Abstract
After World War I, Angell found that the central theme of The Great Illusion — that war was futile if waged between industrial countries, because the free trade system and the sensitivity of credit created a degree of interdependence which could not be defied — could not be sustained to anything like the same extent as he had assumed. It had been invalidated by the war and the Peace Treaty. Writing in 1921 about his pre-war view that, while co-operation between nations had become essential for the very lives of their peoples, such co-operation did not take place between states but between individual firms and traders, he argued:
This line of reasoning is no longer valid, for it was based upon a system of economic individualism, upon a distinction between the functions proper to the State and those proper to the citizen. This individualist system has been profoundly transformed in the direction of national control by the measures adopted everywhere for the purposes of war; a transformation that the confiscatory clauses of the Treaty and the arrangements for the payment of the indemnity help to render permanent. While the old understanding or convention has been destroyed — or its disappearance very greatly accelerated — by the Allies, no new one has been established to take its place.1
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Notes and References
Angell, The Fruits of Victory (1921) p. 66.
Ibid., p. 70.
Angell, The Great Illusion, p. 309.
In this context, there is much of interest in Arthur Greenwood, ‘International Economic Relations’, in A. J. Grant et al., An bitroduction to the Study of International Relations (London: Macmillan, 1916) esp. pp. 99–101.
Norman Angell by His Contemporaries, a photocopied collection in Ball State papers, p. 2. Internal evidence suggests 1963 as its date.
The Fruits of Victory, p. vii.
Graham Wallas, Human Nature in Politics (1948; first published 1908) p.114.
Ibid., pp. vi and vii. ‘Racial’ here has the meaning which we should now give to ‘ethnic’.
L. T. Hobhouse, Democracy and Reaction (1904) p. 169.
The references here are to Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd (1896),
Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. Phillips Bradley (1951),
and Walter Lippmann, The Public Philosophy (1955).
Angell, ‘Peace and the Public Mind’, in Frederick W. Haberman (ed.), Peace 1926–1950, vol. 2 (1972).
Sun-Pictorial, Melbourne (3 February 1959).
Sunday Times (10 July 1921). The review (on the whole a favourable one) was by F. W. Wilson in the same paper for 3 July.
Angell, The Public Mind (1926) p. 138.
See, e.g., ‘The Press and Propaganda’, Spectator (19 November 1937).
Angell, The Defence of the Empire (1937) pp. 50–55.
The Observer (10 January 1932).
The reference is to Kipling’s story, ‘As Easy as A. B. C’, in A Diversity of Creatures (1917).
This postulates a time in the future when people have decided that ‘it’s against human nature to stand in a crowd, besides being bad for the health’. The world is ruled by philosopher-kings through air power. In another story about the same philosopher-kings, Kipling said that ‘war, as a paying concern, ceased in 1967’. (‘With the Night Mail’, in Actions and Reactions, 1909.) Is this an unexpected echo of Angeli?
Angell wrote on ‘Educational and Psychological Factors’, and Laski on ‘The Economic Foundations of Peace’.
The Great Illusion, p. 131.
Angell to Arthur Mee, 1 March 1915 (Ball State papers). Mee, the editor of The Children’s Newspaper and The Children’s Encyclopaedia, was an old friend of Angell’s from his days with Northcliffe. I have added the ‘not’ in brackets because otherwise the sentence does not make complete sense; the letter has been transcribed from an uncorrected hasty carbon, of which there are many amongst Angell’s papers.
For example, his second contribution to The Intelligent Man’s Way to Prevent War bears this title.
G. Lowes Dickinson, The European Anarchy (1916) pp. 9–10.
Angell, After All, p. 314.
See, e.g., his two articles, ‘Is War Inevitable?’, War and Peace (May and June 1914) pp. 221–3 and 252–3.
See, e.g., After All, pp. 135–7, and The Fruits of Victory, pp. 191–5.
This is the final sentence in a powerful piece of argument in America and the New World-State, pp. 32–4.
See the correspondence on this with Maxwell Garnett, Ball State Papers.
The source for this paragraph is pp. 60–74 and 212–4 of Angell’s The Defence of the Empire.
E. H. Carr, The Twenty Tears’ Crisis (1981; first published in 1939) p. 11.
Ibid., pp. 25–6. Angell is used as an example in much the same way in Chapter II of Hans J. Morgenthau, Scientific Man versus Power Politics (1947).
These had included Angell. See his editorial, ‘The Peace Ballot and the Coming War’, Time and Tide (29 June 1935).
E. H. Carr, review in International Affairs, XVI, 2 (March–April 1937) pp. 282–3.
Headway (January 1940) pp. 4–5.
Toynbee to Angell, 23 January 1940, Ball State Papers (also in the Bodleian).
Strangely enough, one notable person in the 1930s thought that Angell had conclusively shown that ‘it pays men better to think and feel as members of the universal society, to behave, that is to say, as if territorial state boundaries did not exist, or would shortly be superseded, than to behave as if these boundaries were insurmountable and irremovable’. (C. E. M. Joad, Guide to the Philosophy of Morals and Politics (1938) p. 75.)
J. A. Hobson, Confessions of an Economic Heretic (1938) p. 96.
Michael Howard, War and the Liberal Conscience (1978) p. 11.
Ibid., pp. 130–2.
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© 1986 J. D. B. Miller
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Miller, J.D.B. (1986). Public Mind and Collective Security. In: Norman Angell and the Futility of War. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07523-2_3
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