will contribute to a better understanding of Sidgwick, his liberal internationalism and his role in the study of politics and IR in Britain. 102

Philosophy and internationalist ethics The focus of this chapter is motivated by the individual importance of Spencer and Sidgwick, their sustained engagement with international politics and the gaps in existing scholarship. Moreover, as we shall see, the pairing provides an instructive contrast and demonstrates the variation possible within internationalist ideology. This emphasis might, however, appear to distort the intellectual landscape of late nineteenth-century Britain, a period that is often heralded as the heyday of philosophical idealism. As a prelude to the analyses of the international thought of Spencer and Sidgwick that make up the bulk of this chapter, the following section briefly introduces the main tenets of idealist philosophy and its bearing upon informed discussion of international politics. A note on philosophical idealism Philosophical idealism was in vogue in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and recent scholarship has increased our understanding of its nature and attractions.8 In contrast to Spencer’s widely disseminated philosophy, idealism attracted a smaller and more elitist following, primarily in Oxford, where German philosophy was studied seriously. As a reaction against British individualism, this deeply religious and anglicised Hegelianism consistently tried to overcome metaphysical or philosophical distinctions between mind and matter or the individual and the community. T. H. Green (1836–1882) was idealism’s first and most prominent exponent and he was followed by a string of important philosophers, including F. H. Bradley (1846–1924), D. G. Ritchie (1853–1903) and Bernard Bosanquet (1848–1923). Most idealists, including Oxford graduates nursed on idealist doctrines who became part of the political elite, were broadly liberal in orientation, but they differed on important issues, including the extent and character of state intervention in the lives of individuals and the purpose and justifications of imperialism. Green, a university liberal with radical sympathies, stood for a benevo­ lent liberalism in domestic and international affairs, which radiated from the pages of his posthumously published Lectures on the Principles of ­Political Obligation (1886). When fulfilling its real purpose, Green argued, the state acted as a harmoniser in a process of gradual moral development. Domestically it should promote the self-development and good life of its citizens and in international affairs this issued in an internationalist tune, denying inevitable conflict between states, criticising militarist patriotism and foreshadowing the widening of communal allegiances through the nation.9 Green influenced a new generation of liberals and internationalists in important ways, but it was also from this group that the most persistent criticism of the international implications of idealism was to emerge. While explicitly exempting Green, J. A. Hobson and L. T. Hobhouse 103

Philosophy and internationalist ethics both delivered broadsides against the dangerous anti-internationalist potential in philosophical idealism. Such views culminated during the First World War, when Hegelian philosophy was held responsible for the militarist nationalism that led Germany to challenge the European order.10 Philosophical idealism is the best-covered area of late nineteenthcentury international thought, and recent scholarship has convincingly established both that it was not in and of itself anti-internationalist and that it influenced an important strand of liberal internationalism in the twentieth century associated primarily with Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern.11 These general conclusions will not be disputed here. Yet there were idealist voices which in their tone and emphases complicated and occasionally challenged mainstream internationalist beliefs. On the one hand, idealism was communitarian, in the sense that it conceptualised the national community and its external expression, the state, as the most important locus and supporter of morality. Green placed much emphasis on the nation(-state), but he repeatedly insisted that states fulfilling their real purposes would live in peace and that the moral scope of community would, consequently, be gradually widened. Many idealists were to follow Green’s lead and see the nation as a step towards a ‘higher nationality’.12 Bernard Bosanquet essentially defended this position in his Philosophical Theory of the State (1899), but the tone was bleaker and the implications more conservative. He described the nation-state as ‘the widest organisation which has the common experience necessary to found a common life’ and recognised its ‘absolute in power over the individual’. This position did not, Bosanquet stressed, close off moral criticism of (imperfect) state action, but it did drive a wedge between private and public morality. Moreover, it meant that the state had ‘no determinate function in a larger community; the guardian of a whole moral world, but not a factor within an organised moral world. Moral relations presuppose an organised life; but such a life is only within the State, not in relations between the State and other communities.’13 While the state was founded on (a general) will and not force, this line of argument led to scepticism in realising liberal internationalist goals. Particularly during and after the First World War, Bosanquet struggled anxiously to hold his ground against internationalist critics and their, at times unfair, interpretations of his work. Although he shared many internationalist ideals, his bleak view of the obstacles to be overcome in creating real communities wider than the nation-state – a precondition for the common moral order that could ensure well functioning institutions – marked him off from the mainstream of internationalist ideology.14 On the other hand, while the shared idealist ambition of explaining the world as the gradual unfolding of reason and freedom did not imply that everything real was perfect or rational, idealists were often compelled to account for ‘imperfect facts’, such as the persistence of war or ­imperialism. 104

Philosophy and internationalist ethics Some, including Bradley and Ritchie, employed social evolutionary thinking for such purposes. Although they interpreted evolutionary doctrines differently, they both saw a struggle between states or nations as a sign that international politics was lagging behind developments in domestic politics. This meant that progress would, in the end, limit the international struggle, but in the meantime domestic and international politics were politically and morally on a different footing. This was not an uncommon view among internationalists. But when combined with the doctrine that the aim of progress was the development of humankind (and not the individual), such views could lead in anti-internationalist directions. Trying to steer a course between Christian pacificism and internationalist sentimentalism on the one side and the one-sided patriotism of the ‘British interests’ school on the other, Bradley cast doubt on the existence of international law without an international executive, and foresaw the continuation of international struggle. This led him to argue that ‘a nation must aim at the good of mankind and at peace in the end; but as things are, this principle will in some cases justify violence, and even extermination.… The meek will not inherit the earth, and a nation which claims morality must be ready to use force in defence of right’.15 Like Bradley, Ritchie foresaw how the struggle among states would be tamed through the development of ethics and the widening of communities. Viewing the development of rational control over evolution as an outcome of nature’s blind struggle allowed him to speculate about how international politics, like domestic politics, could be restrained. The intro­duction of representative government was ‘something consciously and deliberately chosen’ and by way of analogy Ritchie asked if that example did not ‘hold out the promise that similar good may be done by the substitution of some more intelligent methods for military and industrial competition?’ International arbitration and economic co-operation could be ‘the first “variations” which, if they prove their fitness, will bring into being a new species of civilised society’.16 Coupled with his denial that war was as natural as thunderstorms, this clearly pointed in internationalist directions. However, towards the end of his short life, Ritchie’s view of international politics was flavoured by a ‘temporary realism’ similar to that of Bradley, which in turn led him to criticise naïve and optimistic versions of internationalist ideology and its ‘somewhat irrational transference of schoolboy ethics to inter­ national disputes’. Like Bradley, he identified the fatal problem of enforcement in international co-operation and against this background he advocated a militant liberalism, ready to use force for the causes of order and progress. While half-heartedly acknowledging the dangers in this position, Ritchie regarded ‘the struggle for existence between nations and types of civilisations as of itself helping to determine right and wrong’.17 This meant jettisoning the principle of non-intervention 105

Philosophy and internationalist ethics and accepting the absorption of states and peoples into a structure of empires that, eventually, could be federated. Such applications of idealist thinking to international politics and imperialism placed it beyond the pale of mainstream internationalist ideology. While sharing the diag­ nosis as long-term predictions of internationalism, the ‘realist’ posture of Bradley and Ritchie’s philosophical idealism could lead to conservatism, complacency and a lack of ambition in pursing internationalist goals. In sum, while much of the criticism of idealism emerging during the First World War took little account of the actual and potential ideological overlaps between idealism and liberal internationalism, there were in some versions of idealist political philosophy elements that challenged aspects of internationalism. This is not to accept that idealists essentially confused what is and what ought to be (as Hobhouse later argued) or that they were conservative or reactionary. However, the optimism and activist attitude of some liberal internationalists in their pursuit of order, progress and a public morality in international politics did not characterise all idealists. This was partly because their discussion of the moral nature of the state forced them to tackle vexed questions about the nature and extent of authority and co-operation in international politics. Bosanquet represents this position. In some respects, Bradley and Ritchie went further, appearing as hard-headed, if temporary, realists uncritic­ ally condoning imperialism and accepting the inevitability of war and international struggle. It is no coincidence that Green was exempted from later critiques and that it was his liberal spirit, his stress on the true purposes of the nation-state and his criticism of blind patriotism that most successfully lived on within internationalist ideology. Idealism was not without philosophical rivals. In particular, Herbert Spencer and Henry Sidgwick, both utilitarians in their own ways, provided clear alternatives.18 Compared with idealism, however, these have, in terms of international thought, received little attention. As the following examination of Spencer’s and Sidgwick’s liberal inter­national­ ist ideologies demonstrates, we find not only substantial ideological overlaps with idealism, in particular that of Green, but also an instructive illustration of the diversity of views that the philosophical language of liberal internationalism could accommodate. War, evolution and internationalism: Herbert Spencer Spencer’s social and political thought – a brief overview As context for the more detailed analysis of internationalism that is the main concern, this section can offer no more than a partial sketch of ­Spencer’s social and political thought, concentrating primarily on his concept of 106

Philosophy and internationalist ethics evolution. When introducing Spencer, one is somewhat in­hibited by the aura of tragedy and comedy that continues to surround him. It has been argued that Spencer’s life was so ‘flat, solitary, and uninteresting’ that it could be summarised under five headings: ‘(1) Integration, April 27, 1820; (2) Evolution, 1820–1860; (3) Equilibration 1860–1885; (4) Dissolution, 1885–1903; (5) Disintegration, December 8, 1903’.19 Despite his peculiarity and occasional pedantry, however, Spencer was the most popular philosopher in England (and other parts of the world, including Japan and the Americas) in the 1870s and 1880s, and at the height of his powers he was, almost universally, taken seriously. It is appropriate that we, in our venture to understand his ideas and influence, do the same. Herbert Spencer was born in Derby, England, in 1820, into a family of dissenting Methodists with close ties to Quakerism. He received most of his rather one-sided education privately, with his father, a school teacher, and his uncle playing formative roles. By his early teens he had mainly received instruction in scientific and technical subjects. Provincial interest in science, which Spencer’s family epitomised, was inextricably linked to radicalism; it was an ideology that had ‘rationalism, enthusiasm, utilitarianism and radicalism bound in a coherent pattern’.20 On top of a strict religious upbringing and his fervour for science, Spencer was subjected to a strongly anti-authoritarian ideology associated with provincial dissent. In this system, individualism, free trade and minimal government were worshipped as a semi-religious doctrine that had John Bright and Richard Cobden as its main apostles. Besides preaching the gospel of laissez-faire – a creed perceived to be equally relevant in economics and politics – these radical ideals were ‘founded ultimately in a Christian notion of natural rights, made historically feasible … by the appropriate shaping of character by evangelicalism, or by a purely secular moral enlightenment’.21 Moreover, this ideology was distinctively peace oriented; it was anti-slavery and anti-imperial, and generally prided itself on its rational, disinterested humanitarianism in domestic and international politics. It was almost predestined, therefore, that the young Spencer, after trying his luck as an inventor and in the burgeoning railway industry, should take up journalism and the causes of radicalism. In The Proper Sphere of Government, twelve letters published in The Nonconformist in 1842–1843, Spencer argued that the purpose of government was limited to the administration of justice, which above all meant defending the natural rights of humankind.22 Over time, this creed issued in Spencer’s fundamental principle of equal freedom: ‘Every man is free to do that which he wills provided he infringes not the equal freedom of any other man’.23 While his early political theory was informed by a ‘beautiful self-adjusting principle, which will keep all [society’s] elements in equilibrium…’, 24 it was also embedded within a larger progressive 107

Philosophy and internationalist ethics framework, from which Spencer’s evolutionism developed. The moral philosophy set forth in Social Statics (1851) was a peculiar mix of rights theory – amicably set against utilitarianism – and a vague, inherited evangelical image of the sinful nature of humans.25 When Spencer later moved away from explicit deism and formulated the semi-religious idea of the ‘Unknown’, his politics remained intact. He continued to argue against almost any state intervention beyond what ‘the administration of justice’ required. The purpose of government was not to regulate commerce; not to educate the people; not to teach religion; not to administer charity; not to make roads and railways; but simply to defend the natural rights of man – to protect person and property – to prevent the aggressions of the powerful upon the weak – in a word to administer justice. This is the natural, the original, office of a government. It was not intended to do less; it ought not to be allowed to do more.26

Spencer’s fully theorised concept of evolution involved an attempt to provide more elaborate psychological and sociological foundations for his political theory. Thus, in shifting his earlier moral intuitionism towards associationist psychology, for Spencer rights ceased to be ‘natural’, moral intuitions, but became instead ‘emergent social practices’ that would (in a perfect society) be obeyed due to the happiness they generated.27 However, this later view did not change the fact that there would be progressively less government as the forces of nature worked themselves out. Spencer stuck to most of his early political beliefs after setting out on the odyssey it would prove to complete the synthetic philosophy. It has been aptly remarked that Spencer’s evolutionism had ‘almost frightening ramifications, all-pervasive continuity, boundless magnitude, massive yet imperceptible power, ceaseless, restless, endless, and relentless’.28 Spencer was an evolutionist before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859), and although the book did cause him to modify his theory, his concept of evolution was basically Lamarckian. Jean-­Baptiste Lamarck (1744–1829) had argued that the central mechanism in evolution was inheritance of acquired characteristics. According to this view, organisms were not passively shaped by their environment; rather, it was through interaction between organisms and their environment that needs and behaviour were modified and passed on to new generations. Although Spencer was more concerned with the evolution of individual organisms than species change, it was this notion of (generally successful) adaptation to the environment that prevented Spencer from fully accepting natural selection.29 The insight of environmental adaptation was combined with a principle of universal transformation from homogeneity to heterogeneity, derived from the German embryolo­g ist Karl von Baer (1792–1876). 30 The core of Spencer’s evolutionism was two separate but interlinked concepts, individuation 108

Philosophy and internationalist ethics and ­differentiation. At a general level, Spencer held that organisms became distinct from other organisms – ‘individualised’ – by a process of differentiation of organs, but this process also implied another kind of individuation, because the organism in question became more integrated. Applying this idea to the social and political domain, Spencer could explain how ‘simple groups’ had been multiplied and transformed into ‘great nations’ through their need to survive. Spencer conceived of societies as organisms and just as nature was ‘red in tooth and claw’ (as Tennyson phrased it) so the social world was built on bloody and tragic conflict. 31 Yet through the gradual individuation and differentiation of societies, social relations reached a new stage, encompassing highly differentiated social institutions, which were interdependent as a result of their integration in a division of labour characteristic of modern societies. When applied to the domain of ethics, Spencer found a develop­ment from egoism to altruism and from the slow discovery of ethical principles to the gradual internalisation of these principles. 32 From this concept of evolution flowed a number of important consequences. Firstly, it is important to recognise how Spencer’s Lamarckism worked against a racial theory. The term ‘race’ was widely and imprecisely used in Victorian Britain and, at least until the late nineteenth century, the term was rarely used in a strict biological sense. Spencer occasion­ally used racialist language to describe the process whereby early evolutionary forces had made ‘lower creatures’ give way to ‘superiors’. 33 But like other forms of social evolutionary thinking, Spencer provided reassurance that humankind was essentially one, while, at the same time, explaining the differences between different sections of humankind (whether racially distinguished or not). 34 Consequently, ‘development’ or ‘civilisation’ was potentially possible for all sections of humankind. References to ‘lower races’ did not, therefore, signify a perpetual stigmatisation, but a prejudiced estimation of the current moral and political position of these groups in an evolutionary process. For Spencer, social progress was not necessarily linear, although his moral ranking of social species could give that impression. 35 Secondly, it is worth emphasising that Spencer described the pro­ cesses of social evolution as both natural and positive. On the one hand, they were necessary insofar as they conformed to the general law of evolution. On the other hand, Spencer’s political and moral philosophy openly welcomed most of these evolutionary developments, as they led to a state of affairs in which the human condition was improved. The endstate of Spencer’s evolutionism was a heterogeneous and interdependent society with thriving, altruistic individuals. The facilitating mechanism was the (Lamarckian) idea of adaptation. Following the publication of Darwin’s theory of evolution, Spencer allowed for a mix of environmental adaptation and the haphazard and uncontrollable principle of 109

Philosophy and internationalist ethics natural selection, with the latter given priority (among brutes) in the early stages of evolution. Yet Spencer’s evolutionary optimism debarred him from handing over responsibility for the progressive development of humankind to natural selection. The environmental model of learning through inherit­ance and experience provided a better safeguard for evolution than rationality or random selection, because it allowed for a more orderly conception of human development. This understanding of evolution was particularly suited to Spencer’s wider philosophy: it appeared naturalistic and scientific but was ethically much more acceptable than the potentially chaotic consequences of natural selection; it put the emphasis on (more or less self-conscious) adaptation rather than blind, ceaseless struggle and fortuitous mutation. 36 Thirdly, Spencer’s political ideology and his conception of evolution were to some extent made for each other. His political views were mainly formulated in The Social Statics and reformulated in The Man versus the State. On one level, the pessimism of The Man versus the State does indeed – with its indictment of Tories and Liberals alike, its tirade against collectivism (or communism as Spencer had it) and its staunch defence of individualism – stand in opposition to the magnanimous optimism characterising his statements on the process of evolution. Yet the opposition is only apparent. Spencer’s predicament at this time was that of an intellectual Messiah who knew where evolution was heading if it was allowed to take its course. To his great disappointment, this was not realised by his contemporaries. As John Burrow has pointed out, there is a political tension in evolutionary positivism between political impatience and pragmatic conservatism. 37 For Spencer, this tension was never resolved: evolution was never so certain that it could not be obstructed (by non-adaptation), but on the other hand Spencer mostly held that constructed human – i.e. extra-evolutionary – action could do little to assist it, because ‘the fitnesses [sic] of institutions are relative to the natures of citizens’. 38 Therefore Spencer’s later political thought desperately aimed at driving home the point that nature should be left to itself: ‘A fundamental error pervading the thinking of nearly all parties, political and social, is that evils admit of immediate and radical remedies’. 39 Although ultimately an optimist on behalf of humankind, Spencer was astutely aware of the suffering that had to be endured before his utopia could be reached. Spencer’s omnipresent and apparently scientific concept of evolution was in effect constantly moulded and refashioned so as to confirm the main impetus of his politics, a logic that also informed his internationalism. But in the long run their marriage also presented problems. The viability and plausibility of Spencer’s political views were partly predicated upon the assumption that development in social organisms and human nature came about as naturally as the developments in other 110

Philosophy and internationalist ethics organisms, and that animal and social organisms could be likened to each other.40 But this was increasingly challenged. While the political views and the theory of evolution championed by Spencer were not incompatible, other linkages were possible and perhaps more plausible. T. H. Huxley was the first to challenge the connection between Spencer’s individualism and his organicism, pointing out that ‘the real force of the analogy [between animal and social organisms] is totally opposed to the negative view of State function’.41 Although Spencer never shied away from state action in the administration of justice, he held that ‘Government is begotten of aggression and by aggression’ – a motto that nicely sums up his attitude to authority and what he regarded as misconceived paternalism in a developed society.42 The problem, however, refused to go away, and in international politics it took on a particular form. But in order to understand the discrepancy between Spencer’s astute analysis of international political developments in the late nineteenth century and the predictions enshrined in his theory of evolution, we must return to the early Spencer and his internationalist legacy. The early Spencer and international politics What makes Spencer’s international thought particularly interesting is that it was inserted into a larger philosophical framework that provided seemingly scientific backing for liberal internationalism. Just as the relation­ship between Spencer’s ‘domestic’ political views were presented as compatible with the theory of evolution, so was his prophecy and politics of peace. [T]he conclusion of profoundest moment to which all lines of argument converge, is that the possibility of a high social state, political as well as general, fundamentally depends on the cessation of war…. it is needless to emphasize afresh the truth that persistent militancy, maintaining adapted institutions, must inevitably prevent, or else neutralise, changes in the direction of more equit­ able institutions and laws; while permanent peace will of necessity be followed by social amelioration of every kind.43

This conclusion from one of Spencer’s later works on sociology (a field encompassing the study of politics) could lead one to believe that ­Spencer’s peace-mindedness was a result of his ‘social scientific’ endeavours.44 If anything, the opposite was the case. The non-conformist radicalism of Spencer’s youth had clear internationalist dimensions linked to the vision of Cobden and the peace movement. Spencer’s early writings brought out his ideological heritage. Having identified the ‘proper sphere of government’ (which was fairly limited), Spencer countered a number of hypothetical objections to 111

Philosophy and internationalist ethics his position. One such objection was that his theory did not allow the ­government to undertake ‘absolutely necessary wars’. Spencer retorted by flatly rejecting the idea that war is beneficial to a political community. War involved unacceptable suffering. Moreover, he pointed to the political, commercial and moral evils of war. Politically, war led to unnatural excitement and illusions of grandeur – not unlike the effect of alcohol upon human beings – and commercially wars of conquest directed resources away from commerce and industry, the real engines of progress. Finally, Spencer pointed out that war ‘is inconsistent with the spirit of Christianity’. War aroused ‘animal passions’, it turned ‘brute courage’ into a virtue and acted as ‘the grand bar to the extension of that feeling of universal brotherhood with all nations, so essential to the real pros­perity of mankind’.45 Against this background, Spencer hesitantly declined to discuss ‘necessary wars’. Although he admitted that defence against invasion or aggression might in principle be necessary, he still did not include this task in his (short) list of government tasks. In denying that this presented a problem for his theory of government, Spencer offered an ingenious line of argument, reflecting his early political philosophy (he gave his science of ethics as a ‘code of correct rules for the control of human beings … applicable, if true, to the guidance of humanity in its highest conceivable perfection’).46 The problem of defensive or necessary wars would vanish when all governments had limited their activities to administering justice. At this stage, ‘aggressive war would cease; but when aggressive war ceases, defensive war becomes unnecessary’.47 In order to set things in motion, Spencer advocated that England unilaterally renounce war. For a thinker who saw the ‘triumph of the Anti-Corn Law League’ as ‘simply the most marked instance yet, of the new style of government – that of opinion, overcoming the old style – that of force’, and who held that ‘Progress … is not an accident, but a necessity’,48 the future, domestic as well as international, surely looked bright. Yet already in Social Statics (1851), Spencer backtracked somewhat from his earlier insistence on the futility of discussing defensive wars. The doctrine of non-resistance – as opposed to a doctrine of non-aggression – was flawed on a number of counts: firstly, it made little sense to behave differently towards national and international criminals; secondly, nonresistance made ‘pacific relationships between men and nations look needlessly Utopian’; thirdly, non-resistance was not ­deducible from the moral law; and finally, non-resistance could be shown to be absolutely wrong – ‘we may not carelessly abandon our rights’.49 This final point under­lines that self-defence in international politics came to be included in the cluster of rights (in this instance to security) which Spencer laid at the foundation of his political theory. 50 Despite this admission of a right to self-defence, Spencer’s optimistic perspective on international ­relations, derived from his unceasing radicalism, remained intact. In Social Statics, 112

Philosophy and internationalist ethics he argued that the establishment of a system of international arbitration was merely a question of time. Moreover, on the verge of formulating his idea about social evolution through stages, Spencer also ventured a startling prophecy about the future of international order: A federation of peoples – a universal society, can exist only when man’s adaptation to the social state has become tolerably complete. We have already seen … that in the earliest state of civilization, when the repulsive force is strong, and the aggregative force weak, only small communities are possible; a modification of character causes these tribes, and satrapies, and gentes, and feudal lordships, and clans, gradually to coalesce into nations; and a still further modification will allow for further union. That the time for this is now drawing nigh, seems probable…. 51

What stands out in this optimistic forecast is the uncertainty or flexi­ bility that the evolutionary model introduced. Thus, in a most ‘utopian’ passage, we encounter the type of evolutionary caveat (‘only when man’s adaptation to the social state has become tolerably complete’) that provided rhetorical room of manoeuvre and enabled the critique of the state and the development of international politics that Spencer was later to undertake. Important elements of this critique were, however, already present at this stage: both The Proper Sphere of Government and Social Statics included strongly worded attacks on the belligerent, profit-hungry aristocracy and state-driven colonisation. 52 These early political beliefs about right and wrong in international relations fossilised rather than changed during Spencer’s life. He was foremost among the small number of liberal intellectuals who, in the latter part of the century, consistently took the side of ‘humanity’ when it came to international conflicts. He denounced Governor Eyre’s actions in Jamaica in 1865 as well as the Bulgarian atrocities in 1876, he opposed the South African War of 1899–1902 and he continuously stressed the unjust nature of what he saw as retrogressive, cowardly imperialism. Moreover, Spencer stood his ground against the atmosphere of suspicion and confrontation that characterised great-power rivalry in the late nineteenth century, as his internationalist beliefs were increasingly lodged in stinging critiques conveying disillusion rather than optimism. The later Spencer and the deterioration of international politics Spencer’s sociology accorded supreme importance to war as a causal mechanism but it was nevertheless a prophecy of peace. In the opening pages of Political Institutions (1882), the fifth part of the Principles of Sociology, Spencer admitted the absolutely central role that war played in human evolution. Looking back, he described how it ‘had to be 113

Philosophy and internationalist ethics reluctantly admitted that war, everywhere and always hateful, has nevertheless been a factor in civilization, by bringing about the ­consolidation of groups – simple into compound, doubly-compound, and treblycompound – until great nations are formed’. By analogy with the organic world, the social world would see the arrival of ‘a stage in which survival of the fittest among societies, hitherto effected by sanguinary conflicts, will be effected by peaceful conflicts’. 53 In Spencer’s later, sociological work, it was inter-societal rather than individual conflict that took on the role as the most important historical-sociological motor. This entailed that the evolutionary path to civilisation was littered with conflict and suffering, the high probability of failure and death, and the frightening prospect of the fittest, but not necessarily the ethically best, surviving. 54 These factors conspired to make Spencer more sensitive to (and more disillusioned with) the development of international relations. The most important conceptual tool that Spencer deployed in his attempt to make sense of international politics was the distinction between militant and industrial societies, which, although present in rudi­ mentary form in the early writings, was systematically developed only in his later work. 55 The distinction allowed Spencer (and other liberals) to come to terms with the horror of war by assigning it a crucial role in the development of human history: relegating war to the past paved the way for pursuing the objectives of internationalism. The distinction was important not only in terms of its thematic content, but also because it was inserted into a temporal framework that fitted nicely with liberal thought. The opposition between the two (ideal) types of society was illustrated by three analytical levels, which each contained a host of contrasts. The first and most important level was developed by a characteristic Spencerian mix of deduction and induction, the second extrapolated the (adapted) characters of individuals, and the third contained heuristic illustrations of each type of society. The most important oppositions that emerged from Spencer’s later discussions are summarised in Table 4.1. 56 This breathtaking list of oppositions contains many themes deserving attention, but two are particularly important for understanding the development of Spencer’s internationalism: the causal and explanatory mechanisms involved and the critical potential of the distinction between militant and industrial societies which followed from its fluidity. Before proceeding, however, it is worth stressing a more general point that the analysis below is intended to illustrate: namely, that the real upshot of Spencer’s detailed analysis was the evolutionary perspective and its implications for the conception of the international domain as subject to all-pervasive evolutionary pressures. Within this evolutionary framework, historical time was made linear and extended almost indefinitely into the past as well as into the future, which in turn made social life susceptible to explanation, prediction and, for some at least, hope. With Spencer’s analysis 114

Status Compulsory co-operation Despotism Context of war (external and international protection necessary) Inter-societal antagonism (military) Centralisation Primary duty of the state: national defence Subordination/obedience/regimentation/coercion/ supervision Public dominates private, the state subsumes the individual Self-sufficiency (autarchy) Protectionism

Loyalty, militancy, revengefulness, vindictiveness, unchastity, little sense of individual freedom, the status of women low, egoism

Sparta, ancient Egypt, ancient Peruvian empire, modern Russia, Germany since the Franco-Prussian war

Level I Characteristics, society

Level II Characteristics, individuals

Level III Illustrations

The militant type of society

Table 4.1 – Spencer and militant versus industrial societies

Indian hill tribes, ancient ‘pueblos’ of North America, the later stage of European civilisation (England, the United States)

Strong sense and defence of individual freedom, peaceloving sentiments (forgiveness, truthfulness, kindness, chastity, humane sentiments in general), the status of women high, altruism

Inter-societal competition (commercial and moral) Decentralised administration Primary duty of the state: the administration of justice Individuality defended by the state (the administration of justice) Individuals independent, little corporate action, wide range of private organisations Interdependence Laissez-faire

Contract Voluntary co-operation Representative government Context of peace (internal protection necessary)

The industrial type of society

Philosophy and internationalist ethics of its international consequences, social evolution acquired, for liberal internationalists, a spatial dimension as well. War was the crucial motor of social evolution, which made possible the transition from the militant and to the industrial type of society: demands for security and corporate action caused people in the early stages of history to form groups which fought other groups. In this process of the survival of the fittest societies, specific societies continued to grow through conquest and security needs. Moreover, the military leader often became the political leader, which amounted to the establishment of the ideal-typical militant society. The power of war was, however, limited – it could bring about change only on a certain scale. War also carried the seeds of voluntary co-operation. When a particular stage was reached, the advantages of war were exceeded by its dis­ advantages, leading (through individuation and differentiation) to the development of specialised and interdependent societies. This develop­ ment was ­paralleled in the domain of ethics, where social altruism gradually substituted egoism until international conditions allowed for the develop­ment of internationalist altruism. 57 This meant that the brutal military struggle for survival between societies could be applied only to the earlier stages of human evolution. It was Spencer’s adamant insistence on this point that distinguished him from more confrontational variants of evolutionary arguments. However, considering the importance of this crucial sequence in Spencer’s theory, it is curiously under-theorised. In Political Institutions, he argued that when, the struggle for existence between societies by war having ceased, there remains only the industrial struggle for existence, the final survival and spread must be on the part of those societies which produce the largest number of the best individuals – individuals best adapted for life in the industrial state. 58

This postulate does not explain how and why the good/industrial/ civilised result from the bad/militant/barbaric. And if the actions asso­ ciated with the latter prove successful through experience, the need for a detailed explanation is only exacerbated. One way out of this dilemma was to claim that civilisation was inevitable, but Spencer was increasingly reluctant to go down this path. 59 The problem remains: is war becoming obsolete because it fits Spencer’s ideal (the industrial society), or does this projected transition have a theoretical or empirical base? Does peace lead to the industrial society or does the emergence of industrial societies lead to peace? Presumably, Spencer thought the two mutually reinforcing. Yet in this transitional phase between the militant and the industrial society, Spencer’s argument remains veiled in mystery. It was rarely illustrated, which only serves to strengthen the suspicion that the analysis of war was ideology-driven: it was assumed that evolution 116

Philosophy and internationalist ethics had a certain, peaceful, direction, and Spencer then amassed empirical and speculative ‘evidence’ to support this ­a ssumption. As a result, the explanations for change and progress that Spencer provided were underspecified. Everything caused everything. This can be brought out if we draw on Kenneth Waltz’s classic typology of first-, second- and third-image explanations of war, referring to explanations of war based (primarily) on human nature, the nature of societies or polities, or the nature of the international system.60 Spencer will at a first glance appear a first-image theorist, because he ultimately believed in the possibility of human nature being transformed. In The Principles of Ethics, he argued: While the majority believe that human nature is unchangeable, there are some who believe that it may rapidly be changed. Both beliefs are wrong. Great alterations may be wrought, but only in course of multitudinous generations: the small alterations, such as those which distinguish nation from nation, taking centuries, and the great alterations, molding an egoistic nature into an altruistic one, taking eras.61

Yet Spencer’s international ideas are not so easily pigeon-holed. In fact, he also argued that the development of yet better individuals translated into yet better societies, more likely to develop means other than war for settling their differences. Under-developed societies – societies in which pluralism and altruism were fostered but which continued to thrive in military virtues – were inevitably hostile towards their neighbours. Individual and national character was everything, but character could develop only in the right circumstances. There was a circular logic at work in this argument: a sustained period of international peace would further the evolution towards industrial societies, giving rise to a more strongly entrenched condition of peace in international politics.62 At the level of individuals, the reasoning was similar: ‘An absolutely just or perfectly sympathetic person, could not live and act according to his nature in a tribe of cannibals’.63 In sum, the development of the industrial type of society, which in turn would lead to the development of the best individuals developing their sentiments and virtues, could take place only under conditions of international peace. These character­ istics of the international system, commercial and moral competition in a context of peace, would be conducive to national and individual development. Thus, Spencer’s vision is a combination of first-, secondand (less explicitly) third-image analysis. Below this fluid mixture of explanations, Spencer operated with a much more fundamental level of analysis: the force of nature. At the end of Social Statics, Spencer had rhetorically asked ‘Who … is to find out when the time for any given change has arrived?’ The answer was brutally simple: ‘No one: it will find itself out. For us to perplex ourselves with such questions is both needless and absurd.’64 117

Philosophy and internationalist ethics Reactionary radicalism? The second theme that is particularly important in the distinction between militant and industrial societies concerns the ideological and critical potential that the distinction, due to its flexibility, carried. As always with Spencer, any distinction or typology was broken up or blurred as soon as it had been created, and he actually operated with four societies – two militant and two industrial – rather than a simple dichotomy. Militant societies could be either primitive or strictly organised; similarly, industrial societies could exist in rudimentary or complete form.65 The flexibility this system introduced is important: Spencer did not triumphantly declare that Britain or Europe had arrived safely in the era of industrial societies, although they were closer to this ideal than the rest of the world. There was a movement in the right direction, but substantial challenges loomed. In contrast to his early, exclusive focus on the ideal theorising of absolute ethics, Spencer now dealt in more detail with relative ethics. In The Principles of Ethics, he argued that ‘the requirements of absolute ethics can be wholly conformed to only in a state of permanent peace; and … so long as the world continues to be occupied by peoples given to political burglary, the requirements of relative ethics only, can be fulfilled’.66 In setting out the requirements of relative ethics, Spencer wavered between two positions: one descriptive and pessimistic, the other prescriptive and optimistic. He lamented that so long ‘as the religion of enmity so largely qualifies the religion of amity, the doctrine of unlimited state authority must prevail’.67 Moreover, Spencer stressed that renunciation of the right of self-defence depended on the international political context. Needless to say, this was a second-best.68 Although he found the signs of international reconciliation weak, he indicated that they would eventually be assisted by industrialism, and this progressive development involved a limitation on government. However, the constructive argument was hampered by the fact that there was no panacea for international peace. Again, a negative view of ‘extra-evolutionary’ action applied. Much could be done in terms of human obstruction of, but little in terms of direct human contribution to, the process of evolution. It is the critical potential that followed from this posture that is important. Spencer was acutely aware that his theory looked less and less likely to be vindicated as international relations deteriorated during the closing decades of the nineteenth century. If his evolutionism did not ‘fit the facts’, Spencer could either fiddle with his theory or lament the behaviour of his fellow human beings who were responsible for retrogression or stagnation. He did both. He increasingly stressed that societies could regress as well as progress. The closing pages of Principles of ­Sociology are perhaps the best demonstration of the ambivalence between ­despondency and 118

Philosophy and internationalist ethics recovery. A law of rhythm ‘manifested throughout all things’ and oscil­ lating between regress and progress seemed to direct world affairs from so­mewhere above.69 That Spencer found himself in a period of regress meant that he could no longer be an absolute optimist. He was now a ‘relative optimist’, which made it possible – at the same time – to step up the critique of contemporary international affairs (which he followed closely, with increasing desperation and indignation) and look forward to a time when evolution would bring about a ‘peace-­maintaining federation’, a precondition for the full development of freedom.70 This attitude was manifested in the practical implications of Spencer’s internationalism, including his involvement in the largely unsuccessful Anti-Aggression League, an organisation founded in the early 1880s on the conviction that the principle of non-aggression was sounder than the principle of non-resistance.71 However, Spencer’s internationalist posture was also prevalent in his later writings, many of which resembled jeremiads with their constant wavering between disillusion and despair, impending gloom and distant hope. The increasing intensity of imperialist rhetoric and practice in the late nineteenth century was increasingly scrutinised and criticised by Spencer. He found historians and the clergy, as well as aggressive colonists and politicians, guilty of this development. At the same time, Spencer was highly alert to developments in British culture that furthered the process of ‘re-barbarization’ that he detected and detested.72 In this context, the South African War of 1899–1902 became for Spencer, as for many other internationalists, a significant event. The war was the culmination of a series of conflicts between Boers and the British empire during the nineteenth century. British acquisitions and annexations of Boer terri­tory, the establishment of independent Boer republics in the South African interior, and repeated British attempts to safeguard increasing political and financial interests in the area led to the two Boer Wars (1880–1881 and 1899–1902). The specific causes of the Second Boer War are still debated. The Afrikaner denial of civil rights to uitlanders (primarily British citizens who had flowed into the Transvaal after the discovery of gold at the Witwatersrand in 1886), British interference in the internal affairs of the Boer republics, a capitalist–jingoist conspiracy that followed the discovery of natural resources (which culminated in the Jameson raid in 1895) and the aggressive policies of the Governor of Cape Colony and High Commissioner of South Africa, Sir Alfred Milner, all played their part.73 For many liberals and radicals, the war was both unjustifiable and loathsome in its exploitation of jingoistic patriot­ism, quite apart from the fact that it was also the worst war in terms of costs, casualties and honour in which Britain was involved between 1815 and 1914. The belligerent mood did, however, restrain some internationalists from voicing their concerns. Spencer was not intimidated. He supported 119

Philosophy and internationalist ethics the Boers in their claims against the British government and the war only strengthened his radical critique of imperialism. He pointed out how this dreadful phenomenon was intimately connected to domestic politics, how militarism and imperialism went hand in hand.74 In advancing these views, Spencer was firmly in the ‘party of humanity’. Spencer’s radical internationalist posture also translated into advice to the Japanese government, through an intermediary, to stay clear of British and American influence and support for the idea of peaceful arbitra­tion, by arguing that it was consistent with his belief ‘that advance to higher forms of man and society essentially depends on the decline of militancy and the growth of industrialism’.75 The description that best captures the thoroughgoing and critical internationalism that Spencer adopted at the end of his life is found in a letter that Spencer wrote to his French trans­ lator, E. Cazelles, in December 1896. It is worth quoting at length: The truth is that, of all the feelings I entertain concerning social affairs, my detestation of the barbarous conduct of strong peoples to weak peoples is the most intense.… To my thinking the nations which call themselves civilized are no better than white savages.…   Elsewhere I have spoken of the nations of Europe as a hundred million pagans masquerading as Christians. Not unfrequently in private intercourse I have found myself trying to convert Christians to Christianity, but have invariably failed. The truth is that priests and people alike, while taking their nominal creed from the New Testament, take their real creed from Homer. Not Christ, but Achilles, is their ideal. One day in the week they profess the creed of forgiveness, and six days in the week they inculcate and practice the creed of revenge.… Not only do I feel perpetually angered by this hypocrisy which daily says one thing and does the opposite thing, but I also feel perpetually angered by it as being diametrically opposed to human progress.76

This internationalist critique had as its ultimate purpose bringing progress, order and justice to the international domain, which could make a realisation of Spencer’s political utopia possible. As a natural corol­lary of the futility of premature attempts to assist evolution, Spencer advanced moral internationalist arguments based on classic refrains about the economic and moral costs of imperialism, the dangers of arms races, and the importance of avoiding an international atmosphere of hostility and suspicion. Like many contemporaries, Spencer naturalised the nation and foreshadowed the development of larger political units. But he had no time for narrow or provincial nationalism, and he came to detest the patriotic sentiment increasingly associated with imperialism. Until the turn of the century, he maintained a balanced view of patriotism, defined as ‘nationally that which egoism is individually’, and as a ‘social scientist’ and a spokesman for the requirements of relative ethics, Spencer did point to the potentially positive effects of loyalty 120

Philosophy and internationalist ethics to ruler and country, especially in the earlier stages of social evolution. However, by 1902 his hostility was outspoken: the cry ‘Our country, right or wrong!’ was detestable and contained the lowest sentiments.77 In sum, Spencer’s ideas about international politics fall clearly within the bounds of liberal internationalism. But while Spencer exploited arguments in the vein of Bright and Cobden, he also brought his own evolutionary language to the support of this ideology. In particular, Spencer’s sociology functioned as a ‘scientific’ vindication of his political views. The early hands-off internationalism was in large measure kept intact, even if it was pursued differently in later years. Although Spencer spurned the allegation that he tailored the facts to fit his political beliefs, the modern reader is left with a feeling that an element of this practice must have been prevalent. Thus, the evolutionary prophecy to a large extent found its destination in an extension and development of the political utopias of the early Spencer: a tolerant and plural community with a limited state administering justice between individuals, existing within a larger context of peaceful relations between industrial societies, which through competition produced yet better individuals, who in turn developed a higher ethic, marked by altruism and humane sentiments. When this destination appeared to be lost on the political and intellectual horizon, Spencer became cautious and gloomy, arguing that ‘No such nature as that which has filled Europe with millions of armed men, here eager for conquest and there for revenge … can, by any device, be framed into a harmonious community’.78 These were the words of a disillusioned but passionate internationalist. Between principles and power: Henry Sidgwick’s liberal internationalism Sidgwick’s moral philosophy and political thought – a brief overview In 1855, Henry Sidgwick, seventeen years of age, made the journey from Rugby to Cambridge, where he enlisted as an undergraduate at Trinity College, which, at the time, was mastered (in more than one sense) by the academic multi-tasker William Whewell. Sidgwick quickly took to Cambridge and Cambridge to him: he won several prizes and scholarships and soon became a member of the Apostles, a semi-secret discussion society. In 1859, he graduated with a double first and became a fellow of Trinity (a position he resigned in 1869), before ascending to the Knightbridge Chair of Moral Philosophy in 1883. Although a well known and central figure in the university – from his arrival as an undergraduate until his death forty-five years later, he was, except for one term, in Cambridge – Sidgwick never attracted academic fame and 121

Philosophy and internationalist ethics worship. In 1876, he married Eleanor Balfour (1845–1936), and together the Sidgwicks became two of the (disappointed) pioneers of psychical research in Britain, an interest that inevitably attracts a certain amount of scorn in the twenty-first century. Eleanor was the sister of the philosopher and Conservative politician Arthur James Balfour and, at the time of Henry’s marriage, Henry’s sister Mary had already married Edward White Benson, who became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1882. When Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister and Balfour’s uncle, visited Cambridge to receive an honorary degree, he naturally stayed with Sidgwick. This proximity to the establishment was an important aspect of Sidgwick’s life and thought.79 Above all, it is Sidgwick’s scepticism towards dogmatism in religious affairs that has coloured his image. A good case can be made that the decade leading up to 1869, when Sidgwick resigned his fellowship over the thirty-nine articles which dons were required to endorse, was decisive in his intellectual development.80 Sidgwick did not resolve the religious dilemma through this decision or through philosophy. His thought was in large part given over to continuous reflection on the religious conundrum, which in turn was marked by stern scepticism that it could ever really be settled. His occasional golfing partner John Maynard Keynes captured this quandary in his notorious and slightly condescending remark that Sidgwick ‘never did anything but wonder whether Christianity was true and prove it wasn’t and hope it was’. F. W. Maitland perhaps said it better when he pointed out that Sidgwick never forgot ‘the exact point where proof ended and only hope remained’.81 In 1874, Sidgwick published The Methods of Ethics, a landmark in moral philosophy. Following his inner religious conflicts, Sidgwick became sceptical of the possibility of an ideal, watertight ethical system. The book should be set against the backdrop of earlier ­nineteenth-century moral philosophy, especially the Cambridge moralists, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Whewell, George Grote and F. D. Maurice, to whom Sidgwick was directly exposed.82 Maurice and Whewell, both predecessors in the Knightbridge chair, made strong impressions on Sidgwick. In The Elements of Morality, Including Polity (1845), Whewell had presented a systematic view of morality, inspired by the science of geology, which included moral axioms such as justice, purity, order, earnest­ness and moral purpose, which were, Whewell claimed, intuitively known even if they were not self-evidently true. This ‘scientific’ starting point was reconciled with Whewell’s Anglicanism through a theory of moral progress, according to which humankind’s obedience to religi­ously inspired social rules grew ever more sincere.83 Although Sidgwick conceded to Whewell and intuitionism that there was a need for ‘a fundamental ethical intuition’ to get moral philosophical ­speculation off the ground, The Methods was singularly incredulous in 122

