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The International Theory of Leonard Woolf

A Study in Twentieth-Century Idealism

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  • © 2003

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Authors:
  1. Peter Wilson
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Table of contents (9 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xiv
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  2. Fabian, Internationalist, and “Interwar Idealist”

    • Peter Wilson
    Pages 1-10

  3. What is Idealism?

    • Peter Wilson
    Pages 11-21

  4. International Government: An Exposition

    • Peter Wilson
    Pages 23-51

  5. International Government: Analysis and Assessment

    • Peter Wilson
    Pages 53-81

  6. Imperialism: An Exposition

    • Peter Wilson
    Pages 83-113

  7. Imperialism: Analysis and Assessment

    • Peter Wilson
    Pages 115-141

  8. Liberal Internationalism, Anticapitalism, and Consumers’ Co-operation: Toward a Nonstate, Nonmarket Approach to International Economic Organization

    • Peter Wilson
    Pages 143-175

  9. The Idealist Counterattack: Mr. Woolf versus Professor Carr

    • Peter Wilson
    Pages 177-207

  10. Woolf’s Legacy: Ideals, Reason, and Historical Change

    • Peter Wilson
    Pages 209-217

  11. Back Matter

    Pages 221-269
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Keywords

About this book

Colonial civil servant, Fabian socialist, and eminence grise of the Bloombury Circle, Leonard Woolf was one of the most prolific writers on international relations of the early to mid-Twentieth Century. His report for the Fabian Society, International Government , was influential on the creation of the League of Nations. He was co-founder of the popular pressure group, the League of Nations Society. He was a leading critic of empire. He helped to educate the British Labour Party on global issues, constructing, in 1929, its first credible foreign policy. With his wife, Virginia, he founded the celebrated Hogarth Press. He pioneered 'functionalist' and 'transnationalist' theory. He pioneered documentary journalism. He wrote towards the end of his long life one of the most insightful autobiographies of the Twentieth Century. This book examines the thought of this fascinating and relatively unknown political thinker. It thoroughly reassesses his ideas, for decades condemned as 'utopian', in the context of the much more fluid international scene of theTwenty-First century. In particular, it asks have his ideas about international government gained new pertinence in the post-Cold War world?

Reviews

Leonard Woolf was a major thinker and writer on international relations during the first half of the twentieth century. As an eloquent exponent of internationalism - international organization, economic interdependence, anti-imperialism - he was strongly critical of, and was in turn ridiculed by, "realist" thinkers such as E. H. Carr. The Woolf-Carr controversy resonates today, as does Woolf's ceaseless advocacy of international cooperation over and above a preoccupation with the allegedly immutable power politics or national interests that he believed inevitably led to conflict and war. He produced many of the visions that generations have inherited in order to bring the world a little closer to peace and interdependence. His ideas deserve serious study, and there is no better guide to them than Peter Wilson's careful and thorough analysis offered in this book. - Akira Iriye, Department of History, Harvard University

"In this book, Peter Wilson performs a signal service forthose interested in international political thought, in the history of ideas and in the trajectory and fate of some of the central ideas of the twentieth century. His meticulous scholarship shows both how important Woolf was in a number of central areas of British life and thought and how much he still repays

reading if we want to understand central debates in twentieth century international relations. And at a time when debates about the fate of liberal internationalism are again centre stage, Wilson's masterly account of Woolf's version of that project teaches us much. A superb study." - Nicholas Rengger, Professor of Political Theory and International Relations, University of St Andrews.

About the author

PETER WILSON is lecturer in International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is editor (with David Long) on Thinkers of the Twenty Years' Crisis: Interwar Idealism Reassessed (Oxford, Cloneadon Press, 1995) and author (with Sypros Economides) of The Economic Factor in International Relations (London, I.B. Tauris, 2001). He is an expert on inter-war international relations theory and has written major articles on the thought of E.M. Carr.

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