Parallel Lives for Peace

Abstract

February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd Reviews 157 1 Ceadel, in the work under review, is quoting from Papers 13: 529. PARALLEL LIVES FOR PEACE Andrew G. Bone Russell Research Centre / McMaster U. Hamilton, on, Canada l8s 4l6 bone@mcmaster.ca Martin Ceadel. Living the Great Illusion: Sir Norman Angell, 1872–1967. Oxford and New York: Oxford U. P., 2009. Pp. xv, 438. isbn 978-0199571161 (hb). £68; us$99. “If there is to be an Anti-War League,” Russell wrote Lady Ottoline on 17 September 1914, “[Norman Angell] must be its Cobden” (p. 169).1 That Angell ultimately failed to provide such a lead is one of the most interesting episodes of a fascinating political life expertly pieced together by Martin Ceadel. That Russell ranked him as heir apparent to the celebrated Victorian free trader and critic of the Crimean War provides a measure of the reputation Angell had built in preceding years as a publicist for peace. With his best-selling book The Great Illusion (1910), he had supposedly inaugurated a “new paciWsm” grounded in realism not sentiment. Its central argument was that the Wnancial and commercial interdependence of modern industrialized states made armed conXict between them futile, for the victors in any war of conquest would be harmed as much as the vanquished. Although developed with the verve of a born propagandist , this alluring thesis was, according to Ceadel, “overstated in certain respects and under-explained in others” (p. 87)—adaptable to both a paciWst position and one of military preparedness. Dogged by these apparent contradictions , Angell would spend much of his later career trying unsuccessfully to reconcile them. He was prone to internal inconsistency in his writings because of a habit of “arriving at their themes inductively and experientially more than through academic cerebration or a priori inference” (p. 5). In a sense he literally “lived” The Great Illusion, an approach to politics utterly diTerent from Russell’s (as Ceadel acknowledges in the same passage). Angell’s intellectual limitations did not prevent his signature work from becoming a runaway success. It sold over two million copies, was translated into twenty-Wve languages and stimulated the formation of numerous “Angellite” study-groups, leagues and societies, together with the journal War and Peace. His devotees included successful industrialists and Tory politicians, as well as Quaker paciWsts, Liberal disarmers and anti-militarists inside the Independent Labour Party. This breadth of appeal is quite astonishing, not least, for example, February 19, 2011 (11:48 am) E:\CPBR\RUSSJOUR\TYPE3002\russell 30,2 040 red.wpd 158 Reviews 2 See Papers 13: xxxii. 3 Ibid., pp. 66 and 148. because orthodox socialists shouldz have been condemning capitalism as the primary agent of war, not embracing it as an instrument for its prevention. “Angellism ” was also at odds theoretically with that radical strain exempliWed by J.yA. Hobson and H.yN. Brailsford (the latter of whom penned a critical review of The Great Illusionz) and which emphasized how certain vested interests—in international Wnance, the armaments and allied industries and the “yellow” press—did proWt from war or threats of war. The Edwardian Russell was something of an “Angellite” in his robust defence of free trade on internationalist as much as economic grounds. Or perhaps it was more the case that he and Angell were “Cobdenites”. Although both men’s dissenting radicalism owed something to the inspirational tribune of the Anti-Corn Law League, Russell and Angell were also interested in the psychology as well as the economics of war and peace. The most persistent criticism faced by Angell after August 1914 was the least fair; he had only ever suggested that war was irrational , not that it was impossible. In fact, war would remain highly likely, he thought, so long as its irrationality was not much more widely appreciated. He had tackled this issue in his Wrst book and returned to it with the rather desultory (for Ceadel) discussion of human nature comprising the second part of The Great Illusion. Angell also acquired, as a result, a lifelong commitment to mass education for peace, although he repeatedly failed to develop a...