Philosophy and internationalist ethics its scrutiny of the larger moralist claim that the existence of morality or a moral realm in itself could afford evidence for, and reasons to believe in, Christianity.84 This conclusion contributed to the general sense of failure with which Sidgwick initially regarded his inquiry into the foundations of ethics. However, the bulk of Sidgwick’s most lasting book was devoted to an attempt to reconcile three different ethical systems (intuitionism, rational egoism and utilitarianism). The Methods provided a reformulated defence of utilitarianism, which avoided the psychological and motivational problems that Sidgwick identified in earlier statements and which overcame the moral philosophical stalemate between utilitarianism and intuitionism. The attempt to discover the inductive foundations of morality led Sidgwick to argue that utilitarianism was based on intuitionism. Furthermore, he argued that common-sense morality – which he failed to distinguish clearly from the intuitionism associated with Whewell – could be explained in terms of, and which also tended towards, the ethical doctrines of utilitarianism.85 Beyond these points, however, Sidgwick’s philosophical exploration reached a deadlock. Having explained that utilitarianism subsumed intuitionism, Sidgwick asked whether a utilitarianism which extended ethical obligations beyond the individual through its Benthamite dictum of ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number’ (universal hedonism) was more or less logical than rational egoism, which aimed at only individual pleasure. According to Sidgwick, both methods of reaching ethical decisions were rational and logically sound, and there was nothing to choose between them, as they both rested on self-evident principles. This conundrum – which Sidgwick termed ‘the dualism of practical reason’ – was the primary consideration behind his notorious description of ‘the prolonged effort of the human intellect to frame a perfect ideal of rational conduct’ as being ‘foredoomed to inevitable failure’.86 Morality was constituted by demands of reason; but reason did not make one unequivocal demand on action – quite to the contrary, reason could make conflicting demands.87 To Sidgwick, that invariably meant shipwreck. The Methods also discussed the merits of alternative philosophies, including idealism and social evolutionism. The engagement with idealism and social evolutionary theory (in the shape of Green and Spencer, respectively) was to be a mainstay of Sidgwick’s philosophy. Before turning to Sidgwick’s objections to evolutionary ethics, which are particularly instructive for our purposes, a word on his own method is in order. For Sidgwick, binary oppositions like deduction–induction or philosophy–history did not display the sharpness they often acquire in modern interpretations. His method defies easy classification, but Stefan Collini has captured its central point by stressing that Sidgwick favoured philosophical analysis – which emphasised reflection on widely 123

Philosophy and internationalist ethics shared patterns of thought through the medium of language – combined with ‘a few empirical generalizations indisputably true of the behaviour of members of advanced or “civilized” societies’. The conclusions that followed from this method were ‘of a roughly Utilitarian character’.88 This combination of reasoning and observation followed naturally from Sidgwick’s focus (in ethics as well as politics) on generalisation and practice. Obviously, the focus on practice meant taking the circumstances of particular cases into account. So, in that sense, Sidgwick balanced the various pitfalls of the inductive (historical) and the deductive (philosophical) method: he accepted that it was wrong to judge the past with eyes of today, but he also had much fun turning that into an argument ‘against attempts to base present maxims of policy upon inductions from past history’.89 The philosophical method Sidgwick often qualified by limiting the range of its assumptions to the ambit of political civilisation or, alternatively, by arguing that although they were perhaps not universally true, they were sufficiently true for his purposes. From being unbending assump­t ions, the basic utilitarian axioms were transformed into ‘principles implicit in the common political reasoning that it is the task of reflective analysis to systematize’. This move introduced some historicity into Sidgwick’s ethical or political man: he was a product of civilised history.90 The implications of this approach can be summed up in three words that point to the overlaps and (more strikingly obvious) the gulfs between Sidgwick and Spencer: precision, caution and gradualism. Although Sidgwick generally admired Spencer’s ethical system, he had little time for its utopianism. Not only was he critical of Spencer’s tendency to privilege ‘absolute ethics’ vis-à-vis non-ideal ‘relative ethics’, he was also quite sceptical of the underlying, all-pervading notion of evolution, which turned sociologists into unscientific prophets.91 Sidgwick’s preoccupation with Spencer reflected a mixture of admiration and exasper­ation, which stemmed from a difference of temperament: sociology (of which Spencer was the best-known representative) offered little more than ‘a mixture of vague and variously applied psychological analo­ gies, imperfectly verified historical generalisations, and unwarranted political predictions’.92 After re-reading Comte and Spencer, Sidgwick remarked in his journal in 1885 that, despite his admiration for their intellectual power and ‘amazement at their fatuous self-confidence’, they both totally lacked a notion of self-criticism, which Sidgwick found an invaluable tool in his own work.93 Despite differences in temperament, politics and philosophy, however, Sidgwick and Spencer moved closer towards the end of the century.94 In politics, Sidgwick generally fitted well, at least until the debacle over Home Rule, in the university liberalism that developed during the 1860s and which included among its adherents Goldwin Smith, 124

Philosophy and internationalist ethics A. V. Dicey and James Bryce. They shared a world-view in which ­individualism, benevolent nationalism of the Mazzinian variant, free trade and anti-dogmatism interlocked in an (apparently) comfortable and stable ideological pattern. Like many others, Sidgwick came to feel, quite profoundly, what his latest biographer has termed ‘the three great anxieties of modern liberalism’: fear of the mob (or Pöbel), fear of the implications of losing religious belief and fear that the French Revolution would be the beacon for the future.95 Yet Sidgwick did not feel these anxieties with the same force as, say, Maine or Dicey, whose overblown defences of individualism he never matched. On the other hand, while Sidgwick increasingly fell short of the higher tenets of Mill’s radicalism, his open-minded attitude to softer forms of collectivist liberalism and a deep engagement in university reform, including higher education for women, were broadly in the spirit of Mill.96 These progressive beliefs were, however, constantly tempered by a conservative tendency in Sidgwick’s outlook, which expanded notably following the liberal divorce over Home Rule in 1886 and was influenced by his proximity to Balfour. The estrangement from liberalism in its party political form proved permanent and, as Sidgwick’s support for Unionism weakened, he retired into a peculiar mix of esoteric liberalism and conservatism. Political progress, like scholarship, should be careful and considered, and it was these characteristics which, blended with his complacency and celebration of Western and civilised (English) political institutions, introduced a strong conservative element into his thought.97 ‘Das Henry Sidgwick Problem’? Sidgwick devoted two books to the study of politics, The Elements of Politics (1891) and The Development of European Polity (posthumously published in 1903). The former blended practical and moral philosophical concerns. It was conceived as an introduction to the study of politics and had certain structural similarities with The Methods in its attempt to introduce greater clarity and consistency through careful, and primarily deductive, analysis. Although Sidgwick argued that ‘we must endeavour to determine what ought to be, so far as the constitution and action of government are concerned, as distinct from what is or has been’, he also subjected the political conclusions reached by utilitarianism to careful analysis in order to demonstrate that they were roughly equivalent to the views held by the educated elite.98 In a sense, therefore, the method of The Methods was used to vindicate utilitarianism in Victorian political and intellectual life (even if the book left a nagging doubt: was utilitarianism believed because it was true, or vice versa?). In contrast, The Development of European Polity was basically a conjectural history of political society, spiced up with 125

Philosophy and internationalist ethics political thought in order to ­illuminate the ­transmission of Roman ideas into late eighteenth-century demands for liberty and equality. The lectures that formed the basis of the later book were delivered as part of the reformed moral sciences tripos at Cambridge and were clearly inspired by Sir John Robert Seeley’s Introduction to Political Science, which, edited by Sidgwick, was published posthumously in 1896.99 The aim was to establish, inductively, general laws of cause and effect in the development of political societies. This was an exercise different from that of philosophy as well as from ordinary history: political science conducted inductively did go some way towards a science and could, as a minimum, furnish limited, negative predictions.100 The divergence between the two books has led one scholar to detect ‘Das Henry Sidgwick Problem’ – ‘namely the difficulty of reconciling the fierce antihistoricism of The Elements of Politics with the whole enterprise of tracing the historical evolution of the modern state which he undertook in The Development of European Polity’.101 This discrepancy should not, however, be exaggerated. It is likely that Sidgwick became more comfortable with deriving limited predictions from a certain kind of thorough, well performed historical analysis, and that he realised that this stance was not incompatible with a preference for deductive analysis in moral (and political) philosophy, which was at any rate never fiercely anti-historical.102 Both books demonstrate Sidgwick’s self-satisfaction with civilised (British) political life. In Elements, the approach was utilitarian and indi­ vidualistic in the vein of Bentham.103 Yet, as Ritchie shrewdly pointed out in his (otherwise favourable) review of Elements, in Sidgwick the incessant reforming spirit of Bentham had been substituted by conservative moderation, vindicating the beliefs of the ruling elite: ‘If this is Benthamism, it is Benthamism grown tame and sleek’.104 In The Develop­ ment of European Polity, the conservative tendency took a different form. Sidgwick’s conjectural history was coloured by a gentle Western and British historical triumphalism, but his residual liberalism made him reluctant to declare history over and settle for pure preservation. The book also carried a promise for the future. Sidgwick made it clear that he dealt with political civilisation (i.e. Greek, Roman and modern European) and not with civilisation per se. Although he conceded that ‘civilisation is not a monopoly of the white race’, he found it safe to say that ‘higher political civilisation, the capacity for developing constitutional government in a civilised state’ belonged primarily to the white races of the Indo-Germanic language group.105 By investing political civilisation with a coherent and relatively tight-knit history, he could survey its development historically and thereby venture some limited predictions about its fate. But although this intellectual exercise was structurally analogous to social evolutionary arguments, Sidgwick’s time-frame was narrower, as he stuck to recorded history. But that did not impede a complacent 126

Philosophy and internationalist ethics attitude to past political development, accompanied by a muted confidence in gradual improvement. The hallmark of things to come was federalism, a solution that was accorded much attention in British political thought at the time. The successful US experience and the writings of E. A. Freeman, J. S. Mill, Montague Bernard and later James Bryce and Sidgwick made federalism popular in Britain.106 Sidgwick also tapped into a widely shared belief about the inevitably increasing size of political units. For Sidgwick, the important implication of this was not primarily a fraught international political situation, but rather a long-term peaceful development, where international federations complemented and superseded national and regional ones. Modern federalism satisfied a requirement for security, and so it led to larger political units while offering the best way of ‘recon­ ciling the maximum of liberty compatible with order’. Græco-Italian city-states, German tribes, the Archæan League, the recent German and Italian unifications and, most impressively, the United States of America led the always careful Sidgwick to argue that it was ‘not beyond the limits of a sober forecast to conjecture that some further integration may take place in the West European states’, and when this happened ‘the new political aggregate will be formed on the basis of a federal polity’.107 The limited predictions of continued refinement of European political society to a large extent complemented rather than contradicted his guarded analysis in the Elements. Sidgwick can rarely be placed firmly on one side of any equation, whether methodological or political. The rather skewed focus on domestic politics in existing scholarship has, perhaps, led to his conservative leanings being overemphasised. There are markedly progressive elements in Sidgwick’s political thought and moral philosophy, but these are disproportionately concerned with problems of international politics. Conservative and esoteric elements were found in this area also, but on the whole Sidgwick remained a steadfast liberal in international affairs. Sidgwick’s internationalist vision, which hardened during the final decade of his life, is important for understanding his political thought, its purposes and pitfalls. Sidgwick and the elements of international politics Sidgwick’s internationalism was neither dogmatic nor unchanging, and must be seen in relation to his thought as a whole, as well as in a wider intellectual context. The next three sections propose to do this: this (first) section is a critical exposition of the international dimension of Sidgwick’s textbook The Elements of Politics; the following section analyses two important internationalist essays that Sidgwick published (and re-published) in the 1890s and detects a significant change in his 127

Philosophy and internationalist ethics thought towards ‘defiant’ internationalism; the final section turns to the darker aspects of Sidgwick’s approach to international politics, including his views on violence and imperialism. Although internationalism was no uniform ideology, Sidgwick’s beliefs concerning international politics put him squarely within its core territory. Firstly, he distinguished only in degree between domestic and international politics: in both spheres there was a duty to act morally.108 Secondly, Sidgwick argued that international progress – the establishment of order and the achievement of justice at the international level – was possible, if not immanent, in the existing political configuration. This was closely related to his prediction of international alliances and federal polities, but it was also detectable in his shadowy confidence in moral progress. In the introduction to The Elements of Politics, Sidgwick argued that internal politics could be seen as prior to external politics, ‘since we can conceive … the union of the human race under one “parliament of man”’.109 Thirdly, Sidgwick subscribed to the most popular engines of international progress. He staunchly supported the doctrine of free trade, stressing that from a neutral point of view it was irrefutable. Free trade led to peace by aligning the interests of the industrial classes and by removing conflicts about access to new markets.110 Sidgwick also supported international law and arbitration, but, like Spencer, he was an exponent of moral internationalist arguments: the workings of mechan­ isms and institutions remained dependent on the development of the moral faculties of people and states in their international dealings. The discussion of international politics in The Elements of Politics is marked by the strong presence of Benthamite, analytical jurisprudence, as filtered through the work of John Austin. Sidgwick’s utilitarian bent naturally made him susceptible to this approach, and he accepted many of its basic tenets, including the privileging of positive over natural law. The latter, which he defined as ‘a higher law valid independently of human legislation’, was ‘on the whole, antiquated: and, indeed it seems to involve a grave and dangerous confusion between (1) Law as it is here and now, and (2) Law as it ought to be, the ideal by which Positive Law ought to be judged and, if possible, rectified’.111 Nevertheless, Sidgwick rejected the Austinian concept of sovereignty and he also defended the notion of international law as law, despite this inevitably involving a blurring of law as it is and law as it ought to be. According to Sidgwick, both positivism and some kind of naturalism (or ethical deductivism) were necessary.112 This approach to international law was in tune with self-professed positivist international lawyers like T. E. Holland and W. E. Hall – both of whom were acknowledged as sources of inspiration in the preface to the Elements. Like them, Sidgwick defended inter­national law as law, but it was a qualified defence, which encompassed the ‘convenient’ distinction between ‘legal’ (sanctions) and ‘moral’ duties (dis/approbation).113 128

Philosophy and internationalist ethics Indeed, on closer inspection, the distinction between law and morality in the international sphere introduces confusion rather than clarity, as international law comes to occupy an intermediate position. Thus, an ideal–typical distinction between international law and morality leads to the classification of real international law as a hybrid of the two.114 Sidgwick’s vision of international law continuing its development towards proper law reflected the ambivalence in its underlying jurisprudence. It was ‘undeniable that international law, like civil law, has been gradually made more definite and coherent’ and it was conceivable that this process would continue. In relation to the most fundamental questions of international relations, however, Sidgwick added a dose of scepticism. He had few illusions about the potency of arbitration in the face of national interests. He repeatedly argued that ‘the most important issues between States will not be settled by arbitration’.115 The process of ‘juridification’ of international law was therefore limited and applic­able only to certain, relatively unimportant, questions. According to Sidgwick, the deepest issues in international affairs would, for now, have to be governed by principles of international morality.116 This under­standing of international law is summed up in Figure 4.1.

Domestic politics

International politics International law covers both

Law

distinguished from

Morality

Law (enforced by sanctions) resolves Minor disputes and (most) fundamental questions

Law

and

Morality

International law resolves only Minor disputes

Morality is used to try to resolve Fundamental questions

Figure 4.1 – Sidgwick’s notion of international law

In sum, while the Elements supported the development of international law, it could also be read as a moral internationalist warning against putting too much faith in legal mechanisms.117 Sidgwick’s discussion contained many of the equivocations and aspirations also entertained by the international lawyers of his day, but on the whole he came across as more sceptical. Any expansive and over-confident notion of international law was immediately met in the Elements with admonitions of fragility. To what extent did this scepticism jeopardise Sidgwick’s 129

Philosophy and internationalist ethics federal utopia, that further ‘aggregation of mankind into larger unions’, hitherto ­fashioned for reasons of security and competition, which was his preferred development?118 Presumably, such arrangements would need a measure of effectual international law? Sidgwick argued that the financial costs of war, the increasingly industrial character of Western societies, and improved and intensified communications could bring about ‘an extensive federation of civilised states strong enough to put down wars among its members’.119 This prophecy notwithstanding, the starting point was the existence of the state, defined as a political society or community deriving its corporate unity from domestic obedience and external recognition. Ideally, state and nationality (defined as a ‘sentiment of unity’) coincided, and Sidgwick therefore poured cold water on wild hopes for European federation: There is not at present, and there is no immediate prospect of developing, any consciousness of common nationality among Euro­ peans or West-Europeans as such: and the practically dominant political ideal of the present age does not include an extension of government beyond the limits of the nation. As in Greek history the practically dominant ideal is a society of City-states, independent, though observing in their mutual relations some kind of common law, so, in the period to which we belong, it is a society of Nationstates under ‘International Law’.120

While Sidgwick ended on a bright note, it seems hard to escape the conclusion that even this ideal would be unrealisable if an atmosphere of hostility and egoism led to international law being continuously dis­ obeyed. But a central aspect of Sidgwick’s international thought was his consistent prioritisation of moral over legal or institutional transformative mechanisms: his limited, realisable ideal was not in the first instance a legal arrangement, but rather an underlying ethical transformation. In order to substantiate this claim, we need to look more closely at the right-hand side of Figure 4.1, at the grey area of international morality, or what Sidgwick termed international duties. In speaking of international duties, Sidgwick deployed a domestic analogy, despite conceding, in his usual style, that it was imperfect. The analogy was, however, sufficiently strong to determine ‘how far the accepted principles of civil order within a normal modern community are applicable to a society of independent States’.121 These ‘accepted principles of civil order’ were, according to Sidgwick, individualist. In international affairs, individualism, which had negative freedom as its cornerstone, translated into the principle of non-interference. Coupled with the fundamental moral idea of reciprocity, this doctrine issued in some general, negative ‘rules of mutual duty which it is desirable to maintain among civilised States’: abstention from ‘injuring any other 130

Philosophy and internationalist ethics State or its members (1) directly, or (2) by interference with rights of property, or (3) by non-performance of contract’. These ‘three rules of duty’, viewed from another angle, simultaneously constituted ‘the primary international rights’.122 This exposition embodied, however, the tensions that riddled Sidgwick’s understanding of international law. Principles of international duty were distinguished from prudential maxims of foreign policy, but Sidgwick also introduced a distinction between strict principles and principles that it is unkind or unfriendly not to adhere to.123 The obvious question is to what extent the strict principles – which have war as their potential sanction – are identical with the three basic duties? If this is so, do the basic duties form part of international law (properly so called) rather than international morality? This must be the implication when Sidgwick goes on to speak about ‘the limits of strict – or “legal” – international duty’, even if he complains that the legal rules are vague.124 In that case we are led back to a genuinely naturalist foundation for international law, for, as Sidgwick stressed, the basic principle of non-interference had its origin in natural law, which was antiquated in a civilised world.125 Sidgwick’s essays in international morality Despite, or perhaps as a result of, this common perplexity surrounding the status of international law, Sidgwick was clear that law was secondary to international morality. Disliking conflict, whether domestic or international, his proposed solution to each was often the same: moral education. Moral transformation was a necessary first step before the creation of institutions could further embed a new international order. An examination of Sidgwick’s writings on international politics in the 1890s – that includes his essays in practical ethics, most importantly ‘Public morality’ (1897) and ‘The morality of strife’ (1890/1898), as well as his treatises on politics – suggests that he became more ‘defiantly optimistic’ about the development of international morality.126 In ‘Public morality’, Sidgwick adamantly drove home the point that states, like individuals, were subject to ethical constraints, in the sense that their conduct could (and should) be scrutinised from a moral perspective. This was no straightjacket. Sidgwick argued that if states could not expect reciprocity in their dealings with other states, they were allowed a ‘corresponding extension of the right of self-protection, in the interest of humanity at large no less than in its own interest’ – a line of argument that could, in theory, be used to justify pre-emptive war. This reasoning was, however, based on the domestic analogy: a similar ­situation was possible in the dealings of individuals, which in turn allowed Sidgwick to stress that ‘the interests of the part [whether the state or individual] is to be pursued only in such manner and degree 131

Philosophy and internationalist ethics as is compatible with the interests of the larger community of which it is part’.127 ‘Public morality’ is arguably the most fundamental of ­Sidgwick’s internationalist writings, because it makes this simple point. It conveniently dodged vexed questions about this morality’s authority and legitimacy or how to avoid abuse. The basic and ideological character of the essay is underlined by the fact that Sidgwick felt a need to counter the standard objection to his internationalist position. In referring to his ideological opponents, Sidgwick speaks of those who maintain that ‘ordinary rules of veracity, justice, good faith, etc.’ cannot be applied to states. Such jibes at invisible and unnamed practical people were common among late nineteenth-century internationalists, but in this context Sidgwick referred to ‘the remarkable catena of authorities’ that Lord Acton had identified in a recent introduction to Machiavelli’s The Prince.128 Acton’s text is a catalogue of English and foreign writers who, knowingly or not, have expressed an essentially Machiavellian doctrine; Bacon and Carlyle are mentioned, as is the anti-internationalist menace James Fitzjames Stephen. However, a large number of the references are to German writers, which explains Sidgwick’s remark that the approval of breaches of the morality of states has been formulated in explicit general maxims, raised into a system, and deliberately applied by eminent students of history and political science to the acts of statesmen in remote ages and countries. This seems to be especially the case in Germany, where men of letters have in recent times taken the lead in advocating the emancipation of the statesman from the restraints of ordinary morality.129

This ideology of national egoism, biased patriotism and party feeling was the acknowledged enemy of internationalism. Apart from a general reaction to ‘the political idealism of the later eighteenth century’ and a venture to have patriotism take the place of Christianity, Sidgwick also credited the rise of neo-Machiavellianism to the success of the historical method and its underlying Hegelian idealism. From the idealist dictum that ‘the real is rational’, it seemed ‘an obvious inference that the man who succeeds is always in the right, whatever his path to success, the man who fails always in the wrong’.130 This indictment of German thought can be read as a tentative suggestion that philosophical idealism could be held partly responsible for a neo-Machiavellian doctrine in international affairs – an argument that gathered momentum in the early twentieth century.131 Responding to the different varieties of this debased, practical ideology, Sidgwick pointed out that it was possible to be practical without arguing that statesmen were exempted from ordinary moral constraints. The 1898 edition of ‘The morality of strife’ follows on logically from ‘Public morality’. It is an internationalist engagement with real ­international political problems. Sidgwick states his fundamental 132

Philosophy and internationalist ethics dislike of war as a means of solving disputes, but nevertheless attempts a realistic analysis of conflict resolution on the assumption that ‘the extinction of strife through the extension of amity’ is ‘at best a remote event’.132 This cool-headed starting point was based on the view that war was more than a conflict of interests – it normally involved a more fundamental conflict of different views of right and justice. If rights and justice could be clearly defined, the occurrence of war would diminish, but such a venture was ultim­ately impossible. A practical solution to the problem of war could only go some way in this direction. It is against this background that Sidgwick introduced a distinction between an external method and an internal or properly moral method (which resembles the distinction between institutional and moral arguments employed in this book). The former, exemplified in methods of arbitration, he defined as primarily legal, insti­t utional. Sidgwick supported arbitration, but history had showed ‘that minor violations of international rights – such as arbitration undoubtedly might settle – have rarely been the real causes, though they have often been the ostensible causes and the real occasions, of momentous wars’.133 In turning to the second or internal method, Sidgwick distinguished between the laws of war, widely viewed at the time as an expression of developed morality, and the attempt to cultivate a spirit of justice. The latter Sidgwick conceived as an ethical exercise in three steps, reminiscent of the ideal of the impartial spectator, where the object is to disagree in a way that prevents conflict from escalating into strife. This would cultivate a spirit of justice and facilitate the employment of the external method. Yet, according to Sidgwick, ‘there is hardly any plain duty of great importance in which civilised men fail so palpably as in this’.134 This remark highlights a characteristic feature of international­ ism at the time: faith is overwhelmingly invested in moral progress, which is nevertheless judged to have performed despairingly up until the time of writing. Paradoxically, it is as if the failure of moral progress in international affairs becomes the beacon not only of internationalist reform but also of a constructive, optimist attitude. If this is seen in the context of increasing rivalry among the European great powers and the race to carve up the world, Sidgwick’s internationalism looks defiantly stubborn in its insistence on the possibility of achieving progress, order and justice in international politics. In fact, there is some evidence that Sidgwick’s defiant internationalism was a product of the 1890s. There are crucial differences between the first (1890) and the second edition (1898) of ‘The morality of strife’.135 In the first edition, Sidgwick did not relate his discussion of international conflict to domestic and industrial conflict and, more importantly, in discussing the internal method of conflict resolution he put less emphasis on achieving an impartial perspective from where to 133

Philosophy and internationalist ethics view international conflicts:. ‘if we must be judges in our own cause, we must endeavour to be just judges’, Sidgwick argued.136 But this attempt to achieve impartiality was dramatically curtailed by a demand to stand by the patria in times of conflict. Sidgwick did not urge the thoughtful and moral part of every community to ‘keep coldly aloof from patriotic sentiment; when the struggle has commenced, it is doubtless right for most if not all men to side with their country unreservedly’.137 Aside from pointing to the esoteric, elitist tendencies in Sidgwick, this early formulation has clear affinities with the practical ideology that it purports to criticise.138 Further textual evidence suggests that Sidgwick’s internationalist beliefs hardened during the 1890s. In the first edition of the Elements (1891), Sidgwick argued that ‘we must proceed on the assumption that a universal political order, maintained by a government representing the civilised part of humanity, is an ideal beyond the range of practical effort’.139 This was not the only sceptical formulation omitted from the second edition (1896). Sidgwick seems to have realised that launching his international­ist vessel in such rocky and dangerous waters was detrimental to its safe passage. This might explain why the first edition was reluctant to call principles of international duty ‘law’ (a rhetorical move discussed above), why later editions were more adamant that states are restrained by duties, why Sidgwick omitted a reference to ‘the struggle for existence among individuals and societies’ in the second edition, and why the discussion and refutation of Hobbes’s claim that ‘right and wrong, justice and injustice have no place’ in international affairs was introduced only in the second edition.140 At this stage it is worth returning briefly to Sidgwick’s notion of an inter­ national society and its potential embodiment in international law and/ or federal institutions. If we recall the discussion of Sidgwick’s method in relation to his political writings and view this against the background of the movement towards defiant internationalism during the 1890s, it is perhaps less surprising why Sidgwick’s preference for federation in Elements translates into a ‘scientific’ prediction in The Develop­ment of European Polity. In the former, Sidgwick thought that the formation of temporary alliances against ‘aggression’ was the best way of ‘preparing the way for a permanent federation of civilised States, strong enough to prevent wars among its members’.141 It was clear that Sidgwick favoured federalism, but it was not until the closing pages of the latter book that the following (and by Sidgwick’s standards) daring conclusion was ventured: ‘When we turn our gaze from the past to the future, an extension of federalism seems to me the most probable of the political prophecies relative to the form of government’.142 But this prophecy was, of course, dependent on the moral development that Sidgwick in his later essays came to insist was ongoing but at present insufficient. The development of Sidgwick’s defiant internationalism during the 1890s was gradual and 134

Philosophy and internationalist ethics some notable tensions persisted but, equally important, The Elements of Politics and The Development of European Polity were consistent in their projection and pursuit of basic internationalist ideals. Sidgwick in practice: imperialism and violence This final section turns to the problematic aspects of Sidgwick’s approach to international politics, including his justification of imperialism and his purported rationalisation of violence. The main import of the analysis is that, while Sidgwick was clearly blighted by arrogance and a cultural understanding of racial difference, and while his utilitarian moral philosophy could (in principle) justify violence for the promotion of a vaporous common good, the most crucial problem in Sidgwick’s international thought lay in his reverence for authority. I argue that in dealing with these contentious aspects of the thought of historical figures we should avoid the twin pitfalls of condoning through silence or condemning through anachronism. Like most liberal intellectuals in the late nineteenth century, Sidgwick exuded arrogance and racial prejudice. Textual practices of subordination, fashioned along the contours of the distinction between civilisation and barbarism (undoubtedly linked to actual subordination and exploitation), are found in most writings about international and imperial questions at the time. Nevertheless, specifically in relation to the subject of race, we should not rush to conclusions about the extent to which it infused ­Victorian discourse. The mid-Victorian period was dominated by a civilisational perspective that worked against racism informed by biology, and although the closing decades of the century witnessed a more intense, biological discourse on race, the civilisational perspective was still powerful, partly because it could be stretched temporally so that the potential development of barbarism towards civilisation was located in the distant future.143 Sidgwick produced most of his political writings in these decades and when reviewing contemporary books with a marked tendency to racial stereotyping – Benjamin Kidd’s hugely popular Social Evolution (1894) and Charles Henry Pearson’s National Life and Character (1893) – he did not pick up on the theme.144 Sidgwick repeatedly condoned imperialist practices through employing, primarily, a distinction between ‘civilised’ and ‘barbaric’ peoples and, secon­darily, racial stereotypes grounded in an understanding of race that was as much cultural as biological. In his discussion of colonisation, Sidgwick wrote about ‘regions un­ inhabited except by savage tribes’ and of ‘aliens belonging to a lower grade of civilisation’.145 In the context of the fundamental duties that states owe to each other, he underscored that no class of societies (‘civilised’, ‘­semi-civilised’, ‘barbaric’) could be exempted from the basic inter­national 135

Philosophy and internationalist ethics duties when dealing with a civilised state. This formulation meant that the British and other empires could override duties of non-interference, contract performance and, perhaps most importantly, respect for private property in dealing with societies beyond the unstable borders of the ‘civilised world’. For the victims of European expansion, it was scant consolation that Sidgwick also supported some form of compensation for the damage done in the name of civilisation.146 Although he often referred to and distanced himself from the barbarous conduct of some imperialists, Sidgwick was a firm supporter of the British empire. He acknowledged that it had its drawbacks – including deaths, geo­political vulnerability and the risk of instigating great-power competition – but these were outweighed by material and, in particular, spiritual advantages. The latter derived from what Sidgwick termed ‘spiritual expansion’, the ‘sentimental advantages, derived from justifiable conquests’. There was, according to Sidgwick, a ‘justifiable pride’, linked to sentiments of patriotism, in ‘spreading the highest kind of civilisation’.147 In Sidgwick, liberal internationalism and liberal imperialism went hand in hand. However deplorable this appears today (and it is not a combination unfamiliar to the twenty-first century), for some liberals at the time it was a possible and apparently coherent combination. A number of approaches to this malaise are possible. One, silence, is clearly unsatisfactory. A full-blown ‘orientalist’ critique in the vein of the late Edward Said is the option chosen by Bart Schultz in his biography of Sidgwick. Schultz is right that many existing accounts of Sidgwick’s politics have dodged awkward questions about his eurocentrism and imperialism. And he does an admirable job of bringing out these prejudices – their sources, configuration and the conviction with which they were held. However, his indignant tone evokes a stern schoolmaster disappointed in his star pupil, a rather unhelpful attitude in discussing these inherently sensitive themes.148 Sidgwick was an influential philosopher who supported imperialism and who (deliberately or not) made a virtue out of a practice that he and many of his contemporaries (wrongly it appears to us) considered, if not a necessity, then at the very least a good idea. Being more sensitive to the contexts in which people held various beliefs can help us explain why what appears to us as inconsistent or unacceptable appeared consistent and attractive to the people we are studying. Such an approach does not mean condoning imperialism. There is some truth in the statement that ‘To gloss over the racism of the past is to perpetuate it’, but to castigate Sidgwick for ‘swimming in rather than examining the various prejudices of his times’ seems too obvious an instance of the intellectual historian longing to be a time-travelling moralist.149 In a related argument, Sissela Bok has laid bare how Sidgwick’s utilitarian moral philosophy, in combination with his paternalism, all too easily led to the justification of violence. She identifies a ‘conflict in Sidgwick’s 136

Philosophy and internationalist ethics approach to practical ethics: between the shared fundamental values he regards as duties, and his utilitarian convictions, which permit violations of such values as long as they promote the common good’.150 Bok points to classic pitfalls of utilitarian reasoning and identifies a complacency in Sidgwick with respect to wars and its effects, particularly beyond Europe. Arguably, however, she underplays the constraining elements in his line of reasoning. Sidgwick tried to argue his internationalist case on the presumption that interstate war would continue to be a prevalent way of settling disputes. Indeed, he stressed that ‘the evils of war are so keenly felt that the moralist may without danger allow himself to make the most of the opportunities of moral development that it affords’.151 He repeatedly condemned war not only in private but also in the theoretical pages of his political philosophy, and he sought to distinguish his utilitarianism from ‘national egoism’ by insisting on the universality of the ends that the chosen means should justify.152 In other words, aided by his internationalist beliefs, Sidgwick fought hard, and largely successfully, to avert a dualism of practical reason with respect to war. The most problematic aspect of Sidgwick’s approach to international and imperial politics is, I would suggest, his reverence for authority. His utilitarian moral philosophy (which strove to combine basic values with consequentialist reasoning) and his prejudices and paternalism surely did little to sharpen his tools for critique, but the main obstacle lay in ­Sidgwick’s conception of his own role as an intellectual when dealing with violence and imperialism. Compared with Spencer, Sidgwick was never an uncompromising, radical internationalist and he was certainly less troubled by imperial projects and their consequences. He also believed in rather than disliked authority and people in power, partly because he felt responsible for having educated the governing elite. Sidgwick opposed the South African War, confessing that he had ‘an “early Victorian” dislike of the whole affair’ and that he ‘thought the war unjustifiable on any principle of International right, and on the whole indefensible on grounds of policy: though I admit the situation a difficult one’.153 The political atmosphere added to the difficulty. Critics of the war were quickly castigated as pro-Boer. John Westlake, Sidgwick’s colleague at Cambridge, spoke out in favour of the war by arguing that the war was just even if it was not straightforwardly legal. Despite his private doubts, Sidgwick did not voice his opinion in public. He was not one to create a fuss and his moral indignation with the war, jingoism, particular British officials and the British people was characteristically tempered by practical or prudential considerations.154 This empathy with practitioners and the exigencies of practical politics was a vital dividing line between Spencer and Sidgwick, between radical and ‘government house’ internationalism. Sidgwick certainly had little of Spencer’s critical sharpness towards the powerful, and 137

Philosophy and internationalist ethics the ­estab­lish­ment’s philosopher castigated the maverick for his ‘tirade against militancy’ and wished he had maintained ‘a greater impartiality of tone’. Moreover, he had little time for Spencer’s sociological analysis when it was mixed with ‘one-sided rhetoric of a professional advocate of the Peace Society: cheap sneers at bishops for their warlike sentiments’.155 What Sidgwick aimed at in such deliberations was impartiality: let us reflect impartially on the morality of our own age and country. I am far from saying that English morality as regards external ­aggression is not open to criticism. But I recognise – what Mr. Spencer does not recognise – that the justification or excuse for lawless aggression that I deplore is not without a moral element: it is not aggression pure and simple, but violence in defence of what are conceived to be legitimate claims, which meets this regrettable sympathy.156

There is little doubt that Sidgwick went too far in his attempt to understand and sympathise with decision-makers in this respect. The effect of this supposed impartiality was almost inevitably partiality. He did not, it seems, have the nerve or the temper that required him to stand up to those responsible or, more simply, he did not think it his task. In short, he was not a radical in international affairs. There were contradictions between Sidgwick’s internationalism and his imperialism and, less obviously, within his internationalism. We clearly ought to identify these inconsistencies as well as Sidgwick’s tendency to accommodate, rather than speaking truth to power. But we should not conflate distinct issues or let Sidgwick’s imperialism nullify his internationalist beliefs. Quentin Skinner has argued that ‘The business of the historian … is surely to serve as a recording angel, not a hanging judge’.157 While the unimpeded anachronistic application of our moral standards to history is clearly unsatisfactory, I wonder if even recording angels are not sometimes constrained by their lofty perspective or their flapping wings. We ought to strive for a more balanced vantage point, one which can be occupied by humans rather than unearthly beings. Sidgwick’s liberal internationalism is best understood in the wider context in which his ideas were conceived. His approach to inter­national law mirrored those of contemporary international lawyers by wavering between a strictly positivist and a thinly disguised naturalist conception of law while, at the same time, overcoming the Austinian challenge that international law did not amount to law. But Sidgwick’s internationalism was above all moral. It was grounded in a few fundamental duties originat­ ing in natural law thinking and which demanded non-intervention, the sanctity of contracts (treaties) and respect for property in the dealings of civilised societies. During the 1890s, ­Sidgwick’s internationalism became increasingly defiant and insistent on the ­possibility of moral ­education and transformation. This shift of emphasis in Sidgwick’s thought 138

Philosophy and internationalist ethics occurred in spite of, or perhaps because of, the deterioration of greatpower politics in the final decade of the nineteenth century. However, Sidgwick’s internationalism also went hand in hand with a reverence for authority and a rationalisation of imperial projects. Although his writings display a movement towards a high-minded moralistic internationalism, his actions were much less radical. In many contexts we encounter the phrase ‘putting principles into practice’. This was not Sidgwick’s project. In his writings he often aimed at distilling some realistic principles from reason and practice. These principles should, in turn, guide the ruling and emerging elites. In Sidgwick’s international thought, however, this method was sometimes reduced to putting practice into principles. He was surely an internationalist, but of a more private, academic kind than many before or after him. Not a natural campaigner, pamphleteer or politician, Sidgwick was above all a professor at Cambridge. It is a character­istic of his philosophical and religious thought that he invariably ended up facing inescapable, insoluble conundrums. The problem was less complicated and arguably more serious in his international thought, where he was caught between principles and power. Conclusion In late nineteenth-century British philosophical discourse, we find a marked emphasis on the problems and perils of international politics as well as a liberal internationalist concern with the existence, fragility and future of international morality. There was, in short, a philosophical language of liberal internationalist ideology. Philosophical idealism, particularly in T. H. Green’s version, was an important element in the intel­lectual underpinnings of liberal internationalist ideology. As we have seen, however, other idealist philosophers challenged aspects of liberal internationalism. In the social and political thought of Herbert Spencer and Henry Sidgwick we find sustained attempts to theorise international relations from a liberal internationalist perspective, producing valuable ideological resources in the process. But while the analysis above has highlighted a considerable overlap in internationalist values between Spencer and Sidgwick, it has also identified their different temper and the markedly different ways in which they arrived at their beliefs. Ultimately, Spencer’s evolutionary system and the sharp edge of his internationalist criticisms reflected his radical heritage. Conversely, Sidgwick’s relatively moderate internationalism and cautious method reflected his empathy with and loyalty to people in power. Taken as a whole, the analysis points to the concomitant diversity and strength of internationalism as a ­political ideology among successful liberal philosophers and their ­audiences in the late nineteenth century. 139

Philosophy and internationalist ethics Notes 1 Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols (London, 1904), II, p. 466. 2 A recent, and historically ill-informed, attempt to reintroduce evolutionary biology into IR bizarrely sees Spencer as a perverted Darwinian. Bradley A. Thayer, Darwin and International Relations (Lexington, 2004), pp. 15, 273. 3 See for example J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer (London, 1971); David ­Wiltshire, The Social and Political Thought of Herbert Spencer (Oxford, 1978); Jonathan H. Turner, Herbert Spencer (London, 1985); M. W. Taylor, Men versus the State (Oxford, 1992); David Weinstein, Equal Freedom and Utility (Cambridge, 1998); John Offer (ed.), Herbert Spencer, 4 vols (London, 2000); Mark Francis, Herbert Spencer and the Invention of Modern Life (London, 2007). Exceptions include Fabrizio Battistelli, ‘War and militarism in the thought of Herbert Spencer’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology, 34 (1993), 192–209; Paul Crook, Darwinism, War and History (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 40–7; T. S. Gray, The Political Philosophy of Herbert Spencer (Aldershot, 1996), ch. 7; David Weinstein, ‘Imagining Darwinism’, in Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis (eds), Utilitarianism and Empire (Lanham, 2005), 189–209. 4 In 1915, Alfred W. Tillett published a loyal exposition, written before the war, of Spencer’s views on international politics and their importance for his philosophy. See Alfred W. Tillett, Militancy versus Civilization (London, 1915). Spencer’s philosophy was briefly revived following the wartime experience of increased state intervention. The main occasion was the publication of Hugh Elliot, Herbert Spencer (London, 1917). See also Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided (Oxford, 1985), pp. 29–30. 5 Herbert Spencer, ‘Anglo-American arbitration’ [1896], in Facts and Comments (London, 1902), 129–30; Herbert Spencer, The Man versus the State [1884], in Man versus the State (Indianapolis, 1982), 1–177, p. 174. 6 Bart Schultz, Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge, 2004). The most striking example of the condescending attitude is Stefan Collini, ‘My roles and their duties: Sidgwick as philosopher, professor and public moralist’, in Ross Harrison (ed.), Henry Sidgwick (Oxford, 2001), 9–49. But see also Jonathan Ree, ‘Ethics, utilitarianism, and positive boredom’, in Harrison, Henry Sidgwick, pp. 51–7. 7 Both examples are from Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, pp. 569 and 603, respectively. See also Collini, ‘My roles and their duties’, especially pp. 27–9. 8 See for example David Boucher and Andrew Vincent, British Idealism and ­Political Theory (Edinburgh, 2000); Sandra den Otter, British Idealism and Social Explanation (Oxford, 1996); Peter Nicholson, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists (Cambridge, 1990). 9 T. H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation [1886], in Collected Works of T. H. Green, ed. P. Nicholson, 5 vols (Bristol, 1997), II, 334–553, sections 163, 166–7, 170–1; T. H. Green, Prolegomena to Ethics [1883], in Collected Works, IV, book 3. See also Duncan S. A. Bell and Casper Sylvest, ‘International society in Victorian political thought: T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Sidgwick’, Modern Intellectual History, 3 (2006), 207–38; Denys P. Leighton, ‘T. H. Green and the dissidence of dissent: on religion and national character in nineteenth-century England’, Parliamentary History, 27 (2008), 43–56. 10 See also John Morrow, ‘British idealism, German philosophy and the First World War’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 28 (1982), 380–90; Casper Sylvest, ‘Beyond the state? Pluralism and internationalism in early twentieth-century Britain’, International Relations, 21 (2007), 67–85.

