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The founding text of International Relations? Norman Angell's seminal yet flawed The Great Illusion (1909–1938)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2010

MARTIN CEADEL
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Abstract

Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, which ran through six versions in London between November 1909 and December 1938, has some claim to have launched International Relations as a self-consciously independent yet sub-consciously liberal discipline. Understood to argue primarily that the interlocking fragility of the international financial system stopped modern states profiting from aggression, its ideas were promoted by a specially created foundation as ‘the science of international politics’ or ‘international polity’. Since the 1970s, moreover, the book has been credited by scholars with pioneering the concepts of interdependence and globalisation. Now, therefore, it is less its seminal qualities than its fundamental flaws that require emphasis. Its celebrated claim about the irenic implications of financial interdependence was widely misunderstood as implying the impossibility, in addition to the disutility, of aggression. And a little-noticed second argument – that political control over territory brought no substantive benefits – was not only implausible but inconsistent with Angell's declared opposition to cuts in arms spending. The Great Illusion's policy recommendations were thus ambiguous, and altered from edition to edition as its author grappled first with the contradiction between pacifist and pro-defence strands in his thinking and then with the changing international situation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 37 , Issue 4 , October 2011 , pp. 1671 - 1693
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 2010

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References

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37 Copyrighted January 1910 by Edith M. Williams and printed by ‘The Colonial Press, C. H. Simmonds and Co.’: a proof copy is in the Angell Papers.

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51 Ibid., pp. 197, 248.

52 Ibid., pp. 258, 273–4.

53 Ibid., pp. 285, 292–4, 297.

54 Ibid., pp. 286–8, 306–12.

55 Ibid., pp. 115, 304–9.

56 Unpublished letter to David Starr Jordan, 10 April 1912: Jordan Papers, Stanford University.

57 Angell, GI (1912), pp. v–vi.

58 Ibid., p. 254.

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65 Angell's response to altered circumstances after the First World War is fully examined in Ceadel, Living the Great Illusion, chaps 7–8.

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