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British Idealist International Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

David Boucher
David Boucher*
Affiliation:
University of Wales Swansea
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Abstract

International relations theorists have long complained about the paucity of rigorous political philosophy in their discipline, and especially bemoan the lack of classic texts to guide them. It is suggested that with the exception of Thucydides, there is little exclusively concerned with International Relations, and nothing that international relations theorists have constructed to resemble the received canon comparable with its sister subject of political theory. Yet all of the major political theorists accommodate international relations in some way, and are invoked by contemporary international relations theorists as having something important to say. Contemporary international relations theory, however, is immersed in its own sense of self-importance, seeing the value of everything in utilitarian or practical terms. The desire to change the world, and not merely to understand it, predisposes the discipline to scale the obligatory heights of Machiavelli, Grotius, Kant, Hegel and Marx in order to pillage what is useful, and to ignore the attempts of philosophers more immediately at the root of modern international relations theory who addressed many of the questions currently thought important and which pointed the way to some of the contemporary answers. Hegel's ill-deserved, but not wholly unfounded, reputation as a brutal realist, and the association of Bosanquet and the rest of the British Idealists with German or Prussian philosophy during and between the two world wars in popular and learned journals, newspapers, and the publications of leading philosophers, including Hobhouse, Hobson, Dewey, Santayana, Laski, Delise Burns, Cole and Joad, have served to bury almost without trace a wealth of literature that applied what are now fashionably called communitarian principles to international questions. Even Chris Brown, who relates Hegel, Green and Bosanquet to the communitarian approach to international relations, ignores the fact that British idealists addressed the key issues of the possibility of extending the community to the international sphere and the establishment of supranational institutions.

Type
Hegel and British Idealism
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 16 , Issue 1: number 31 , Spring/Summer 1995 , pp. 73 - 89
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1995

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References

1 A version of this paper was first delivered at the History of Political Thought Conference, Oxford, January 1993, and a different version at the Hegel Society of Great Britain Conference, September, 1994. I would like to thank the participants from whose comments the argument of this paper has greatly benefitted. A much longer version appeared in print under the title ‘British Idealism, the State and International Relations’, Journal of the History of Ideas, (1994), 671–693 Google Scholar. What is presented here is a revised version of one part of that article. I would like to thank Donald R Kelly, the editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas, for permission freely to draw upon the above article.

2 A good deal has been done to rehabilitate Bosanquet, but the arguments have not been extended to the other British idealists in any systematic way. See Ewing, A C, The Individual, the State, and World Government (New York, Macmillan, 1947), 190–201 Google Scholar; Nicholson, Peter P, ‘Philosophical Idealism and International Politics: A Reply to Dr Savigear’, British Journal of International Studies, 2 (1976), 76–83 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Collini, Stefan, ‘Hobhouse, Bosanquet and the State: Philosophical Idealism and Political Argument in England 1880-1918’, Past and Present, 72 (1976), 86–111 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Band, D C, ‘The Critical Reception of English Neo-Hegelianism in Britain and America, 1914-1960’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 26 (1980), 230–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Nicholson, Peter P, The Political Philosophy of the British Idealists (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990), 221–28Google Scholar; Beddie, Brian, ‘Hegel and International Relations’, Political Theory Newsletter 4 (1992), 126–29Google Scholar.

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4 Cf what the Laws say to Socrates in Plato's Crito, 50A: “since you have been born and brought up and educated, can you deny, in the first place, that you were our child and servant, both you and your ancestors?”

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19 Of the Absolute Idealists only Bradley's politics are something of a mystery. Ritchie had been a member of the Fabian Society, but left during the mid 1890s.

20 Brown, , ‘International Political Theory and the Idea of World Community’, 91 and 105 Google Scholar. The categorization of international relations theory into cosmopolitan and communitarian points of view leads to the strange paradox of a universal community that does not transcend the state (Kant), and a communitarianism which transcends the state and envisages the extension of the moral community world-wide (the British Idealists). Brown unfortunately misses this latter paradox.

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