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Philosophy and internationalist ethics 11 See especially David Boucher, ‘British idealism, the state, and international relations’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 55 (1994), 671–94; Peter P. Nicholson, ‘Philosophical idealism and international politics. A reply to Dr Savigear’, British Journal of International Studies, 2 (1976), 76–83; Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords (Princeton, 2005); and the discussion in chapter 6. 12 See for example Viscount [Richard Burdon] Haldane, ‘The higher nationality’ [1913], in The Conduct of Life and Other Addresses (London, 1914), 99–136. See also Andrew Vincent, ‘German philosophy and British public policy: Richard Burdon Haldane in theory and practice’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 68 (2007), 157–79. 13 Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State (London, 1899), pp. 320, 324–5. 14 See particularly Bernard Bosanquet, ‘Patriotism in the perfect state’, in Eleanor M. Sidgwick, Gilbert Murray, A. C. Bradley, L. P. Jacks, G. F. Stout and B. ­Bosanquet, The International Crisis in Its Ethical and Psychological Aspects (London, 1915), 132–54; Bosanquet, ‘The function of the state in promoting the unity of mankind’ [1917], in The British Idealists, ed. D. Boucher (Cambridge, 1997), 270–95. But see also Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, fourth edition (London, 1965), pp. xlv–lxii; Nicholson, Political ­Philosophy, pp. 221–9. For the critics, see for example C. Delisle Burns, Bertrand Russell and G. D. H. Cole, ‘Symposium: the nature of the state in view of its external relations’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, new series, 16 (1915–1916), 290–325; L. T. Hobhouse, ‘Introduction to the second edition’ [1909], in Democ­racy and Reaction, ed. P. F. Clarke (New York, 1973 [1904]), 247–80; L. T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London, 1960 [1918]); J. A. Hobson, Towards International Government (London, 1915), p. 178. 15 F. H. Bradley, ‘The limits of individual and national self-sacrifice’, International Journal of Ethics, 5 (1894), 17–28, at p. 27. 16 David G. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics, second edition (London, 1891), pp. 34, 36. 17 D. G. Ritchie, ‘War and peace’, International Journal of Ethics, 11 (1901), 137–58, at pp. 147, 154. The article sparked a series of heated exchanges between Ritchie and John M. Robertson, defending a radical internationalist view. 18 See Ross Harrison, ‘Utilitarians and idealists’, in P. Baldwin (ed.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, 2003), 255–65. 19 F. J. C. Hearnshaw, ‘Herbert Spencer and the individualists’, in F. J. C. Hearnshaw (ed.), The Social and Political Ideas of Some Representative Thinkers of the Victorian Age (London, 1933), 53–83, at pp. 56, 55. 20 Peel, Herbert Spencer, p. 54. 21 Peel, Herbert Spencer, p. 76. For a good discussion of the contexts from which Spencer’s early philosophy sprang, see Francis, Herbert Spencer, chs 7–11. 22 Herbert Spencer, The Proper Sphere of Government [1842–1843], reprinted in Spencer, Man versus the State, 179–263. Most, though not all, of Spencer’s works cited here are included in Herbert Spencer, Collected Writings, ed. M. W. Taylor, 12 vols (London, 1996). 23 Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Ethics, 2 vols (Indianapolis, 1978 [1879– 1893]), II, p. 62. 24 Spencer, Proper Sphere of Government, p. 186. 25 Herbert Spencer, Social Statics (London, 1851), pp. 13, 62, 66, 77–8, 280. On Spencer’s utilitarianism, see Weinstein, Equal Freedom and Utility. 26 Spencer, Proper Sphere of Government, p. 187. Famously, Spencer also argued

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against state-directed poor relief. See Spencer, Proper Sphere of Government, pp. 200–1; Spencer, Social Statics, ch. 25; Boyd Hilton, The Age of Atonement (Oxford, 1986), pp. 296, 311. For a revisionist account of Spencer’s political thought, see Francis, Herbert Spencer, especially chs 15, 18, 19. Weinstein, Equal Freedom and Utility, p. 78. For Spencer’s later explicit refutation of natural rights theory, see the final chapter of The Man versus the State. On Spencer and associationist psychology, see George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987), pp. 128–37. Wiltshire, Social and Political Thought, p. 192. See also Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason (London, 1971), p. 90. I cannot elaborate the (somewhat overdrawn) distinction between Darwinian and Lamarckian concepts of evolution. For good discussions, see Peter J. Bowler, The Invention of Progress (Oxford, 1989); John Burrow, Evolution and Society (Cambridge, 1966); Francis, Herbert Spencer, ch. 12; Stocking, ­Victorian Anthropology. This was reflected in Spencer’s definition of evolution as change from ‘an indefinite, incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent, heterogeneity’. Herbert Spencer, First Principles (London, 1867), p. 396. See for example Herbert Spencer, Political Institutions (London, 1882), para­g raph 582. See also John Burrow, ‘Historicism and social evolution’, in Benedikt Stuchtey and Peter Wende (eds), British and German Historiography 1750–1950 (Oxford, 2000), 251–64, especially p. 262. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, part I [1879]) and part V [1893]. On altruism and its place in Victorian intellectual life, see Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford, 1991), ch. 2. Spencer, Social Statics, pp. 416, 448–9. Burrow, Evolution and Society, pp. 97–9. See also Peter Mandler, The English National Character (New Haven, 2006), pp. 72–86. Spencer left room for differences of time and circumstance when discussing the evolution of various communities. See for Spencer, Political Institutions, paragraph 578. He also argued that apparently ‘backward’ races which had enjoyed long periods of peace had been allowed to develop superior sentiments of ethics and justice. See for example Spencer, Principles of Ethics, II, p. 49n. For discussions of this theme, see Peel, Herbert Spencer, ch. 6; Stocking, ­Victorian Anthropology, pp. 224–8, 236. The best detailed analysis of Spencer’s concept(s) of evolution is Robert G. Perrin, ‘Herbert Spencer’s four theories of social evolution’, American Journal of Sociology, 81 (1976), 1339–59. Burrow, Evolution and Society, p. 227. Spencer, ‘The filiation of ideas’ [1899], in David Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London, 1908), 533–76, at p. 568. Spencer, ‘From freedom to bondage’ [1891], in Man versus the State, pp. 487–518, at p. 515. Herbert Spencer, ‘The social organism’ [1860], in Man versus the State, 383–434; Spencer, ‘Progress: its law and cause’ [1857], in Essays, 3 vols (London, 1891), I, 8–63. T. H. Huxley, ‘Administrative nihilism’ [1871], reprinted in Offer, Herbert Spencer, IV, 56–74, at p. 65. Cf. Spencer, ‘Specialized administration’ [1871], in Man versus the State, 435–86. Spencer, The Man versus the State, p. 71. Spencer, Political Institutions, paragraph 582. On Spencer’s wide concept of sociology, ‘the study of Evolution in its most complex form’, see Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (London, 1873)

Philosophy and internationalist ethics

45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

66

67 68 69 70 71

p. 385; Spencer, Principles of Sociology, 3 vols (London, 1876–96), I, p. v. See also Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 187–208. Spencer, Proper Sphere of Government, p. 213. Spencer, Social Statics, p. 15. Spencer, Proper Sphere of Government, p. 216. Spencer, Social Statics, pp. 13, 65. Spencer, Social Statics, pp. 270–1. Spencer himself later argued that his early views on war were untenable. See Spencer, Autobiography, I, pp. 209–10. Spencer, Social Statics, pp. 272–3. Spencer, Proper Sphere of Government, p. 261; Spencer, Social Statics, p. 360. Spencer, ‘The filiation of ideas’, p. 569. See also Spencer, Political Institutions, paragraph 435. In his early writings, Spencer had identified population pressure (leading to conflict) as the immediate cause of progress. Herbert Spencer, ‘Mr. Martineau on evolution’ [1871], in Essays, I, 371–88; Herbert Spencer, ‘Evolutionary ethics’ [1893], in Various Fragments (London, 1897), 111–18. See for example Spencer, Social Statics, pp. 420f; Spencer, ‘Specialized administration’. The distinction was common among provincial radicals and supporters of the Anti-Corn Law League and has roots stretching back to Montesquieu, Scottish enlightenment thought and Comte. This table is derived from the analyses in Spencer, Political Institutions, chs 17, 18; Spencer, Principles of Ethics, part II. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, part I; Spencer, Political Institutions, paragraph 561. See also Mike Hawkins, Social Darwinism in European and American Thought 1860–1945 (Cambridge, 1997), p. 92. Spencer, Political Institutions, paragraph 567. See the discussion in Spencer, ‘Evolutionary ethics’. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York, 1959). Spencer, Principles of Ethics, II, p. 442. Here, Spencer deployed a classical liberal argument about interdependence and the peaceful effects of commerce. Spencer, Political Institutions, paragraph 577. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, I, p. 307. Spencer, Social Statics, p. 474. These four types of society resemble, but are not identical with, Spencer’s typology of simple, compound, doubly-compound, and trebly-compound ­societies. See Spencer, Principles of Sociology, I, paragraph 270; Battistelli, ‘War and militarism’. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, II, p. 88. This distinction is mentioned in Social Statics, but discussed in detail only in Spencer, Principles of Ethics, and Spencer, ‘Absolute political ethics’ [1890], in Essays, III, 217–28. Sidgwick was critical of this distinction and argued that in practice all we needed was relative ethics. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics, seventh edition (London, 1907 [1874]), p. 18; Sidgwick, ‘Mr Spencer’s ethical system’, Mind, 5 (1880), 216–26. Spencer, Principles of Ethics, II, p. 240. Spencer, ‘Absolute political ethics’, p. 228; Spencer, Principles of Ethics, I, pp. 268–9. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, paragraph 852. Spencer, Principles of Sociology, paragraph 853. Spencer predictably described his involvement in the League as ‘the greatest disaster of my life’. Spencer, Autobiography, II, p. 375. See also Spencer to John Bright, 2 July 1881, in Duncan, Life and Letters, p. 221; Spencer, ‘The

143

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72

73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81

82 83 84

85

144

Anti-Aggression League’, Non-conformist and Independent (2 March 1882), p. 185; Paul Laity, The British Peace Movement, 1870–1914 (Oxford, 2001), pp. 95–9. Spencer was a source of inspiration to the late nineteenth-century peace move­ment, most notably through his friendship with Carnegie. See Andrew Carnegie, Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie, ed. J. C. Van Dyke (London, 1920), p. 338. Spencer had already lambasted ‘the great-man-theory of history’ in 1873, in The Study of Sociology. For his attacks on the clergy, see Spencer, The Prin­ ciples of Sociology, part IV, III, paragraphs 583–660, especially paragraph 631; Spencer, ‘From freedom to bondage’, especially p. 516; Spencer, Principles of Ethics, I, p. 350. For a biting attack on colonists and politicians, see Spencer to F. W. Chesson, 18 November 1880, in Duncan, Life and Letters, pp. 219–20. In the realm of culture, Spencer condemned Rudyard Kipling, ‘in whose writings one-tenth of nominal Christianity is joined with nine-tenths of real paganism’. Spencer, ‘Re-barbarization’, in Facts and Comments, 122–33, at p. 131. See for example Donal Lowry (ed.), The South-African War Reappraised (Manchester, 2000); Thomas Pakenham, The Boer War (London, 1992 [1979]); Iain R. Smith, The Origins of the South African War, 1899–1902 (London, 1996). Herbert Spencer, ‘Imperialism and slavery’, in Facts and Comments, 112–21; Duncan, Life and Letters, pp. 421–3. See Spencer to Kentaro Kaneko, 21 August, 23 August, 26 August 1892, all in Duncan, Life and Letters, pp. 319–23; on arbitration, see Spencer, ‘AngloAmerican arbitration’. Spencer to E. Cazelles, 6 December 1896, in Duncan, Life and Letters, pp. 399–400. Spencer, The Study of Sociology, pp. 205–6; Spencer, ‘Patriotism’, in Facts and Comments, 88–91. Spencer, ‘From freedom to bondage’, p. 516. For biographical treatments, see A. Sidgwick and E. M. Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick (London, 1906); Schultz, Henry Sidgwick. Most of the texts referred to below are found in The Works of Henry Sidgwick, 15 vols (Bristol, 1996). Stefan Collini, ‘The ordinary experience of civilized life. Sidgwick’s politics and the method of reflective analysis’, in Bart Schultz (ed.), Essays on Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge, 1992), 333–67. John Maynard Keynes (to Bernard Swithinbank, 27 March 1906) and F. W. Maitland (not dated), both quoted in Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, pp. 4, 689. Maitland also pointed out how Sidgwick’s approach to religion led to a great deal of Weltschmerz. See F. W. Maitland, ‘Henry Sidgwick’ [1906], in The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, ed. H. A. L. Fisher, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1911), III, 531–40. J. B. Schneewind, ‘Sidgwick and the Cambridge moralists’, in Schultz, Essays on Henry Sidgwick, 93–121. William Whewell, The Elements of Morality, Including Polity, 2 vols (London, 1845); J. B. Schneewind, ‘Whewell’s ethics’, in Nicholas Rescher (ed.), American Philosophical Quarterly Monographs No. 1 (Oxford, 1968), 108–41. Sidgwick, Methods, pp. xv–xxi, at p. xvi (‘Preface to the sixth edition’). This had led Schneewind to argue that the book should also be regarded as ‘the presentation of the negative results of a theological investigation’. Schneewind, ‘Sidgwick and the Cambridge moralists’, p. 118. For a definition of the most common form of intuitionism, see Sidgwick, Methods, p. 101. But see also Bernard Williams, ‘The point of view of the universe: Sidgwick and the ambitions of ethics’ [1982], in Making Sense of Humanity and Other Philosophical Papers (Cambridge, 1995), 153–71.

Philosophy and internationalist ethics 86 Sidgwick, Methods [first edition, 1874], p. 473. See also the preface to the sixth edition of Methods. 87 See also J. B. Schneewind, Sidgwick’s Ethics and Victorian Moral Philosophy (Oxford, 1977), pp. 303–4. 88 Collini, ‘The ordinary experience’, p. 339. 89 Henry Sidgwick, The Elements of Politics, third edition (London, 1908 [1891]), p. 8. See also Sidgwick, ‘Political prophecy and sociology’ [1894], in Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses (London, 1904), 216–34, especially pp. 223–4. 90 Collini, ‘The ordinary experience’, p. 348. See also Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, p. 559. 91 See Sidgwick, Methods of Ethics, p. 18 and the accompanying footnote. See also Sidgwick, ‘Mr Spencer’s ethical system’, especially pp. 225–6; Henry Sidgwick, ‘The relation of ethics to sociology’, International Journal of Ethics, 10 (1899), 1–21; Henry Sidgwick, Lectures on the Ethics of T. H. Green, Mr. Herbert Spencer and J. Martineau (London, 1902), p. 206. Already in 1873, Sidgwick felt moved to criticise Spencer ‘somewhat severely’. Sidgwick to F. W. H. Myers, February 1873, Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS Sidgwick 100/237. 92 Henry Sidgwick, ‘The scope and method of economic science’ [1885], in Miscellaneous Essays and Addresses, 170–99, at p. 198. 93 Diary entry, 11 August 1885, quoted in Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, p. 421, see also pp. 277, 436. Sidgwick described Spencer as ‘our most eminent living philosopher’ and he lamented that Spencer’s philosophy still lingered in ‘the cold shade of official neglect’. Sidgwick, ‘Political prophecy and sociology’, p. 222; and Sidgwick, ‘The relation of ethics to sociology’, p. 2. 94 See David Weinstein, ‘Deductive hedonism and the anxiety of influence’, Utilitas, 12 (2000), 329–46; Taylor, Men versus the State, p. 220. 95 Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, p. 27. See also Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism (London, 1976). 96 Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, p. 593. 97 See also Williams, ‘The point of view of the universe’. 98 Sidgwick, Elements of Politics, p. 7. Sidgwick was deeply sceptical about the book. See especially his letter to J. A. Symonds, 1 December 1887 (reproduced in Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, p. 481), which contains the downbeat remark that ‘my deep conviction is that [the method of The Elements of Politics] can yield as yet little fruit of practical utility – so doubt whether it is worth while to work it out in a book. Still man must work – and a Professor must write books’. 99 J. R. Seeley, Introduction to Political Science, ed. H. Sidgwick (London, 1896). 100 Henry Sidgwick, The Development of European Polity, ed. E. M. Sidgwick (London, 1903), pp. 2–3, 6. 101 Collini, ‘The ordinary experience’, p. 353. 102 Sidgwick clearly thought of the two approaches to politics as complementary. See Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, p. 562; Sidgwick, ‘Political prophecy and sociology’; and compare chapter 1 of the first and third editions of Sidgwick, Elements. Collini has suggested that, had Sidgwick lived to publish The Development of European Polity himself, the relative optimism about evolution and inference from induction would have played less of a role. In light of the analysis below, I find this claim doubtful. Collini, ‘The ordinary experience’, pp. 354, 358. 103 See particularly Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 39, 43, 208. 104 D. G. Ritchie, Review of Henry Sidgwick, The Elements of Politics, Inter­ national Journal of Ethics, 2 (1891–1892), 254–7. 105 Sidgwick, Development, p. 13, italics in original.

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Philosophy and internationalist ethics 106 John Pinder, ‘The federal idea and the British liberal tradition’, in Andrea Bosco (ed.), The Federal Idea (London, 1991), 99–118. 107 Sidgwick, Development, pp. 437, 439. 108 See particularly Sidgwick, ‘Public morality’, in Sidgwick, Practical Ethics (London, 1898), 52–82, especially pp. 77, 82. See also Sidgwick, Elements, ch. 15. 109 Sidgwick, Elements, p. 16. See also p. 219. 110 Henry Sidgwick, Principles of Political Economy, third edition (London, 1901 [1883]), book 3, ch. 5; Sidgwick, Elements, ch. 18. 111 Sidgwick, Elements, p. 22. See also Methods, ch. 2. 112 Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 29, 285–6 and the appendix. See also Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, pp. 623–6. 113 Sidgwick, Elements, p. 287. In the preface and in the chapter on ‘Principles of international duty’ (p. 249), Sidgwick mentioned his ‘extensive obligation’ to Hall’s work. On Hall, see the discussion in chapter 3 of the present volume. Sidgwick’s list of sources for this part of the book also included Bentham, Mill, Austin and Pollock. 114 Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 291–3. The distinction is made on two levels: sanctions and definiteness/consistency. 115 Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 288–9; see also pp. 263–5, 300. 116 Sidgwick, Elements, p. 297. 117 When F. W. Maitland read the proofs of The Elements, he was particularly impressed with the discussion of international law, which he thought was ‘all shreds and patches’. Maitland to Sidgwick, 11 December 1888, in The Letters of Frederic William Maitland, ed. C. H. S. Fifoot (Cambridge, 1965), p. 54. 118 Sidgwick, Elements, p. 219. 119 Sidgwick, Elements, p. 219. 120 Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 219–20; see also, pp. 221, 224–5. 121 Sidgwick, Elements, p. 241. 122 Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 244–5. 123 Sidgwick, Elements, ch. 15. 124 Sidgwick, Elements, p. 264. 125 Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 243–4. 126 Both essays were included in Practical Ethics (1898) and were posthumously recycled – in timely fashion – during and after the Great War. See primarily [Henry Sidgwick], National and International Wrongs, ed. J. Bryce and E. M. Sidgwick (London, 1919); Eleanor M. Sidgwick, ‘The morality of strife in relation to the war’, in The International Crisis, 1–21. 127 Sidgwick, ‘Public morality’, pp. 81–2. 128 Sidgwick, ‘Public morality’, p. 55. Lord Acton, ‘Introduction’, in Niccolo ­Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. L. Arthur Burd (Oxford, 1891), xix–xl. See also chapter 5. 129 Sidgwick, ‘Public morality’, p. 59. 130 Sidgwick, ‘Public morality’, p. 66. 131 In comparison with many British liberals, Sidgwick’s view of Germany was fairly negative. He visited Germany at the time of the Franco-Prussian War, which he declared ‘a disgrace to civilization’. Henry Sidgwick to Mary Sidgwick, 1870 [undated], MS Sidgwick 99/141; see also Sidgwick to Mrs Clough, 9 January 1871, MS Sidgwick 105/26. 132 Henry Sidgwick, ‘The morality of strife’ [1890], in Practical Ethics, 83–112, at p. 89. 133 Sidgwick, ‘The morality of strife’, p. 100. These formulations are quite similar to those found in Waltz, Man, the State and War, p. 232. 134 Sidgwick, ‘The morality of strife’, p. 106.

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Philosophy and internationalist ethics 35 See also Collini, ‘My roles and their duties’, pp. 27–9. 1 136 Henry Sidgwick, ‘The morality of strife’, International Journal of Ethics, 1 (1890), 1–15, at p. 13. 137 Sidgwick, ‘The morality of strife’ [1890], p. 14. 138 Some of these tensions are brought out nicely by Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, pp. 621–3, in the context of a discussion of a letter Sidgwick sent to Lord Lytton after receiving comments on the ‘international’ chapters of the Elements. 139 Sidgwick, Elements [first edition, 1891], p. 228. 140 Sidgwick, Elements [first edition, 1891], p. 228; Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 240–1. In The Methods, rational egoism is associated with Hobbes and self-preservation. See preface to the sixth edition of The Methods, p. xvii. 141 Sidgwick, Elements of Politics, p. 267. See also pp. 16, 301–2, 310, 544. 142 Sidgwick, Development, p. 439. 143 See also Mandler, The English National Character, pp. 72–86. 144 See Sidgwick, ‘Political prophecy and sociology’. 145 Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 310, 328. Sidgwick also described China as ‘the one alien civilisation that it remains Europe to overcome’. Sidgwick to Rev. E. M. Young, 13 August 1900, Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, p. 597. 146 Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 244, 256. 147 Sidgwick, Elements, pp. 312–13. Sidgwick was generally reluctant to press the economic case for empire. 148 Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, pp. 317, 731 (n.46 and n.51) and ch. 7. 149 Bart Schultz, ‘Sidgwick’s racism’, in Schultz and Varouxakis, Utilitarianism and Empire, 211–50, at pp. 246, 244; Schultz, Henry Sidgwick, p. 670. 150 Sissela Bok, ‘Henry Sidgwick’s practical ethics’, Utilitas, 12 (2000), 361–78, at p. 371. 151 Sidgwick, ‘The morality of strife’ [1898], p. 91. Bok also castigates Sidgwick for his remarks in this essay about the benefits of the laws of war. This was a commonplace view at the time, and Bok’s astonishment that ‘someone so knowledgeable about international affairs’ (and its practices of conquest and repression) could have allowed the essay ‘simply to be republished’ (Bok, ‘Sidgwick’s practical ethics’, p. 371) is off the mark: the essay was significantly revised and, in fact, the paragraph in question does not appear in the first edition. 152 See for example Sidgwick, Lectures, p. 237; Sidgwick to Mary Sidgwick, [undated] 1870, MS Sidgwick 99/141. 153 Sidgwick to Mrs William Sidgwick, 2 March 1900, and Sidgwick to H. G. Dakyns, 3 February 1900, in Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, pp. 581, 580. 154 See for example Sidgwick to Lord Tennyson, Christmas Day 1899, in Sidgwick and Sidgwick, Henry Sidgwick, pp. 576–7. On Westlake, see Casper Sylvest, ‘“Our passion for legality”: international law and imperialism in the late nineteenth-century Britain’, Review of International Studies, 34 (2008), 403–23. 155 Sidgwick, Lectures, pp. 235, 236. 156 Sidgwick, Lectures, p. 234, my italics. See also p. 236. 157 Quentin Skinner, Machiavelli (Oxford, 2000), pp. 99–100.

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CH APTER 5

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history

[The student of history] is the politician with his face turned backwards. (Lord Acton, 18951)

No fan of traditional history writing, Herbert Spencer took particular exception to the ‘great man’ theory of history, a doctrine that involved an unscientific and ‘universal love of personalities’ such as ‘Frederick the Greedy’ and ‘Napoleon the Treacherous’.2 While this attack was mainly directed at a familiar opponent of positivist history, J. A. Froude, the loathing between Spencer and the historians also extended to William Stubbs, a notorious patriotic and imperialist Tory with a Whiggish histori­cal bent, who ‘solemnly burned a volume of Herbert Spencer while Canon of St. Pauls’ in the late 1870s. 3 There is, indeed, something to this conservative, or politically realist, stance of historians. Thomas Carlyle also had little time for naïve liberal ‘do-goodism’. At first glance it seems that philosophical, lofty speculation favours peace, whereas the hardnosed, fact-based work of historians favours the approach of the practical people under study. But such a contrast is misleading and too simplistic to capture the complexity of the ways in which history was approached and studied in the nineteenth century. During the reign of Queen Victoria, British society and public debate were saturated with historical tropes and representations.4 The greatly extended time-scale of the Victorian imagination, to which evolutionism contributed, the self-image of Britain as a gradually evolving stable polity, able to combine liberty and order, and the curiosity produced by the progress of civilisation that few doubted, all contributed to the wide dispersion of interest in history. The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was also the time when history emerged as an academic discipline. The subject was slowly (and unevenly) professionalised: the gentleman reading a few books in his Victorian study was gradually substituted by a university-employed historian spending time in the archives. The period also witnessed the 148

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history creation of journals and modern textbooks, the founding of academic organisations and the establishment of research degrees. 5 ‘German’ methods of source criticism, primarily derived from Leopold von Ranke, slowly made an impact in Britain, which coalesced with this gradual professionalisation of history. Nevertheless, British historians rarely heeded Ranke’s principle of being led by the sources and refraining from moral and political judgement. Such judgements were freely passed in the work of Thomas Babington Macaulay and Carlyle, and more indirectly in the work of the following generation of historians that contributed to and fed off the high standing of history and historical arguments in public life. British (i.e. predominantly English) historians ‘spoke on all sorts of national issues, not only those that were obviously historical’, and they did so because history was ‘seen as central to a proper understanding of the national character and its propagation as a crucial glue for social and political cohesion’.6 It is all the more surprising, therefore, that few analyses of the international aspects or implications of the writings of British historians exist.7 This chapter, accordingly, takes a step in this direction by providing a historically contextualised analysis of the writings of three liberal historians – James Bryce (1838–1922), John Morley (1838–1923) and Lord Acton (1834–1902) – with a particular emphasis on questions of international politics. The aim is to examine manifestations of liberal internationalism shored up by history or historical studies, while simul­ taneously pursuing the book’s general argument about the strength, nature, trajectory and variety of this overarching ideology. In different ways, Bryce, Morley and Acton used history in their politics (and their politics in history), and by exploring the ideals they shared and the ways in which their internationalist beliefs were promulgated, their depen­ dence on and contribution to a wider internationalist outlook among the liberal intelligentsia will emerge in a clearer light. A note on the British historical tradition Compared with the discussion of international law and philosophy in the previous chapters, this chapter has a more limited range with respect to the internationalist ‘language’ under consideration. History was a multifaceted and contested site of learning and argument, encompassing a wide variety of historical representations and different types of scholars, with a plethora of political views.8 A comprehensive or general­ised analysis is beyond the scope of this chapter, but at the outset a sketch of the most salient characteristics of British historical writing at the time is in order. As a subject, history was virtually boundless, encroaching, as we have seen, into (emerging) neighbouring fields like 149

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history law, philosophy and political science. It included, for example, conjectural histories of the progression of humankind or specific nations in the vein of eighteenth-century Scottish enlightenment thought. This genre received a marked boost with the rise of Comtean positivism, and influential figures like François Guizot, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer all contributed, directly or indirectly, to this strand. Positivism influenced prominent historians like H. T. Buckle (1821–1862), J. R. Seeley (1834–1895) and W. E. H. Lecky (1838–1903), but its importance should not be over­estimated. A detailed philosophy of history was less of an entry card into the developing historical profession than, say, a study of Cromwell. While grand schemes were popular in the 1860s and lived on in the vogue for a political science trying to establish laws of political development on the basis of historical knowledge, an inductive approach to history was more common.9 The majority of historians could not accept positivism in history due to its perceived failure to allow for the free will of individuals and the centrality of accident in history. What united this majority was a number of assumptions about the working of history, including the impor­tance of individuals in historical processes, the possibility of progress and improvement, and the centrality of the national community. Most histori­ans were individualists, methodologically and politically, but they still ‘subscribed to a view of history that placed the nation centre-stage and that ascribed to their own nation distinctive generic charac­teristics and to its history a distinctive continuous pattern, teleologically deter­mined’.10 The point of this approach was to avoid collectivist, holist notions of history which would make individuals and their decisions meaningless historically (or so it was thought).11 The collective aspect of history was clandestinely inserted in less dangerous form as a Whiggish assumption about the progressive and privileged path laid out for the English nation. This partly reflected a universalisation of values previously associated with a partisan Whig narrative and led to disdain for philosophies of history, not because these historians ‘believed that history had no meaning, but because they believed that its meaning was implicit and self-evident’.12 Blending a concern with facts and a predilection for judgement, history could, poten­tially, ‘attain the status of scientific sermon’.13 Suspended between a literary past and a scientific future, we thus find history attempting (like other nascent academic disciplines) to fuse moral and political purpose with the credibility of the professional academic. The moral and political import of historical writings varied markedly, in domestic as well as international politics. The international effects of the ‘naturalisation’ of the nation could lead in conservative or ‘realist’ directions, as exemplified by Stubbs and, more equivocally, by the partially Whig historians Seeley and Froude. In this view, the empire was both a constitutional structure and the symbol of a British mission; the 150

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history honour of the British state and something to be defended abroad.14 But not all Victorian historians shared this view. For many liberals, while the empire still radiated a sense of benefit to the world, the Whig notion of gradual, moral progress was cast in a universal language and thereby transposed to the international domain. Indeed, there are quite a few Victorian historians – for example, the positivist H. T. Buckle,15 the Quaker historian Frederic Seebohm,16 the fiercely liberal and internationalist Goldwin Smith17 and J. R. Green18 – whose work could be used to defend a reading of civilisational progress, closely linked to Victorian liberalism and liberal internationalism. Yet the point is not to argue that the British historical tradition was exclusively internationalist or exclusively something else. The sheer scope and variety of the Victorian production and consumption of history makes such generalisations self-defeating. It can be demonstrated, however, that prominent historians provided intellectual and ideological support for liberal internationalism. The analysis below focuses on late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century manifestations of what can perhaps be described as Whig history, but which is undoubtedly liberal history.19 Macaulay, the best-known representative of the Whig tradition, argued in his celebrated History of England that ‘the history of our country during the last hundred and sixty years is eminently the history of physical, of moral, and of intellectual improvement’.20 Macaulay’s book has become the stereotype of celebratory and biased Whig history charting the progress of British liberty and representative government from the seventeenth century, a constitutional narrative that was later supplemented by tropes about Protestantism and the empire.21 But this substantive version of Whig history as exceptional and exceptionally English can be complemented by a looser understanding of Whig history as historical writing which is ‘essentially embryology, deriving its point from present concerns’.22 In this chapter, the ‘Whig’ label is used in the wider sense, which amply covers the triumvirate of liberal historians under scrutiny. For a number of reasons, James Bryce, John Morley and Lord Acton are central in our attempt to understand the make-up and fortunes of British internationalist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Two of the three, Bryce and Morley, outlived most in their own generation and were advancing liberal internationalist ideas into the 1920s. Bryce even played a role in the establishment of the academic discipline of International Relations (IR).23 Acton’s influence is more indirect. Although he lived for a shorter time and was more of an outsider due to his ‘un-English’ cosmopolitanism and Catholicism, he was capable of addressing the English liberal imagination. Taken together, their different approaches to the emerging discipline and the practice of history reflect the broad appeal of historical representations and its relationship to political debates. Bryce, Morley and Acton 151

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history form a relatively coherent Gladstonian liberal troika, which nevertheless contains interesting diversity, not least in the ways in which they advanced internationalist views. Finally, their interwoven personal ties are, while perhaps of less immediate importance, illustrative of the close-knit world of liberal intellectuals, which strengthened ideological and epistemic consensus. Morley and Bryce were intellectuals in politics, both serving in Gladstone’s fourth cabinet from 1892, and together they represented a powerful quest to extend liberal principles to the international domain. At the time, Acton was also mentioned as a potential member of the cabinet, but that did not go down well in all liberal circles; instead, he continued in his role as the chief personal adviser to the ageing liberal icon. Following Gladstone’s irrevocable retirement in 1894, Acton and Morley were central figures in debates about the future of the Liberal Party. They were not close friends – in fact, they competed for Gladstone’s attention in the 1890s – but through his acquaintance with the American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, Morley became the owner of Acton’s enormous library, which was later donated to Cambridge University Library. One could go on. This almost short-circuited interconnection of the intellectual elite is a trademark of Victorian Britain. But while it often meant uniformity of purpose at the level of slogans, it did not eradicate intellectual differences or idiosyncrasies. Bryce, Morley and Acton all wrote history with an internationalist taint or purpose, but they did so in different ways. Nationality and empire: Bryce and the search for peace James Bryce has been described as ‘the chief representative of the estab­ lished tradition of studying things political’.24 Aside from being a central character in the liberal intelligentsia, a historian and a jurist, Bryce was involved in liberal politics over the course of six decades. He was part of successive Liberal governments as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, President of the Board of Trade, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Ambassador to the United States. Before entering politics, Bryce went to Trinity College, Oxford, where he quickly became a popular figure among young university liberals. In 1857, he joined the Old Mortality Society, whose original members included A. V. Dicey and A. C. ­Swinburne and which soon enrolled the likes of T. H. Green and T. E. Holland. Despite his Presbyterian background, Bryce obtained a fellowship at Oriel College, while Oxford was still firmly dominated by the Anglican Church. In 1863 he won the Arnold Prize for his essay ‘The Holy Roman Empire’, which was published (in extended form) the following year, to wide acclaim.25 On the back of this book Gladstone took an unusual step in 1870 and 152

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history appointed a Scottish Presbyterian to be Regius Professor of Civil Law at Oxford, a position Bryce held until 1893. Early influences During the 1860s, Bryce was one of the leading lights of academic liberal­ism and a radical in domestic and foreign affairs.26 He cham­pioned democratic reform, supported the cause of struggling nationalities and took the side of the North in the American Civil War. In these views he was partly inspired by Goldwin Smith, Oxford’s Regius Professor of Modern History, whose steadfast liberal internationalism was an important influence.27 While the shining light of Bryce’s radicalism in domestic affairs gradually faded, his internationalist views remained more stable. The main inspiration behind Bryce’s approach to history was E. A. Freeman, another liberal Oxford professor. But the pupil was no simple follower of the idiosyncratic master. Bryce’s understanding of history was definitely wider than Freeman’s notorious dictum that ‘history is past politics, and politics is present history’, a conception that, according to Bryce, belonged to the eighteenth rather than the nineteenth century.28 On the other hand, he thought history should not be conceptualised so broadly that it became vague. In common with many of his contem­ poraries, Bryce held that the ‘object of history is to discover and set forth facts’, and he had a certain contempt for the lofty generalisations of Buckle or Spencer when unaccompanied by these cherished facts. As Bryce argued in the ‘Prefatory note’ to the first issue of the English Historical Review in 1886, history was best understood as ‘the record of human action, and of thought only in its direct influence upon action’. This made politics the nexus of history, but other subjects were relevant insofar as they had a bearing on the actions of people. In exemplifying these other subjects, Bryce revealed his personal preferences: history ‘deals with language as evidence of the relations of races to one another, or as a force in uniting or disjoining them. She finds in literature and art illustrations of the productive power and the taste of a nation, and notes the effect they exercise in developing national life.’29 This focus on the life of nations, on tracing the rise and fall of grand ideas, is, as Kleinknecht has argued, akin to some aspects of the liberal Anglican idea of history.30 Yet Bryce was first and foremost a child of the Oxford school: cyclical movements were examined in order to assert a fundamental continuity in history, in the guise of either the national or the imperial idea.31 While Bryce is not normally counted among the central Whig historians, he was also much concerned with the particular fate of the English and the march of ideas about law and government, something that was particularly manifest in his writings about America and Anglo-American kinship. If ‘a sense of the privileges of the English derived from their 153

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history history’ characterises the Whig historian, Bryce certainly has a good claim to the label. 32 His view of history was coupled with central beliefs of Freeman and Smith. Their writings straddled many themes that also captivated Bryce, including federalism, imperialism and nationalism. From Freeman he obtained ‘a general view of foreign politics’, which included notions about the racial superiority of the Teuton, a mistrust and dislike of French imperialism, Austrian autocracy and Turkish rule over Christians in the East. 33 During the First World War, Bryce reflected on another cardinal belief. He looked back to the late 1850s, when many an active and sanguine mind in Europe and America was aflame with what then began to be called the Principle of Nationality.… Men hoped that so soon as each people, delivered from a foreign yoke, became master of its own destinies, all would go well for the world. The two sacred principles of Liberty and Nationality would, like twin-guardian angels, lead into the paths of tranquil happiness, a Mazzinian paradise of moral dignity and liberty, a Cobdenian paradise of commercial prosperity and international peace. 34

Bryce supported Italian and German unification and advanced the case of small, aspiring (Christian) nationalities of the East. These views were liberal to the core, although they could acquire in the hands of Freeman a peculiar authoritarian and dogmatic bent. Bryce’s version was less spectacular but full of tensions. Championing the historical method implied some form of relativism, which had to be squared with liberal universalism. From another perspective, this meant that any kind of progress or reform had to bow to the demands of continuity in history. The logical outcome of such tensions is perhaps a softening on all sides, resulting in a variation of well known English gradualism. But, with respect to inter­ national politics, frictions remained, most notably between the demands of national freedom and those of international order. The Holy Roman Empire, race and nation ‘I like Mr. Bryce. He knows so much and is so modest’ was the reported reaction of Queen Victoria after undertaking to read The Holy Roman Empire in 1893, well nigh thirty years after it was first published. 35 In that book, Bryce offered a detailed tour de force of the idea of the empire, from classical Roman military colossus, to the reinvigorating fusion of newborn Catholicism with the authority and magic of the City of Rome, to the temporary political revival of the empire from 800 AD under the reign of Charlemagne (an admirable figure in which Teutonic and Roman characteristics, which Bryce throughout his life assumed uncritically, were blended to perfection), to a prolonged period of rivalry between secular and ecclesiastical authority, to the seemingly everlasting decay of the post-feudal empire, through a secession of crises culminating in 154

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history the Reformation but followed by almost three centuries of fragmentation before the empire was formally dissolved in the midst of Napoleonic rage in 1806. The book was constantly reprinted in the half century from its first publication, mostly with only minor changes except for the supplementary chapters, written in 1873, on how Germany was different from but also the ‘modern representative’ of the medieval empire. 36 One persistent theme in The Holy Roman Empire, the relationship between groups (or nations) and overarching – i.e. international or imperial – institutions, is particularly important for understanding the nature of Bryce’s liberal internationalism. From this perspective, the book narrates a story of fragmentation, of how an impossible and utopian idea of a universal empire led first to a splintering of ‘Germany’ into hundreds of principalities and then later to a more realistic (and more welcome) unification of the German nation. The first of these options was surely anathema to Bryce, even if he recognised its usefulness in turbulent times. ‘No one will deny that it was and is desirable to prevent a universal monarchy in Europe.’37 But he valued order too much to have any sympathy for the fragmentation of ‘Germany’ following the Peace of Westphalia – tellingly, he branded the resulting system ‘vicious’ and argued that it paralysed ‘the trade, the literature, and the political thought of Germany’. 38 Bryce’s hypostatisation of great nations (becoming great states) should not be seen as anti-universalist per se. The twentieth-century contrast between the national (particular) and the international (universal) is potentially distorting when approaching late nineteenth-century British international thought. Bryce began from the assumption that nationality and internationalism were compatible, if not mutually dependent, but he gradually acquired a dual understanding of the principle of nationality: while he consistently argued that nationality was the only medium through which humanity could be joined in peace and prosperity, he increasingly realised that national allegiance could block progress by giving rise to insularity, prejudice, hatred and wars. Yet before we can turn to the question of how the principle of ­nationality could and should be tamed, we must look closer at the light Bryce threw on the Dark Ages. The Holy Roman Empire, it is worth repeating, dealt with the ideas that bolstered that empire, and one of the most fascinating episodes of the story – what Bryce termed the ‘theory of the Medieval Empire’ – now appeared outrageously anachronistic. In a nutshell, the theory held an image of a universal humanity which was correspondingly expressed in a universal state. It was the perfect inter­dependence of the papacy and the empire. Bryce admired this construction and its watertight logic, but he also stressed that it was never actually realised and that it became increasingly inflexible and unprogressive. Nevertheless, Bryce displayed a moderate enthusiasm for the theory. It had saved the European peoples from ‘the isolation, and 155

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history narrowness, and jealous exclusiveness’ that had restrained earlier civilis­ ations and which now plagued ‘the kingdoms of the East’. Due to this universal postulate, European peoples had been brought into contact and co-operation with each other. This was indispensable for all ‘true culture and progress’. Bryce was not a man whose passion ran away with his pen, but he maintained that the Empire of the Middle Ages had ‘preserved the feeling of a brotherhood of mankind, a commonwealth of the whole world, whose sublime unity transcended every minor distinction’. 39 Contemporary Europe would not see the advent of a universal monarchy, Bryce stressed. Industrialisation, trade and communications had brought the nations of the nineteenth century into contact and cooperation, but this had resulted in increased rather than reduced national feeling across the board. And to Bryce that was not simply a good or a bad thing, which is connected to his complex, and sometimes confused, notion of nationality. To begin with, the origin of the principle was unclear. Bryce occasionally displayed a vivid historical imagination, but often he was unswervingly anachronistic, transferring the problems of his day backwards into history. Despite the concession that ‘national distinctions had scarcely begun to exist’ at the height of the medieval theory of the empire in the tenth century, he continued to discuss the role of the empire in the language of nineteenth-century liberalism, pointing out how its notion of universality constrained and developed the nations it encompassed.40 The development of nations was preordained for a liberal like Bryce. In the period 1100–1400, society had gradually organised itself according to ‘fixed principles’, recognised ‘the value of order, industry, equality’ and realised the importance of ‘the common good’. These developments had given birth to politics. Unsurprisingly, this was also the period in which nationalities were born: order, progress and civilisation were equated with the advent of national feeling.41 Internationally, however, this development resulted in anarchy, a situation which was only partially remedied by the fiction of the emperor as an international judge. Further amelioration of this anarchic realm depended on moral progress symbiotically manifesting itself in the policies of mature nations and the norms and rules governing the interrelations of these nations. It should be pointed out, however, that Bryce often used the terms ‘race’ and ‘nationality’ interchangeably, a common practice at a time when race had not yet come to be understood in strictly biological terms.42 The result was that the meaning of both was unclear. Bryce’s interest in race seems to have been influenced by the prejudices of Freeman: the search for historical continuity often led them to couple their liberal ideology with some (rather crude) ethnological assumptions, which in turn contributed further to the fusion of race and nation. In Bryce’s work, such stereotypes worked to naturalise and condone the subjection of peoples considered inferior, for example in India, and he certainly promulgated 156

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history racial prejudices about the existence of ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ races, corresponding to a division of the world by means of a distinction between civilisation and barbarism.43 Such self-congratulatory arguments were conventional among British internationalists, but it is worth stressing that Bryce’s understanding of race blended cultural and biological elements. D. G. Ritchie’s accusation that ‘People in general are far too ready to refer the differences they find between nations to race-characteristics, instead of taking the trouble to look for other explanations first, in geographical conditions, institutions, past history and other external influences’ is, to some extent, true of Bryce.44 At the turn of the century, however, when more purely biological understandings of race proliferated, Bryce did articulate a more explicitly environmental and cultural conception of race. Signs of this development stretch back to the 1890s and were also evidenced in his increasing emphasis on material context, primarily in the shape of geography. These ideas must have led to increased awareness of the volatility, imprecision and dangers of the language of race, and Bryce was occasionally frank in acknowledging the lack of credible evidence for racial stereotypes. Nonetheless, the fact-hungering historian was reluctant to relinquish the conveniently flexible language of race.45 Bryce never quite managed to distinguish and define these slippery notions, except when the need for explanatory sub-clauses made it unavoidable. In early times (i.e. 1100–1400), nationalities were ‘each distinguished by a peculiar language and character, and by steadily increasing differences of habits and institutions’, but nationality was also a phenomenon tied to ‘instincts of political freedom, that local patriotism which they [several countries in Europe] long retained and have not yet wholly lost’. Later, Bryce identified an ‘instinct or passion of nationality’, which he described as ‘the desire of a people already conscious of moral and social unity, to see such unity expressed and realized under a single government, which shall give it place and name among civilized states’.46 These largely positive formulations about nationality were, however, met by some dark counterparts. In the first edition of The Holy Roman Empire, he spoke of national prejudices as something to be restrained and ordered. Later editions were more outspoken in the recognition that ‘The racial or commercial antagonisms of democracies are as fertile in menaces to peace as were ever the dynastic interests of princes’.47 The balance sheet did, however, give cause for optimism: had it not been for the Holy Roman empire, ‘the bonds of national union’ would have been less noble and more dangerous.48 Post hoc, ergo propter hoc! ‘Upwards’ through the past It is no coincidence, therefore, that when Bryce published a revised, enlarged edition of The Holy Roman Empire in 1873, he ended on a 157

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history bright note. With his range of reference limited to the ‘civilised’ world (Europe and North America), it seemed that the principle of ­nationality had largely been implemented. But the result had been an age of doubt. New developments or institutions in the social world were always founded on deep and settled convictions. These were now lacking. Social progress was a consistent theme, but there was no consensus on how to achieve it. Bryce instead looked to the international scene. What would come next? The answer was unavoidably speculative, balancing on the edge between hope and prediction: If in the years to come a new body of ideas and beliefs is by degrees built up capable of satisfying the need men have to find a consecration for Power and a tie which shall bind them together and represent the aspirations of collective humanity, the form these beliefs will take must differ widely in outward aspect from that in which the Middle Ages found satisfaction. But it may embody some portion of that which was the soul and essence of the Holy Empire – the love of peace, the sense of the brotherhood of mankind, the recognition of the sacredness and supremacy of the spiritual life.49

This ideal of the peaceful and orderly co-existence of nations, which recognised the brotherhood of mankind, Bryce continued to pursue both internationally and within the British empire through the imperial federation movement. 50 In his political career, which after 1880 increasingly focused on international issues, he consistently tried to translate theory into internationalist practice by defending the rights of struggling nationalities and upholding the standards of international law and morality. The result was a pearl string of internationalist deeds: he was instrumental in the Bulgarian agitation, he supported the cause of the Armenians in the Ottoman empire 51 and he became an important broker in American–British relations. Moreover, after having visited South Africa in 1895 (where he stayed with Cecil Rhodes, a fellow Oriel man), Bryce argued against the South African War of 1899–1902, claiming that its real cause ‘was the menacing language of Britain coupled with her preparations for war’. 52 Bryce’s prolific writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries cannot be analysed in detail here. Apart from a substantial amount of journalism mainly undertaken for the American weekly The Nation, Bryce’s later publications also include the massive The American Commonwealth (1888), Studies in History and Jurisprudence (1901), a collection of essays under the title The Hindrances to Good Citizenship (1909) and Modern Democracies (1921). These works all reflected a central, if not the central, intellectual interest of Bryce: the progress of human civilisation in its widest sense, including the development of morals, law and ordered societies, and of their interrelations, which were in large part determined by the strength and character of people’s 158

