British Liberal Internationalism, 1880-1930: Making Progress? (review)

This is a wide-ranging, detailed survey of a central phenomenon in both British politics and the international arena. As such, British Liberal Internationalism, 1880-1930 is a welcome addition to two disciplines that suffer from a process of narrow specialization that sometimes blocks out the view of related fields. But such a book is needed for another reason. Liberal internationalism, in its modern and postmodern mutations, tends to view itself as obvious: can anybody really object to the gradual and peaceful construction of an international authority that would mitigate war and conflict? Casper Sylvest's book historicizes liberal internationalism and shows it for what it is: one possible position among many, and one that is, like all others, shaped by the culture, prejudices, and omissions of those who propagate it.

The book is organized in an overlapping thematic-chronological pattern. For each period, Sylvest isolates a group of specialists who define the terminology and aspirations of liberal internationalism. Starting with the Victorian statesmen who advocated an internationalist perspective from the mid-nineteenth century on, the study advances to examine the positions of mid-century jurists and late-century philosophers, political theorists, and historians. Sylvest ends with a look at liberal internationalism in the early twentieth century, with special attention given to links with earlier segments of the tradition. The names are more or less what one would expect from the title: Richard Cobden and William Gladstone, Henry Maine and Robert Phillimore, James Bryce, A. V. Dicey and John Morley, Herbert Spencer, D. G. Ritchie and Henry Sidgwick, and later L. T. Hobhouse, Alfred Zimmern, and G. Lowes Dickinson. The book also explores related scholars and authors, presenting for each the relevant biographical data, background influences, and main rivals and bête noirs.

If I had to choose a single analytical insight from the many the book offers, it would be the competition within liberal internationalism between naturalism and positivism. Liberals tend to believe in an objective, prepolitical order that is supported by a timeless authority such as God or science and is immune to the will of princes and arbitrary majorities. Social contracts, and hence sovereignty and the law emanating from sovereignty, may be plausibly based on naturalism as long as one is within the domestic sphere. But the task becomes harder when one moves outside it, to a place where there is no single sovereignty. Hence, Sylvest shows, liberal scholars from the mid-nineteenth century on have turned to a positivist explanation of internationalism. If global law cannot be based on a natural order, then it may be based on the order one creates: on the incremental advance of practice and opinion. Hence, liberal jurists such as Maine took pains to distance themselves from the essentialism of such harsh utilitarians as John Austin and his reliance on immutable human nature.

Justification from practice, however, involves a loss of objectivity and an opening to traditionalism. Accordingly, liberals still required naturalist support, even while espousing positivism. Here, the gradualist, historical perception of nature itself, which culminated in the mid-century rise of evolutionary theory, was a much-needed help. As a result, liberal accounts of international politics were characteristically those of a process: not what we have today, but what we may have later if we keep to a certain course. Law was detached from sovereignty and observed nature and became, for them, the outcome of a projected telos anchored in currently felt moral intuition.

While the book is successful as detailed history, it leaves open some theoretical questions. Faced with the lawlessness and violence of politics, the realist position taken by Austin has its appeal, at least as description. How, in terms of analysis rather than normative evaluation, did liberal internationalism grapple with it? Most passages that relate to this tension brush it aside by referring to it as a moral or even temperamental difference. Austin, the realist, was "inflexible" (64), whereas his critic Maine was more fine-tuned...