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history ­ articular and universal allegiances. 53 Bryce’s liberalism was shot through p with this theme. His close links with and deep interests in America furnishes an example. The American Commonwealth was intended as a descriptive book, a sort of factual contemporary history of America. In this Bryce succeeded to the extent that Woodrow Wilson, despite praising the book, complained that Bryce risked losing the grander historical perspective that marked his earlier writings. The book did, however, reveal Bryce’s liberal leanings. Apart from supplying Americans with an overwhelmingly positive outside view of their politics and society and introducing Britons to contemporary America, The American Commonwealth supplied important arguments about the natural kinship between Britain and America in politics and culture, the virtues of the double patriotism that the American federal system fostered, and a positive inter­pretation of federalism more widely (which in turn endorsed the idea of Home Rule in a British context). 54 Bryce’s central preoccupation and its liberal import were also evident in those parts of his oeuvre that were explicitly concerned with international politics. A short essay on ‘The age of discontent’ (1891) returned to the dissatisfaction and bewilderment that Bryce detected among contemporaries. He emphasised that discontent was more constructive and forward-looking than despondency and despair. Its causes were identified through a comparison with the previous generation. It was not that the main goals of the 1850s and 1860s – stipulated as political liberty, freedom of thought, speech and worship, the principle of nationality, and international peace – had not been achieved. In fact, Bryce argued that all but peace had in large measure been realised. Rather, it was the inconsequence of their achievement that led to disappointment. Despite the positive side-effects of the current discontent, progress had definitely been less than expected. In discussing the frustration of peace, the most ‘ardently desired’ goal of ‘the idealists of forty years ago’, Bryce wanted to distance himself from the naïvety and simplicity of the way in which earlier ‘sanguine prophets’ like Richard Cobden and John Bright had preached a pure liberal economic doctrine leading to perpetual peace. On the other hand, he insisted on the essential soundness of internationalism, while holding the national spirit in high regard. It was lamentable that nations were ‘still deluded by the notion that their gain is necessarily another’s loss, and another’s loss their own gain’.55 Essentially, the message Bryce conveyed in his short essay was a message about history and progress, and by virtue of his restatement of the relevance and reliability of the internationalist doctrine, it was also a message that was applicable across the political board. Progress was possible, even if it was not inevitable or immediately to be expected: The movement of humanity is not, as the ancient fancied, in cycles, but shows a sustained, though often interrupted, progress.… history entitles us to believe that though depression and ­d iscouragements

159

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history frequently overshadow its path, its general progress is upwards, that in each age it gains more than it loses and retains most of what it has ever gained. Nor is this progress clearer in anything than in the fact that evils which men once accepted as inevitable have now become intolerable. 56

This message of progress and redemption Bryce essentially repeated when he wrote an introductory essay to The World’s History, a massive eight-volume German study translated into English in 1901. The preconditions of historical study at the turn of the century included a widened knowledge of prehistoric times, advances in the historical method and natural science, closer contact between races and increased interdepen­ dence, which in turn made a new, universal history possible. This form of history was grandiose and operated within a vastly extended timescale, and it should ‘include all the races and tribes of man within its scope and … bring all these races and tribes into a connection with one another such as to display their annals as an organic whole’. 57 The writing of history, Bryce reiterated, was concerned with facts and it should only cautiously generalise about the past or prophesise about the future. Bryce did, however, venture a generalisation about the intellectual development of humankind. Certain moral and social principles or ideas won general acceptance and came to exert ‘a potent influence upon human life of action’. 58 The ideas Bryce had in mind were, roughly, the cardinal beliefs of humanitarian liberalism, and included the condemnation of slavery and treaty-breaking, the notion that rulers have moral responsibility for the exercise of their power, ideas about social and civil equality and religious freedom. Thus we find the cardinal elements of internationalist ideology – the preoccupation with achieving progress, order and justice in international politics – depicted as an integral part of the general progress of humankind. This belief in a process, albeit irregular and sometimes regressive, by which history validated broadly liberal and internationalist principles is a classic illustration of the dominant strand of ‘moral internationalism’ in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Britain. We can now see how internationalist progress could combine with a romantic harking back to some apparently retrograde institutions of the Holy Roman Empire. It was no easy fit, but for Bryce the simplicity of the Roman world-view was attractive. It could not straightforwardly be transferred to his own times, but it was useful for directing and controlling international(ist) progress. 59 It has been said about Whig historians that they are either totally in love with the past, or that they are so in love with the present or the future that they must re-make the past in those images.60 Bryce had a notion of progress as a double process of re-invention and updating of the simple ideals and truth of old. There clearly was a deep affection for the noble ideas of unity prevalent in the 160

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history past, but that had less to do with their effect in the past and more to do with their potential utility in the re-organised world of the future. Thus the Holy Roman Empire was, despite its glaring faults, redeemed as a historical polity and contemporary inspiration by the identification of its splendid utopia, which promised to reconcile the particular and universal allegiances of humans. Through his political actions and writings during the first decades of the twentieth century, Bryce supplies a crucial clue to the continuity in British liberal internationalism. There were of course aspects of international politics on which it can generally be said that liberal internationalists changed their minds (sometimes repeatedly), just as there were individual internationalists who hardened or mellowed. In the 1850s, Bryce had sided with Cobden in the discussion over the British empire, but later he came to see himself as a moderate supporter of the empire, which he distinguished from aggressive, unreasonable imperialism.61 Both views are clearly compatible with the configuration of internationalist ideology at the time. And on core elements of internationalism – support for arbitration (which he also pursued as Ambassador to the United States), the development of international law, disarmament, free trade and an ideal of international order based on the conviction that state action, like the action of individuals, is subject to moral scrutiny and stipulations – Bryce never wavered. The First World War challenged these beliefs and instilled in him a more sceptical attitude. The war also challenged the deep admiration for Germany that Bryce had entertained since spending a semester in Heidelberg in the 1860s. Despite trying to maintain a critical distance towards British participation in the war, he fell prey to the patriotic temptation that he always asked fellow historians to avoid. Within a short period of time, his admiration for Germany turned into a crusade to weed out the ideology of brutal power by which the country had been infected. Bryce chaired a committee which substantiated claims about German atrocities that had earlier been reported in the press. In hindsight, the influential report of the committee appears dubious.62 Similarly, many of the essays which he wrote during the war display a peculiar blend of liberal internationalism and a combative indictment of Germany and the German people for accepting the spirit of Prussian militarism.63 Bryce became an absolutely central figure in the wartime movement for the establishment of a League of Nations and later in the increasingly desperate attempt to get the United States to join the new organisation. In this area, he was a force for moderation and realism, stressing that any attempt to establish an international institution, even a limited version, was fraught with difficulties that had to be squarely faced.64 Yet Bryce continued to hold the Manichean mantle of righteous internationalism on its mission to eradicate the worship of force, power and war. 161

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history Between disillusion and defiance In 1921, Bryce delivered eight lectures in Williamstown, ­Massachusetts, which were later published under the title International Relations (1922). The lectures restated some fundamental internationalist points: there is such a thing as international law, it is possible to avert war, and states are subject to morality, despite the repeated denial of these points by an extreme theory promulgated by Thucydides, Machia­velli and men of practice. Bryce now appeared a more moderate man of peace, a reformer of the cool-headed type who acknowledged the limited effect of sound ideas in a corrupted world. The time was not ripe (as it never had and never would be) for a world state and such talk was counterproductive.65 Moreover, he openly confronted the shortcomings of liberal inter­ national­ism in its Victorian guise. Arguments to the effect that trade and the principle of nationality led to peace were perhaps logically sound, but nothing was so simple in practice. Trade was no insurance against war and a consistent implementation of the principle of nationality was well nigh impossible. The lectures exuded disillusion: a liberal (inter)­nationalist had been driven to the wall by relentless national jealousy, prejudice and rivalry. Bryce had some hope and expectation on behalf of the League of Nations, but ultimately, he argued, states were in a state of nature towards each other, and the prospect of improving their relations depended ‘upon the possibility of improving human nature itself’.66 Apart from a sometimes dispassionate restatement of core internationalist values, his response to this rather bleak predicament was a retreat into history. In the Middle Ages, the aristocracy, men of learning or common folk had not been separated by national feeling and the Church had been a source of unity, transcending all boundaries, racial, linguistic and national. ‘In this respect Europe has gone backwards rather than forwards since the Middle Ages.’67 This outspoken lament over the turn that the age of nationality had taken had been long in the making – as we have seen, Bryce warned of the dangers of nationality at an early stage. But until the Great War, Bryce kept his ‘professional optimism’ intact and refused to despair.68 In his later years, clouds gathered more easily. Bryce continued to insist on the allegiance that nations owed to humanity and on the possibility, indeed the necessity, of accommodating nations within a wider framework of humanity. The mayhem of European conflict seemed only to strengthen an underlying intuition of The Holy Roman Empire: despite all its faults and its transient role as stepping stone in the glorious progress of Western civilisation, that empire possessed a valuable proclamation of humankind’s unity, which was gone past recall. As we shall see in chapter 6, although the war and its aftermath amply demonstrated that this Brycean ideal had little influence on political practice, it continued to 162

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history find support among the younger generation of internationalists. Fittingly, one of Bryce’s last writings returned to Dante and the importance of his ideas for the post-war world. Despite progress in learning and wealth, the world had witnessed ‘widespread slaughter and destruction; racial and national hatreds burn with a hotter flame and threaten further strife’. In this predicament, Bryce argued, reviving the spirit of Dante was vital: That which commands our attention to-day is not the form which Dante’s hope took, but his ardour for the restoration of Justice and Peace, things to him inseparable, because without Justice there can be no Peace, since oppression and aggression provoke war, and with­out Peace there can be no Justice, since brute force will prevail against it.69

John Morley, internationalism and the ‘great man’ theory of history Both Bryce and John Morley were born in 1838 and lived unusually long lives.70 They entered the world in the infancy of Queen Victoria’s reign; both went to Oxford in the 1850s; they shared many fundamental political beliefs; they served together in government; and both lived to see the horrors of the Great War (1914–1918). Yet among all the similarities, there are important differences. Morley never loved Oxford as Bryce did: he lived a more secluded life in the university, far removed from the intellectual jet-set of Bryce’s impressive friends in the Old ­Mortality Society. Also, Morley struggled more with his professional identity, constantly agonising over the (im)possibility of bridging his intellectual pursuits with his practical embroilment in politics. Although they subscribed to almost identical versions of liberal internationalism, the ways in which they used historical studies to validate and promulgate this ideology were different. Early influences After attending schools in Blackburn and London, Morley went to Oxford in 1856 on a scholarship at Lincoln College. Little is known about his time in Oxford, or indeed of his personal life as a whole. Morley lived a very private life with his wife Rose Mary Ayling and destroyed many of his personal papers before his death. Due to this lack of information, Morley’s life has always appeared ‘smoother than it actually was, a perception based upon a public persona and published writings’.71 The original intention behind sending Morley to Oxford was that he should take orders in the Anglican Church, but, like many others, the young, bookish Morley lost his faith and fell out with his father. Instead, he turned to London and law, but his financial situation made journalism the only viable option, and even in that profession Morley’s literary qualities 163

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history only gradually gained him a foothold. After various editorships in the bewildering world of minor Victorian periodicals, Morley was appointed editor of the Fortnightly Review in 1867, and he quickly turned the journal into a mainstay of late nineteenth-century political and intellectual life. The ambition, and a reason for its success, was to present different viewpoints, and Morley did not let his own radicalism get in the way. Morley’s Weltanschauung was formed by encounters with Comtean positivism and Millian liberalism. In the 1860s, Morley became a close friend of Frederic Harrison, the leading positivist in England, and his early writings display some enthusiasm towards positivist beliefs. In particular, it was the Comtean philosophy of history and the stress on scientific method which attracted the young Morley.72 However, during the early 1870s Morley grew increasingly wary of the authoritarian and religious bent of Comtism. In John Stuart Mill he found not only a forcefully stated critique along the same lines, but also liberal principles, intellectual mastery and ‘the true stamp of perfect rationality’. By the mid-1870s, Morley was a committed Millite and a critic of Comte. That this shift of intellectual allegiance could take place so easily is related to the congruence of Mill’s and Comte’s projects. While they both aimed to bring ‘people to extend positive modes of thinking to the master subjects of moral, politics, and religion’, Mill escaped Comte’s historical determinism and the religion of humanity that Morley found increasingly problematic.73 This development was also reflected in Morley’s renowned book On Compromise (1874), which Stefan Collini has aptly described as ‘essentially agnosticism and radical Liberalism in parade uniform’.74 Stressing truth, sincerity, conscientiousness, intellectual bravery and a liberal optimism about the future, Morley played the role of ‘Jeremiah of an agnostic faith’.75 On Compromise was a rationalist tract concerned with truth. Especially regarding questions of conscience, no compromise or accommodation was possible, according to Morley. But this concern for truth was based on a mystical, almost quasi-religious metaphysic, which, in close parallel to Herbert Spencer (whom Morley admired and often met), relegated the most fundamental questions to the unknowable and unfathomable, which was then ‘used to foil definite practical certainties about secular knowledge, about politics, about the progress of society’.76 In Morley’s attempt to vindicate ‘earthly rationality’ and political liberalism, Jeffrey von Arx has pointed to the importance of his French studies. Encouraged by Mill, Morley presented a benevolent reading of the French philosophes, attempting to counter a longstanding tradition of conservative vilification. Morley’s hero, Voltaire, was presented as a moderate, flexible reformer who worked with the forces of history. The price paid for this argument was the sacrifice of (the Genevan) and recklessly dogmatic Rousseau. In these arguments, the positivist conception of history is slightly loosened, so that although history has a proper and 164

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history inevitable direction, this does not mean that it cannot be frustrated or advanced by the actions of individuals in general, and political and intellectual leaders in particular. True statesmanship is thereby understood as discerning progressive forces, and then nurturing, developing and exploiting them for the right purposes.77 Although von Arx has analysed how this view of history panned out in Morley’s French studies, his interpretation does not include Morley’s biographies of Cobden and Gladstone. As I shall go on to argue, these two monuments of ­Victorian biography demonstrate how Morley made history and hagiography buttress internationalist ideology. Before proceeding, however, a few remarks on the nature of Morley’s liberal internationalism are in order. Morley, Machiavelli and Manichaeism At the beginning of June 1897, Morley delivered the Romanes Lecture in Oxford’s Sheldonian Theatre. His chosen subject, Machiavelli, was a favourite among liberal internationalists, and the lecture is illustrative of Morley’s historical interest and writing. His preferred genre was a mixture of biography and history and he prided himself on writing impartially about figures with whom he shared little, including Niccolò Machiavelli, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Joseph de Maistre. Following a synthetic account of Machiavelli’s beliefs, Morley approached the real nub of the venture in the final part of the lecture. This turned, unsurprisingly, on contemporary politics. For Machiavelli, ‘The universal test is reason of state’ and this ideology had a modern manifestation, which Morley described in the following terms: Nature does not work by moral rules. Nature, ‘red in tooth and claw’ does by system all that good men by system avoid. Is not the whole universe of sentient being haunted all day and all night long by the haggard shapes of Hunger, Cruelty, Force, Fear?78

This modern defence of reason of state objected to states and individuals being governed by the same system of morals and Morley made it clear that it involved ‘the worship of nation and empire. Everything policy requires, justice sanctions. There are no crimes in politics, only blunders.’ To Morley this was anathema. In direct contrast to (the carica­ ture of) Machiavelli, Morley argued that the state was equivalent to a moral person, capable of acting rightly and wrongly. Moreover, ‘Civilis­ ation is taken to advance, exactly in proportion as communities leave behind the violences of external nature, and of man in a state of war’.79 Through this rhetorical move, Morley created a struggle between reason of state and a liberal humanitarianism, a fundamental dividing line, which he then projected backwards into history. Despite this ­Manichean tendency, Morley treated Machiavelli in a relatively balanced way. In 165

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history places, the lecture appears scholarly and Morley conceded that some of Machiavelli’s points were ‘deep truths’.80 Ultimately, however, Morley took Machiavelli and his school to focus on ‘cunning, jealousy, perfidy, ingratitude, dupery’ while believing that they could build a world on that foundation. This separation of ethics and politics was the pinnacle of utopianism, according to Morley. The potential conflict between Morley’s attempted impartiality and his morbid dislike of reason-ofstate arguments could be resolved only by placing Machiavelli firmly on one side of the political choice that transcended every other political division. This was the struggle between ‘energy, force, will, violence’, on the one hand, and ‘justice and conscience, humanity and right’, on the other. Insofar as Machiavelli represented one side in this ‘eternal struggle’, he retained ‘a place in the literature of modern political systems and of European morals’.81 This explains why Morley bothered to lecture on Machiavelli: in a modern incarnation, his ideas continued to haunt internationalists and humanitarians, and no matter how obvious the choice between sinister, cold-blooded and pessimistic reason of state and an affectionate and deeply moral liberalism appeared, the need for its continued resolution kept the liberal internationalist vanguard on its toes. But perhaps there was another, deeper reason for Morley’s interest in Machiavelli. In terms of his occupational identity, Morley shared something with the Florentine: they were both scholars close to centres of political power, without ever having the leading role. To some extent, this can also account for Morley’s interest in Edmund Burke, a figure he deeply admired and about whom he wrote a study in order to assess ‘his contributions to the cause of the collective progress of mankind’.82 The fascination with practical politics revolved around ‘men of action’. Morley naturally became the biographical historian, focusing on politics and political leadership in his writings about the past and, simultaneously, using the past in his contemporary politics. By virtue of his monumental biographies of Cobden and Gladstone, Morley developed into the internationalist answer to the ‘great man’ theory of history and its traditionally uncritical admiration of reason of state. It was Morley’s closeness to politics that gave him a particular claim to be writing history, or rather a certain type of biographical history. There was always for Morley a very close connection between history and biography, which was due to, at least, three factors. Firstly, like many of his contemporaries, Morley attached huge importance to individual character. Secondly, he was essentially an elitist who believed in the vital role of leaders in an age of mass politics. Finally, and most peculiarly, there was in Morley a notion that the achievements of individuals represented something larger than them. This did not necessarily lead to the form of hero worship that Morley disliked in Carlyle, but Morley was fascinated by strong leadership – intellectual and political.83 166

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history Morley’s Cobden Although The Life of Richard Cobden appears a run-of-the-mill biography of the Victorian period, it was innovative at the time of its publication in 1879.84 It is long, chronologically organised, full of extensive quotations from letters and diaries, and it delivers a favourable judgement of its subject. Partly, this is to be explained by Morley’s increased admira­tion for Cobden in the process of researching and writing his Life. The reader cannot help but be impressed with Morley’s consistent and occasionally laborious defence of Cobden. Of course, one could think of many other figures in need of a solid internationalist defence, and in that sense Morley’s task was not overwhelming. In fact, at the time of writing, ‘the cult of Cobden’ was already well underway and had been piloted in several portraits.85 Yet Morley’s picture is uniform: Cobden was an admirable character with a lifelong devotion to the right causes – sometimes at the expense of his personal financial situation – who did not always receive proper recognition in his own lifetime. To take just a few examples, Morley called Cobden ‘the most active and the most persuasive popular statesman’, praised his ‘generous public spirit’ and ‘transparent honesty’, and hailed his ‘simplicity, earnestness, and conviction’, as well as his uncompromising devotion to ‘the thankless questions of Retrenchment and Peace’.86 Cobden had fought a constant battle against reactionaries and evil-doers of most kinds, from protectionists to war-mongers, including so-called liberals. As a counter to his already utopian legacy, Morley portrayed Cobden as a man of practice and action and pressed home the point that his wider internationalism and opposition to war had its source not in fluffy religiosity or humanitarianism but in the conviction that ‘war and preparation for it consumed the resources which were required for the improvement of the temporal condition of the population’.87 It is unlikely that the source of Cobden’s internationalism can be reduced to a choice between rationality and morality. The strength of Cobden’s policies lay exactly in appealing to both, but Morley attached particular importance to stressing the ‘shrewd and practical’ aspects of Cobden’s internationalism.88 This gave rise to another consistent theme: Cobden’s noble patriotism. If he should not be seen as a sentimental utopian, neither should Cobden be branded a soulless cosmopolitan. It was Cobden’s English background that gave his internationalist beliefs their strength. As we have seen, the latter part of the nineteenth century witnessed an ongoing battle over the meanings of terms like ‘nationality’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘patriotism’. It was increasingly being recognised that they were all double-edged swords that could be sharpened by whoever had the right rhetorical tools.89 Morley attempted to turn Cobden’s internationalist ideas into a backbone of noble patriotism. 167

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history The vulgar kind of patriotic sentiment leads its professors to exult in military interventions.… What Cobden sought was to nourish that nobler and more substantial kind of patriotism, which takes a pride in the virtue and enlightenment of our own citizens, in the wisdom and success of our institutions, in the beneficence of our dealings with less advanced possessions, and in the lofty justice and independence of our attitude to other nations.90

In such passages it is distinctively Morley’s Cobden that is portrayed. This is also the case when Morley argues that Cobden made a clever decision to focus on single issues rather than broad liberal programmes (a mantra for Morley91) or when Cobden’s rejection of ‘socialism’ is praised and put in the service of a rather tendentious argument to the effect that it is ‘rather amazing’ that ‘in the country where Socialism has been less talked about than any other country in Europe, its principles have been most extensively applied’.92 In the midst of all the praise, there were, however, a few sticking points. While Morley proudly claimed that many of Cobden’s internationalist beliefs had tacitly been accepted, a few aspects of his career and thought invited a more considered defence. Minor offences were accounted for by reference to the passing of time, or as unimportant slip-ups. It was pointed out that Cobden’s belief in phrenology, which ‘to-day would stamp a man as unscientific’, was in 1835 ‘a good sign of mental activity’. In the same casual style, Morley explained that Cobden’s occasional reference to unfashionable ex­ pressions like ‘the rights of man’ and ‘natural law’ were ‘accidents’.93 Of more importance was Cobden’s principle of non-intervention, which had become a dividing line among liberals since the European revolutions of 1848. At the forefront were questions about the extent to which aspiring nationalities could count on the support of liberal Britain. Looking back at this turbulent time, many liberals would have shared Morley’s unwillingness to ‘state the principle of non-intervention in rational and statesmanlike terms, if it is under all circumstances, and without qualification or limit, to preclude an armed protest against intervention by other foreign powers’. Experience had made such Cobdenite inflexibility a dispensable luxury. But even here, Morley moulded Cobden in his own image. Despite contrary evidence, Morley argued that Cobden ‘would have relied upon opinion’ in putting the principle into practice.94 Finally, Morley’s portrayal of Cobden as a practical man made it neces­sary to square pragmatism with ethical principles. In 1860, Cobden negotiated the Anglo-French commercial treaty with Louis Napoleon’s government. During the 1870s, Louis Napoleon had a bad press, to put it mildly, and at the time when Morley was writing it was natural for liberal readers to ask how Cobden could co-operate with the French Emperor and a reactionary government, ‘which, besides being lawless and violent in its origin, persisted in stifling the press, corrupting the 168

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history administration, silencing the popular voice, and from time to time sending great batches of untried and often innocent men to obscure and miserable death at Cayenne’. While Morley conceded the illiberal origin and nature of the regime, he also castigated its predecessor as an ‘anarchy of utopists, anarchists and talkers’. Not much could be said in favour of the government of Louis Napoleon, but at least it had ‘the merit of preserving an amount and kind of order in which the ideas of a better system might grow up’.95 To a liberal of Morley’s kind this was the crux of the matter. But it also meant that political order became as important as individual rights. Leaving the subject, Morley stressed the results of Cobden’s work in this area, arguing in utilitarian fashion that the improved relations between France and Britain since 1860 were ‘the verification of Cobden’s hope and foresight’.96 In sum, Morley’s Cobden represented the pinnacle of an honest and simple liberalism, which, although in need of continuous re-interpretation at the fringes, was durable and relevant. Unsurprisingly, Morley was later reproached for ‘not insisting more upon Cobden’s limitations’.97 But Morley’s Cobden was more than a pure construction made from scratch with a precise result in mind. It also reflected how writing the book made an impact on Morley’s own internationalist views: through Cobden, Morley’s understanding of the real value of conciliatory diplomacy and what F. W. Hirst called ‘the logical connection between peace and progress’ deepened.98 There is little doubt that Morley wanted his own internationalism to be like Cobden’s – principled yet practical and wholly free from ‘the spirit of Machiavellian calculation’.99 Morley’s Gladstone Throughout The Life of Cobden, Gladstone was portrayed favourably, and it is hardly surprising that he thought highly of the book.100 ­Gladstone appeared as almost the only man of principle left in the mainly Whig governments under the impetus of Russell and Palmerston. When, in 1903, Morley came to write the biography of his friend and political mentor, times had changed. The liberal programme of Home Rule for Ireland, in which both Bryce and Morley were central figures, had been tried and failed and the political climate in Britain had, from Morley’s perspective, deteriorated markedly. To some extent, the writing of The Life of William Ewart Gladstone (1903) was a game of ostrich at a time when the individualist and anti-imperialist Morley was alienated from the liberal mainstream. On the other hand, however, it is clear that Morley was very conscious of the political force of the book: it could, potentially, reawaken true liberalism. Morley was not the Gladstone family’s first choice as a biographer (incidentally, the names of Acton and Bryce were both mentioned in the process) but, when asked, Morley did 169

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history not hesitate. The end-product was, in all respects, successful. The book sold almost 100,000 copies before it went out of print in 1942, while a cheaper, shorter edition sold nearly 50,000 copies. Despite its age and weaknesses, Morley’s Life, which was superseded only with the publication of H. C. G. Matthew’s recent study, is still highly regarded. In comparison with The Life of Cobden, much more has been written about Morley’s ‘tombstone’ to Gladstone (as Harold Laski later termed it), but the international aspects of the book have received scant attention.101 The Life of Gladstone is above all the story of the young conservative High Church disciple who became the grand old man of liberalism. The Gladstone family expressly asked that Morley did not attempt a detailed description of Gladstone’s religious life – a task for which they presumably saw an agnostic rationalist unfit.102 Consequently, Morley’s Gladstone was more political than religious (even if there are quite a few chapters on ecclesiastical matters), which strengthened the main story­ line, shared by Gladstone, that the horizon and vision of the grand old man deepened and widened throughout his life, towards an irresistible liberalism that religious Oxford had prevented him from seeing. Bred by Eton, Oxford and the Anglican Church, Gladstone was born a Tory, but on the divisive issue of free trade, which became the acid test of liberalism, the young promising MP followed Peel and defected from the Tories. Instead, he became the incarnation of liberalism in Britain. Peace, reform and retrenchment were his great objects as Chancellor of the Exchequer and these liberal watchwords informed the four governments under his leadership. Because Gladstone’s religiosity is not accorded the significance it deserves, the narrative appears not only to involve too much change (and too little continuity) but it fails dramatically to point to the conservative or anti-liberal streak in Gladstone’s thought. Yet this tendency to present the Gladstone that Morley admired was even more pronounced in the context of international politics and imperialism. The background against which The Life of Gladstone was composed is important: the South African War raged and Morley was one of its most ferocious critics. He thought imperialism decidedly retrogressive and he eyed an option of turning the question of British imperial and foreign policy into one of those deciding questions that could act as a litmus test of real liberalism. In 1904, L. T. Hobhouse (1864–1929) published Democracy and Reaction. As a liberal individualist, it is unsurprising that Morley disliked the new liberal tendencies of the younger generation and resisted the rhetorical lure with which Hobhouse tried to reconcile parts of liberalism with socialism following their joint condemnation of the South African War. The fight against imperialism and expediency was the only area of complete agreement between Morley, collectivist liberals and socialists. On this theme Morley found the book outstanding, because it sketched the lines of the battlefield admirably. To 170

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history this, Morley added his own historical, Manichean twist: ‘Terms alter, but the issue is constant – force against right; reason of State against maxims of ethics; policy against justice and truth; serpent against dove; fox against lion; narrow and local expediency against the broad and the eternal; private morals the test or not of public morals’.103 This notion of eternal questions reappearing in different guises is crucial for grasping how Gladstone, in Morley’s hands, was made an icon of internationalism. At an early stage of the biography, Morley claims that ‘the question of questions’ of Gladstone’s active career was the problem of ‘the correspondence between the rule of private morals and of public. Is the rule one and the same for individual and for state?’ According to Morley, Gladstone had long since believed so and he continued to resist ‘the odious contention that moral progress in the relations of nations and states to one another is an illusion and a dream’.104 Gladstone’s contribution to the Don Pacifico debate in the House of Commons in 1850 stood as ‘a grand classic exposition’ of opposing principles of foreign policy. It was the first time that Gladstone appealed ‘to the common sentiment of the civilised world, to the general and fixed convictions of mankind, to the principles of brotherhood among nations, to their sacred independence, to the equality in their rights of the weak with the strong’.105 In parallel with the classic liberal image that Morley created of Gladstone, there runs an image of the internationalist hero who slowly discovered and entrenched the true principles. Initially, Gladstone saw the Crimean War as a ‘vindication of the public law of Europe against a wanton disturber’, a noble but immature internationalist position according to Morley. The later resignation from cabinet and resulting political isolation were, in contrast, truly admirable, and Gladstone’s policies of peace and retrenchment emerged as the only bulwark against dangerous Palmerstonian populism.106 After gradually realising internationalist principles, Gladstone became, in Morley’s hands, the leader who grasped and mastered the tendency of the times, the modern and rational influence against the forces of reaction. An example is the doctrine of nationality, which gained, according to Morley, ‘a commanding hold’ on Gladstone. This happened at a time when other, retrograde theories or concepts, like the divine right of kings, providential pre-eminence of dynasties, balance of power and sovereign independence, were moving into the background. However, like Morley, Gladstone was no untrammelled radical democrat and to Morley it was a sign of ideological health that he was never swayed by ‘the glorified democracy of Mazzinian propaganda’. This left much unsaid. There is an argument to be made that it was an older, and at root conservative, doctrine of order that had ‘a commanding hold’ on Gladstone’s actions in international politics, and not the doctrine of ­nationality.107 Morley’s outlook was much the same as Gladstone’s, 171

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history despite their different starting points. Morley clearly supported the principle of nationality, but he wanted it to unfold within a stable European order. His internationalist ideals were not revolutionist – he had no intention of overthrowing the existing order. It was clearly surprising and lamentable from Morley’s (and Bryce’s) perspective that there had been a ‘practical declension of what has been called allegiance to humanity’ in the wake of the spirit of nationality.108 While it can be reasonably argued that Morley neglected or misunderstood the conservative elements of Gladstone’s domestic politics, I think it is harder to make the same case with regard to international politics. This does not mean, however, that Gladstone and Morley did not share internationalist ideals. It does, though, tell us something about the rather limited radicalism of one powerful version of internationalist ideology: it was harsh in its critique of traditional methods of conducting international politics but, because it did not advocate a new international order (but rather the development of a particular sentiment or ethos within the existing order), it could appear more radical than it really was. Morley and many other inter­ nationalists shared with Gladstone the notion of a necessary political order as the precondition of reformed international politics. Just as Cobden had not always come down on the right side of Morley’s moral fence, so Gladstone’s life threw up some uncomfortable facts. One issue was Gladstone’s initial support for the South in the American Civil War, when the grand old man (like many other people, as Morley stressed) ‘failed to take the true measure’ of the conflict.109 It was also no easy task to defend the Gladstonian policies in Egypt and Sudan in the early 1880s – especially not against the background of Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign. Morley appeared to side with Bright against Gladstone on the question of Egypt, but he created an image of Gladstone and his cabinet as fighting against single-handed intervention (despite the eventual decision to pursue this course).110 Morley described Sudan as an ‘unedifying and a tragic chapter’ of British politics and, although Gladstone had made minor mistakes, it was a political tragedy with a logic of its own. Morley’s message was unmistakeable: despite some difficulties, Gladstone exuded the spirit of true internationalism. For example, Gladstone and Bismarck were respectively described as ‘the genius of popular right, and free government, and settled law of nations … [and] the genius of force and reason of state and blood and iron’ and, to the critics of Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign, Morley simplistically retorted that ‘One should take care lest in quenching the spirit of Midlothian, we leave sovereign mastery of the world to Machiavelli’.111 Similarly, Morley identified a deep Gladstonian conviction in the argument that ‘war, whatever else we may choose to say of it, is no antidote for Mammon-worship and can never be a cure for moral evils’.112 Morley even argued that the pamphlet Gladstone wrote at the 172

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history height of the Bulgarian agitation in 1876 ‘beats with a sustained pulse and passion that recalls Burke’s letters on the Regicide Peace’ and that ‘the keynote of this great crusade was the association of humanity with a high policy worthy of the British name’.113 It is no coincidence that Morley left Gladstone’s beloved home of Hawarden in September 1899 after sifting through another chunk of papers to give one of the most powerful speeches against the South African War.114 But the lasting effect of Morley’s internationalist reading of Gladstone’s political life was to install the grand old man in the pantheon of internationalism alongside Cobden, and to place him firmly on one side in the ongoing struggle over the right foreign and imperial policies. Morley in the twentieth century In the early twentieth century, Morley was Secretary of State for India. Like most liberals, he entertained some crude assumptions about the different potentials of ‘civilised’ and ‘non-civilised’ peoples, which in turn influenced his approach to the British empire. During his time in office, if not before, Morley lost any illusions he might have had with regard to a speedy transition of India to self-government, although he did attempt some liberal reforms. Despite a strong radical vein that made him susceptible to the argument that imperialism posed a danger to liberty at home, Morley was not an out-and-out critic of empire, which would have made it difficult for him to fill the post.115 He continued to press liberal causes from his private office while he, inescapably perhaps, got blood on his hands in carrying out his public office. Hamer has described how the dual personality who occupied this post – the practical man of affairs and the radical opponent of imperialism – inevitably faced some difficult political decisions, which led him to sacrifice his principles, for example by (reluctantly) sanctioning the use of force against Indian uprisings and other harsh measures, such as preventive deportations. At first, Morley defended these decisions but later, amid the horridness of world war, he atoned for them.116 It was almost as if the charges of hypocrisy, against which Morley had defended Gladstone, returned to haunt Morley himself. Meanwhile, Morley promulgated liberal internationalist ideology ­politically and intellectually. In his more weighty and reasoned arguments, his mix of history and biography played a central role. On the centenary of Mill’s birth, he used ‘Millite sanity’ to argue against ‘Neo-­ Machiavellism in England – end justifying the means, country right or wrong, and all the rest of it’.117 Whether it was Cobden, Gladstone or Mill who was dusted off to fight a battle against evil did not matter much to Morley, as the struggle was eternal. In the summer of 1912, when Morley, as Chancellor, delivered two lectures at the Victoria University 173

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history of Manchester (now the University of Manchester), he continued the same battle against new enemies. The familiar names of Machiavelli and de Maistre were mentioned but it was now a school of contemporary German political thought – that of Bismarck, Treitschke and General Bernhardi – that Morley felt a need to counter.118 Criticising Germany was never easy for Morley, who deeply admired the country, and the coming of the Great War was a comparatively hard blow for him. Initially, Morley argued against the war and for ‘diplomatic energy and armed neutrality’, but to no avail. Following the German invasion of Belgium, the cabinet saw no other option than war, and Morley felt compelled to resign. In the posthumously published Memorandum on Resignation, which Bryce encouraged him to write, Morley described himself as ‘a notorious peaceman and little-Englander’ and fittingly employed a Cobdenite language of radicalism.119 A disillusioned internationalist retired to his study, wrote his memoirs and followed the temporary disintegration of liberalism and internationalism in a militarist rampage of unparalleled proportions. Acton’s ethics and the view from nowhere In the closing years of the nineteenth century, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton, First Baron of Acton, enjoyed the most brilliant intellectual reputation of the day.120 Everyone agreed that Acton – a Catholic educated in Germany and a European nobleman with ties to the Kingdom of Naples and the Holy Roman Empire – was a ‘prodigy of learning’, who knew quite a bit about everything.121 But Acton was also felt to be a notorious underachiever, which is undoubtedly connected to his productivity, or lack thereof, as a historian. It is often repeated that Acton hardly wrote anything, but that is a myth. He did not write big books and the book which most captured the imagination of Acton’s contemporaries and later interpreters – the eagerly awaited history of liberty that Acton ironically termed ‘The Madonna of the Future’ – also remained unwritten.122 But Acton was not unproductive, as his volumes of essays and lectures testify. It seems to be the combination of perceived idleness in writing and a reputation of immense learning that has inspired as well as provoked posterity. For one, Harold Laski held Acton to be ‘a rather sorry spectacle – to have a reputation because your friends say you could have done anything you please irritates rather than impresses; and yet there is something in him which leaves room for real emotion’.123 Early influences As a historian, a Catholic and a liberal, Acton lived a turbulent intellectual life. Widowed at an early age, in 1840 Acton’s mother married 174

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history the later Lord Granville, who became Liberal leader of the House of Lords and a member of three of Gladstone’s governments. The young Acton wanted to go to Cambridge, but his religious beliefs led to a string of rejections. Instead, he went to Munich and inaugurated a remarkable friendship and academic and religious partnership with Johann Joseph Ignaz von Döllinger (1799–1890), one of the best church historians of the day. It was in the intellectual landscapes of Bavaria and under the direction of Döllinger that Acton’s mind was enlarged and shaped. In particular, Acton came to share the doctrine of developing Christianity, which saw Christian religion as the embodiment of history and not as a philosophical system; it held that ‘its dogmas were not fixed for all time but underwent change and development’.124 The milieu of Munich was not dominated by liberal Catholicism, although it moved rapidly in that direction after Acton’s arrival. To him, this creed meant crushing ‘arbitrary authority of both Church and State in religious matters’, subordinating it to ‘the rule of law and tradition’.125 This ideology was liberal not only because it found no inconsistency between the Catholic creed and the developments of science and technology, but also because it stressed that the Christian notion of conscience imperatively demands a corresponding measure of personal liberty. The feeling of duty and responsibility to God is the only arbiter of a Christian’s actions. With this no human authority can be permitted to interfere.126

As we shall see, Acton’s early liberalism was heavily circumscribed. Nevertheless, by the logic of circumstance, Döllinger and Acton, who was a lacklustre and largely absent Liberal MP from 1859 to 1866 for Carlow (Ireland) and Bridgnorth, were slowly but surely pressed into a battle with dogmatic ultramontanism and its stubborn insistence on the doctrine of papal infallibility. They both protested. After leaving Germany, Acton promoted liberal Catholicism through his editorship of English periodicals, including the Rambler and the Home and Foreign Review. During the 1867 Vatican Council he continued his dissent, now from the corridors of power in Rome. In Munich, Döllinger was part of the same liberal Catholic public relations exercise, publishing Acton’s reports on the retrograde developments of the Council. Their struggle was in vain but, while Döllinger was soon excommunicated, Acton managed to stay in the Church, despite Cardinal Manning’s attempt to force the issue. Acton balanced on a knife-edge – he never denounced the doctrine of papal infallibility outright, but he continued to battle against the notion that popes or cardinals deserved a polished history or no history at all. It is all the more ironic that Acton later fell out with his ex-communicated mentor over issues of moral judgement in history.127 Acton’s insistence on the sins of the Church and of the popes ­gradually 175

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history broadened to an obsession with the general misdeeds of persons in positions of power, which he continued to expose in his writings. In 1895, Acton was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History in the University of Cambridge. There are many warnings that must be heeded before we approach Acton’s political philosophy, but three are of special importance. Firstly, Acton is an eminently quotable writer and never more so than in the countless fragments he left behind. But using this material is fraught with interpretative and methodological dangers concerning dating, context and intention. I rely primarily on the published and dated sources and less (or where the interpretive dangers are fewer) on fragments. Secondly, this chapter is concerned only with those aspects of Acton’s thought that are important for understanding how inter­national­ ist ideology became part and parcel of his liberalism. Other themes that form a necessary background to the analysis can be treated only cursorily. Finally, we should be aware that Acton cannot be taken as a straightforward representative of English or British intellectual life. His religion, his cosmopolitanism and his distinctively European horizon make that impossible. F. W. Maitland once asked whether Acton would have been ‘quite such a master of contemporary history, quite such an impartial judge of modern England, so European, so supernational, so catholic, so liberal, so wise, so Olympian, so serene’ if he had not had his applications to Cambridge rejected in the 1850s.128 Acton was, however, made a professor in that most English of institutions, where his characteristic self-confessed political idealism, moral passion and intellectual arrogance were on display in the lecture hall and through his writings.129 Acton found in Britain a receptive audience that, even if it could not accept all aspects of his detached cosmopolitanism, had little difficulty in enlisting his humanitarianism and liberalism as supporting pillars of liberal internationalism. It is on these grounds that he deserves a place in the development of liberal international thought in Britain. At the risk of needlessly simplifying a complex mind, it is possible to identify an overall movement in Acton’s political thinking from a Burkean liberalism – gripped with achieving order by insisting on ­political plural­ism and, correspondingly, warning against the dangers of abstract universalist principles and the spirit of majoritarian democracy – to a fully fledged moralistic (and partly democratic) liberalism – whose basic principles of justice and liberty were grounded in Christianity as the developing force of human history. These positions are best seen, I think, as poles on a continuum rather than sharp oppositions. Although there are certain elements of Acton’s later thought that contradict his earlier beliefs (e.g. on issues like slavery, democracy and imperialism), mostly it is a matter of changing emphases within a parasitic relationship between liberty and history. The early, almost obsessive insistence on pluralism 176

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history did not disappear, and Acton’s interest in questions of right and wrong in history clearly grew out of his early struggles with(in) Catholicism. The reasons for this were simple: liberty meant ability to pass judgement in history and, conversely, history meant, inter alia, the growth of liberty. Democracy and nationalism In the 1850s and 1860s, Acton’s creed represented a solid base and the polished exterior of liberalism blended with flashes of reaction. Praise of individual freedom and trenchant critique of absolutism were combined with anti-democratic and anti-national outbursts. Moreover, the early Acton supported colonisation and imperialism as part of a plan of universal conversion to Christianity.130 But perhaps the trait that seems most seriously to dent Acton’s early liberalism is his support of the South in the American Civil War and his defence of slavery. These views developed from Acton’s dread of absolutism, especially in its modern, democratic form, which led to an identification of society and state. ‘Democracy generally monopolizes and concentrates power’, Acton argued, and he repeatedly pointed to the potential dangers of a tyranny of the majority.131 From this perspective, most nineteenth-century politics turned on questions of minority rights and self-government. In the American Civil War, the North represented a steam-rolling absolutism, whereas the South stood up for liberty and independence within a larger unity. Therefore, Acton lamented that the English ‘antipathy against absolute monarchy does not extend to absolute democracy’.132 While there is clearly some liberal logic to this argument, it has been rightly said that the early Acton had a tendency ‘to begin from liberal premises in order to reach highly illiberal conclusions’.133 A pertinent example is his defence of slavery, which appears in different and more or less ambiguous guises in his early writings: as a reproach to the ‘abstract, ideal absolutism’ of demands for equality or as a naturalisation of slavery in evolutionary, civilisational terms, where slavery is held to be ‘criminal only when it is artificial’. Most astoundingly, Acton recognised that, as an institution, slavery was incompatible with the ‘system of Christian liberty’; yet in the same breath he also pointed out that the Apostles never condemned slavery, ‘even within the Christian fold’, and that the ‘sort of civil liberty which came with Christianity into the world … did not require the abolition of slavery’.134 Acton’s approach to the principle of nationality should also be seen in the light of anti-absolutism. In contrast to the views that Bryce formed at Oxford, Acton had little sympathy for the break-up of the Austrian empire or for the notion that one state should contain only one nation. Acton’s famous essay on the subject should be read as a polemic against liberal enthusiasm for Italian unification. His response to a ­reconfiguration of 177

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history Europe along national lines was that of a Continental mind, of an anxious Catholic who equated France with revolution and Austria with harmonious stability.135 Acton began by making a distinction between two kinds of nationality. One, the French, tended towards unity and was founded on the ‘perpetual supremacy of the collective will’. The other, English view of nationality tended ‘to diversity and not to uniformity, to harmony and not to unity’. It was the first version of ‘nationality’ that would dominate the political future of Europe and it was to the implications for liberty that Acton directed his opposition. ‘Liberty provokes diversity, and diversity preserves liberty by supplying the means of organisation.’ Unity and liberty were inimical to each other. Consequently, the principle of nationality was ‘a retrograde step in history’, essentially a ‘confutation of democracy’.136 Despite their political differences on the subject of Italian unification (which Acton came to accept), it is important to stress what Acton shared with Bryce on the subject of nationality. There was a common thread in their arguments, as they sought to identify and promul­gate good, often English, manifestations of national allegiance that were compatible with internationalism abroad and liberality at home, while rejecting chauvinistic and narrow-minded forms. Whether the menace was democracy or nationalism or, worse, a conjunction of the two, Acton’s preferred solution was federalism. Federation was ‘the only barrier to Democracy’ and ‘the only way of avoiding war’.137 In 1871, at the end of a lecture on the Franco-Prussian War, Acton aired his uneasiness with the political developments in the two countries: he feared the absolute republic as much as the absolute monarchy. Referring to Germany, he argued that ‘a Federation between Sovereign States is perhaps of all forms of Government the one that promises to provide, in the long run, the strongest and safest securities for the liberty and the progress of the world’.138 To Acton, federalism was the mechanism through which diversity in unity was possible, the trick by which liberty could be combined with demands of modern politics. Federalism essentially meant tolerance and although he never elaborated the point, Acton held it ‘capable of unlimited extension’.139 It is this line of argument which makes it possible to see Acton as an, admittedly distant, forefather of English political pluralism.140 Moralism and history Late in life, Acton promulgated a moralistic, almost dogmatic, liberalism in which ‘providence became the critic of the past and the present without ceasing to be the hope of the future’.141 This stance came about through a preoccupation with questions concerning moral judgement in history. At the same time, following the disappointment of the Vatican Council, from the 1870s onwards Acton became increasingly involved in 178

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history Liberal politics – ironically, this happened only when he was no longer a Liberal MP but had on Gladstone’s initiative taken up a Liberal seat in the House of Lords.142 It was in this later phase that he became an important representative of internationalist ideology. Whether Acton is best understood as the fullest incarnation of the Whig historian or as the nemesis of historical Whiggism is a complex issue. Herbert Butterfield, author of The Whig Interpretation of History (1931), could not make up his mind, and I will side-step this vexed question by venturing two points.143 Firstly, although the development of liberty and self-government was for Acton at the heart of historical progress, he was not a Whig historian in the narrow sense that he held English liberty to be a providential winning cause. Secondly, and in the wider sense, Acton clearly was a Whig ­historian because he insisted on history drifting in progressive directions and being unavoidably entangled with present concerns. Acton’s historical imagination was too well developed for him to have any sympathy for vulgar, materialistic presentism or the unsophisticated logic of positivist history. In 1858, he mounted a brutal attack on H. T. Buckle’s method, learning, integrity and intelligence and referred to post hoc, ergo propter hoc as ‘the great logical principle of the positivists’.144 For Acton, history offered truth, virtue and vice on display, and as such we ought to learn from it, albeit not in a direct way. As he argued in his inaugural lecture in Cambridge in 1895: the science of politics is the one science that is deposited by the stream of history, like grains of gold in the sand of a river; and the knowledge of the past, the record of truths revealed by experience, is eminently practical, as an instrument of action and a power that goes to the making of the future.145

Acton was preoccupied with the possibility of establishing a science of politics and although he argued that the student of history was a poli­tician facing the past, he had a much broader understanding of the subject than his predecessor in the Regius Chair, J. R. Seeley.146 Whereas Seeley was concerned with amassing historical facts that could be processed into laws of political science, Acton was sceptical towards such a project and keenly interested in the ethical blunders, feats and dilemmas thrown up by history. To Acton, history was a ‘science’ (or Wissenschaft) in the sense that it involved the production of knowledge through original archival research and a certain amount of academic specialisation. But the raison d’être of history was truth. It was ‘the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history’ and he pleaded with the audience to his inaugural lecture ‘never to debase the moral currency or to lower the standard of rectitude’.147 Increasingly, it was moral judgement (and redemption) that came to define Acton’s view of the activity of doing history. It is against this background that Acton’s critique of Leopold von Ranke and other German historians should be seen. He admired Ranke deeply 179

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history and often spoke of him as his master and instructor, but he had little use for Rankean relativism.148 The problem was partly methodological. Acton sought to tone down the novelty of Ranke’s purported methodological revolution and stressed that it could be executed too faithfully. In Ranke, the description of the context of historical actions became so thick that it left little room for individual action, decision or responsibility. A similar critique emerges in ‘German schools of history’ (1886), which Acton wrote for the first issue of the English Historical Review. Here, he criticised the ‘mobility of the moral code’ that he found among German historians. It was built around the notion that ‘Mankind varies and advances in ethical insight; the virtue of to-day was once a crime, and the code changes with latitude’.149 Acton did not directly accuse Ranke of adhering to this view, but he detected a tendency to impartiality (or indifference) in crucial cases of moral judgement. It was even worse and more pronounced in historians of the Prussian school, including Heinrich von Sybel, Gustav Droysen and Heinrich von Treitschke. Their problem was not merely that of the partisan; rather, they became apologetic historians by virtue of their triumphalist belief that ‘The forces to be reckoned with are those which, in the long-run prevail’.150 In these remarks on German schools of history we find the seeds of Acton’s famous dispute with Mandell Creighton, Dixie Professor of ­Ecclesiastical History at Cambridge 1884–1991, first editor of the English Historical Review and later Bishop of London. After having reviewed the first two volumes of Creighton’s, History of the Papacy quite favourably, Acton was asked by Creighton to review the third and fourth volumes when they came out in 1887. The new volumes made a big impression on Acton, mainly because they raised the question of historical responsibility and judgement in its acutest form. The review in the English Historical Review came as no little surprise to Creighton. Following a correspon­dence between the two men, Acton toned it down, but it still reads harshly. For Acton, the actions of the papacy during the Reformation were explosive material, and he was disappointed with Creighton’s slick impartiality. ‘He is not striving to prove a case, or burrowing towards a conclusion, but wishes to pass through scenes of raging controversy and passion with a serene curiosity, a suspended judgment, a divided jury, and a pair of white gloves’. This gave Acton cause to return to his familiar enemies in the historical business. Creighton’s aloofness either meant relativism (‘every age ought to be tried by its own canons’) or triumphalism (‘the will of Providence is made manifest by success’).151 The correspondence between the two historians is more interesting and dramatic, which is not least due to Acton’s frankness as a critic and Creighton’s admiration for Acton (as well as his open-mindedness as a scholar).152 And it was the occasion for one of Acton’s most famous pleas for moral judgement in history and for a legendary utterance about power: 180

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge Pope and King unlike other men, with a favourable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against the holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.… There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it. That is the point at which the negation of Catholicism and the negation of Liberalism meet and keep high festival, and the end learns to justify the means.153

Acton objected strongly to any attempt to exonerate historical personalities on consideration of either date or station, and he strongly disapproved of the doctrines of expediency or ‘political atheism’. The only way to achieve a history that was conscientious and unapologetic was to honour truth and ethics. ‘The inflexible integrity of the moral code is, to me, the secret of the authority, the dignity, the utility of history.’154 At the end of Acton’s remarkable letter he attached a list of political and historical epigrams, all concerned with the issue of moral judgement in history. Acton did not conceive his ideas on this subject with direct reference to international political problems, but it is striking how many of these epigrams could serve as slogans for internationalists: insistence on the definiteness of public morality, lament of the lack of moral progress in Europe, and appeals for impartiality and truth. Predictably, Creighton found it hard to bow to Acton’s uncompromising moralism. Surely, some consideration had to be paid to the difference between individual and public action? Who was he to condemn the actions of men in ages gone by? Did they always know what they were doing? These were sensible questions that exposed the fragility of Acton’s position. Creighton agreed that ‘Moral progress has indeed been slow; it still is powerless to affect international relations’.155 But whether hanging judges in the court of history would be of much help was another matter. To Acton this was the only option, even if it was not a solution in a strict sense of the word. Moralism and internationalism From the 1880s onwards, this moralism propelled Acton into a liberal inter­nationalist approach to international politics: he stressed the virtues of peace and tolerance, the possibilities of moral learning and progress, and the resulting potential for international political order. Moreover, he had few problems identifying its political enemies, like Beaconsfieldism and jingoism. Acton’s admiration for Gladstone as the most brilliant English statesman may have bolstered this approach to international politics. Like Gladstone, he did not find it sensible to view states in isolation. He refused to accept national borders in anything but a trivial sense; a state was part of, if not a universal order, then at least a European order 181

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history larger than itself.156 In stark contrast to his earlier defence of imperialism, Acton’s moralism now led to anti-imperialism and internationalist isolationism. Acton became a little Englander. As Gertrude Himmelfarb has pointed out, his enemies at this stage were as many as they were diverse: socialism, Toryism, positivism, racism, nationalism, imperialism, determinism, laissez-faire and the survival of the fittest were all credited with endangering the sacred principle of liberty.157 Acton was not, however, a pacifist. Nowhere does he indicate that he would refuse to fight in selfdefence, and he certainly had few problems supporting the increase in the size of the Royal Navy in order to implement his internationalist vision, as his correspondence with Mary Gladstone over the naval estimates of 1894 testifies. Writing to Mary, he enclosed a memorandum that he obviously wanted passed on to her father, who refused to agree to an increase in spending, despite the 1893–1894 naval scare. Acton wanted a relatively strong navy in order to avoid being dragged into the Triple Alliance in case of a French attempt to put pressure on Britain. In other words, he wanted a strong navy in order to allow Britain to pursue a policy of ‘detachment and impartial benevolence’. Point by point Acton tried to refute Gladstone’s arguments against an increase in the naval estimates. One of Gladstone’s fears was that the increase would promote militarism. Here, Acton was resigned to the fact that Europe was already in arms – although this was deplorable, it was a fact that British policy could not alter. Moreover, ‘A fleet with an army is an instrument of militarism. A fleet without an army is not.’ And Acton went further. Evidently fearing that he would be misunderstood, he added that ‘although I am as mad and as drunk as the rest, it is not from national pride or ambition. All that ministers to those feelings I admit to be a sin, and wars of conquest and aggrandisement are literally no better in my eyes than murder.’158 Unlike many other liberals or internationalists, Acton had little urge to insist on the realism of his views, and he once scribbled that ‘Liberalism wishes for what ought to be, irrespective of what is’.159 He did occasionally run into brick walls of actual immoral behaviour, and his attempt to grapple with the usefulness and morality of the French Revolu­tion is perhaps the best example of this.160 As a crusader for liberty and peace, Acton was a rare species, acknowledging the risk that any crusade could degenerate into an absolutism that could crush diversity. However, he shared with most internationalists a scorn for practical men who did ‘not believe that politics are a branch of Moral Science. They think that politics teach what is likely to do good or harm, not what is right and wrong, innocent or sinful.’161 This is familiar internationalist territory, but rhetorically Acton was sharper and more polemical than most. His uncompromising honesty as an intellectual critic meant that Acton often named his adversaries, including James Fitzjames Stephen and Charles Dilke. This was unusual among internationalists. 182

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history In a famous essay on Machiavelli, Acton was on a mission to expose the subtle but living influence of the notorious Florentine, who had produced an ideology for a new era in which states, no longer limited by a church in decay, emerged and made politics ‘an affair of might, a mere struggle for power’.162 The essay is a fine example of Acton’s enormous erudition, and it inspired not only Sidgwick (as we saw in chapter 4) but also Gladstone, who, on receiving the lecture, wrote to Acton: ‘What a marvellous, what a terrible – I almost add what a detestable – array of authori­t ies you produce. Against such pricks as these I must kick a little.’163 However, as a piece of writing it was weighed down by citations. Bryce thought that Acton’s style increasingly came to suffer from an abundance of ‘interspersed citations, and from the overfulness and sublety of the thought, which occasionally led to obscurity’, and Morley found Acton’s introduction ‘weighty – almost too weighty’ and ‘as hard reading as a corrupt bit of Thucydides’.164 Acton managed, however, to identify the ways in which Machiavelli’s political logic and ‘ethical basis of judgments’ had crept into the modern world – he even described historical triumphalism, the justice of success, as ‘the nursling of the nineteenth century’.165 The consequentialist logic that Acton despised stemmed directly from Machiavelli. As a broader political logic, it was possible to find examples of Machiavellism in Britain (including Bacon and Carlyle), but Acton pointed out that it was the Continent, and especially Germany, that was behind the recovery of Machiavellian principles. This development reached its pinnacle in the movements for the unification of Italy and Germany. Unity had not ceased to be a spectre of oppression: ‘the immediate purpose with which Italians and Germans effected the great change in the European constitution was unity, not liberty. They constructed, not securities, but forces. ­Machiavelli’s time had come.’166 In the face of such a wrecked intellectual world, Acton’s response was simple and subversive: exposing the hypocrisy of practical men and their historical benefactors. Only such a strategy could force readers of history to see victims, failures and contingency, rather than heroes, successes and inevitability. Some aspects of Acton’s thought were left behind by later inter­nationalists, most fatefully perhaps his warnings against the dangers of nationalism. But other elements were picked up and naturalised. Perhaps the most important of Acton’s contributions was the way he catalysed and crystallised that spirit of moralism which refused to accept arguments from necessity, which protested against expediency, and which sought to judge moral and political questions with the aid of a liberal ethical code that was partial and impartial at the same time. This strengthened the sense of moral superiority lodged in liberal internationalist ideology. Internationalists had to be on the side of justice, freedom and humanity; they could never be unquestionably 183

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history loyal citizens of the great state. The big questions in politics and history should be viewed from nowhere. Conclusion This chapter has sought to demonstrate how history was put to use in internationalist ideology in the writings of three liberal historians. For James Bryce, the values and assumptions of liberal internationalism were, simultaneously, validated and romanticised by history. Bryce entertained a notion of moral progress in international politics, but it was tempered by increasing disquiet over the destructive potential of nationalism. Against this creed, Bryce held up the half-serious utopia of medieval Roman universalism (‘one emperor, one pope’), because it symbolised a unity and solidarity among humans that was increasingly under strain. A universalism with a place for differences was Bryce’s internationalist ideal. He exploited the multivalent concept of the nation to produce history that exemplified a harmonious relationship between nationalism and internationalism. In terminology, it was far from Acton, for Bryce was less troubled by the risk of universalism transmuting into absolutism. But, practically, their ideals were not miles apart. It was an ideal of diversity in unity within a gradualist, progressive framework. It was, in other words, a reformist internationalism intent on combining Burkean stability with progress. The same can be said of Morley, who used his skills as a writer and a biographer to manufacture a legend of internationalist statesmen. In Cobden and Gladstone he created the heroes who could serve as that incarnation of core values through which ideologies create intellectual staying power. Morley understood the importance of winning the battle of words, and he used historical allies whenever contemporary internationalism was being dwarfed by its political and intellectual rivals. Lord Acton’s contribution to this Weltanschauung was both more indirect and more fundamental, in that he provided the justification for a historical moralism that had long since been a trademark of inter­ nationalist ideology. By dissecting history and passing judgement on its brightest and darkest sides, fresh liberal reformers could reinvigorate their projects. Acton’s spirit was truly the spirit of a combative inter­ nationalism that would have an army of historians on its side. As he put it: ‘The emergencies of practical politics have introduced a false morality – and it is the mission of history to expose it’.167 For liberal intellectuals in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the triumvirate of Bryce, Morley and Acton was important. They represented adumbrations and antecedents of a particular strand of internationalism that found its resources in the depth and breadth of history. In ­different 184

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history ways they symbolised intellectual power and political determination in an age when liberal ideals and aspirations were under pressure at home and abroad. Their response was to dissect the various trends and policies that they thought responsible for this malaise and to reassert with renewed vigour the truths of old, while at the same time providing them with historical support. In doing so, they not only kept alive internationalist ideology; they also refined it and helped carry it into the twentieth century. Notes 1 Lord Acton, ‘The study of history’ [1895], reprinted in Selected Writings of Lord Acton, ed. J. Rufus Fears, 3 vols (Indianapolis, 1985–1988), II, 504–52, at p. 543. 2 Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (London, 1873), pp. 32, 37. 3 G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, second edition (Cambridge, 1913), p. 344. See also J. A. Froude, ‘The science of history’ [1864], in Short Studies on Great Subjects, third edition (London, 1868), 1–25. 4 The increasing appetite for history was reflected in the number of historical books published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Jonathan Rose, The Edwardian Temperament, 1895–1919 (Athens, 1986), appendix (‘Census of books published in Britain 1870–1924’), pp. 213–22. 5 As always, it is important not to overemphasise the extent of professionalisation. For good discussions of the discipline’s development in Britain, see: Michael Bentley, ‘The evolution and dissemination of historical knowledge’, in Martin Daunton (ed.), The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (Oxford, 2005), 173–97; Doris Goldstein, ‘The organizational development of the British historical profession, 1884–1921’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research, 55 (1982), 180–93; Doris Goldstein, ‘The professionalization of history in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries’, History of Historiography, 3 (1983), 3–27; Rosemary Jann, ‘From amateur to professional: the case of the Oxbridge historians’, Journal of British Studies, 22 (1983), 122–47; John Kenyon, The History Men (London, 1983), pp. 183–99; Phillippa Levine, The Amateur and the Professional (Cambridge, 1986); Peter R. H. Slee, Learning and a Liberal Education (Manchester, 1986). 6 Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London, 2002), p. 45. On the wider functions of history in politics and culture, see Olive Anderson, ‘The political uses of history in mid nineteenth century England’, Past and Present, 36 (1967), 87–105; Levine, The Amateur and the Professional, ch. 4; Billie Melman, The Culture of History (Oxford, 2006). 7 One remarkable exception is Thomas Kleinknecht, Imperiale und internationale Ordnung (Göttingen, 1985). See also Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past (Cambridge, 2005), ch. 3. 8 A by no means exhaustive list of prominent historians who one could legitimately claim had an impact in the period that concerns us here would include H. Hallam, Lord Macaulay, H. T. Buckle, C. Thirlwall, George Grote, Thomas Arnold, Thomas Carlyle, C. Kingsley, M. Burrows, G. O. Trevelyan, J. A. Froude, E. A. Freeman, J. R. Green, W. Stubbs, J. R. Seeley, S. R. Gardiner, C. Oman, M. Creighton, W. E. Lecky, F. Seebohm, Goldwin Smith, John Morley, F. Y. Powell, Lord Acton, F. W. Maitland, J. L. Hammond, James Bryce, C. H. Firth, T. F. Tout, A. W. Ward, R. L. Poole, A. F. Pollard, J. H. Round, G. M.

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9 10

11 12 13 14

15

16 17

18

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Trevelyan, G. P. Gooch, H. A. L. Fisher, Ernest Barker, H. W. C. Davis, Ramsay Muir, Charles Webster and R. H. Tawney. Breathtaking as the list is, it does not include Edwardian amateur historians like Hilaire Belloc and G. K. Chester­ ton, prominent economic historians (Arnold Toynbee, T. W. Cunningham, George Unwin and W. J. Ashley), nor scholars of ancient history. The latter group included those interested in the history of Rome (e.g. Charles Merivale, W. W. Forster and J. B. Bury), Greece (e.g. W. Ridgeway, Gilbert Murray, A. E. Zimmern and G. Lowes Dickinson) and Byzantium (e.g. G. Finlay). See also Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge, 1983), p. 359. Christopher Parker, The English Historical Tradition since 1850 (Edinburgh, 1990), pp. 40–1. See also John Burrow, A Liberal Descent (Cambridge, 1981); Reba Soffer, ‘Nation, duty, character and confidence: history at Oxford, 1850–1914’, Historical Journal, 30 (1987), 77–104. This conception of history, stressing the nation and believing in both contingency and progress, can be linked to liberal Anglican ideas, the importance of which in Victorian intellectual life is increasingly being appreciated. See for example H. S. Jones, ‘The idea of the national in Victorian political thought’, European Journal of Political Theory, 5 (2006), 12–21. The classic study is Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, 1952). See also the discussion in John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive, fifth edition, 2 vols (London, 1862 [1843]), II, book 6, ch. 11 (‘Additional elucidations of the science of history’). E. H. Carr, What Is History?, second edition (London, 1987 [1961]), p. 20. On the universalisation of Whig values, see Peter Bowler, The Invention of Progress (Oxford, 1989), p. 7; Soffer, ‘Nation, duty’, pp. 77, 91. Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘History: the poverty of empiricism’, in Robin Blackburn (ed.), Ideology in Social Science (London, 1972), 96–115, at p. 98. Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, pp. 72, 84. On the development of the Whig tradition, see also Burrow, A Liberal Descent, pp. 7, 296 and passim. When Carlyle and Stubbs both supported the Bulgarian agitation of 1876, it was a rivalry for the title of the odd man out. See, generally, R. T. Shannon, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Agitation 1876 (London, 1963). See for example Buckle’s discussion of the evils of war in H. T. Buckle, History of Civilization in England, 2 vols (London, 1857, 1861), I, pp. 173–203. See also Bernard Semmel, ‘H. T. Buckle: the liberal faith and the science of history’, British Journal of Sociology, 27 (1976), 370–86. Frederic Seebohm, On International Reform (London, 1871). Seebohm (1833– 1912), a Quaker and a liberal in politics, is best known for his works on English medieval history. For examples of Smith’s (1823–1910) internationalism (chosen among his remarkably consistent and voluminous writings), see Goldwin Smith, ‘Richard Cobden’, Macmillan’s Magazine, 12 (1865), 90–2; Goldwin Smith, ‘The Manchester school’, Contemporary Review, 67 (1895), 377–90; Goldwin Smith, ‘Imperialism in the United States’, Contemporary Review, 75 (1899), 620–9. J. R. Green (1837–1883) is generally regarded as a member of the Oxford school of English history, but was more nuanced than both Stubbs and Freeman. See J. R. Green, A Short History of the English People (London, 1876). Green was a liberal internationalist, albeit of a pragmatic sort. See Green to James Bryce, not dated [1880?], in H. A. L. Fisher, James Bryce, 2 vols (London, 1927), I, pp. 172–3; and, generally, The Letters of John Richard Green, ed. L. Stephen (London, 1901). See also Anthony Brundage, The People’s Historian (London, 1994).

Liberal internationalism and the uses of history 19 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (New York, 1965 [1931]). 20 Thomas Babington Macaulay, The History of England, ed. H. Trevor-Roper, abridged version (Harmondsworth, 1968 [1848–1861]), p. 52. 21 See Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, part I. 22 Burrow, A Liberal Descent, p. 294. 23 James Bryce, International Relations (London, 1922). 24 See Collini et al., That Noble Science, p. 236. Good biographies include Fisher, James Bryce; Edmund Ions, James Bryce and American Democracy, 1870–1922 (London, 1968); John T. Seaman Jr, Citizen of the World (London, 2006). See also Hugh Tulloch, James Bryce’s American Commonwealth (Woodbridge, 1988). 25 On the conception and writing of the book, see Fisher, James Bryce, I, pp. 61–71. On its reception, see Kleinknecht, Imperiale und internationale Ordnung, appendix I. 26 Christopher Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism (London, 1976). 27 It is no coincidence that Bryce vented his frustration with the ‘Jingo whirlwind’ at the turn of the century to Goldwin Smith, who had left England for a new start in North America. Bryce to Goldwin Smith, 12 April 1901, in Fisher, James Bryce, I, p. 317. On the figures who influenced Bryce see also James Bryce, ‘Legal studies in the University of Oxford, valedictory lecture’ [1893], in Studies in History and Jurisprudence, 2 vols (Oxford, 1901), II, 504–25. 28 James Bryce, ‘Edward Augustus Freeman’, in Studies in Contemporary Biog­ raphy (London, 1903), 262–92. On Freeman, see particularly Burrow, A Liberal Descent, chs 7, 8; C. J. W. Parker, ‘The failure of liberal racialism: the racial ideas of E. A. Freeman’, Historical Journal, 24 (1981), 825–46. 29 James Bryce, ‘Prefatory note’, English Historical Review, 1 (1886), 1–6, at p. 3. See also James Bryce, ‘On the writing and teaching of history’ [1911], in University and Historical Addresses (London, 1913), 339–64. 30 Kleinknecht, Imperiale und internationale Ordnung, p. 232. Kleinknecht argues that we find in Bryce a ‘modernised liberal-idealist variant of the Anglican idea of history’ (my translation). 31 In Bryce’s contribution to Essays on Reform (1867), the project was apparently the opposite: stressing how the relativity of history invalidated historical arguments against democracy. However, he also stressed that one argument ‘drawn from the previous history of a State is worth many arguments drawn from the circumstances of other states, whether past or present’. This caveat reintroduced the assumption of continuity in history, albeit in a more guarded and localised version. James Bryce, ‘The historical aspect of democracy’, in Essays on Reform (London, 1867), 239–78, at p. 276. 32 Burrow, A Liberal Descent, p. 242. 33 Fisher, James Bryce, II, pp. 308–9; and also I, pp. 113–14. 34 James Bryce, ‘The principle of nationality and its applications’, in Essays and Addresses in Wartime (London, 1918), 126–57, at p. 126. 35 Queen Victoria, not dated [1893], quoted in Fisher, James Bryce, I, p. 295. James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire (Oxford, 1864). 36 James Bryce, The Holy Roman Empire, new edition (London, 1910), p. vi. See also pp. 476–505. 37 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 143 [new edition p. 393; see also pp. 423, 435, 500]. 38 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 142 [new edition, p. 391]. 39 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, pp. 165–6 [new edition, p. 433]. 40 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 51 [new edition, p. 118].

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Liberal internationalism and the uses of history 41 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, pp. 104, 111 [new edition, pp. 251, 265; see also p. 489]. 42 Arguably, Bryce never managed to separate the two. See for example Bryce, International Relations, pp. 116–23. But see also Bryce, ‘The principle of ­nationality’. These later discussions are notable for their frank admissions of the limits of a liberal principle of nationality. 43 For an example of Bryce’s stereotypes at work, see James Bryce, ‘The Roman Empire and the British Empire in India’, in Studies in History and Jurisprudence, I, 1–84. One scholar has recently portrayed Bryce as a fundamentally racist theorist: Bart Schultz, ‘Sidgwick’s racism’, in Bart Schultz and Georgios Varouxakis (eds), Utilitarianism and Empire (Lanham, 2005), 211–50. 44 David G. Ritchie, Darwinism and Politics, second edition (London, 1891), p. 129. 45 Bryce’s racism towards blacks in America was modified in an ‘environmentalist’ direction when he, in a new chapter added to The American Commonwealth in 1910, felt able to identify progress among this section of the American population. James Bryce, The American Commonwealth, 2 vols (Indianapolis, 1995 [1888]), II, pp. 1168–9, 1179. On geography, see James Bryce, ‘The relations of history and geography’, Contemporary Review, 49 (1886), 426–43; James Bryce, ‘Introductory essay’ [1901], in H. F. Helmolt (ed.), The World’s History, 8 vols (London, 1901–1907), I, xv–lx. For Bryce’s continuing use of the language of race and admissions of its doubtful validity, see for example James Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, third edition (London, 1899 [1897]), ch. 21; James Bryce, The Relations of the Advanced and the Backward Races of Mankind (Oxford, 1902), especially pp. 26n., 35; James Bryce, ‘Some difficulties in colonial government encountered by Great Britain and how they have been met’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 30 (1907), 16–23; James Bryce, Race Sentiment as a Factor in History (London, 1915), p. 4. Bryce’s environmental notion of race, concerned with the influence of nature on peoples and the formation and development of nations or ‘races’, was partly an attempt to validate his prejudices about higher and lower races (in a way that available ‘facts’ did not). 46 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 111 [new edition, p. 265] and Holy Roman Empire, new edition, p. 489. 47 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, new edition, p. 435. See also Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 168 [new edition, p. 437]. 48 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, p. 167 [new edition, pp. 435–6]. 49 Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, new edition, p. 505. See also p. 437. 50 It is not clear whether Bryce was consistently searching for a great national empire or a great empire of nations or some mixture of the two. On the movement for imperial federation in Britain in the late nineteenth century, see Duncan S. A. Bell, The Idea of a Greater Britain (Princeton, 2007); Kleinknecht, Imperiale und internationale Ordnung, ch. 4. 51 Fisher even described Bryce as ‘the member for Armenia in the British House of Commons’ ( James Bryce, I, p. 183, see also pp. 300–3). 52 Bryce, Impressions of South Africa, p. xxxiv. This third edition included a new prefatory chapter dealing with the outbreak of war. 53 Bryce, American Commonwealth; Bryce, Studies in History and Jurisprudence; James Bryce, The Hindrances to Good Citizenship (New Haven, 1909); James Bryce, Modern Democracies, 2 vols (London, 1921). See also Casper Sylvest, ‘James Bryce and the two faces of nationalism’, in Ian Hall and Lisa Hill (eds), British International Thought from Hobbes to Namier (Basingstoke, forthcoming).

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Liberal internationalism and the uses of history 54 See Bryce, American Commonwealth, especially pp. 1, 13, 237, 378, 1499–500; Tulloch, James Bryce’s American Commonwealth. For Woodrow Wilson’s critique, see Woodrow Wilson, ‘Bryce’s American Commonwealth’, Political Science Quarterly, 4 (1889), 153–69. On Bryce’s important links with American liberals, see Leslie Butler, Critical Americans (Chapel Hill, 2007). 55 James Bryce, ‘The age of discontent’, Contemporary Review, 49 (1891), 14–29, at pp. 22–3. See also Bryce, ‘The relations of political science to history and practice: presidential address’, American Political Science Review, 3 (1909), 1–19. 56 Bryce, ‘The age of discontent’, p. 29. 57 Bryce, ‘Introductory essay’, p. xxi. See also James Bryce, Presidential Address to International Congress of Historians by the Right Hon. James Bryce (Oxford, 1913). 58 Bryce, ‘Introductory essay’, p. li. 59 See also Kleinknecht, Imperiale und internationale Ordnung, pp. 15, 108–12, 237. 60 Burrow, A Liberal Descent, pp. 294–5. 61 Ions, James Bryce and American Democracy, p. 28. In the late nineteenth century, Bryce consistently opposed American imperialism, but there is little to suggest that he was an opponent of British expansionism as long as it was conducted in its traditionally haphazard way. See James Bryce, ‘The policy of annexation for America’, Forum, 24b (1897), 385–95; James Bryce, ‘America revisited: the changes of a quarter century, II’, Outlook (1 April 1905), 846–55. 62 See Trevor Wilson, ‘Lord Bryce’s investigation into alleged German atrocities in Belgium, 1914–15’, Journal of Contemporary History, 14 (1979), 369–83; Tulloch, James Bryce’s American Commonwealth, pp. 225–33. Fisher also served on the committee, which flavoured his account ( James Bryce, II, pp. 132–5). See also James Bryce, ‘The war state: its mind and methods’, in Essays and Addresses, 39–64. 63 For example, Bryce, Essays and Addresses, pp. 1–2; James Bryce, ‘Opening address’, in The International Crisis (Oxford, 1916), 1–8. 64 On these points, see James Bryce, ‘Concerning a league of nations for peace’ [1918] and ‘War and human progress’ [1916], in Essays and Addresses, 158–83 and 65–91, respectively. See also M. D. Durbin, ‘Towards the concept of collective security: the Bryce Group’s “Proposals for the avoidance of war”, 1914–1917’, International Organization, 24 (1970), 288–318. 65 See K. G. Robbins, ‘Lord Bryce and the First World War’, Historical Journal, 10 (1967), 255–77; Kleinknecht, Imperiale und internationale Ordnung, p. 216; Fisher, James Bryce, II, pp. 121–260. 66 Bryce, International Relations, pp. 5–6. 67 Bryce, International Relations, pp. 137–8; see also p. 123. 68 Tulloch, Bryce’s American Commonwealth, pp. 218, 223. But see, however, Bryce, ‘Introductory essay’, p. lvii; Bryce, Race Sentiment as a Factor in History, p. 36; Bryce, ‘The principle of nationality’. 69 James Bryce, ‘Some thoughts on Dante in his relation to our own time’, in Dante Sexcentenary Committee, Dante (London, 1921), 1–15, at pp. 13–14. See also Seaman Jr, Citizen of the World, ch. 11. 70 Bryce died in 1922, Morley in 1923. They both outlived Henry Sidgwick (also born in 1838) by over twenty years. 71 John Powell, ‘Introduction’, in John Morley, On Compromise, ed. J. Powell, second edition (Keele, 1997 [1877]), 1–34, at p. 12. 72 See for example the comments in John Morley, Edmund Burke (London, 1867), p. 24; and D. A. Hamer, John Morley (Oxford, 1968); Jeffrey Paul von Arx, Progress and Pessimism (Cambridge, 1985), especially p. 130.

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Liberal internationalism and the uses of history 73 John Morley, ‘Mr. Mill’s autobiography’ [1874], in Critical Miscellanies, 3 vols (London, 1886), III, 53–92, at pp. 54, 73–4. See also John Morley, ‘The death of Mr. Mill’ [1873], in Critical Miscellanies, III, 37–51; John Morley, ‘Comte’ [1876], in Critical Miscellanies, III, 337–84; John Morley, ‘John Stuart Mill: an anniversary’ [1906], in Miscellanies (London, 1908), 145–68. 74 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists (Oxford, 1991), p. 103. 75 Powell, ‘Introduction’, p. 23. 76 A. O. J. Cockshut, Truth to Life (London, 1974), p. 178. See also Morley, On Compromise, p. 108. 77 See von Arx, Progress and Pessimism, pp. 130–5. In On Compromise (p. 88), Morley notoriously argued that, to him, ‘the history of mankind is a huge ­pis-aller, just as our present society is; a prodigious wasteful experiment, from which a certain number of precious results have been extracted but which is not now, nor has ever been at any other time, a final measure of all the possibilities of the time’. 78 John Morley, Machiavelli (Oxford, 1897), pp. 32, 42–3. 79 Morley, Machiavelli, pp. 44–5. 80 Morley, Machiavelli, p. 46. See also Morley, Recollections, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1918 [1917]), I, p. 290. 81 Morley, Machiavelli, pp. 49–50. 82 Morley, Edmund Burke, p. 55. See also p. 26. Morley’s admiration for Burke’s liberalism (as he termed it) was almost boundless, and it was particularly evident in Burke’s reaction to British methods of governance in India. See particularly Morley, Edmund Burke, ch. 5. Much recent literature displays a comparable eulogising tendency towards Burke’s views on empire. See for example Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago, 1999). But see also Margaret Kohn and Daniel I. O’Neill, ‘A tale of two Indias: Burke and Mill on empire and slavery in the West Indies and America’, Political Theory, 34 (2006), 192–228. 83 According to Morley’s best biographer, this was connected to his own dream of a ‘life of action’. See Hamer, John Morley, p. 57. For Morley’s critique of Carlyle, see John Morley, ‘Carlyle’ [1870], in Critical Miscellanies, I, 135–201. 84 John Morley, The Life of Richard Cobden, thirteenth edition (London, 1906). On the art of biography in the nineteenth century, see Cockshut, Truth to Life. 85 Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), pp. 37, 141–52. 86 Morley, Life of Cobden, pp. 7, 25, 202, 194, 834. 87 Morley, Life of Cobden, p. 534. 88 Morley, Life of Cobden, p. 95. 89 See the analysis in Georgios Varouxakis, ‘“Patriotism”, “cosmopolitanism” and “humanity” in Victorian political thought’, European Journal of Political Theory, 5 (2006), 100–18; Casper Sylvest, ‘Beyond the state? Pluralism and internationalism in early twentieth-century Britain’, International Relations, 21 (2007), 67–85. 90 Morley, Life of Cobden, p. 601. 91 See Hamer, John Morley, chs 5–7. 92 Morley, Life of Cobden, pp. 203, 303. 93 Morley, Life of Cobden, pp. 40–1, 97. 94 Morley, Life of Cobden, pp. 530–1. In 1864, Cobden wrote, in wildly optimistic terms, that ‘Henceforth we shall observe an absolute abstention from continental politics. Non-intervention is the policy of all future governments in this country’ (Cobden to M. Chevalier, 5 November 1864, quoted in Morley, Life of Cobden, p. 914). Cobden also argued that ‘I am against any interference in the affairs of another nation, even if it be confined to moral suasion’. Cobden (not

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Liberal internationalism and the uses of history dated) quoted in Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State and War (New York, 1959), p. 104. 95 Morley, Life of Cobden, pp. 731–2. 96 Morley, Life of Cobden, pp. 732–3. See also J. P. Parry, ‘The impact of Napoleon III on British politics, 1851–1880’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, sixth series, 11 (2001), 147–75. 97 Morley, Recollections, I, p. 142. 98 F. W. Hirst, Early Life and Letters of John Morley, 2 vols (London, 1927), II, pp. 189–90. 99 Morley, Life of Cobden, p. 939. 100 H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1875–1898 (Oxford, 1995), p. 276. 101 John Morley, The Life of William Ewart Gladstone, 3 vols (London, 1903). On the book, see M. R. D. Foot, ‘Morley’s Gladstone: a reappraisal’, Bulletin of the John Rylands Library, 51 (1968–1969), 368–80; Cockshut, Truth to Life, ch. 10. See also H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone 1809–1874 (Oxford, 1988), pp. 256–7; Matthew, Gladstone 1875–1898. Some of the international(ist) dimensions of Morley’s biography are treated in D. M. Schreuder, ‘The making of Mr. Gladstone’s posthumous career: the role of Morley and Knaplund as “monumental masons”, 1903–1927’, in B. Kinzer (ed.), The Gladstonian Turn of Mind (Toronto, 1985), 197–243. Schreuder underrates the amount of material and interpretation related to international issues in Morley’s biography. Laski’s remark is found in a letter to Justice Holmes, 26 September 1923, in Mark DeWolfe Howe (ed.), Holmes–Laski Letters, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1953), I, p. 543. 102 Foot, ‘Morley’s Gladstone’, p. 371. 103 John Morley, ‘Democracy and reaction’ [1905], in Morley, Miscellanies, 261–320, at p. 278. See also the discussion of Hobhouse in chapter 6. 104 Morley, Life of Gladstone, I, p. 204, and III, p. 551. James Bryce reiterated many of the points first made by Morley, when he, in 1916, wrote the preface to A. Tilney Bassett (ed.), Gladstone’s Speeches (London, 1916). 105 Morley, Life of Gladstone, I, pp. 369–70. 106 Morley, Life of Gladstone, I, p. 484, and, more generally, pp. 476–95, and II, pp. 18–41. 107 Morley, Life of Gladstone, II, pp. 2, 13, 110. See also the discussion in D. M. Schreuder, ‘Gladstone as “troublemaker”: liberal foreign policy and the German annexation of Alsace-Lorraine’, Journal of British Studies, 17 (1978), 106–35. 108 John Morley, Notes on Politics and History (London, 1913), p. 66. 109 Morley, Life of Gladstone, II, p. 70. 110 Morley, Life of Gladstone, III, p. 80. 111 Morley, Life of Gladstone, II, pp. 322, 594. 112 Morley, Life of Gladstone, III, p. 547. 113 Morley, Life of Gladstone, II, pp. 553, 555. 114 Foot, ‘Morley’s Gladstone’, p. 378. For Morley’s criticism of the South African War, see John Morley, Liberal Principles and Imperialism (London, 1900); John Morley, Two Years of War – and After (London, 1901). 115 See Stephen E. Koss, John Morley at the India Office, 1905–1910 (New Haven, 1969), especially ch. 7. See also the discussion in R. J. Moore, ‘John Morley’s acid test: India, 1906–1910’, Pacific Affairs, 40 (1967–1968), 333–40. But see also Morley, Recollections, II, p. 80: ‘The very word empire is in history and essence military; emperor means soldier; all modern history and tradition asso­ ciate empires with war.’ 116 Hamer, John Morley, pp. 347f., 375. See also Koss, John Morley, ch. 9. 117 Morley, ‘John Stuart Mill: an anniversary’, p. 167.

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Liberal internationalism and the uses of history 118 Morley, Notes on Politics and History, pp. 93, 103–4. 119 John Morley, Memorandum on Resignation (London, 1928), pp. vii, 7, 15. 120 Apart from the Selected Writings (see note 1), I shall refer to the following writings by Acton: Lectures on Modern History, ed. J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (London, 1906); Lectures on the French Revolution, ed. J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (Indianapolis, 2000 [1910]); Letters of Lord Acton to Mary, Daughter of the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, ed. H. Paul, second edition (London, 1913); Selections from the Correspondence of the First Lord Acton, ed. J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (London, 1917). Good studies of Acton as a historian and political thinker include: Owen Chadwick, Acton and History (Cambridge, 1998); G. E. Fasnacht, Acton’s Political Philosophy (London, 1952); Gertrude Himmelfarb, Lord Acton (London, 1952); Hugh Tulloch, Acton (London, 1988). Roland Hill, Lord Acton (New Haven, 2000) is the best biography, although it is not particularly strong on Acton’s political thought. 121 Herbert Paul, ‘Introductory memoir’, in Acton, Letters of Lord Acton, ix–lxix, at p. ix. See also James Bryce, ‘John Emerich Dalberg-Acton, Lord Acton’, in Studies in Contemporary Biography, 382–99. 122 Acton mentions ‘the Madonna’ (after a novel by Henry James) in a letter to Mary Gladstone, 25 February 1882, in Letters of Lord Acton, p. 100. 123 Harold Laski to Justice Holmes, 5 September 1917, quoted in Howe, Holmes– Laski Letters, I, p. 98. 124 Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, p. 23. 125 Acton to Döllinger, 13 April 1870, in Selected Writings, III, p. 617. 126 Lord Acton, ‘Political thoughts on the church’ [1859], in Selected Writings, III, 17–36, at p. 29. 127 The twists and turns of this story, including the fall-out of Acton and Döllinger, are relayed superbly in Chadwick, Acton and History. 128 F. W. Maitland, ‘Lord Acton’ [1902], in The Collected Papers of Frederic William Maitland, ed. H. A. L. Fisher, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1911), III, 512–21, at p. 520. Acton himself had a more downbeat approach to this theme, which was the occasion of one of his famous statements, that he never had any contemporaries. See Acton to Mary Gladstone, 3 June 1881, in Letters of Lord Acton, p. 83. 129 See for example J. N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, second edition (London, 1914 [1913]), pp. 253, 258–9; Herbert Butterfield, ‘Acton: his training, methods and intellectual system’, in A. O. Sarkissian (ed.), Studies in Diplomatic History and Historiography in Honour of G. P. Gooch, C.H. (London, 1961), 169–98. 130 See Acton, ‘Colonies’ [1862], in Selected Writings, I, 177–88. 131 Cambridge, University Library, MS Acton 5605, p. 4, in Selected Writings, III, p. 556; Lord Acton, ‘Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe’ [1878], in Selected Writings, I, 54–85. On Acton’s early, reactionary views, see also Karl Petander, Lord Acton och hans kritik af Leopold von Ranke (Stockholm, 1955), p. 15; Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, pp. 67, 69, 184. 132 Lord Acton, ‘Reports on the Civil War in America’ [1861–1863], in Selected Writings, I, 280–360, at p. 291. See also Acton to General Lee, 4 November 1866, in Selected Writings, I, p. 363. 133 Tulloch, Acton, p. 27. 134 Lord Acton, ‘Political causes of the American Revolution’ [1861], in Selected Writings, I, 216–62, at pp. 258–9; Lord Acton, ‘Report on current events, July 1860’ [1860], in Selected Writings, I, 478–517, at p. 505 (referring to Russia). 135 See Timothy Lang, ‘Lord Acton and “the insanity of nationality”’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 63 (2002), 129–49. 136 Lord Acton, ‘Nationality’ [1862], in Selected Writings, I, 409–33, at pp. 424–5,

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Liberal internationalism and the uses of history 433. See also Lord Acton, ‘Cavour’ [1861] in Selected Writings, I, 434–58; ­Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, p. 86. 137 MS Acton 4942, in Selected Writings, III, p. 558; MS Acton 5415, quoted in Fasnacht, Acton’s Political Philosophy, p. 244. 138 Lord Acton, The War of 1870 (London, 1871), p. 61. 139 MS Acton 4895, in Selected Writings, III, p. 559. See also Acton, ‘May’s Democracy’, especially p. 84. 140 See John Burrow, Whigs and Liberals (Oxford, 1988), p. 132; Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, pp. 86–7; Sylvest, ‘Beyond the state?’ 141 Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, p. 204. 142 On the peerage, see Gladstone to Acton, 6 November 1869, and Acton to Gladstone, 11 November 1869, in Selections, pp. 169–70. 143 See for example Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History, p. 109; Herbert Butterfield, Man on His Past (Cambridge, 1955); Butterfield, ‘Acton’. For a good discussion, see Tulloch, Acton, ch. 5. 144 Lord Acton, ‘Buckle’s philosophy of history’ [1858], in Selected Writings, III, 443–59, at p. 453. 145 Acton, ‘The study of history’, pp. 504–5. This lecture also contains the most succinct statement of Acton’s view of history as the development of liberty. MS Acton 5011, in Selected Writings, III, p. 622: ‘Wherein history is liberal: Teaches disrespect, shows up horrors, follies, errors, crimes of the ablest and the best. Slowness of all progress.’ 146 On Seeley, see Deborah Wormell, Sir John Robert Seeley and the Uses of History (Cambridge, 1980). 147 Lord Acton, ‘The massacre of St. Bartholomew’ [1869], in Selected Writings, II, 198–240, at p. 240; Acton, ‘The study of history’, p. 546. This emphasis on truth was not confined to historical study – according to Acton’s daughter, Mamy, the only offence for which Acton would beat his children was lying. Hill, Lord Acton, p. 172. 148 Lord Acton, ‘Ranke’ [1867], in Selected Writings, II, 165–72. 149 Acton, ‘German schools of History’ [1886], in Selected Writings, II, 325–64, at p. 334. See also Petander, Lord Acton. 150 Acton, ‘German schools of history’, p. 356. See also Casper Sylvest, ‘British liberal historians and the primacy of internationalism’, in William Mulligan and Brendan Simms (eds), The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000 (Basingstoke, forthcoming). 151 Lord Acton, ‘Review of Creighton’s History of the Papacy’ [1887], in Selected Writings, II, 365–77, at pp. 367, 373. 152 See also the discussion of the entire correspondence in F. Engel de Janösi, ‘The correspondence between Lord Acton and Bishop Creighton’, Cambridge Historical Journal, 6 (1940), 307–21. 153 Acton to Creighton, 5 April 1887, in Selected Writings, II, p. 383. 154 Acton to Creighton, 5 April 1887, in Selected Writings, II, p. 384. See also MS Acton 5602, in Selected Writings, III, p. 500. 155 Creighton to Acton, 9 April 1887, in Selected Writings, II, p. 391. 156 See also Petander, Lord Acton, p. 72. 157 Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, p. 180. See also MS Acton 4954, p. 23, in Selected Writings, III, p. 582: ‘England: In judging our national merits we must allow much for our national hypocrisy. Where ever we went, we were the best ­colonists in the world – but we exterminated the natives where ever we went.’ 158 Acton to Mrs Drew (Mary Gladstone), 30 January 1894, in Selections, pp. 247, 249. For the background, see Matthew, Gladstone 1875–1898, pp. 348–52. 159 MS Acton 5422, quoted in Himmelfarb, Lord Acton, p. 204.

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Liberal internationalism and the uses of history 160 Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution. These lectures were delivered at the University of Cambridge between 1895 and 1899. 161 Acton to Mary Gladstone, 16 October 1887, in Letters of Lord Acton, p. 180. 162 Acton, Lectures on Modern History, p. 81. 163 W. E. Gladstone to Acton, 16 August 1891, in Selections, p. 257. 164 Bryce, ‘John Emerich Dalberg-Acton’, p. 397; Morley, Recollections, I, pp. 231, 290. 165 Acton, ‘Introduction to Burd’s edition of Il Principe by Machiavelli’ [1891], in Selected Writings, II, 479–95, at p. 485. 166 Acton, ‘Introduction to Burd’, p. 490. 167 MS Acton 5011, p. 80, in Selected Writings, III, p. 629.

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Part III – Traces

CH APTER 6

Into the twentieth century

Collective security is the only security. (George Peabody Gooch, 19351)

The twentieth century was profoundly shaped by the experience of world wars, and it was in coming to terms with arms races, economic crises, aggressive nationalism and totalitarianism that liberal intellectuals, particularly in the Anglo-American world, most vigorously and successfully promoted the ideas and ideals of internationalism. The League of Nations and the United Nations can be seen as the blossoming fruits as well as the sad failures of this creed. The new generation of internationalists coming of age in the twentieth century agreed that the moralist spirit of the old internationalism was insufficient, and their new, reformed internationalism, while generally institutional in character and committed to collective security, continued to reflect the longstanding diversity of internationalist ideology. As I argue in this chapter, however, in terms of the central vision, arguments and rhetorical strategies of the new internationalism, the seeds had been sown in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was, in other words, the culmination of a tradition of internationalist thinking among liberal intellectuals in Britain. Having analysed the internationalist languages of law, philosophy and history in the late nineteenth century, this chapter identifies the intellectual traces of these languages in the opening decades of the twentieth. Needless to say, intellectual influence is a slippery, un­quantifiable entity. In some instances, direct lines of inspiration or influence can be detected, but, more often, the vestiges of nineteenth-century liberal inter­nationalist languages are faint and widely strewn, concerning style, temper or argumentative strategies. Such traces are nevertheless important for understanding the nature, trajectory and appeal of liberal inter­nationalist ideology. Although the analysis below clearly has a bearing on disciplinary history, the aim is not to contribute to the (often 197

Into the twentieth century too narrow) institutional aspects of the history of international law, political science or International Relations (IR) in Britain, but rather to sketch the ideological resources available to liberal inter­nationalists in the twentieth century, particularly when they recuperated in the wake of the First World War. This is done by drawing on and supplementing existing research. As outlined in the Introduction, early twentieth-­ century liberal international thought has received attention from scholars working in either IR or British intellectual history, but there is a need to integrate these literatures. Moreover, there has been a tendency, particularly in IR, to overemphasise the (self-professed) originality of inter-war liberal internationalists, which is arguably related to the begin­nings of the discipline in the post-1918 period and a corresponding lack of interest in pre-war ideas. Against this background, the chapter focuses on continuity rather than change. This perspective can seem to favour a particular interpretation of the period and its most distinctive event, the First World War: one can either view the war as heralding a momentous discontinuity in British and European consciousness or, alternatively, see the war and the reactions to it as originating from within existing political and cultural traditions. This is essentially a choice between viewing the war as ‘a time bomb of total change’ or ‘a more humble pressure-cooker of gradualist evolution’.2 A related, but distinct, theme concerns the view of international politics in the Edwardian era. If one sees the years from the end of the South African War as the final period of tranquillity before reality came knocking, this favours a volcanic interpretation of the war that began, as lightning from blue skies, in the summer of 1914. Conversely, a cynical view of international politics holding that a major European war was clearly on the horizon is bound to favour the gradualist agenda. The way analyses are framed is anything but trivial. The choices need not, however, be so stark. It is perfectly possible to loosen the strictures of these approaches and argue for continuity in certain spheres and less in others, and this is, indeed, the assumption on which this chapter proceeds: while sceptical of ‘time bombs’, the possibility of discontinuities in other potential languages of internationalism cannot be ruled out. 3 Yet the thrust of the chapter is that the mantras of inter­nationalist ideology – the possibility and importance of achieving progress, order and justice in international politics and concomitant beliefs in the applica­bility of public morality to this domain, as well as the compatibility of nationality and internationalism – remained fairly stable in the beginning of the twentieth century. It is all the more important, therefore, to be clear about the extent and character of discontinuity. The distinction between moral and institutional arguments in internationalist ideology is particularly important in this respect. From the late nineteenth century through to the inter-war 198

Into the twentieth century years, a gradual change took place within British liberal internationalism from (primarily) moral to (primarily) institutional arguments. This development was markedly accelerated during the Great War, when traditional explanations of war – which interweaved and variously stressed lack of moral development, the flawed and dangerous doctrines of ‘practical men’, imperialism, capitalism or insufficient transparency in the conduct of foreign policy – were accompanied by a diagnosis holding that the fundamental cause of war was to be found in the anarchic nature of international politics. As Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932) argued in the most sustained analysis, the nature of anarchy – its lack of authority and a common morality – left statesmen no choice but to practise Machiavellianism.4 At the same time, the younger generation of internationalists became more sceptical, though not fatalistic, in their assessment of human rationality and the prospects of enlightenment. ‘Formerly we thought of civilized man as 80 per cent rational. We have now halved the percentage’, John Atkinson Hobson (1858–1940) was to argue in 1938. 5 Overall, however, these trends involved a reorientation of means more than ends. Moreover, the increasing prominence accorded to institutional solutions did not substitute for belief in potential moral development or efforts to bring it about through enlightenment and education. Even those who claimed to have lost faith in human rationality vested their hopes in rationally devised institutions as a way of solving political problems. The moral and institutional dimensions of internationalist ideology were increasingly seen as mutually reinforcing, and questions about their relative importance for entrenching progress, order and justice became the central nexus of internationalist debate during the inter-war years. The chapter unavoidably displays the traits of the musical medley: while it samples together different themes, the underlying rhythm changes little. In three sections that correspond to the analysis chapters 3–5, I unearth the traces among twentieth-century internationalists of the legal, philosophical and historical languages of internationalism. The structure is not rigidly adhered to, as the thought and writings of some twentieth-century figures transgressed emerging academic boundaries and drew on more than one language. Internationalist ideology continued to widen its base; a whole range of public intellectuals, from the academic to the peace activist, were brought together during the First World War in government departments, pressure groups, political parties and emerging academic disciplines. Covering this rich territory, the chapter is naturally selective. Still, it is hoped that the dis­c ussion supplies an overview of early twentieth-century internationalist ideology and its most prominent defenders, as well as illustrations of the debt that the new generation owed to their lateVictorian predecessors. 199

Into the twentieth century Law in the face of anarchy During the nineteenth century, international law in Britain became increasingly professionalised. The jurisprudence underlying the subject changed significantly, as international lawyers moved away from basing their subject on some agency or structure outside the law, thereby partly accommodating the positivist (or Austinian) argument that international law was not properly law but rather a form of positive morality. The most popular way of underpinning international law was found in new notions of temporality. The increasingly popular mantra of evolution was invoked, often in a mixture of social and legal evolutionary ideas, to explain not merely the relative powerlessness of international law but also its forthcoming deliverance. International law, it was hesitantly admitted, was not yet law in the perfect sense of the word, but there were abundant signs that it was becoming so: it was lagging behind but following a path structurally similar to that of domestic law. Despite bemoaning the state of international relations, students of international law were confident that they had time on their side. This jurisprudential set-up allowed most scholars of international law to fulfil a dual role: they were legal positivists ‘scientifically’ identifying the rules established by consent and custom in the practice of international politics, but they also, as liberal internationalist ideologues, tried to shape this practice according to the developmental scheme that now acted as a substitute for earlier notions of natural law. One heir to this approach was Lassa Francis Lawrence Oppenheim (1858–1919), John Westlake’s successor as Whewell Professor of Inter­ national Law at Cambridge. Oppenheim was born near Frankfurt, Germany, in 1858 and after a veritable tour de horizon of German universities (including Göttingen, Heidelberg and Berlin) and their foremost professors of law and history (including Lotze, Jhering, ­Treitschke and Bluntschli), he emigrated to Britain in 1895. Oppenheim is often heralded as a moderniser, the transitional figure who brought the subject safely and scientifically into the twentieth century, leaving behind the muddled waters of the Victorian period.6 But Oppenheim’s paradigmatic positivism can also be seen as embodying a normative strategy, which makes it possible to read him as a ‘Grotian’ or a ‘soft realist’ in the peculiar idiom of the so-called English school of IR.7 Such readings are plausible due to the programmatic statements in Oppen­heim’s influential two-volume treatise International Law (1905, 1906). Apart from proclaiming positivism the only true jurisprudence, Oppenheim stated his beliefs that ‘States solely and exclusively are the subjects of International Law’ and that a precon­dition of international law was the existence of a balance of power.8 There were important differences between late nineteenth-­century scholars and Oppenheim, not least in the latter’s precision in defining 200

Into the twentieth century and employing legal concepts and his critical attitude to deducing the law from internationalist slogans that appeared self-evidently true inside the profession. Yet, in crucial respects, Oppenheim represents continuity within the British tradition of international law. In 1908, Oppenheim supplied a paradigmatic statement of the positivist method. But he spoke in the idiom of legal and moral development, while clinging to the positivist raft: ‘If anything is dependent upon gradual historical development, it is that delicate body of rules which is called international law’. This logic was exactly what should make the international legal scholar resist the various temptations of the dreamer, the schemer, the armchair politician and the moralist: ‘the international jurist must not walk in clouds; he must remain on the ground of what is realizable and tangible’.9 Yet this was no hard-nosed realism, as Oppenheim’s nuanced discussion of codification illustrates. Codifying law had some drawbacks, including interference with ‘so-called organic growth of usage into custom’. Pointing to municipal law, Oppenheim argued that ‘history has given its verdict in favour of codification’. So, if codification respected gradualism (and conservatism), it could be beneficial. Oppenheim then added a more adventurous argument: If there is a Law of Nations in existence in spite of the non-existence of an international court to guarantee its realisation, I cannot see why the non-existence of such a court should be an obstacle to codifying the very same Law of Nations. It may indeed be maintained that codification is all the more necessary as such an international court does not exist.10

This nicely illustrates the early Oppenheim’s ambivalence towards institutional forms of internationalism; codification could be seen, simultaneously, as creating adherence to international law but also, especially if such efforts were exaggerated, as premature and counterproductive meddling with the forces of history. Informing this stance was Oppenheim’s liberalism, state-centrist and Continental in character, and a partly concealed gradualism, which emerge most clearly in a brief tract entitled Das Gewissen (1898).11 Under­standing the conscience (Gewissen), defined as ‘the awakening of our moral and religious ideas and senses in relations to already executed actions or actions to be executed’, was a precondition for understanding the nature and function of law.12 The conscience was a product of moral and psychological development and, after discussing the ideas of Darwin and Spencer, Oppenheim settled on an essentially Lamarckian form of social evolutionism. This meant that the conscience was not the same for all individuals, but was dependent on context, character and intelligence. The conscience was not an individualist concept: ‘peoples’ had consciences and it was this type of collective conscience (or moral sense) that had been instrumental in the overcoming of, for example, 201

Into the twentieth century slavery. To some extent, humans were masters of their own conscience, as it was formed in a dialectic between individuals and society. And this relationship was vital for understanding ‘the progressive development of morals, religion and law’, which was moving, gradually, towards more perfect forms.13 It is striking how ‘the conscience’ performs a role similar to that of classical natural law: it is a yardstick of moral and legal develop­ment and accessible to (almost) everyone through our qualities as civilised humans. The clearest example of this working of the conscience was the history of international law, which symbolised a development of a ‘conscience of peoples’ from amorality, through morality within a people, to morality (and later, with Grotius, law) between peoples.14 In essence, Oppenheim deployed the language of legal evolution to advance a moral internationalist argument. Oppenheim’s notion of evolution was also brought out in his discussions of natural law, of which the self-styled positivist was sharply critical. Natural law prevented proper criticism of positive law, it made international law vulnerable to Austinian attacks and, most revealingly, it ‘constantly mixes up the past, the present and the future’.15 This body of ‘law’ had been a useful thing in the past – indeed, ‘The law of nature supplied the crutches with whose help history has taught mankind’ to walk out of the Middle Ages and into the modern world. But natural law was dead; positive law was now the order of the day.16 As Oppenheim’s predecessors had discovered, this position was, strictly speaking, untenable. When confronting the question of why treaties are legally binding, Oppenheim argued that this was so because there existed a customary rule of international law to this effect. The further question was, of course, from where did the customary rule originate? And here Oppenheim invoked a theoretical distinction between sources and causes. As sources of international law, he allowed only treatise and custom. Yet these sources had causes, and here elements of natural law crept into Oppenheim’s jurisprudential system. It was ‘religious and moral reasons’ that had, in this idiom, caused the custom. Likewise, it was a slow moral development which had caused many of the increasingly codified laws of war.17 From a positivist perspective, religion and morals are hard to pin down, but they are virtually inescapable in any attempt to define natural law. So, although natural law was relegated to the museum, it occasionally sneaked out under the cover of darkness to play an important role in underpinning international law: its religious and moral prescriptions had brought about international law, and insofar as the further development of this body of rules was dependent on further moral development, as Oppenheim argued, its facilitating role was not exhausted.18 Meanwhile, the apparent discarding of natural law allowed Oppen­ heim to set out the proper positive method for the future. It meant separating is from ought and focusing on ‘existing recognized rules of 202

Into the twentieth century international law as they are to be found in the customary practice of the states or in law-making conventions’.19 Yet Oppenheim was no less a moralist than his predecessors. Although he was trained in Germany, it is telling that his approach found such favour in Britain. Indeed, Oppenheim continued and extended rather than changed the idiom of international legal scholars. He pursued the same ideals, and in positivism he found a basis for realisable ideals, which stood in sharp contrast to the hopeless dreams associated with natural law. To no small extent, the justification of the positive method was a strategic one, and it certainly did not prevent Oppenheim from proclaiming that ‘Ours is the faith that removes mountains, for our cause is that of humanity. The all-powerful force of the good which pushes mankind forward through the depths of history will in time unite all nations under the firm roof of a universally recognized and precisely codified law.’20 As I argued in chapter 3, the intellectual system that Oppenheim carried into the twentieth century was caught in a logic of moderation. It could never wholeheartedly support the construction of international institutions without worrying whether they were examples of impatient and premature scheming that neglected the necessary gradualism in the development of international law. Oppenheim was one of the first scholars to seriously discuss the construction of a league of nations before the First World War, yet the tone of his analysis was defensive, wavering between resignation and cautious idealism, and effectively demonstrating the workings of the logic of moderation. According to Oppenheim, who repeatedly denied that he was a utopian dreamer, ‘international legislation, international administration of justice, and international organization’ would be at the forefront of international law in years to come. But institutionalisation was preconditioned on moral development and gradualist patience. Thus, The growth and final shaping of the international organization will go hand in hand with the progress of the law of nations. Now the progress of the law of nations is conditioned by the growth of the international community in mental strength, and this growth in mental strength is in its turn conditioned by the growth in strength and in bulk, the broadening and deepening, of private and public morale. In the nature of the case this progress can mature only very slowly. We have here to do with a process of development lasting over many generations and probably throughout centuries, the end of which no man can foresee.21

Sometimes this process was described as preordained; at other times it was seen as the unintentional outcome of state action.22 But Oppenheim rarely wavered on the final outcome. The First World War questioned and contradicted many of the magnanimous formulations of pre-war international legal argument, but it also accelerated the existing development 203

Into the twentieth century of internationalism towards more explicitly institutionalist arguments. Most lawyers put their faith in the League of Nations, which emerged from the ashes of war. Although traditionally a sceptic, Oppenheim came to support the League, though never uncritically, while trying to fit it into his larger conception of international law. Consequently, he interpreted the League as a first attempt to embody institutionally the family of nations, which was at the root of past and potential progress in international politics. Oppenheim wanted it both ways: he supported the new institution but also wanted to stick to his notion of international law as state and consent driven. This landed him in a predicament: he insisted on the importance of sovereignty, while denying that it meant ‘absolute boundless liberty of action’.23 International law was the result of a consensus reached through the sovereign decisions of a multiplicity of states, but Oppenheim denied that a state would lose any sovereignty by entering the League of Nations. Moreover, he argued that even if a state did lose sovereignty this was not necessarily lamentable, as the ‘Prussian conception of the State as an end in itself and of the authority of the State as something above everything else’ was an obstacle to progress. So Oppenheim returned to his early notion of the role of the international lawyer as an interpreter and moulder of international law. While the law was apparently driven by states and consent, it was ultimately under­ written by an eschatology of progress supervised by the legal scholar.24 While Oppenheim’s hard-nosed positivist posture can obscure the extent to which he utilised and developed a British liberal tradition of understanding international law, members of the next generation of legal scholars were more radical, partly reacting against Oppenheim’s apparent ‘realism’.25 The young Philip Noel-Baker (1889–1982), ardent peace campaigner and Olympic track medallist, embarked on a career in international law after obtaining a Whewell scholarship in international law at Cambridge in 1911. As a young, enthusiastic student of international law, Noel-Baker must have been impatient with his cautious professor, but with the outbreak of war their views increasingly coalesced. In 1924, Noel-Baker became the first Professor of IR at the London School of Economics and following the Second World War and the publication of The Arms Race (1958), he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959. Throughout the inter-war years, Noel-Baker was a central figure inside and outside Parliament in the preparation and explanation of the foreign policy priorities of the Labour Party. His work, straddling the worlds of academe and policy, illustrates how the central questions of international politics were increasingly debated in a legal idiom and how institutional internationalist arguments, with the help of liberal intellectuals who turned left during and after the First World War, gained greater prominence in the Labour Party during the 1920s.26 In the academic study of the law, however, it was one of Oppenheim’s 204

Into the twentieth century successors in the Whewell chair, and another immigrant, who became the prime representative of what Martti Koskenniemi has termed ‘the Victorian tradition of international law’.27 Hersch Lauterpacht (1897–1960) was critical of positivism and its focus on the state and sovereignty, which from the outset frustrated efforts at peace and progress. Individuals, the ultimate reference points of international law, and their potential for peaceful co-existence and co-operation disappeared from the positivist system, an argument that led Lauterpacht to attack Oppenheim.28 To some extent, Lauterpacht needed a caricature to get his own, rival jurisprudence off the ground, and here Oppenheim’s blunt formulations served the purpose well. But, in fact, Lauterpacht acknowledged that the legal ‘self-sufficiency’ of modern positivism had (with the possible exceptions of W. E. Hall and Oppenheim) not (yet) permeated British international law. It was, indeed, paradoxical that in Britain, a country virtually free from Roman law, scholars argued strongly for its applicability to international law. What Oppenheim had failed to realise (or admit) was that his positivism, like all modern positivism, was, strictly speaking, untenable, as it could not exist without reference to chameleons like ‘general jurisprudence’, ‘the reason of the thing’ or ‘logical deductions’.29 In the end, Lauterpacht got his way when he, serving as editor, revised and republished Oppen­ heim’s treatise. More than fifteen years after his death, Oppenheim made a U-turn and practised (with Lauterpacht’s help) a severe form of self-criticism that culminated in the statement that ‘rigid positivism can no longer be regarded as being in accordance with international law’. 30 To identify Lauterpacht, a Polish Jew taught in Germany by Hans Kelsen who moved to Britain and reached the pinnacle of his scholarly career in the inter-war period, as spearheading a Victorian tradition of international law is counterintuitive, but nevertheless compelling. His repeated denial of a great divide between domestic and international politics, municipal and international law, while, simultaneously, trying to reform the international along the lines of the familiar, domestic experience is, as we have seen, a trademark of late nineteenth-century liberal internationalist ideology. 31 Yet Lauterpacht differed from the Victorians in one important respect: he was more at ease with institutional arguments and he felt no need to dress up his moralism as scientific positivism. Illustrating the impatient post-war mindset, he also realised that the peculiar form of positivism which accommodated international law by pointing to its relatively backward place in a general legal evolutionary process could be both stultifying and counterproductive. If the cloak of legal positivism could only take international law so far, it followed that a frontal attack on its assumptions and consequences would pave the way. Whether in the shape of private law analogies, extra-legal foundations or an insistence on the justiciability of all disputes, international 205

Into the twentieth century law was, Lauterpacht admitted, in need of all the help it could get, if it was ever to fulfil its role as pacifier of humankind. 32 The Great War was a force for change, but it was equally the prism through which pre-war conceptions of international law were revised and updated, leaving many assumptions and objectives intact. Despite widespread lament of the law’s sorry state, the academic study of the law flourished in the tragic circumstances of war. The Grotius Society was formed in 1915 and there were calls for more and better teaching of the subject. 33 Most importantly, significant international lawyers supported the establishment of a league of nations. Alongside Oppen­heim, prominent scholars like T. J. Lawrence and Lord Phillimore, the son of the international lawyer Robert Phillimore, who headed a govern­ mental committee that studied historical and contemporary proposals for a league, were instrumental in emphasising the institutional aspects of liberal internationalism. Steeped in evolutionary gradualism, the proposals of these figures were generally cautious. They were all in favour of international courts and councils to resolve justiciable and non-­ justiciable conflicts, and they all argued that the establishment of some kind of international authority with the means to enforce its ­decisions was necess­ary. At the same time, they all denied that this involved the surrender of national sovereignty. 34 As a result of their efforts, the language of British international law was re-evaluated and revamped, but it was not changed beyond recognition – it was, in short, a reorientation of means more than ends. The relative passivity inherent in prophesising was substituted by a more activist attitude that is characteristic of the agent making a promise. But this should not obscure the fact that the ethico-political sensibility informing this change of strategy lived through the Armageddon of the Great War. The internationalist ethos and language of late nineteenth-century British international law proved not only ideologically malleable but also remarkably resilient. Philosophy and the future of international politics This section addresses the legacy of late-Victorian liberal philosophers in early twentieth-century manifestations of internationalist ideology. In contrast to the emerging disciplines of international law and history, the professional study of philosophy in Britain, particularly at Cambridge, was increasingly removed from public debate. G. E. Moore (1873–1958) and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) were both instrumental in the rise of analytical philosophy and its focus on language, mathematics and logic. Moore’s cultivation of simple truths, aesthetics and personal experience and Russell’s search for an unpolluted rational foundation of philosophical truth could lead to withdrawal from politics. Yet not 206

Into the twentieth century everyone withdrew: Leonard Woolf (1880–1969), one among several ‘blooms­berries’ captivated by Moore, took a strong interest in politics and became a central internationalist voice during and after the war. 35 Russell, the godson of John Stuart Mill, also shared the main tenets of liberal internationalist ideology, although his version was both more gloomily pacifistic and radically institutional than most. Indeed, Russell openly admitted that he was a child of the Victorians and that the war had made the adjustment of his beliefs about international politics difficult, ‘not only emotionally but also intellectually’. 36 The important point, however, is that the formalised, technical ways of debating philosophy severed the strong link between philosophy and politics that we found in Green, Sidgwick and Spencer. Russell, who was taught moral philosophy by Sidgwick and at an early stage subscribed to philosophical idealism, which had made inroads also in Cambridge in the 1890s, epitomises this: when he changed his mind on the fundamental or technical aspects of philosophy or logic, his complicated political theory, liberal-radical and utilitarian in inspiration, remained unaffected. Indeed, for Russell, philosophy and politics were in this sense almost completely detached. 37 Nevertheless, a large group of liberal intellectuals who pondered the prospects and problems of international politics – and whose work can be classified as political science, moral philosophy, sociology or, more diffusely, interventions in well informed public debate – drew on the philosophical ideas of the previous generation. Idealism was still a strong force, particularly at Oxford, and, for philosophical idealists, international order remained a central preoccupation in the opening decades of the twentieth century. Chapter 4 sketched the problems of accommodation between liberal internationalism and some variants of philosophical idealism. Bernard Bosanquet, whose Hegelian organicism led to the belief that a true community with a proper general will was a precondition of any proper authority at the international level, struggled to accommodate his philosophy to the institutional turn of international­ ism during the war. By sticking to the old idealist explanation of war as rooted in the imperfect nature of existing states, and thereby downplaying the increasingly popular notion that war was a result of anarchy, he defended an unreconstructed idealist variant of moral internationalism well into the war. When he came to support the League, Bosanquet was hardly cheerful and shrewdly identified the central obstacles to be overcome. 38 As a response to increasing criticism that idealism was reactionary and could justify anti-internationalist projects, idealists were keen to dissociate German idealism (Kant, Fichte and Hegel) from German policy and its underlying ideology of Prussian power politics advanced by Heinrich von Treitschke. 39 But while idealism was to some extent discredited by the war, heralding its decline among professional philosophers during the 1920s, it came to play an important role among 207

Into the twentieth century liberal ­internationalists who had encountered the spirit of T. H. Green at Oxford. The philosopher and sociologist Leonard Trelawney Hobhouse (1864– 1929), a fervent internationalist and probably the most sophisticated ‘new liberal’ of the early twentieth century, nicely illustrates idealism’s awkward legacy. Hobhouse was imbued with Green’s benevolent idealism, which combined effortlessly with Gladstonian internationalism, and Hobhouse explicitly exempted Green from his frontal attacks on more strongly Hegelian versions of idealism, which ‘swelled the current of retrogression’. ‘If all that is real is rational, it is difficult to resist the view that what wins is right’, Hobhouse argued. In particular, he was critical of Bosanquet’s ideas and their implications for international politics, a conflict that was related to their disparate views of the nature and duties of the state.40 The spirit of Green’s idealism was also present in the variant of internationalist ideology associated with scholars like Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), Alfred E. Zimmern (1879–1957) and Ernest Barker (1874–1960), who all had a background in classics. Although Hellenism was undoubtedly the strongest ingredient in their liberal outlook, Green’s concern with the widening of communities and the obligations of states beyond their borders lived on in their work.41 Idealism’s retreat was gradual; it continued to assert influence on liberal thought in the inter-war years, but in a more muted, transfigured form. It has been remarked of Henry Sidgwick that he was ‘an apprehensive political traveller, nervously rehearsing the potential mishaps of any journey and made edgy by the uncertainty of the destination: the longer he studied the brochures for utopia, the more he warmed to the idea of staying at home’.42 How widely did Sidgwick’s ideas about inter­national politics travel? Providing a satisfying answer to this question is complicated by Sidgwick’s failure to create a school. His popularity in the twentieth century was arguably greater when John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971) resurrected him than, say, in 1920. As a political philoso­ pher, successors in the field, like Harold Laski and Graham Wallas, mocked The Elements of Politics for its dry and painstaking style. On the other hand, Sidgwick’s essays on international politics, stressing the importance of public morality and providing an early critique of German idealism, clearly spoke to the new generation and were duly republished in 1919. Moreover, the university reformer who had helped devise the teaching of politics at Cambridge was still on the menu well into the 1920s, and it was arguably in the narrow environment of early twentieth-century Cambridge that the influence of Sidgwick was felt most deeply, and then not as a philosopher but rather as a moral and intellectual example.43 Younger Cambridge internationalists had the privilege of experi­encing Sidgwick when the secret debating society, the Apostles, met on Sunday 208

Into the twentieth century evenings. Sidgwick seems to have been regarded with a mixture of admira­ tion and a light touch of the young frowning upon the old. To the young historian G. M. Trevelyan (1876–1962), a grand-nephew of Macaulay and future Master of Trinity College, Sidgwick was ‘the most conscientious of thinkers’ and a privilege to listen to, especially when discussing philosophy with Russell.44 Another apostle impressed by Sidgwick was Leonard Woolf, who, after spending years in Ceylon as an imperial administrator and marrying the future novelist Virginia Stephen, became an important internationalist figure, both within the Labour Party and in wider public debate. Woolf clearly respected Sidgwick as the society’s grand old man, but the allegiances of younger apostles were shifting towards the new bright lights of Cambridge philosophy.45 G. Lowes Dickinson, a young don at King’s College, was clearly in awe of Sidgwick. Dickinson has been described as a sentimental homo­sexual and a sad dreamer who ‘wanted to save humanity’ but was unable to ‘hit the right keys on his typewriter’.46 This is not entirely fair. ­Dickinson did grapple with the real world and its problems and it was when he did so that the spirit of Sidgwick is most clearly present. A Modern Symposium (1908) relayed a conversation between thinly veiled personalities from the recent or contemporary political and intellectual scene in Britain. A central figure in this early dialogical tract is Henry Martin, who, as an agnostic and thoroughly sincere and reasonable professor with a whitening beard, bore Sidgwick’s major trademarks. In Dickinson’s setting we hear Professor Martin arguing serenely for a golden way between anarchy and collectivism, between liberty and order.47 Before the outbreak of war in 1914, Dickinson was not particularly interested in international politics (although it was clearly part of his liberal creed), but during the war he emerged as one of the most important contributors to scholarly debate, pioneering the analysis of international anarchy.48 Whether and to what extent this analysis owed anything to Sidgwick’s international thought is unclear, but Dickinson, whose background was in classics, was clearly familiar with Sidgwick’s views and his approach to politics. In 1910–1911 he delivered the lectures at Cambridge on Sidgwickian courses like ‘Modern political theories’ and ‘Analytical and deductive politics’, the latter of which Dickinson had taught at King’s College, Cambridge, since 1896.49 The evidence for Sidgwick’s influence is sparse and circumstantial, and the nature of his impact on internationalist ideology is clearly ambivalent. On the one hand, younger internationalists encountered Sidgwick through his internationalist essays, his popular textbook on politics or as the spirit of Cambridge philosophy. He provided the last great statement of utilitarianism, a moral philosophical vocabulary that could be applied to international questions, and a critique of the implications of philosophical idealism for thinking about war and peace. Sidgwick’s 209

Into the twentieth century ­ ccasional golfing partner, a prominent intellectual, an internationalist o of the new generation and author of The Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), John Maynard Keynes, was later to argue that the ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than commonly believed. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slave of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling the frenzy of some academic scribbler of a few years back. 50

Like practical men, intellectuals of the Edwardian and inter-war years owed debts to academic scribblers of the Victorian era. For better and worse, a new generation in Cambridge, and beyond, were exposed to Sidgwick’s ideas, and they set important intellectual terms for speculation about the nature and development of international politics. On the other hand, younger internationalists were never the ideological slaves of Sidgwick, who had a dislike of campaigning and anything associated with populism. Indeed, as liberal internationalists stepped up their campaign against the wickedness of power politics, Sidgwick’s ‘government house’ sympathies could find little favour. Moreover, while he succeeded in dethroning philosophical idealism and preparing the ground for the rise of professionalised, analytical philosophy, Sidgwick simultaneously contributed to the severing of links between philosophical speculation and internationalist ideology. His own philosophy had clear ideological implications, but it never attracted a devoted following among the new generation, partly because he made few efforts to increase its popularity or create a school. So if in some ways Sidgwick’s influence was powerful, it was also markedly diffuse. In contrast to Sidgwick, the impact of Herbert Spencer’s social and political thought on twentieth-century liberal internationalists is more easily discernible. However, there are two particular obstacles in the way of appreciating exactly how and why Spencer’s influence took on the character it did. Firstly, it is widely acknowledged that Spencer’s intellectual standing was in decline before his death in 1903, and there is evidence that this trend continued in the Edwardian years. 51 The intellectual atmosphere had become resistant to all-encompassing and totalising systems of philosophy, and the fact that Spencer was, late in life, accused by Sidgwick and Moore of having committed the naturalistic fallacy, of having derived ought from is, did not improve his image. 52 Moreover, the perception of Spencer’s politics as overstated individualism contributed to the sense that he was a figure of the past rather than a philosopher for the future. While there undoubtedly is something to these arguments about Spencer’s declining reputation – don’t all ages mock their parents? – there is a danger that we unquestioningly accept the avowed 210

Into the twentieth century originality of the younger generation. Spencer was, after all, a hugely important figure in the establishment of British social science. 53 With respect to systematic liberal thinking about international affairs in the early twentieth century, I will argue, Spencer also played an important role in furnishing a language of social evolution towards peace. The second obstacle concerns the early twentieth-century profusion of evolutionary arguments as applied to the social and political world. Evolution was pervasive in intellectual discourse and could be used to justify almost any political or ideological position. At the turn of the century, it appeared that Spencer could no longer control the forces he had helped set in motion. The positivist element in his sociology, including the fascination with facts and their collection, helped identify the nature and extent of the social problem, and other Spencerian ideas became central for Fabianism and attempts to reconcile liberalism with the objectives of the working class. 54 More importantly in terms of the fate of his international thought, the cruder aspects of the evolutionary vocabulary – stressing struggle, fitness and survival – became ‘virtually omnipresent’. 55 Although both Walter Bagehot and Charles Darwin could be said to have anticipated the idea of international struggle, it was primarily during the 1890s and in the hands of scholars like Benjamin Kidd and Karl Pearson that the operation of ‘the survival of the fittest’ was applied internationally. 56 This occurred in the context of an increasingly racialised public and intellectual discourse receptive to the application of arguments from biology in the social sphere. The popularity of eugenics was one manifestation of this development, but more subtly the biological idiom also appeared to make some liberals more cynical in their views on international politics. 57 Even if the evolutionary theories of politics that drew explicit militaristic or imperialistic conclusions were few, there certainly was a drift away from the peaceful Spencerian idiom as concerns for national efficiency and Britain’s global standing were placed at the top of the political agenda. Spencer’s warning that the struggle between individuals and civilised nations should not be put on the same footing was increasingly ignored, and the new focus on external struggles (rather than peaceful competition) between groups arguably ‘helped justify’ the very policies he attacked. 58 These caveats notwithstanding, Spencer’s ideas lived on in the thoughts of early twentieth-century thinkers like Norman Angell (1872–1967) and the two ‘Hobs’, Hobhouse and Hobson. These figures, who all con­tributed to the professionalisation of IR in Britain, exploited a Spencerian evolutionary vocabulary, thereby shoring up internationalism and solving or side-stepping some of its rhetorical and ideological problems. The extent to which Hobhouse’s internationalism was integral to his new liberalism cannot be stressed enough. The most coherent statement of his self-consciously Gladstonian ­internationalism 211

Into the twentieth century is found in Democracy and Reaction (1904), but his earlier work is important for understanding its underpinnings. In an important article entitled ‘The ethical basis of collectivism’ (1898), Hobhouse argued that all political movements needed ethical ideals but that they should not, politically, become slave to them. To Hobhouse, this was related to his concept of evolution, which signified the antithesis of ideational slavery. He promoted an ‘orthogenic’, i.e. largely moral and increasingly controllable, notion of evolution: as human civilisation progressed it developed organisational tools and co-operative habits that could shape evolution. 59 This understanding of evolution was less wide-ranging than Spencer’s, and reflected, partly at least, the ­t wentieth-century preference for empirical rather than metaphysical theory. But it also brought to the surface some of the mechanisms in Spencer’s theory. Hobhouse’s insistence on progress as ‘the development of organization’ might seem directly antithetical to Spencer’s notion of progress as progressively less government. Yet Hobhouse agreed with Spencer that human competition in its highest stage was primarily individual rather than communal, that evolution resulted in a moral move from egotism to altruism (or ‘love’), and that evolution led to the formation of larger (ethical) communities.60 Most importantly, though, the concept of evolution performed similar roles in the internationalisms of Spencer and Hobhouse. Whereas the development of moral consciousness had led to a marked improvement in the conduct of personal relationships, the conduct of impersonal relation­ships was almost unaffected. The consequences of this ‘gap’ were most harshly felt in international politics.61 The overcoming of war and force through the extension of ethical claims that followed from the extension of communal feeling was the project for further evolution. Hobhouse shared the aim of peaceful competition with Spencer, but they differed on the means to be employed: We continue to play a game against one another, but the rules of the game are gradually modified in the interests of humanity. Every such limitation of war and competition is a gain, and in the economic sphere such limitations as are imposed by Factory Acts, sanitary regulations, and even perhaps poor laws, have long been admitted as the most important applications of the Collectivist principle in modern legislation. They run parallel with the abolition of explosive bullets and the protection of the wounded and other regulations of war by the Geneva Convention. When all the world is one family, the millennium will have been reached. Short of that it is possible to moralize rivalry, and possibly, in the spirit of the inclusive method, turn it into a means of grace.62

This passage is rich in interpretive avenues. Hobhouse demonstrates not only the coherence of his politics across the national/inter­national divide, but also, strikingly, the disjuncture between the means. Whereas, in domestic politics, he relied on legislation and state intervention, in 212

Into the twentieth century i­nternational politics he knew that institutional means were under­ developed. Nevertheless, he did not argue for an acceleration of institution building on the international level, but mainly relied on the further development of moral consciousness. Only during the war did Hobhouse fully accept that ‘the older internationalism, based on belief in humanitarian ethics on the one hand, and in the peaceful tendencies of commerce on the other, is dead’.63 As internationalists, Hobhouse and Spencer concurred on most international questions, but more importantly they both used projections of evolutionary processes to deny validity and credibility to various forms of imperialism, nationalism and militarism. Hobhouse warned that ‘The fact that a thing is evolving is no proof that it is good, the fact that society has evolved is no proof that is has progressed’. Unlike Spencer, he saw higher stages of social evolution as susceptible to human guidance, but in their insistence on the telos of evolution as peaceful competition among industrial societies within a context of international peace, order and justice, the two were in close agreement. Despite Spencer’s retrograde libertarian individualism, he appears to have been more of a presence in Hobhouse’s thought than the new liberal saw fit to admit.64 The economist Hobson, Hobhouse’s friend and fellow new liberal, was another prominent internationalist in the first quarter of the twentieth century, and his attempt to reshape liberalism for a new era was also accompanied by an attempt to adapt internationalism to the modern world by mixing time-honoured principles with claims to ideological inno­vation. Hobson paid homage to a tradition of liberal internationalism when he lamented that ‘ethical considerations based on humanity are hardly held applicable to States’.65 Like Hobhouse, Hobson conceived of evolution in the light of the human ability to rationalise it, to substitute one form of struggle with another.66 Moreover, he pointed to the interdependence of the modern world in terms of trade and technology as constituting a defining moment in human existence. Morally and intellectually the world was not one, and a prime reason for this was a failure ‘to take a cool, clear, scientific view of international relations’.67 As so often with Hobson, the right view was obscured by the actions and culture of specific groups of manufactures, traders, politicians and militarists. And he added an important theoretical dimension to the internationalist analysis through his concern with the bellicosity of the crowd in The Psychology of Jingoism (1901), an interest that developed out of Hobson’s journalistic coverage of and opposition to the South African War.68 At the early stage of his career, Hobson employed a dual remedial strategy. On the one hand, he put his faith in a progress of necessity; an interdependent world was the ‘true basis of internationalism to which political relations will have to adjust themselves’.69 On the other hand, the world was in need of enlightenment. The retrogressive 213

Into the twentieth century interests of the aristocracy–military–trading complex had to be exposed and here Hobson carved out a role for himself, most notably through his most famous work, Imperialism (1902).70 Hobson was evidently in debt to Spencer. Like Spencer’s early indict­ ment of (state-driven) colonisation, Hobson denied that Britain’s colonies were economically beneficial to the mother country. More revealingly, Imperialism ‘contained an implicit, extended, and intricate definition of “industry” and “industrialism”, one rooted in the tradition best represented in the immediate past by Spencer but one developed beyond that level’. Furthermore, when Hobson reviewed Kidd’s Social Evolution, he opposed the idea of warfare ‘in pursuit of efficiency’ and substituted it with a Spencerian logic in which altruism, co-operation and harmony were possible.71 Hobson admired Spencer: he called the synthetic phil­osophy ‘a monumental contribution to human knowledge’, which for the first time established ‘something which could be called a Science of History, of Politics, of Ethics’. However, he was also wary of Spencer’s libertarianism, describing Spencer’s refusal to apply the organic view of society in the new liberal direction as ‘strangely perverse’.72 In contrast, Hobson abandoned laissez-faire domestically and internationally and launched a theoretical defence of a benevolent imperialism on the conditions that it was beneficial to the world and the governed alike, and sanctioned by an international government.73 This was anathema to Spencer. But with respect to contemporary practice, the two had much in common. In particular, Hobson’s critical spirit and his indictments of the establishment are reminiscent of Spencer. Despite entertaining some rather crude stereotypes, particularly of Jews, occasionally Hobson’s relativ­ism and respect for different (and mainly ‘backward’) peoples is akin to Spencer’s in its mix of tolerance and arrogance. ‘The notion that there are certain common brands of “justice”, “freedom”, “civilization”, which can profitably, or even possibly, be imposed upon widely divergent types of peoples so as to satisfy their needs, is a dangerous fallacy.’74 Spencer could have penned that and, indeed, in Hobson’s turn-of-the-century dissections of imperialism we find many Spencerian mantras formulated ambivalently as part prophecies and part pleas: substituting crude struggle between nations for a higher form of struggle in arts, literature and commerce; countering the influence of church and state in fostering imperial patriotism through the education system; the coming of federal international government; heeding the principle of non-aggression in international affairs and respecting the ripeness of time as a means of avoiding the perils accompanying attempts to force progress. Hobson and Spencer belonged to different generations but, as internationalists, their projects, language and enemies were remarkably similar. In the writings of the more traditional liberal Norman Angell we also find traces of Spencer’s internationalist language. The Great Illusion 214

Into the twentieth century (1910) is notorious for its economic argument against military conflict and territorial aggrandisement, and the book is often portrayed as Cobden­ite in inspiration because Angell appealed as much to the pocket as to the principles of capitalists and decision-makers. Yet Spencer looms large and not only as a transmitter of Cobdenite ideas to turn-of-thecentury conditions. Late in his life, Angell to some extent defended the Victorian optimism that he acknowledged as a source of his early radicalism-cum-liberalism. Already at a young age he had ‘swallowed’ Spencer and when working as a cowboy in the United States he discussed Spencer’s ideas with his fellows.75 Angell published his first book, Patriotism under Three Flags, in 1903 and besides approvingly quoting Spencer’s dictum that social progress depended on industrialism overcoming militancy, his tirade against patriotism had a quote from Spencer as its epigraph: ‘Were anyone to call me dishonest or untruthful, he would touch me to the quick. Were he to say that I am unpatriotic, he would leave me unmoved.’76 Similarly, the ‘biological’ argument underpinning The Great Illusion – that human nature is changeable and, consequently, that war is not inevitable – was infused with Spencerian elements. Under the heading ‘The progress from cannibalism to Herbert Spencer’, Angell rhetorically asked, ‘do we mean by the phrase that “human nature does not change” that the feelings of the paleolithic [sic] man who ate the bodies of his enemies and of his own children are the same as those of Herbert Spencer?’ It was against this background that Angell insisted that struggle between nations was antithetical to further evolution and that, in the long run, ‘the whole drift of human tendencies is away from such conflict as is represented by war between States’.77 In sum, the importance of Spencer’s views on international politics for later internationalists lay in his ability to use evolutionary philosophy to formulate a coherent ideology, where a sense of gloom and a sense of hope (verging on certainty) co-existed. Hobhouse, Hobson and Angell, I would suggest, took on board the brighter dimensions of Spencer’s evolutionary theory as well as its focus on (and implications for) the inter­national domain. Moreover, they exploited the fact that this posture also opened up a critical space where the irrationalism or militarism of certain sections of British society could be scrutinised. It was this intimate relationship between pessimism and optimism which made international­ism seem dynamic, progressive and, at the same time, non-utopian and realistic. The young internationalists were often pessim­istic with regard to the immediate realisation of their goals, but on a deeper level they also firmly believed in a particular form of ana­logical reasoning: just as ideas of justice and civil order in domestic society were products of history, (moral) evolution would eventually help realise internationalism for this world. This mode of argument changed significantly in institutional directions during the First World War, particularly for 215

Into the twentieth century Angell and Hobson, who accepted Dickinson’s explanation of war as caused by anarchy and sought institutional measures that could support (or in Hobson’s case almost create) the moral development of humankind that the war had exposed as fragile and insufficient. Yet, before the war, the temporality that followed from the idea of social evolution and their trenchant critiques of established ways of dealing in international affairs owed much to Spencer. The writings of Hobson, Hobhouse and Angell were infused with the values of Cobden, Bright and Gladstone – but they were articulated in the vocabulary of Spencerian evolutionary internationalism. This is testimony to Spencer’s ‘diffusively pervasive’ influence.78 Hobson admitted this much when he argued that ‘We are all Spencerians to-day, whether we like it or not’.79 The internationalist appetite for history According to the traditional narrative describing the development of history as an academic discipline in Britain, by the early twentieth century the amateur(ish) historian, writing in a literary style and with a thinly veiled political bias, was a threatened species. Scholarship and integrity, defined by archival study and conscious detachment from political controversies respectively, encroached on the profession. On a general level, such a development did take place. Yet, as Michael Bentley has recently argued, it took place alongside a resuscitation of the Whig historical tradition, a tradition that provided ‘a continuing critique’ of the tendencies and consequences of professionalisation.80 What Bentley has in mind here is Whiggism concerned with constitutional, ecclesiastical and imperial history, but the statement is even more forceful if we understand Whig history in the broader embryonic sense introduced in chapter 5. Global politics in the early twentieth century challenged this Whig liberal understanding of history and provoked a considerable reaction. Thus, on the international arena, historians ‘found a new sphere for the operation of liberal principles’.81 Yet, as we have seen, inter­nationalist ideology featured prominently in the work of pre-war liberal historians, and it therefore seems more reasonable to steer a midway course between these two (different, but related) arguments: firstly, even if for a time the Whig liberal tradition was less prominent in the ancient universities, it never disappeared and, particularly in connection with empire and inter­national politics, it reasserted itself in the first half of the twentieth century; this means, secondly, that although the Whig liberal tradition received a boost during the First World War and became more markedly oriented towards international politics, this re-orientation drew on resources within an existing and well developed historical vocabulary for discussing international politics, its problems and prospects. 216

Into the twentieth century Any attempt to succinctly identify the traces of a historically minded language of internationalism in the early twentieth century faces a considerable selection problem. Not only did two of our original cast – Lord Bryce and Viscount Morley (as they were now known) – outlive most of their contemporaries and continue to spread the internationalist message well into the 1920s, but during and after the war there was a plethora of mostly internationalist historians trying to learn lessons from the past, partaking in controversies over the origin of the war, and supporting the righteousness of Britain’s cause. It is well known that historians, inside as well as outside government offices (or somewhere in between), painted a self-congratulatory image of Britain as the liberal wave of the future and deployed broadly internationalist arguments to justify British policy.82 Harold Temperley (1879–1939) and Charles Webster (1886–1961) special­ised in the foreign policy of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, focusing on British statesmen like Castlereagh, Canning and Palmerston, which instilled in their broadly liberal outlook a great respect for the practical mastery of diplomacy. Temperley later edited the history of the Paris Peace Conferences and co-edited the British Documents on the Origin of the War (more on which below). As head of the Historical Section of the Foreign Office during the war, which brought him into contact with other prominent historically minded internationalists like Zimmern and James Headlam-Morley, Temperley was central in providing intellectual support for the war.83 Webster, who had taken over the Chair of Modern History at Liverpool from Ramsay Muir in 1914, worked under Temperley at the Foreign Office and wrote The Congress of Vienna (1920) in an attempt to learn from earlier peace efforts. He went on to become Professor of IR at Aberystwyth (after Zimmern) in the decade from 1922, a productive period in which he wrote a study of Castlereagh and a thoroughly internationalist tract on the League of Nations.84 Another group of intellectuals with an interest in both history and inter­ national politics consisted of the Oxford classicists inspired by Green’s idealism. Murray, Zimmern, Barker and H. A. L. Fisher (1865–1940) all went on to become active and important internationalists. Zimmern, who in 1919 became the first professor of IR in the world, spoke for this group (and many others) when in 1931 he argued, in a lecture inaugurating his professorship at Oxford, that ‘There is no frontier between the present and the past and there can be no barrier between the political thinker and the historian’.85 Barker and Fisher were both well acquainted with Bryce, which their views on history, nationality and international politics indicated. Fisher served on the Bryce Commission during the war and later wrote Bryce’s biography.86 Barker helped Bryce revise The Holy Roman Empire in the early 1900s, an experience that shone through in his writings, published during and after the war, on the unity 217

Into the twentieth century of medieval civilisation, Dante’s sense of culture and civility, and the dire need for a new unity among nations. Moreover, Barker took over from Bryce as one of the most prominent spokespersons for the theory of good and bad nationalism.87 John Morley’s hagiography was reflected in the writings of younger historians, for example the prominent social historian J. L. Hammond (1872–1949), who attributed to his idol Gladstone an internationalist, European outlook, or what he later called ‘the League of Nations mind’.88 Hobson, despite being a journalist by trade and a disappointed (and self-proclaimed) intellectual heretic, also ventured into this territory, writing a new, complementary study of Cobden, ‘the international man’. Hobson wished to demonstrate that Cobden had a philosophy of international relations that was much wider than the laissez-faire doctrines informing the campaign for the abolition of the Corn Laws. Symptomatically, Hobson’s admiration and resurrection of Cobden was mixed with a measure of condescension: as a creature of his age, Cobden had failed to see how the poor condition of the workers was a precondition of an, apparently, prosperous society. It spoke volumes for the Edwardian feeling of disappointment with and superiority over the Victorians, when Hobson argued that the logic informing moral internationalism had been tried and failed.89 Nevertheless, Hobson still felt that (an updated) Cobden had something to offer, and if it is true, as Anthony Howe has argued, that Cobdenism survived well into the age of organicism because liberalism could abandon laissez-faire while ‘retaining and strengthening its attachment to Cobden’s doctrines of free-trade, taxation, war, and internationalism’, this was partly due to Hobson’s effort.90 Finally, G. M. Trevelyan continued the Morleyan tradition while fusing it with Acton’s intense moralism. Trevelyan was educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he obtained a first in history in 1896 when both Acton and Sidgwick held their chairs. Trevelyan came from a prominent liberal family. His father, G. O. Trevelyan, was a member of Gladstone’s cabinets, and his brother Charles turned left during the First World War and joined the Labour Party through the Union of Democratic Control, with which many radical internationalists were affiliated.91 Like his great-uncle Macaulay, Trevelyan wanted to write popular and readable books in the shape of romantic national histories or biographies of great men. A trilogy on Garibaldi demonstrated Trevelyan’s liberal commitment to struggling nationalities and his admiration for national heroes. His biography of John Bright displayed many Morleyan features and was a timely reminder to British liberals about the essentials of internationalism and the importance of speaking truth to power. Trevelyan admired Bright’s liberal internationalism, including its anti-imperialism and its commitment to free and good government. Isolationism was not, 218

Into the twentieth century however, easy to reconcile with Trevelyan’s romantic nationalist streak.92 Before the war, Trevelyan also helped establish and run the Independent Review, a journal which was particularly strong on international questions. After some initial doubts, he supported the war effort and served (alongside and under Philip Noel-Baker) in an ambulance unit on the Italian front. As Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge from 1927 and later Master of Trinity College, Trevelyan promulgated a romantic liberalism that increasingly veered in a conservative direction. ‘War was for him the very stuff of history’, Michael Howard has argued, ‘and he found no difficulty in reconciling it with his Liberalism. How have men gained and preserved their liberties, he would have asked, except by fighting?’93 As these numerous examples demonstrate, the opening decades of the twentieth century witnessed a surge of liberal internationalist ideology advanced in an historical idiom. The remainder of this section concentrates on the work of George Peabody Gooch (1873–1968) as a pre-eminent twentieth-century bearer of the internationalist mantle created by Bryce, Morley and Acton. Not only was his open-ended but genuinely optimistic philosophy of history, which allowed for both chance and passion, a fitting representative of the liberal tradition in English history,94 but, by virtue of his range, his liberalism and his dedicated internationalism, Gooch knits the narrative together in an ideal fashion. Apart from spasmodically dipping into the languages of law and philosophy analysed above, and thereby demonstrating the crossfertilisation between the languages of internationalism, he mastered all dimensions of the historical language of internationalism developed by the previous generation. Like no other historian, the intensely liberal Gooch put history in the service of internationalism. Financially independent, Gooch chose history as his profession after obtaining a first in history from Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was Trevelyan’s senior by a few years. Truly a product of the Victorian culture of altruism, the young Gooch was determined to serve humanity through philanthropy, politics and history.95 In 1898, he published The History of Democratic Ideas in the Seventeenth Century – an essay that had won the Thirlwall Prize the year before and which he also, unsuccessfully, submitted for a fellowship at Trinity. Gooch moved to London and got involved in philanthropy and the Charity Organization Society. At Trevelyan’s suggestion, he also taught at the Working Men’s College, experiences that took him somewhat in the direction of the new liberalism. Incensed by the South African War and its conduct, Gooch published The War and Its Causes (1900) and the following year he contributed an essay to The Heart of Empire (1901). The former was a pamphlet published by the Transvaal Committee in which Gooch examined events leading up to the needless war and, to prove his point, he invoked a 219

Into the twentieth century powerful analogy: just like Cobden and Bright had spoken out against the Crimean War and incurred patriotic abuse from all sides, so a select group of fair-minded liberals spoke out against the South African War. Gooch found consolation in continuing the analogy: opposition to war would, eventually, be vindicated.96 The essay in The Heart of Empire was altogether more aggressive and critical in tone. Taking his cue from the debate about Greater Britain, Gooch argued that the British mind had not yet adjusted itself to the expansion that the empire had undergone during the second half of the nineteenth century. But while the British people should not be ashamed of the empire, and particularly its settler colonies, wider expansionism was not praiseworthy. Fusing the spirit of Spencer, Acton and his friend Hobson, Gooch called attention ‘to certain characteristics of the recent growth of the Imperialist temper by which the moral currency is debased, and which constitute a grave danger not only to our own Empire, but to the peace and well-being of the world’.97 The dangerous doctrine which glorified war and denied that morality applied to foreign affairs in general and expansionism in particular was drawn from the familiar bugbears of internationalist ideology, including Machiavelli, Nietzsche and Treitschke. In order to refute this doctrine and expose Western hypocrisy, Gooch bought into Spencerian arguments about the dangers of bellicose, homogenising patriotism and the benefits of war in earlier stages of civilisation and its corresponding unsuitability for the modern world.98 Gooch’s alternative vision consisted of a brief, almost ideal-typical sketch of internationalist ideology or what he called ‘the plain rules that are vital to the moral health of great and small nations alike’. Following a critical discussion of contemporary international problems, Gooch used the ideas of William Penn, Abbé Saint-Pierre, Jeremy Bentham and Immanuel Kant to argue that it was increasingly realised that ‘the nationalist ideal must be supplemented by the internationalist’.99 Referring to Sidgwick’s essay ‘Public morality’, he drove home the point that private and public morality stood on the same footing. In essence, Gooch pleaded for liberal pluralism in international affairs: most nations entertained notions of exceptionalism, and such claims were, like the customs and social organisation of ‘backward’ societies, worthy of tolerance and respect. In 1906, Gooch stood for Parliament and won a seat in the Liberal landslide. As a young MP he focused mainly on international questions. This was hardly surprising: he was a member of the (predominantly internationalist) Rainbow Circle and clearly felt ideologically at home with new liberals in the area of foreign policy.100 Gooch lost his seat in 1910 and never returned to Parliament. Instead, he devoted his time to intellectual activities. In 1911, Gooch began his staggering forty-nineyear stint as editor of the Contemporary Review (1911 to 1960, from 220

Into the twentieth century 1931 onwards as single editor) and in 1913 he published his most acclaimed work, a massive survey of European historiography. History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century demonstrated Gooch’s preference for impar­tiality as a scholarly value, but in its critique of certain aspects of German historical writing, most notably Treitschke, whom the young Gooch had heard lecture in Berlin in 1896, it also pointed to strong internationalist commitments.101 The First World War was a profound shock to Gooch, who had married Sophie Else Schön, a German, during his Wanderjahre in Berlin. He fought a rearguard action against the most vilifying arguments against Germany and the German people. Inevitably, he supported and became involved in the movement for the establishment of a league of nations and, particularly in the pages of the Contem­porary Review, Gooch made sure that internationalist views and proposals figured promin­ently.102 In the inter-war years, he became Britain’s most prominent historian of foreign policy and diplomacy. In particular, Gooch grappled with the origins of the First World War, which he, in tune with most internationalists, located in the international anarchy of the pre-war world.103 Although he held no academic position, Gooch was President of the Historical Association of Great Britain 1923–1926 and co-editor of such prestigious publications as The Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 1783–1919 and the massive British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914. He was asked by Ramsay MacDonald, a friend, to take on the latter task, which called for diplomatic skills, balancing the claims of foreign governments, the Foreign Office and the public. Working with the high-minded and occasionally pedantic co-editor, Harold Temperley, also required some tact.104 It is perhaps unsurprising that the middle-aged and moderate internationalist Gooch should become both President of the National Peace Council from 1933 to 1936 and a classic victim of the logic of appeasement in the late 1930s.105 Gooch stuck to the internationalist cause until his death, and by examining the ways in which he promoted it, the debts he owed to a previous generation of liberal historians emerge in a clear light. Gooch’s relationship with Morley is fascinating. Already before they knew each other well, Gooch paid tribute to Morley by comparing his disinterestedness and his ‘steadfast devotion to the public weal’ to those of John Stuart Mill.106 Their relations soon involved differences over Indian policy, however. When the veteran politician Morley agreed to become Indian Secretary in Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal government in 1906, his decisions were scrutinised by young Liberal backbenchers, including the liberal-cum-radical Gooch. While conceding that the Indian Secretary and his Viceroy, Lord Minto, had initiated some important reforms of Indian society and that their situation was far from easy, Gooch criticised Morley’s decision to use old, outdated regulations as the basis for the arbitrary use of force in India. Following 221

Into the twentieth century Morley’s resignation as Secretary of State for India, however, the two initiated a personal friendship that was to grow into one of Morley’s most important during the Great War.107 One event that is likely to have brought the two closer together was the publication of Morley’s Notes on Politics and History (1913). The book was an expanded version of lectures delivered in Manchester in 1912, and before publishing Morley consulted Gooch.108 This is likely to have demonstrated their agreement on questions of international politics. In this area, it was habitual for both Morley and Gooch to construct of a Manichean struggle between the forces of good and evil in order to rhetorically further their case.109 Moreover, Gooch, a self-confessed Gladstonian liberal in international politics, echoed Morley when he praised Gladstone’s humanism and argued that ‘Though the vision of a League of Nations was beyond his range, the spiritual foundations of the edifice are clearly discoverable in his speeches and writings’.110 If Morley had secured Gladstone a prominent place in the pantheon of internationalism, it was such arguments that helped keep the grand old man firmly on his pedestal. Lord Acton was a friend and mentor, whom Gooch on one of his last days in Cambridge had seen deliver the famous inaugural lecture on the study of history. Acton was highly supportive of the young ­historian, and the Regius Professor was apparently furious when Gooch was denied a fellowship at Trinity College. Acton’s impression on Gooch was immense. He became ‘the man to whom he [Gooch] owed the heaviest intellectual debt’.111 As a trainee in the craft of history writing, Gooch took from Acton the legitimacy, indeed primacy, of studying ideas while not being confined to a level of analysis defined by the state. He was clearly inspired by Acton’s intense moralism and often praised his master’s learning and his commitment to liberty. But towards the end of his life, Gooch pointed out that Acton ‘loved superlatives and dogmatic statements much more than I have ever done. Moreover, by nature he was a preacher, aflame with his message of the supremacy of ethics in collective as well as in individual conduct.’112 Perhaps the ageing Gooch no longer imagined himself preaching. But in the first half of the twentieth century he clearly did, something which comes out in what could be termed the ‘republican streak’ of his internationalism, concerned with fleshing out the demands of citizenship with respect to international politics.113 In a succession of articles in the 1920s and 1930s, Gooch attempted to outline the demands that an interdependent world put on the enlightened citizen and the merits that the study of history and foreign affairs had in this respect. For Gooch, this study had to start from the unity of civilisation, which meant that civilised life was both a common achievement and a common responsibility. Exclusivist interpretations of national life were futile, as the race, religion and language of, for example, the British people had all developed in close contact with the 222

Into the twentieth century outside world. By implication, citizens had to study not only the history (or the history of the foreign policy) of their own nation; rather, they had to make an effort to understand the claims and histories of other nations in order to foster ‘respectful toleration of variety’. It was, in other words, in the study of history that ‘the synthesis of intellectual enlightenment and moral stimulus which citizenship requires and demands’ could be found. This argument included a classic internationalist commitment to knowledge as a source of moral development and to informed and enlightened citizenship as compatible with a benevolent nationalism and a peaceful internationalism.114 In coming to terms with the post-war world, Gooch put his faith in an interlocking trinity consisting of democracy, active citizenship and the reform of international politics and foreign policy. This was summed up in the claim that ‘The citizen of the post-war world must be trained to understand and to fulfil the duties imposed on his country and himself by the creation of the League of Nations’.115 But the hook on which Gooch fastened this argument was, I want to suggest, Actonian in essence. The insistence on knowledge and education makes sense only if the national has no a priori precedence vis-à-vis humanity or the international. This was one of Acton’s mantras: that reason of state should always be sub­ordinated to ethical considerations founded on the liberty of humankind. Gooch used this dimension of Acton’s legacy in order to press home the specific point that history could, with benefit, be used to ‘break the spell of the “great man” by explaining that he must be judged not only by the bulk of his achievements but by the cause which he served’. In contrast to Acton, Gooch’s writings suggested rather than imposed moral judgements, but in pursuing his internationalist agenda he drew on Acton’s most famous epigrams about the inflexibility of the moral code and the danger of debasing the moral currency.116 If Gooch took from Morley and Acton an adamant moral inter­ nationalism conscious of its own roots, his debt to Lord Bryce was more specific. Gooch also knew Bryce well. When Bryce was Chief Secretary for Ireland, Gooch served as his parliamentary private secretary.117 The pair had similar interests, intellectually and politically: both were historians concerned with the development of political science, IR and sociology, and they both devoted much attention to the Eastern question, for a time collaborating on the Balkan committee, of which Gooch was briefly chief parliamentary spokesman. Gooch admired the old liberal scholar-cum-statesman and endorsed Bryce’s faith in the peacefulness of democracy as well as his critique of the South African War – he even seems to have exonerated Bryce for his anti-German outbursts during the Great War.118 Bryce’s influence on Gooch is particularly marked in two related areas. Firstly, Gooch was much concerned with the specifically modern phenome­non of nationalism. In the ‘Swarthmore International 223

Into the twentieth century Handbooks’ series, edited by his friend G. L. Dickinson, Gooch wrote a short tract on nationalism in the light of internationalism. The dis­ cussion of nationalism, its different forms and manifestations, was varied and nuanced but had the same double-edged character found in Bryce. Gooch’s preference was for Mazzini’s Italian over Treitschke’s German nationalism. In the former case, the nation was the indispens­able bridge, ‘the half-way house, the middle term, between the individual and the human family’. On the other hand, Treitschke – ‘the Bismarck of the Chair’ – stood for a cruder ‘Teutonic’ variant of nationalism. This battle between a nationalism expressing ‘a profound and legitimate human instinct’ versus a nationalism that acted as midwife to ‘savage racial passion and repulsive national arrogance, and the cult of “sacred egotism”’ became common stock among internationalists.119 The second, and related, way in which Gooch took over the mantle of Bryce demonstrates the subtle blend of continuity and change in British liberal internationalism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Among his friends, Bryce was known as ‘the Holy Roman’, and Gooch acknowledged the importance of Bryce’s first book. Like Ernest Barker, he agreed with Bryce about the continuing attractions of the medieval ideal in a conflict-ridden modern world. In fact, it became a mainstay of Gooch’s internationalist writings to attempt a very Brycean resurrection of the medieval ideal. But whereas Bryce’s admiration for the ‘theory of the medieval empire’ was downbeat, bordering on resignation, Gooch tied his enthusiasm for the respublica Christiana firmly to the mast of institutional internationalism, the League of Nations. On this reading, the League was the logical end-point of history. The world which had no concept of sovereignty and in which God was represented by the two potentates of emperor and pope entertained a valuable belief ‘that mankind was one’.120 The identification of the law of nations with the law of nature marked the beginnings of international law. But a new world symbolised by Machiavelli and the doctrine of sovereignty had since taken over. With Gooch sensing that the tide was about to turn – a familiar statement from a liberal historian – he not only pleaded ‘for the restoration of the medieval conception of the unity of civilis­ ation, brought up to date, secularised and informed with a new and wider outlook’, but also argued that the League of Nations represented ‘the logical and natural consummation of the whole process of human develop­ment’.121 This majestic claim harboured much ambivalence about the agency involved in historical processes, reminiscent of the ‘drift’ or ‘flow’ informing the narratives of earlier Whig historians.122 Was the return of the medieval ideal the result of mysterious forces governing human conduct on earth, or was it something humankind deliberately constructed following a world war that had discredited a world of sovereign states? As he argued in 1924, the post-war generation 224

Into the twentieth century wanted a fundamental overhauling of international relationships. We wanted the creation of a new machinery for international intercourse, but we wanted something much better than that – we wanted the scrapping and burial of the doctrine of unfettered sovereignty, and we wanted the revival of the grand old medieval doctrine that we are all parts of the human family and that in consequence we all owe obligations to one another.123

This ambitious restatement of the internationalist project left the ambiva­ lence about agency intact. Yet it is noteworthy how Gooch utilised the resources already existing within earlier manifestations of international­ ist ideology, which had been presented in a historical ‘language’, to develop and update this ideology. For although most of the ideals could still do the job, the impatience and determination of the post-war generation were distinctive. Gooch’s early, almost unreconstructed Victorian internationalism, which looked first and foremost to moral development, was now directed by a pessimism and urgency less salient in Victorian internationalism: collective security had become the only security. In sum, Gooch is a fitting representative of early twentieth-century liberal internationalists, their debts to a previous generation as well as the ideological innovation they represented. Conclusion This chapter has demonstrated how the legal, philosophical and historical languages of internationalist ideology developed by liberal intellectuals in the late nineteenth century and analysed in the preceding chapters provided a necessary background and source of inspiration for a wide variety of liberal internationalists coming of age in the twentieth century. The legal evolutionary logic of the late-Victorian years lived on in the writings of twentieth-century international lawyers. Whereas the influence of Sidgwick was ambivalent, powerful and scattered at once, T. H. Green’s and Herbert Spencer’s internationalism left more visible (and important) marks on the prominent liberal internationalists who were central not only in public debate but also in the establishment of IR as an academic discipline. The writings of G. P. Gooch displayed a liberal inter­ nationalist ideology that used elements of the legal, philosophical and, in particular, the historical languages of internationalism to continue and modernise the project of encouraging progress, sowing order and enacting justice in international politics. This example not only demonstrates the fundamental continuity in internationalist ideology and its shift towards more institutional modes of argument during and after the war, but also points to cross-fertilisation among languages, which added to the strength and diversity of this set of beliefs in the wake of the First World War. 225

Into the twentieth century Notes 1 G. P. Gooch, ‘Politics and morals’ [1935], in Studies in Diplomacy and Statecraft (London, 1942), 311–40, at p. 339. 2 Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit (Harmondsworth, 1994), p. 1. Among cultural historians, this is a debate between ‘modernists’ and ‘traditionalists’, represented by Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 2000 [1975]), and Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning (Cambridge, 1995), respectively. 3 For an argument for change in the economic language of internationalism, see Frank Trentmann, ‘After the nation-state: citizenship, empire and global coordination in the new internationalism, 1914–1930’, in Kevin Grant, Phillippa Levine and Frank Trentmann (eds), Beyond Sovereignty (London, 2007), 34–53; Frank Trentmann, Free Trade Nation (Oxford, 2008). 4 G. L. Dickinson, The European Anarchy (London, 1916). See also Casper Sylvest, ‘Continuity and change in British liberal internationalism, c. 1900– 1930’, Review of International Studies, 31 (2005), 263–83. 5 J. A. Hobson, Confessions of an Economic Heretic (London, 1938), p. 96. As Hobson’s (and Norman Angell’s) interest in the psychological dynamics of jingoism and patriotism testifies, this development was also well underway before the war. See also Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics, third edition (London, 1920 [1908]). 6 On Oppenheim, see particularly Matthias Schmoeckel, ‘The story of a success: Lassa Oppenheim and his “International Law”’, in M. Stolleis and M. ­Yanagihara (eds), East Asian and European Perspectives on International Law (Baden-Baden, 2004), 57–139; Matthias Schmoeckel, ‘The internationalist as a scientist and herald: Lassa Oppenheim’, European Journal of International Law, 11 (2000), 699–712. 7 See Benedict Kingsbury, ‘Legal positivism as normative politics: international society, balance of power and Lassa Oppenheim’s positive international law’, European Journal of International Law, 13 (2002), 401–36. Kingsbury associates Oppenheim with figures such as E. H. Carr, Hans J. Morgenthau and Hedley Bull. The paradigmatic statement of the English school is Hedley Bull, The Anarchical Society, second edition (London, 1985). For a more recent incarnation, see Andrew Hurrell, On Global Order (Oxford, 2007). 8 Lassa Oppenheim, International Law, 2 vols (London, 1905, 1906), I, pp. 18, 74. Although the book has changed significantly under the tutelage of different editors, it is still popular. See W. Michael Reisman, ‘Lassa Oppenheim’s nine lives’, Yale Journal of International Law, 19 (1994), 255–84. 9 Lassa Oppenheim, ‘The science of international law: its task and method’, American Journal of International Law, 2 (1908), 313–56, at p. 318. 10 Oppenheim, International Law, I, pp. 39, 40, 42. 11 Lassa Oppenheim, Das Gewissen (Basel, 1898). On Oppenheim’s liberalism, see Oppenheim, International Law, I, p. 9; Kingsbury, ‘Legal positivism’, pp. 409–10. 12 Oppenheim, Das Gewissen, p. 12 (my translation). 13 Oppenheim, Das Gewissen, p. 45 (my translation). See also pp. 15, 42, 46. 14 Oppenheim applied a similar analysis to the practice of war. Oppenheim, Das Gewissen, pp. 48–50. 15 Oppenheim, ‘The science of international law’, p. 329. Note the almost identical formulation in Henry Sumner Maine, Ancient Law (London, 1861), pp. 73–4. 16 Oppenheim, International Law, I, pp. 80, 92.

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Into the twentieth century 17 Oppenheim, International Law, I, pp. 24–5, 520, and II, pp. 74–5. 18 On the relationship between public morality and international law, see ­Oppenheim, International Law, I, p. 75, and the discussion in Mark W. Janis, ‘Religion and the literature of international law: some standard texts’, in Mark W. Janis and Carolyn Evans (eds), Religion and International Law (The Hague, 1999), 121–43, especially pp. 136–7. 19 Oppenheim, ‘The science of international law’, p. 333. 20 Oppenheim, ‘The science of international law’, p. 356. 21 Lassa Oppenheim, The Future of International Law, trans. J. P. Bate (Oxford, 1921), p. 16. The essay was first published in German as Die Zukunft des Völker­rechts (Leipzig, 1911). 22 Oppenheim, The Future of International Law, pp. 55, 66. 23 For Oppenheim’s discussion of the League of Nations, see particularly Lassa Oppenheim, The League of Nations and Its Problems (London, 1919), p. 76; Lassa Oppenheim, International Law, ed. R. F. Roxburgh, third edition, 2 vols (London, 1920, 1921), I, pp. 264–301, one of the last things he wrote. The original lectures on which these texts are based are in Cambridge, Trinity College Library, MS Oppenheim a338. See also Mathias Schmoeckel, ‘Consent and caution. Lassa Oppenheim and his reaction to World War I’, in R. Lesaffer (ed.), Peace Treaties and International Law in European History (Cambridge, 2004), 270–88; Hidemi Suganami, ‘The “peace through law” approach: a critical examination of its ideas’, in Trevor Taylor (ed.), Approaches and Theory in International Relations (London, 1978), 100–21. 24 Oppenheim, The League of Nations and Its Problems, p. 78. See also Matthias Schmoeckel ‘Lassa Oppenheim (1858–1919)’, in J. Beatson and R. Zimmermann (ed.), Jurists Uprooted (Oxford, 2004), 583–99. 25 On British international law after the Great War, see also W. E. Beckett, ‘Inter­ national law in England’, Law Quarterly Review, 55 (1939), 257–72; Arnold McNair, ‘International law in Great Britain: 1920–1970’, Law Quarterly Review, 87 (1971), 173–8; and, more generally, David Kennedy, ‘The move to institutions’, Cardozo Law Review, 8 (1987), 841–988. 26 See for example Philip Noel-Baker, The Geneva Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes (London, 1925); Philip Noel-Baker, Dis­ armament (London, 1926); Lorna Lloyd, ‘Philip Noel-Baker and peace through law’, in David Long and Peter Wilson (eds), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis (Oxford, 1995), 25–57. For a biographical treatment, see David J. Whittaker, Fighter for Peace (York, 1989). On the Labour Party, see Casper Sylvest, ‘Interwar internationalism, the British Labour Party and the historiography of International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 48 (2004), 409–32; Rhiannon Vickers, The Labour Party and the World (Manchester, 2004); Lucian Ashworth, International Relations and the Labour Party (London, 2007). 27 Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge, 2001), ch. 5; Martti Koskenniemi, ‘Hersch Lauterpacht 1897–1960’, in Beatson and ­Zimmermann, Jurists Uprooted, 601–61. 28 See particularly H. Lauterpacht, Private Law Sources and Analogies of Inter­ national Law (London, 1927), pp. 51–2. 29 Lauterpacht, Private Law Sources, p. 297. 30 Oppenheim, International Law, ed. H. Lauterpacht, fifth edition, 2 vols (London, 1935, 1937), I, p. 100. See also Reisman, ‘Oppenheim’s nine lives’, pp. 268–70. Lauterpacht apparently believed that Oppenheim had changed his mind, partly at least, on these fundamental questions. See the discussion in H. Lauterpacht, The Function of Law in the International Community (Oxford, 1933), p. 404n1. Lauterpacht also found inspiration in Oppenheim, developing

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the Grotian leg in Oppenheim’s triad of Grotians, naturalists and positivists, which later became central in the English school. For an analysis of Lauterpacht’s thought and its influence in IR, see Renée Jeffery, ‘Hersch Lauterpacht, the realist challenge and the “Grotian tradition” in 20th century International Relations’, European Journal of International Relations, 12 (2006), 223–50. For a similar, albeit more downbeat, perspective, see J. L. Brierly, ‘Shortcomings of international law’, British Yearbook of International Law, 5 (1924), 4–16. See Lauterpacht, Function of Law, especially part VI (‘The limits of the rule of law’). For a critique of positivism bolstered by arguments from the historical school, see pp. 437–8. See ‘Rules [of the Grotius Society]’ and H. Goudy, ‘Introduction’, Transactions of the Grotius Society, 1 (1915), vii–ix and 1–7, respectively; E. D. Whittuck, ‘International law teaching’, Transactions of the Grotius Society, 3 (1918), 43–59. For a discussion of the role of international lawyers in the ‘League of Nations movement’, see Henry R. Winkler, The League of Nations Movement in Great Britain, 1914–1919 (New Brunswick, 1952), especially pp. 97–100. For an example of how institutional arguments were accommodated within a largely gradualist conception of international law, see T. J. Lawrence, ‘The effect of the war on international law’, Transactions of the Grotius Society, 2 (1916), 105–15. On Moore, see Tom Regan, Bloomsbury’s Prophet (Philadelphia, 1986); W. Hagenbuch, ‘Cambridge intellectual currents of 1900’, in D. Crabtree and A. P. Thirlwall (eds), Keynes and the Bloomsbury Group (London, 1980), 3–21. On Woolf, see Fred M. Leventhal, ‘Leonard Woolf (1880–1969): the conscience of a Bloomsbury socialist’, in Susan Pedersen and Peter Mandler (eds), After the Victorians (London, 1994), 149–68; Peter Wilson, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf (Basingstoke, 2003). For his internationalism, see Leonard Woolf, International Government (London, 1916); Leonard Woolf, ‘International morality’ and ‘Statesmen and diplomatists’, in Essays on Literature, History, Politics, etc. (London, 1927), 153–69 and 170–88, respectively. Bertrand Russell, Portraits from Memory and Other Essays (London, 1956), pp. 54–5. On Russell, see also Alan Ryan, Bertrand Russell (London, 1988); Ray Monk, Bertrand Russell (London, 1996). For a flavour of Russell’s views during the war, see his contribution to C. Delisle Burns, Bertrand Russell and G. D. H. Cole, ‘Symposium: the nature of the state in view of its external relations’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, new series, 16 (1915–1916), 290–325. See primarily Bernard Bosanquet, ‘The function of the state in promoting the unity of mankind’ [1917], in The British Idealists, ed. D. Boucher (Cambridge, 1997), 270–95; Bernard Bosanquet, The Philosophical Theory of the State, fourth edition (London, 1965), pp. xlv–lxii; and the discussion in chapter 4. See especially J. H. Muirhead, German Philosophy and the War (Oxford, 1915). See also Ernest Barker, Nietzsche and Treitschke (Oxford, 1914). L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction, ed. P. F. Clarke (New York, 1973 [1904]), p. 78; Hobhouse, ‘Introduction to the second edition’ [1909], in ­Democracy and Reaction, 247–80; L. T. Hobhouse, The Metaphysical Theory of the State (London, 1960 [1918]). See also Casper Sylvest, ‘Beyond the state? Pluralism and internationalism in early twentieth-century Britain’, Inter­ national Relations, 21 (2007), 67–85. The idealist elements in the thought of new liberals have been the subject of impressive work. See particularly Stefan Collini, Liberalism and Sociology (Cambridge, 1979); Stefan Collini, ‘Hobhouse, Bosanquet and the state: philosophical idealism and political

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46 47 48

49 50

51 52 53

argument in England 1880–1918’, Past and Present, 72 (1976), 86–111; Michael Freeden, The New Liberalism (Oxford, 1978); P. F. Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats (Cambridge, 1978). See particularly Jeannie Morefield, Covenants without Swords (Princeton, 2005), pp. 9, 54; Paul Rich, ‘Alfred Zimmern’s cautious idealism: the League of Nations, international education, and the commonwealth’, in Long and Wilson, Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis, 79–99; Julia Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics (Cambridge, 1994), ch. 1; Julia Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain since 1850 (Manchester, 2001), ch. 5; Julia Stapleton, ‘The classicist as liberal intellectual: Gilbert Murray and Alfred Eckhard Zimmern’, in C. Stray (ed.), Gilbert Murray Reassessed (Oxford, 2007), 261–95. Stefan Collini, ‘The ordinary experience of civilized life. Sidgwick’s politics and the method of reflective analysis’, in Bart Schultz (ed.), Essays on Henry Sidgwick (Cambridge, 1992), 333–67, at p. 362. See [Henry Sidgwick], National and International Wrongs, ed. J. Bryce and E. M. Sidgwick (London, 1919). On the study of politics in Cambridge and more widely, see Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge, 1983), ch. 11; Jack Hayward, Bryan Barry and Archie Brown (eds), The British Study of Politics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2003 [1999]), chs 1, 2; Robert Wokler, ‘The professoriate of political thought in England since 1914: a tale of three chairs’, in Dario Castiglione and Ian Hampsher-Monk (eds), The History of Political Thought in National Context (Cambridge, 2001), pp. 134–58. George Macaulay Trevelyan, An Autobiography and Other Essays (London, 1949), pp. 14, 16. See Leonard Woolf, Sowing (London, 1960), pp. 129–30; and Lytton Strachey to Leonard Woolf, 11 October 1903, and Leonard Woolf to Lytton Strachey, 12 October 1903, both in Letters of Leonard Woolf, ed. F. Spotts (London, 1989), pp. 35–6. Robert Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes, 1883–1946 (London, 2003), p. 68. See also The Autobiography of G. Lowes Dickinson and Other Unpublished Writings, ed. D. Proctor (London, 1973). G. Lowes Dickinson, A Modern Symposium (London, 1908), pp. 60–76. G. Lowes Dickinson, The European Anarchy (London, 1916); G. Lowes Dickinson, Causes of International War (London, 1920); G. Lowes Dickinson, War, Its Nature, Cause and Cure (London, 1923); G. Lowes Dickinson, The Inter­ national Anarchy, 1904–1914 (London, 1926). Collini et al., That Noble Science, pp. 352–3; Dickinson, Autobiography, pp. 146–7. John Maynard Keynes, General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money [1936], in The Collected Writings of John Maynard Keynes, ed. G. Moggridge, 30 vols (London, 1971–1989), VII, p. 383. On Keynes, see also Skidelsky, John Maynard Keynes; Donald Markwell, John Maynard Keynes and International Relations (Oxford, 2006). David Duncan, The Life and Letters of Herbert Spencer (London, 1908), p. 487; Hugh Elliot, Herbert Spencer (London, 1917), pp. 307–8; M. W. Taylor, Men versus the State (Oxford, 1992), preface. See David Weinstein, Equal Freedom and Utility (Cambridge, 1998), ch. 6. It is ironic that Spencer appears to have committed a ‘reverse’ naturalist fallacy – i.e. deriving is from ought. M. W. Taylor, ‘Introduction’, in M. W. Taylor (ed.), Herbert Spencer (London, 1996), ix–xxv, especially p. xviii; Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit, pp. 225–6.

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See also Lawrence Goldman, ‘Victorian social science: from singular to plural’, in Martin Daunton, (ed.), The Organisation of Knowledge in Victorian Britain (London, 2005), 87–114. On the Webbs, including Spencer’s friendship with Beatrice (née Potter), see Royden J. Harrison, The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb, 1858–1905 (London, 2000); Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (London, 1926). Gregory Claeys, ‘The “survival of the fittest” and the origins of social Darwinism’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 61 (2000), 223–40, at p. 226. See also Paul Crook, Darwinism, War and History (Cambridge, 1994), p. 200. It should be noted, however, that ‘social Darwinism’ is an invention of the twentieth century. See Geoffrey M. Hodgson, ‘Social Darwinism in Anglophone academic journals: a contribution to the history of the term’, Journal of Historical Sociology, 17 (2004), 428–63. Benjamin Kidd, Social Evolution (London, 1894); Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science, second edition (London, 1905). For dis­c ussions, see Bernard Semmel, Imperialism and Social Reform (London, 1960), ch. 2; Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, ch. 6. See for example Leslie Stephen, ‘Right and wrong in politics’, Monthly Review, 2 (1901), 32–48. See also the discussion of Ritchie and Bradley in chapter 4. On eugenics, which was not the prerogative of racist ultra-conservatives, see Michael Freeden, ‘Eugenics and progressive thought: a study in ideological affinity’ [1979], in Liberal Languages (Princeton, 2005), 144–72. David Wiltshire, The Social and Political Thought of Herbert Spencer (Oxford, 1978), p. 255; J. D. Y. Peel, Herbert Spencer (London, 1971), p. 100. L. T. Hobhouse, ‘The ethical basis of collectivism’, International Journal of Ethics, 8 (1898), 137–56, at pp. 144–6, 151. See also Collini, Liberalism and Sociology, pp. 182, 186. When discussing the extension of communities, Hobhouse also drew on Green. Hobhouse, ‘The ethical basis’, p. 154. See also Hobhouse, Morals in Evolution, 2 vols (London, 1904), ch. 6. Here Hobhouse described a development where the ethics of enmity had almost been overcome by the ethics of amity. Only one further step – the introduction of justice on the international scene – was still due. Hobhouse, ‘The ethical basis’, p. 155. See also Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction, pp. 199–200. L. T. Hobhouse, Questions of War and Peace (London, 1916), p. 189. L. T. Hobhouse, Social Evolution and Political Theory (New York, 1913), p. 8. See also L. T. Hobhouse, Liberalism [1911], in Liberalism and Other Writings, ed. J. Meadowcroft (Cambridge, 1994), 1–120, especially pp. 21, 114–15. Hobson, The Crisis of Liberalism (London, 1909), p. 252. For his later views, see Hobson, Towards International Government (London, 1915). Good secondary literature includes David Long, Towards a New Liberal Internationalism (Cambridge, 1996); Peter Cain, Hobson and Imperialism (Oxford, 2002); Bernard Porter, ‘Hobson and internationalism’, in M. Freeden (ed.), Reappraising J. A. Hobson (London, 1990), 167–81. See particularly J. A. Hobson, ‘The scientific basis of imperialism’, Political Science Quarterly, 17 (1902), 460–89. J. A. Hobson, ‘The ethics of internationalism’, International Journal of Ethics, 17 (1906), 16–28, at p. 17. The most prominent statement of interdependence was Norman Angell, The Great Illusion (London, 1912 [1910]). Interdependence was often heralded as new and epoch-making, but it played an important part in the arguments of both liberal and socialist internationalists, like Cobden and Marx. See Richard Cobden, Russia [1836], in Richard Cobden, The Political

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Writings of Richard Cobden, fourth edition, 2 vols (London, 1903), I, 121–272; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, ed. G. Stedman Jones (London, 2002 [1848]). But see also Stephen Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (London, 1983). J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London, 1901). On South Africa, see J. A. Hobson, ‘Capitalism and imperialism in South Africa’, Contemporary Review, 77 (January–June 1900), 1–17; J. A. Hobson, The War in South Africa (London, 1900). Hobson, ‘The ethics of internationalism’, p. 27. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (London, 1902). The book contained a whole set of arguments against imperialism, the most famous of which was Hobson’s theory of underconsumption. Cain, Hobson and Imperialism, pp. 146, 59. Kropotkin’s Mutual Aid (1902) was another important inspiration. See Hobson, ‘The ethics of internationalism’, pp. 25–6. J. A. Hobson, ‘Herbert Spencer’, South Place Magazine, 9 (1904), 49–55, at p. 52. See also Hobson, Confessions, p. 23. See particularly Hobson, Imperialism, part II, ch. 4; Cain, Hobson and Imperial­ism, chs 3–5. J. A. Hobson, ‘Socialistic imperialism’, International Journal of Ethics, 12 (1901), 44–58, at p. 52. But see David Long, ‘Paternalism and the international­ ization of imperialism: J. A. Hobson on the international government of the “lower races”’, in David Long and Brian C. Schmidt (eds), Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (New York, 2005), 71–92. Norman Angell, After All (London, 1951), pp. 8, 59–60. Ralph Lane [Norman Angell], Patriotism under Three Flags (London, 1903), p. v, see also pp. 243–4; Herbert Spencer, ‘Patriotism’, in Facts and Comments (London, 1902), 88–91, at p. 88. Angell, The Great Illusion, pp. 257, 159, 167. See also pp. 224–5 and the analyses in Crook, Darwinism, War and History, pp. 112–15; Lucian M. Ashworth, Creating International Studies (Aldershot, 1999), pp. 35–8. George Stocking, Victorian Anthropology (New York, 1987), p. 298. Hobson, ‘Herbert Spencer’, p. 49. Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 3–4. See also the discussion in chapter 5. Christopher Parker, The English Historical Tradition since 1850 (Edinburgh, 1990), p. 109. See for example [Members of the Oxford Faculty of Modern History], Why We Are at War (Oxford, 1914); Ramsay Muir, Britain’s Case Against Germany (Manchester, 1914). See also Stuart Wallace, War and the Image of Germany (Edinburgh, 1988), ch. 3. Harold Temperley, Frederic the Great and Kaiser Joseph, second edition (London, 1968 [1915]); Harold Temperley, The Victorian Age in Politics, War and Diplomacy (Cambridge, 1928). See also G. P. Gooch, ‘Harold Temperley’, in Maria Theresa and Other Studies (London, 1951), 348–81. On Headlam-Morley, who later became historical adviser to the Foreign Office, see Gordon Martel, ‘The prehistory of appeasement: Headlam-Morley, the peace settle­ment and revisionism’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 9 (1998), 242–65; Alan Sharp, ‘James Headlam-Morley: creating international history’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 9 (1998), 266–83; Casper Sylvest, ‘British liberal historians and the primacy of internationalism’, in William Mulligan and Brendan Simms (eds), The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000 (Basingstoke, forthcoming).

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Into the twentieth century 84 C. K. Webster, The Study of Nineteenth Century Diplomacy (London, 1915); C. K. Webster, The Congress of Vienna (London, 1920); C. K. Webster, The League of Nations in Theory and Practice (London, 1932). For a good treatment of Webster, see Ian Hall, ‘The art and practice of a diplomatic historian: Sir Charles Webster, 1886–1961’, International Politics, 24 (2005), 470–90. 85 Alfred Zimmern, The Study of International Relations (Oxford, 1931), p. 5. 86 For a flavour of Fisher’s internationalist views, see H. A. L. Fisher, The War – Its Causes and Issues (London, 1914). 87 Ernest Barker, ‘Mediaeval civilization’ [1917?] and ‘Christianity and nationality’ [1927], in Church, State and Study (London, 1930), 44–71 and 131–50; Ernest Barker, ‘Lord Bryce’, English Historical Review, 37 (1922), 219–24; Ernest Barker, National Character and the Factors in Its Formation (London, 1927); Stapleton, Englishness and the Study of Politics, pp. 63, 102–3. On the Janus-faced nature of nationalism, see also Alfred Zimmern, ‘True and false nationalism’ [1915], in Nationality and Government (London, 1918), 61–86. 88 J. L. Hammond, ‘Gladstone and the League of Nations mind’, in J. A. K. Thompson and Arnold Toynbee (eds), Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray (London, 1936), 96–118, at p. 98; J. L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation (London, 1939), especially ch. 5; J. L. Hammond, ‘Colonial and foreign policy’, in Francis W. Hirst, Gilbert Murray and J. L. Hammond, Liberalism and the Empire (London, 1900), 158–211. For a good portrait of Hammond, see Clarke, Liberals and Social Democrats, pp. 78–82. Retrospective support for the League of Nations was also claimed on behalf of Cobden. See William Harbutt Dawson, Richard Cobden and Foreign Policy (London, 1926), pp. 148–50. 89 J. A. Hobson, Richard Cobden (London, 1919), especially p. 396. See also H. C. G. Matthew, ‘Hobson, Ruskin and Cobden’, in Freeden, Reappraising J. A. Hobson, 11–30. 90 Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, 1846–1946 (Oxford, 1997), p. 192. 91 See Marvin Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics during the First World War (Oxford, 1971). 92 George Macaulay Trevelyan, Garibaldi’s Defence of the Roman Republic 1848–9, second edition (London, 1907); George Macaulay Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Thousand (London, 1909); George Macaulay Trevelyan, Garibaldi and the Making of Italy (London, 1912); George Macaulay Trevelyan, The Life of John Bright (London, 1913), especially pp. 343–4. Trevelyan acknowledged his debt to Morley in the preface (p. v). See also the analysis in David Cannadine, G. M. Trevelyan (London, 1992), ch. 2; Joseph M. Hernon, Jr, ‘The last Whig historian and consensus history: George Macaulay Trevelyan, 1876–1962’, American Historical Review, 81 (1976), 66–97. 93 Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (New Brunswick, 1978), p. 10. 94 Parker, English Historical Tradition, p. 114. 95 On Gooch’s life, see Frank Eyck, G. P. Gooch (London, 1982); G. P. Gooch, Under Six Reigns (London, 1958). 96 G. P. Gooch, The War and Its Causes (London, 1900), especially pp. 33–4. 97 G. P. Gooch, ‘Imperialism’, in G. P. Gooch (ed.), The Heart of Empire (London, 1901), 308–97, at pp. 311–12. 98 Gooch, ‘Imperialism’, pp. 318, 323, 324. Gooch drew on Herbert Spencer, The Study of Sociology (London, 1873), ch. 9. See also Gooch, Under Six Reigns, p. 23. 99 Gooch, ‘Imperialism’, pp. 331, 396.

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Into the twentieth century 100 On the Rainbow Circle, a group devoted to exploring the areas of agreement among progressives, see Michael Freeden (ed.), Minutes of the Rainbow Circle, 1894–1924 (London, 1989). Reviewing Hobhouse’s Democracy and Reaction, Gooch ranked it ‘with Mr. Hobson’s “Imperialism” as a classical exposition of the moral basis of politics’. G. P. Gooch, Review of L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (1904), International Journal of Ethics, 15 (1905), 499–503, at p. 503; Gooch, Under Six Reigns, pp. 87, 99. 101 G. P. Gooch, History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century, second edition (Cambridge, 1913). 102 From January 1920, Gooch also had Leonard Woolf edit a monthly feature in the review called ‘World of nations: facts and documents’. Gooch, Under Six Reigns, p. 200; Eyck, G. P. Gooch, ch. 9 and p. 318. As early as 1912, the Review published a short article by the Foreign Policy Committee of the Liberal Party, ‘Our foreign policy and its reform’, Contemporary Review, 101 (1912), 466–71. This article was probably authored by Hobhouse, the secretary of the committee. 103 G. P. Gooch, ‘Recent revelations on European diplomacy’, Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs, 2 (1923), 1–29; G. P. Gooch, Before the War, 2 vols (London, 1938), II, p. vi. 104 G. P. Gooch and A. W. Ward (eds), Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, 1783–1919, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1922–1923); G. P. Gooch and H. Temperley (eds), British Documents on the Origins of the War, 1898–1914, 11 vols (London, 1926–1938). See also Eyck, G. P. Gooch, pp. 329–80. 105 On the National Peace Council, see the essays in G. P. Gooch (ed.), In Pursuit of Peace (New York, 1970 [1933]). On Gooch and appeasement, see Eyck, G. P. Gooch, ch. 11. 106 G. P. Gooch, Review of J. Morley, Miscellanies: Fourth Series (1908), Inter­ national Journal of Ethics, 20 (1909), 120–3, at p. 123. 107 Eyck, G. P. Gooch, ch. 7; Gooch, Under Six Reigns, pp. 126–9; G. P. Gooch, ‘Lord Morley’s recollections’, Contemporary Review, 112 (1917), 628–35; G. P. Gooch, ‘Lord Morley’, Contemporary Review, 124 (1922), 545–55. 108 Eyck, G. P. Gooch, p. 287. 109 For examples of Gooch’s use of this rhetoric, see G. P. Gooch, ‘The teaching of history in relation to world citizenship’, in J. H. Whitehouse and G. P. Gooch, Wider Aspects of Education (Cambridge, 1924), 1–23, especially p. 7; G. P. Gooch, ‘Some conceptions of liberty’ [1948], in, Historical Surveys and Portraits (London, 1966), 73–83. 110 Gooch, ‘Politics and morals’, p. 330. 111 Felix E. Hirsch, ‘George Peabody Gooch’, Journal of Modern History, 26 (1954), 260–71, at p. 262. See also G. P. Gooch, ‘The Cambridge Chair of Modern History’, in Maria Theresa, 297–331; Trevelyan, An Autobiography, p. 18. Gooch’s fellowship application was also supported by Sidgwick. 112 G. P. Gooch, ‘The progress of historical studies’ [1962], in Historical Surveys and Portraits, 138–43, at p. 139. See also Gooch, ‘Imperialism’, p. 332; Gooch, History and Historians, ch. 20; G. P. Gooch, ‘Lord Acton: apostle of liberty’, Foreign Affairs, 25 (1947), 629–42. 113 This was a familiar theme among the intellectual elite. See Julia Stapleton, ‘Citizenship versus patriotism in twentieth-century England’, Historical Journal, 48 (2005), 151–78. 114 G. P. Gooch, ‘History as a training for citizenship’, Contemporary Review, 137 (1930), 347–52, at p. 352; G. P. Gooch, ‘The study of foreign affairs’, Contemporary Review, 120 (1921), 178–89, especially p. 188. The latter paper was delivered at the Royal Institute of International Affairs (Chatham

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Into the twentieth century House), with which Gooch was also involved (see Gooch, Under Six Reigns, pp. 300–4). The theme of interdependence is also pursued in G. P. Gooch, Nationalism (London, 1920). Arguments about interdependence, nationalism and the importance of education also figured prominently in the internationalism of, for example, Angell, Zimmern and Murray. See for example Norman Angell, ‘Popular education and international affairs’, International Affairs, 11 (1932), 321–45, and the discussion in Martin Ceadel, ‘Gilbert Murray and inter­national politics’ and Peter Wilson, ‘Retrieving cosmos: Gilbert Murray’s thought on international relations’, both in Stray, Gilbert Murray Reassessed, 217–37 and 239–60; Jo-Anne Pemberton, Global Metaphors (London, 2001), ch. 4. 115 Gooch, ‘History as a training for citizenship’, p. 350. 116 Gooch, ‘History as a training for citizenship’, p. 351. Peter Mandler has maintained that Gooch blended a nationalist rationale for studying history with some higher and more practical reasons. Mandler provides only one, admittedly ‘nationalist’, quote from Gooch’s writings, but fails to mention both how this is uncharacteristic and how Gooch’s own national ideal (as distinguished from his analysis of the dangers of nationalism) was inconceivable outside a larger internationalist framework. Peter Mandler, History and National Life (London, 2002), pp. 81–2. 117 Gooch, Under Six Reigns, pp. 110–16; Eyck, G. P. Gooch, pp. 79–90; Parker, English Historical Tradition, pp. 113–17. 118 Gooch, ‘The study of foreign affairs’, p. 181; G. P. Gooch, ‘Lord Bryce’, Contemporary Review, 121 (1922), 304–13, especially pp. 308, 311. See also Gooch and Ward, Cambridge History of British Foreign Policy, I, p. viii. 119 Gooch, ‘Politics and morals’, p. 326; Gooch, Nationalism, pp. 58, 125. 120 Gooch, ‘The teaching of history’, p. 4; G. P. Gooch, ‘Nationalism and inter­ nationalism’ [1962], in Historical Surveys and Portraits, 93–105. See also Gooch, ‘Lord Bryce’, pp. 304–6. 121 Gooch, ‘The teaching of history’, p. 4; Gooch, ‘History as a training for citizen­ ship’, p. 350. 122 See Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, p. 175. 123 Gooch, ‘The teaching of history’, p. 21.

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CH APTER 7

A postscript

To be sane in a world of madmen is itself a kind of madness. (JeanJacques Rousseau, 17561)

The twentieth century dealt liberal internationalism a peculiar fate. In practical politics, liberal internationalism had a profound influence on the values and institutions underpinning international politics since the end of the First World War – the League of Nations, the United Nations, their different systems of collective security, the most important economic institutions as well as the development of international law in the realms of arbitration and human rights all bear the stamp of internationalism. Yet the workings of these regimes and institutions have been repeatedly stymied by totalitarian regimes and superpower conflict. Indeed, while the internationalist vision continues to play an important role in global politics and in the avowed foreign policy doctrines of left-liberals, its practical impact has only intermittently given cause for optimism. What later appeared as an extended nightmare lasting from 1914 to 1945 invalidated the League, exposed the fragility of collective security and appeared to dash the high-minded aspirations for progress, order and justice associated with internationalism. After the hopeful 1990s and the quest for a new world order – eerily reminiscent of the 1920s – liberal internationalist values are again beleaguered. On the one hand, respect for international order and justice (and their fragile nature) has declined since the fateful terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001. The increasing oneness of the modern world, which was once seen as a precondition for internationalist projects, is pronounced, and often openly welcomed, in the economic realm, but when viewed through the lenses of risk and security it provides impetus for a new cynicism, with anti-­internationalist impli­cations. A world in which insecurity is everywhere (and security nowhere) requires liberty of action and not entanglement in an outdated international 235

A postscript order, with its inertia of rules and institutions, it is often argued. From this perspective, our time and its challenges to security are too radically different from those of our predecessors to warrant much respect for troublesome, if hard-won, conventions. In this respect, globalis­ation, the multivalent master trope of today, has no set destination. While it can still provide the basis for arguments about a new, democratic global order, in practice globalisation often ends up (re)producing inequality, material and political, by signalling a return to anarchy and the politics of might. On the other hand, the new assertiveness in international politics, spearheaded by the recent American presidency of George W. Bush, has had a purportedly liberal core. A predilection for military means can easily fuse with liberal and democratic values, as the neo­ conservative push for the invasion of Iraq and a democratic revolution in the Middle East have testified. Liberal internationalism enjoys an equally opaque position in the current theoretical landscape of International Relations (IR) as it does in real-world political practice. Internationalist ideals are central to many constructivist, liberal and critical scholars. Explaining how the anarchy of international politics is both resilient yet in principle open to change often involves ideological goals similar to those of internationalism. The most influential constructivist approach, however, seeks academic respectability by presenting itself as merely a method or a position in the philosophy of science, leaving its ideological import unspoken. Similarly, globalisation – identified in a variety of ways, stretching from increased economic interdependence, through dynamics of cultural integration and differentiation, to the near-transcendence of state authority or sover­ eignty – is often seen by intellectuals as the prime motor behind new forms of governance or as the deciding impulse for an agenda of liberaldemocratic reform. These normative commitments are at times pursued indirectly or implicitly, at others in a deliberately utopian manner, as in projects for cosmopolitan governance. Yet the historical legacy of these ideals is rarely mentioned or appealed to, despite the fact that the history of internationalism offers both inspiration and valuable lessons. Undoubtedly, the amnesia surrounding the history of liberal inter­ nationalist ideology is related to the perceived strength of the realist attack that began in the 1930s and which was central to the self-image of much of IR in the post-war period. Untrammelled realism never dominated the discipline in the way myth has it, but the original, normative (and liberal internationalist) impulse behind IR was discarded in favour of a more sombre and factual approach. Recent studies of IR’s past have shown that there never was an inter-war debate between realism and ‘idealism’ and that the post-war attacks of classical realists on inter­nationalism were, to a large extent, intended to save liberalism from itself by salvaging its basic ideals and combining it with a more pessimistic rendering of the 236

A postscript nature of politics.2 However, the turn to (American) social science in the 1960s and 1970s further detached internationalist ideals from IR theory, and current liberal theories, with the partial exceptions of democratic peace theory and calls for global governance, are mainly committed to demonstrating and explaining why states co-operate under anarchy or comply with international law, while their bearings on practical politics are reduced to the technical aspects of institutional design. 3 In short, the liberal internationalist vision is at once pervasive, ignored and exploited – a predicament that invites reflection on its strengths, weaknesses and possible futures in a context of increased political and cultural conflict taking place in the shadow of human-created menaces like global warming and nuclear war. What elements in liberal internationalist ideology, if any, are worth defending and what would we do well to leave behind? Attempts to answer such questions and plot a way forward ought to be based on an examination of the origins of this creed, the contexts in which it emerged, the spirit in which it was held, the nature and extent of its appeal and, perhaps most importantly, its limitations. Hopefully, this book has provided a useful starting point. By examining the international thought of British liberal intellectuals in three broadly distinct fields of enquiry – law, philosophy and history – it has pointed to the existence of a widely shared and overarching ideology of internationalism among the liberal intellectual elite in late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century Britain. But while this ideology had at its core a consensus on fundamental views – including the possibility and necessity of securing progress, generating order and enacting justice in international affairs, the notionally moral similarity of domestic and international politics, the bankruptcy and perils of ‘traditional’, clandestine ways of acting in international politics – liberal internationalism also harboured much variety, in emphases and argumentative strategies. There were significant differences between (and sometimes within) the legal, philosophical and historical languages examined in this book, but it has also sought to show how these languages were instrumental in shoring up the core values of liberal international ideology. For many international lawyers, the notion of legal evolution fulfilled a dual role: it was crucial for their insistence that international law was a science, despite the subject’s contemporaneous shortcomings, and it simultaneously supported their claim that international law was increasingly important for ordering and pacifying international relations. While many of Spencer’s evolutionary arguments were structurally similar to those advanced by jurists, their scope was much wider, covering the future of social life and human ethics, including their implications for inter­ national politics. For another important contributor to the philosophical language of liberal internationalism, Henry Sidgwick, a few fundamental principles and a utilitarianism sensitive to the opinions of ‘civilised’ 237

A postscript human­kind confirmed similar values, although he was less radical and too willing to accommodate these ideals to the demands of the powerful. Liberal historians promulgated the internationalist message in a number of ways: while Morley pursued the international­ist cause through biographies and Acton by exposing the follies and crimes of history, Bryce anxiously watched the dark side of nationalism destroy the medieval ideal of common humanity, which contained some absolutely crucial lessons for the twentieth century. As demonstrated in chapter 6, the characteristic arguments and preoccupations of these internationalist languages left traces among the generation of liberal internationalists who came forever to view the world through the prism of war. Diversity in unity is, in sum, a central characteristic of liberal internationalist ideology from the late nineteenth century through to the inter-war years. Another persistent theme of this book has been the basic continuity in ideas and ideals that liberal internationalist ideology displayed throughout the period. The important shift in internationalist ideology that occurred during (but was already underway before) the First World War concerned means rather than ends. A central ambivalence had permeated liberal international thought: the often starkly ideological, prescriptive nature of internationalist interventions was checked by a fundamental, cautious and often evolutionary gradualism that prevented revolutionary measures. This meant that even a successful attempt to educate decision-makers and public opinion would have to be slow in order to be genuine and convincing. This serenity sits uneasily with the penetrating impatience that supplied internationalism with a sense of urgency. On the other hand, this habit of expecting salvation from the passing of time also, for a while, carried rhetorical force and political promise. Spencer’s dissection of the imperial establishment and his foreshadowing of a world federation of industrial societies is only one example of this. While one could have a relatively active or passive attitude to the challenge of effecting the moral education of the world, it was generally agreed that this moral development was a precondition of progress. As a result, the establishment of institutions was a secondary concern that, despite its utopian lure, was belittled as dangerous, premature scheming. For internationalists living through the First World War, the luxury of patience could no longer be afforded. But the values and many of the argumentative strategies of a previous generation still held sway. Accompanied by a re-orientation of means that was based on a more elaborate understanding of the workings of international anarchy and a more pessimistic view of human nature and rationality, the internationalist mindset survived well into the twentieth century on the back of the great boost it received during the war. These findings have a bearing on both British intellectual history and IR. Firstly, alongside other studies of British international and imperial thought, they help us understand the place of international politics in 238

A postscript British intellectual life and their importance for liberalism as a political ideology during this fascinating period. Much work is still to be done, however. The historiography is skewed in left-liberal directions, and we know fairly little about the intellectual underpinnings of a more sceptical, conservative stance on international politics, except as they have been (not always reliably) relayed by their ideological opponents. This book has pointed to some of the areas where one might fruitfully begin such an investigation, for example the role of the clergy, the military establishment and ‘military’ pressure groups.4 Similarly, there is a need, now that we have a better understanding of British liberal ideas about international politics, to compare these with the development of international thought in other countries, including America and Germany. In an American context, liberal internationalism was also powerful, particularly during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency, but the full extent and nature of ideological and intellectual inspiration across the Atlantic are yet to be uncovered. Moreover, it is noteworthy that in all three languages of internationalism studied here, Germany and German ideas figured prominently, in particular as a contrast useful for identifying truly internationalist ideals. A transnational perspective can help uncover the differences and similarities between the ideological commitments of British and German intellectuals in this period, as well as establish the ways in which these were used for ideological purposes. 5 Secondly, this book also has a bearing on the emergence, configuration and roots of IR as an academic discipline. Many of the figures analysed in the preceding pages consciously tried to theorise inter­ national politics by providing a deeper understanding of, a guide to or an explanation of its most salient phenomena. It has been argued that, by the 1930s, the British science of politics had for over a century ‘been as empty as a dressmaker’s window, ready to be filled by the latest wave of fashion’.6 With respect to the study of international politics, the situation was different. A lineage of international theorising can be traced at least into the final decades of the nineteenth century. The establishment of a proper draper’s shop from 1918, with chairs and robes for professors, signalled a significant change, but while the goods displayed in the window occa­sionally changed colour, their fundamentally internationalist design, inherited from a previous generation, proved a mainstay in the inter-war years. Apart from an understanding of the ‘pre-history’ and the early years of the study of international politics in Britain, it is remarkable how many of the central concerns of twentieth-century IR were also present in the late nineteenth century. The nature and problems of sover­eignty, anarchy, collective action and international law were central themes in this period.7 But perhaps the most significant aspect of international theorising in the period is its deeply ideological character. Indeed, the raison d’être 239

A postscript of the discipline as it was established after the First World War was its norma­tive project, which gave it both purpose and a critical edge, qualities that are much less prevalent today. There would be little point in trying to resuscitate liberal ideas of a bygone era, and this is not my intention, but they remind us of the richness and variety of liberal ­approaches to international politics. The history of internationalist ideas provides a marked contrast to the technical and bloodless versions of liberalism that are predominant in contemporary American IR, and to the myth that liberalism is merely a second-image or ‘inside-out’ theory that explains (the ills of) international politics by pointing to the democratic or authoritarian configuration of polities. Much would be gained if some of this relative sophistication could be conveyed to new students in the field. Rediscovering the original impetus behind systematic and (proto)theoretical argument about international politics in Britain is also a welcome reminder that the study of international politics is inseparable from other intellectual activities like law, philosophy, history, ­economics, sociology and ethics. Liberal internationalism clearly had many drawbacks, including an unwarranted faith in gradual or manufactured progress and a complacent attitude towards the achievements of civilisation, which far too easily led to a naturalisation of difference and domination. Many British internationalists were blissfully unaware of the difficulty of achieving an Olympian perspective. As a result, they often enlisted the authority of science, impartiality and a universalist ethics in their quest for progress, order and justice, while in reality they ended up promoting and defending the values of the British liberal intellectual elite.8 In its late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century manifestations, liberal internationalism was, at root, marred by a deficient and overly rational understanding of the real conflicts that politics invariably throws up. Perhaps the best demonstration of this shortcoming is the virtually universal assumption among internationalists that once the right means for the solution of a political problem is identified, it can be straightforwardly implemented. Even the generation that drew bleak conclusions about human rationality during the war ended up investing their energy and faith in the rational reorganisation of international politics. Little would be gained by emulating these aspects of internationalism. In contrast, the characteristically internationalist blend of normative, practical and theoretical considerations is of more relevance today. The challenge is to find a way of pursuing the nobler ideals of liberal internationalism in a more sophisticated and pragmatic fashion that allows for the contingencies, complexities and, indeed, madness of politics and the human condition. Perhaps particularly in times of crisis, internationalists were right to insist that we control our own destiny. Despair or resignation simply will not do. But we will not make progress in international politics 240

A postscript merely by putting our faith in the march of history or rationally designed institutions. Progress is an achievement that requires skill, judgement and a deep-seated respect for the exigencies of politics. Notes 1 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Lasting Peace through the Federation of Europe and The State of War, trans. C. E. Vaughan (London, 1917 [1756]), p. 91. 2 On the first debate, see for example Peter Wilson, ‘The myth of the “First Great Debate”’, Review of International Studies, 24, special issue (1998), 1–17; Casper Sylvest, ‘Interwar internationalism, the British Labour Party and the historiography of International Relations’, International Studies Quarterly, 48 (2004), 409–32. On classical realism, see for example Michael Williams, The Realist Tradition and the Limits of International Relations (Cambridge, 2005); Vibeke Schou Tjalve, Realist Strategies of Republican Peace (Basingstoke, 2008); Casper Sylvest, ‘John H. Herz and the resurrection of classical realism’, International Relations, 22 (2008), 439–53. 3 For critiques along these lines, see Christian Reus-Smit, ‘The strange death of liberal international theory’, European Journal of International Law, 12 (2002), 573–93; David Long, ‘The Harvard school of liberal international theory: a case for closure’, Millennium, 24 (1995), 489–506. 4 On these pressure groups, see Andrew S. Thompson, Imperial Britain (Harlow, 2000). 5 There is some valuable material in Paul Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1880–1914 (London, 1980). See also Casper Sylvest, ‘British liberal historians and the primacy of internationalism’, in William Mulligan and Brendan Simms (eds), The Primacy of Foreign Policy in British History, 1660–2000 (Basingstoke, forthcoming), and the references therein. For recent studies in transnational cultural history, see Bernhard Rieger, Technology and the Culture of Modernity in Britain and Germany, 1890–1945 (Cambridge, 2005); Dominik Geppert and Robert Gerwarth (eds), Wilhelmine Germany and Edwardian Britain: Essays on Cultural Affinity (Oxford, 2008). On AngloAmerican relations, see for example Leslie Butler, Critical Americans (Chapel Hill, 2007). 6 Stefan Collini, Donald Winch and John Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge, 1983), p. 376. 7 Brian Schmidt has reached similar conclusions in his study of the pre-history of (mainly American) IR. See Brian C. Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy (New York, 1998). 8 See E. H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London, 1939). Some internationalists were adept at revealing similar problems among the defenders of the order they were criticising. See for example J. A. Hobson, Confessions of an Economic Heretic (London, 1938).

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Listed here is the material referred to in the text, including a few unpublished dissertations and papers. Works by the same author are ordered chronologically, by the original publication date. The only other (unpublished) sources referred to are the papers of Henry Sidgwick and Lassa Oppenheim, both held in Trinity College Library, Cambridge. Abbot, Kenneth W., ‘Modern International Relations theory: a prospectus for international lawyers’, Yale Journal of International Law, 14 (1989), 335–411. Abel-Smith, Brian and Robert Stevens, Lawyers and the Courts: A Sociological Study of the English Legal System, 1750–1864 (London: Heineman, 1967). Acton, Lord [John Emerich Edward Dalberg], Selected Writings of Lord Acton, ed. J. Rufus Fears, 3 vols (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1985–1988). —— , ‘Buckle’s philosophy of history’ [1858], in Selected Writings, III, 443–59. —— , ‘Political thoughts on the church’ [1859], in Selected Writings, III, 17–36. —— , ‘Report on current events, July 1860’ [1860], in Selected Writings, I, 478–517. —— , ‘Political causes of the American Revolution’ [1861], in Selected Writings, I, 216–62. —— , ‘Cavour’ [1861], in Selected Writings, I, 434–58. —— , ‘Reports on the Civil War in America’ [1861–1863], in Selected Writings, I, 280–360. —— , ‘Colonies’ [1862], in Selected Writings, I, 177–88. —— , ‘Nationality’ [1862], in Selected Writings, I, 409–33. —— , ‘Ranke’ [1867], in Selected Writings, II, 165–72. —— , ‘The massacre of St. Bartholomew’ [1869], in Selected Writings, II, 198–240. —— , The War of 1870 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1871). —— , ‘Sir Erskine May’s Democracy in Europe’ [1878], in Selected Writings, I, 54–85. —— , ‘German schools of history’ [1886], in Selected Writings, II, 325–64. —— , ‘Review of Creighton’s History of the Papacy’ [1887], in Selected Writings, II, 365–77. —— , ‘Introduction to Burd’s edition of Il Principe by Machiavelli’ [1891], in Selected Writings, II, 479–95. —— , ‘Introduction’, in Niccolo Machiavelli, Il Principe, ed. L. Arthur Burd (Oxford: Clarendon, 1891), xix–xl. —— , ‘The study of history’ [1895], in Selected Writings, II, 504–52. —— , Lectures on Modern History, ed. J. N. Figgis and R. V. Laurence (London: Macmillan, 1906).

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270

Index

Note: ‘n’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Acton, Lord (John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton) 17, 149, 151–2, 174–85 democracy 176–8 empire and imperialism 182, 193n.157 federalism 178 history, view of 178–81, 193n.145 influence 132, 183, 220, 222–3 moralism 181–4, 218, 222 nationalism/nationality 176–8 religious beliefs 174–7 and Sidgwick 132 war and aggrandisement 182 Alabama arbitration 48, 90 American Civil War (1861–1865) 45, 153, 172, 177 Amos, Sheldon 73–4, 84–6, 95n.44, 99n.110 analytical jurisprudence 64–6, 69, 75, 87, 200 anarchy 88, 156, 199, 207–9, 215–16, 221, 236–7 Angell, Norman 7, 10, 12–13, 211, 214–16 patriotism 215 social evolution 214–15 and Spencer 214–16 Anglo-French Treaty (1860) 38, 41, 54n.56 Anti-Aggression League 119 Anti-Corn Law League 29, 36, 112, 143n.55 Apostles, the 121, 177, 208–9

arbitration 35–7, 47–9, 74, 85, 120, 128–9, 133, 161, 235 Arx, Jeffrey von 164–5 Austin, John 16, 63–6, 75–7, 83, 89 analytical jurisprudence 64, 69, 75, 87, 200 and Maine 70, 80 and Sidgwick 128 sovereignty 64, 80, 91, 128 Baer, Karl von 108 Balfour, Arthur James 122, 125 Barker, Ernest 25, 208, 217–18, 224 ‘Beaconsfieldism’ 42, 46, 181 see also Disraeli, Benjamin Bentham, Jeremy 3, 9, 20n.27, 30, 63–4, 126, 128, 220 Bentley, Michael 216 Bernard, Montague 66, 74 biology 72, 81, 88, 109, 135, 157, 211, 215 Bismarck, Otto von 41, 172, 174, 224 Bluntschli, Johann Kaspar 73, 98n.103, 200 Boer wars (1880–1881; 1899–1902) 119–20 see also South African War Bok, Sissela 136–7, 147n.151 Bosanquet, Bernard 16, 103–4, 106, 207–8 Bradley, Francis Herbert 103, 105–6 Bright, John 29, 36, 107, 121, 159, 218, 220

271

Index British intellectual history 3, 6, 18, 61–2, 102, 198, 238–9 Bryce, James 1, 17, 27, 31–2, 79, 151–2, 152–63, 184 allegiance to humanity 155–6, 160–1, 163 empire and imperialism 154–7, 160–2, 189n.61 federalism 127, 154, 159 geography 157, 188n.45 history, view of 153, 160 human nature 162 influence 217–18, 223–4 nationalism/nationality 154–9 progress 1, 157–61 race 153–4, 156–7, 160, 188n.45 war and aggrandisement 162 Buckle, Henry Thomas 150–1, 53, 179 Bulgarian agitation (1876) 42–3, 113, 158, 172–3, 186n.14 Bull, Hedley 18n.4, 226n.7 Burke, Edmund 166, 173, 176, 184, 190n.82 Burrow, John 69, 110 Butterfield, Herbert 179

Comte, Auguste 88, 124, 150, 164 Concert of Europe 42, 47, 85, 90 contextualism 6–8, 11–12 Creighton, Mandell 180–1 Crimean War (1853–1856) 30, 39, 171, 219–20

Cambridge 18n.2, 121–2, 208–10 Carlyle, Thomas 132, 148–9, 166, 183, 186n.14 Carnegie, Andrew 143–4n.71, 152 Carr, Edward Hallett 18n.4, 61, 226n.7, 241n.8 Chadwick, Owen 9–10 Christianity 10, 30, 35–6, 66–7, 112, 120, 122–3, 175–6 civilisation, idea of 31, 44, 66–9, 71, 86–9, 109, 114–16, 135–6, 156–8, 240 Cobden, Richard 2, 7, 11–12, 35–9, 107, 218 anti-colonialism 43–4 arbitration 35–7 and Gladstone 41 Morley’s biography of 184 and the peace movement 37–8 codification, international law 71, 74, 76–7, 85, 89–91, 99n.112, 201–3 collective security 197, 225, 235 Collini, Stefan 15, 31, 79, 123–4, 140n.6, 145n.102, 164 colonisation 37, 43–5, 50, 62, 135, 177, 214, 220 see also empire and imperialism

education 36–7, 131, 138–9, 199, 214, 223, 233–4n.114, 238 empire and imperialism, liberal views of 6, 40, 43–5, 48, 105–6, 120, 135–9, 161, 170, 173, 177, 182, 213–14 see also colonisation English School of International Relations 200, 226n.7, 227–8n.30 enlightenment 34–5, 150, 213, 223 equipoise, age of 27, 33, 52n.38 evolution see legal evolution; social evolution Eyre, Governor Edward John 45, 172

272

Dante Alighieri 163 Darwin, Charles 68, 72, 83, 108–9, 201, 211 democracy 1, 29–30, 79, 84, 176–8, 187n.31, 223 Dicey, Albert Venn 83, 86, 124–5, 152 Dicey, Edward 10, 33 Dickinson, Goldsworthy Lowes 199, 209, 216, 224 Dilke, Charles 182 diplomacy, internationalist views of 12, 34, 36, 38–40, 45–7, 169, 217 Disraeli, Benjamin (Lord Beaconsfield) 42–3 see also ‘Beaconsfieldism’ Döllinger, Johann Joseph Ignaz von 175 Don Pacifico affair 39–40, 171

federalism 37, 47, 106, 113, 119, 127–8, 130, 134–5, 154, 159, 178, 214 First World War 2, 4–5, 10–11, 18, 46, 50, 89, 104–6, 161, 198–9, 203–4, 215–16, 221, 238 Fisher, Herbert Albert Laurens 189n.62, 217 Freeden, Michael 8 freedom 1, 9, 32, 44, 49, 78, 107, 115, 119, 130, 159, 174–9, 182–3, 222

Index Freeman, Edward Augustus 127, 153–4, 156 free trade 11–12, 14, 26–7, 29–30, 32–3, 36–7, 41, 107, 128, 170, 218 Froude, James Anthony 150 Geneva Convention (1864) 74, 212 Gentilis, Albericus 75 Germany and German thought, views of 46, 50, 103–4, 132, 146n.131, 154–5, 161, 174, 179–80, 183, 207–8, 221, 224 Gierke, Otto von 90–1 Gladstone, William Ewart 7, 25, 29, 34, 40–5, 48, 77, 152, 182–3 foreign policy 42–5, 171–3 influence 176, 181, 216, 218, 222 Morley’s biography of 169–73, 184 Gooch, George Peabody 197, 219–25 and Acton 222–3 and Bryce 223–5 and Morley 221–2 nationalism/nationality 223–4 republican internationalism 222–3 government 9, 27–30, 32, 44, 49, 107–8, 111–12, 115, 118, 130, 157, 179 see also state gradualism 31, 37–8, 85–6, 88–91, 124, 154, 201–3, 206, 238 Great Exhibition (1851) 35 Green, John Richard 151, 186n.18 Green, Thomas Hill 16, 103–4, 106, 139, 152, 225 influence 106, 207–8, 230n.60 nationalism/nationality 104 Greg, William Rathbone 36 Grotius, Hugo 65, 72, 75, 80 Grotius Society 206 Guizot, Francois 150 Hague Conferences 87, 90 Hall, William Edward 74, 79, 81–2, 98n.94, 128, 146n.113, 205 Hammond, John Lawrence 39–40, 218 Harrison, Frederic 164 Headlam-Morley, James 217, 231n.83 Hirst, Francis Wrigley 169 history, British study of 148–54, 160, 164–5, 179–80, 216–19

Hobbes, Thomas 12, 26, 39, 93n.18, 134, 147n.140 Hobhouse, Leonard Trelawney 7, 88, 211–13, 215–16, 233n.102 and Gladstone 208 and Green 103–4, 208 and Morley 170 philosophical idealism, critique of 103–4, 106, 208 social evolution 212–13, 230n.61 and Spencer 211–13 Hobson, John Atkinson 7, 10, 12, 199, 213–16, 220, 241n.8 on Cobden 218 and Green 103–4 imperialism 214, 231n.70 philosophical idealism, critique of 103–4 social evolution 213 and Spencer 213–14, 216 Holland, Thomas Erskine 32, 74–7, 79, 96n.72, 99n.122, 128, 152 Home Rule 15, 27, 29, 86, 124–5, 159, 169 Howe, Anthony 41, 218 humanitarianism 42, 74–5, 107, 120, 160, 165–6, 176, 213 human nature 10, 50, 117, 162, 215, 238 Huxley, Thomas Henry 111 ‘idealism’, International Relations 5, 13, 99–100n.124, 216 idealism, philosophical 13, 103–6, 123, 139, 207–10, 217 ideology 8 imperialism see colonisation; empire and imperialism individualism 32, 43, 103, 110–11, 125, 130, 210 Institute of International Law 74 intellectuals/intelligentsia 13–15, 30–2, 37, 152, 199, 207, 237 interdependence 9, 78, 115, 143n.62, 160, 213, 230–1n.67, 233–4n.114, 236 international law, aca������������ demic discipline 14–15, 61–3, 65–8, 74–5, 88–91, 200, 206 International Relations, academic discipline 2–6, 13–14, 62, 151, 197–8, 217, 223, 238–41 Italy 39–41, 127, 154, 177–8, 183, 218

273

Index jingoism 47, 119, 127, 181, 213, 226n.5 jurisprudence, international law and 63–73, 88–91, 128–9, 200–1 Kant, Immanuel 2–3, 9, 84, 220 Kennedy, C. M. 67 Keynes, John Maynard 122, 210 Kidd, Benjamin 135, 211, 214 Koskenniemi, Martti 74–5, 91, 92n.7, 205 Labour Party 204, 209, 218 Lamarck, Jean-Baptiste 108–9, 142n.29, 201 Laski, Harold 170, 174, 208 Lauterpacht, Hersch 205–6 Lawrence, Thomas Joseph 74, 83–6, 99n.113, 206 Hague Conferences 90 legal evolution 84–5 laws of war 85, 99n.112, 133, 202 League of Nations 10, 161–2, 197, 203–4, 206, 217–18, 221–4 Lecky, William Edward Hartpole 150 legal education 61, 65, 70, 93n.20 legal evolution, idea of 16, 63, 69–72, 81–2, 87–8, 200, 237 Levi, Leone 97n.82 liberal Anglicanism 36, 153, 186n.10 liberal internationalism, ideology of and defiance 15, 42, 133–5, 162–3 defined 3–4, 49–51 moral and institutional arguments 10, 50, 197–9, 215–16, 238 liberalism 1–2, 8–9, 25–33, 49, 51n.7 empire and imperialism 6, 44–5 Locke, John 26 Lorimer, James 74, 78–9, 97n.82 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 27, 31, 151, 218 MacDonald, Ramsay 221 Machiavelli, Niccolò 132, 162, 165–6, 183, 220 ‘Machiavellism’ 12, 132, 169, 172–3, 199 Maine, Henry Sumner 70–2, 79, 87, 95n.47, 97n.87, 125 on Austin 80 international law 72–3, 79–81 legal evolution 70–1, 82–3 Maistre, Joseph de 165, 174

274

Maitland, Frederic William 122, 146n.117, 176 Mandler, Peter 234n.116 Marx, Karl 38, 230–1n.67 Matthew, H. C. G. 56n.78, 170 Maurice, John Frederick Denison (F. D.) 122 Mazzini, Guiseppe 30, 38, 41, 125, 154, 171, 224 militarism 12, 103–4, 120, 161, 182, 211, 213, 215 Mill, James 30, 84 Mill, John Stuart 3, 6–7, 14, 30–2, 46, 164, 207, 221 civilisation, idea of 68–9 empire and imperialism 44 free trade 37 history, view of 150 nationalism/nationality 41–2 Milner, Alfred 119 Moore, George Edward 206–7, 210 Morley, John 17, 32, 149, 151–2, 163–74, 184 biography of Cobden 167–9, 184 biography of Gladstone 169–73, 184 on Burke 166, 190n.82 empire and imperialism, 173–4, 191n.115, 221–2 history, view of 164–6, 173, 190n.77 influence 218, 221–3 on Machiavelli 165–6 and Mill 164 nationalism/nationality 171–2 patriotism 167–8 political views 164, 170–1, 173–4 religion 163–4, 170 and Spencer 164 war and aggrandisement 167, 172 Muir, Ramsay 217 Murray, Gilbert 104, 208, 233–4n.114 Napoleon, Louis (Napoleon III of France) 168–9 national character 9, 30, 32, 44, 49, 78, 117, 149 nationalism/nationality 30, 38–9, 48–50, 150, 167, 213, 218–19 Acton on 177–8, 181 Bryce on 154–9, 162–3 Gooch on 222–4, 234n.116

Index Green on 104 Mill on 41–2 Morley on 171–2 Sidgwick on 130, 132, 137 Spencer on 120–1 naturalism, legal 61–2, 65, 74–6, 79, 83–4, 90–1, 93n.11, 150 natural law 16, 63–6, 69, 71–3, 77–80, 87–8, 90–1, 128, 138, 202–3, 220 new liberalism 170–1, 208, 211–13, 219–20, 228–9n.40 Noel-Baker, Philip 204, 219 non-conformism, religious 35–7, 43, 107, 111 non-intervention, principle of 11–12, 34, 36–8, 50, 105–6, 138, 168, 190–1n.94 Old Mortality Society 75, 152, 163 Oppenheim, Lassa Francis Lawrence 200–6 Oxford 18n.2, 77, 103, 152–3, 163, 170, 207 pacificism 35, 105 Palmerston, Lord 25, 29–30, 34, 38–41, 43–4, 171, 217 Parry, Jonathan 32 patriotism 30, 35, 40, 44, 48, 103, 106, 119–20, 132, 159, 167–8, 214–15 peace movement 6, 35, 37–8, 77, 111, 199, 221 Pearson, Charles Henry 135 Pearson, Karl 211 Phillimore, Lord (Walter George Frank Phillimore) 206 Phillimore, Robert 74, 77–8, 93n.20 philosophy, academic discipline 101–3, 206–7, 210 phrenology 36, 168 political science 14, 126, 149–50, 179, 207, 223, 239 Pollock, Frederick 82 positivism, evolutionary 110, 150, 164 positivism, legal 61–2, 67, 74–6, 79, 83, 88, 93n.11 Austin 69 Lauterpacht on 205 Oppenheim 200, 203 Sidgwick 128

practical men, internationalist views of 12–13, 80, 137–8, 182–3, 199, 210 professionalisation 13–14, 89, 148–50, 200, 210–11, 216 psychology 14, 108, 213, 226n.5 public morality 3–4, 26, 49, 104, 131–2, 165, 181, 198, 220 public opinion 10, 12, 26–7, 32, 47, 66, 78, 82, 84–5, 88, 96n.70, 238 race 109, 135–6, 142n.35, 156–7, 188n.45 radicalism 29–30, 36, 107, 164, 215–16 Ranke, Leopold von 149, 179–80 rationalism and rationality 26, 31, 33, 107, 164, 170, 199, 213, 240–1 Rawls, John 102, 208 realism 5, 13, 47, 105, 204, 236 reason of state 165–6, 171–2, 223 reform, democratic and parliamentary 29–30, 33, 35, 153, 170 Rhodes, Cecil 13, 158 Ritchie, David George 16, 103, 105–6, 126, 157 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 71, 164–5, 235 Russell, Bertrand 206–7 Russell, Lord John 29, 48 Salisbury, Lord (Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil) 46–9, 122 Savigny, Friedrich Karl von 71, 87 Schultz, Bart 136, 188n.43 secularisation 67–8 Seebohm, Frederic 151, 186n.16 Seeley, John Robert 126, 150–1, 179 Sepoy Rebellion 43 Sidgwick, Henry 16–17, 32, 79–80, 88, 101–3, 121–40, 237–8 and Acton 132, 183 and Austin 128 and Bentham 126, 128 defiant internationalism 127–8, 131, 133–5, 138–9 federalism 127–8, 130, 134 German thought, critique of 132 on Hobbes 134, 147n.140 imperialism 135–6 influence 207–10, 220, 225 international law 128–31 moral philosophy 122–4, 131–5

275

Index nationalism/nationality 130, 132 political views 124–5, 127 and practical men 137–8 race 126, 135 religion 122–3 on Spencer 124, 137–8, 143n.66, 145n.93 violence 136–7 war and aggrandisement 133, 137 and Whewell 121–3 Skinner, Quentin 7–8, 138 slavery 29, 35–6, 39, 107, 160, 177, 201–2 Smith, Goldwin 124, 151, 153 social Darwinism 13, 105–6, 116, 134, 211, 230n.55 social evolution, idea of 17, 31, 63, 69, 72, 105, 108–11, 116, 201, 211–16 adaptation 72, 108–10 social science 30–1, 68, 82, 101–2, 126, 150, 179, 211, 237 sociology 111, 113–15, 124, 143n.44, 207, 211, 223 South African War (1899–1902) 43, 47, 113, 119, 137, 158, 170, 213, 219–20 see also Boer wars sovereignty 61, 64, 80, 91, 128, 204, 206, 224–5, 239 Spencer, Herbert 14, 16–17, 31, 101–3, 106–21, 139–40, 237–8 evolution, concept of 108–11 federalism 113, 119 government, purpose of 107–8, 111–12, 115, 118 history, view of 148, 150 human nature 110–11, 117 on imperialism 113, 119–21 industrial and militant societies 215–16, 143n.65 influence 72, 201, 210–16, 220 militarism 111, 120 moral philosophy 109, 112, 116, 118 and Morley 164, nationalism/nationality 120–1 patriotism 120–1 political views 107–8, 110–12, 118–21 race 109, 142n.35 religion 107–8, 120, 144n.72

276

rights, concept of 107–8, 112 and Sidgwick 124, 137–8 sociology 113–16, 121, 215 war and aggrandisement 111–17, 120 state, conceptions of the 46, 103–4, 106, 108, 113, 115, 130, 165, 204, 208, 212, 214 see also government state intervention 41, 103, 108, 130, 140n.4 Stephen, James Fitzjames 78, 83, 132, 182 Stephen, J. K. 98n.103 Stubbs, William 148, 150, 186n.14 Temperley, Harold 217, 221 transnational history 239 Treaty of Washington (1871) 74 Treitschke, Heinrich von 46, 174, 180, 207, 220–1, 224 Trevelyan, George Macaulay 209, 218–19 Twiss, Travers 74, 93n.20 United Nations 197, 235 university liberalism 31–2, 75, 124–5, 152 university reform 125, 152 utilitarianism 6, 30–1, 69, 102, 107–8, 123–5, 136–7, 209 Wallas, Graham 208, 226n.5 Waltz, Kenneth 117, 146n.133 war and aggrandisement 1–3, 10, 33–7, 44, 67, 84–5, 104–6, 199, 207, 212, 220 Acton on 182 Bryce on 162 Morley on 167, 172 Sidgwick on 131, 133, 137 Spencer on 111–17 Webster, Charles 217 Westlake, John 74, 86–7, 90, 137 Whewell, William 67, 121–3 Whig history 150–1, 153–4, 160, 179, 216, 224 Woolf, Leonard Sidney 7, 12, 207, 209, 233n.102 Zimmern, Alfred Eckhard 104, 208, 217