The Athens of Example:

The Classical World in British International Thought,

1900–1939

A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester

for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Humanities

2020

Liam Stowell

School of Arts, Languages and Cultures

2

Contents

Abstract 3

Declaration and Copyright Statement 4

The Author 5

Acknowledgements 6

Introduction 7

I – The ancient past and the international present: classical Greece and global order 28

II – ‘The res publica with which it is our duty to concern ourselves… extends to the ends of the

earth’: citizenship, civic virtue and the international republican moment 61

III – Public opinion, civic education and intellectual leadership in international affairs 97

IV – ‘The Greek door to the study of history’: Arnold J. Toynbee, international order and the

classical inheritance 135

Conclusion 173

Bibliography 178

Word Count: 79,073

3

Abstract

This thesis examines the deep interconnections between classical learning and modern international

relations among three early-twentieth-century British internationalists, Gilbert Murray, Arnold J.

Toynbee and Alfred Zimmern. These intellectuals began their careers as classical scholars before

becoming some of Britain’s foremost academic experts and public commentators on world politics

after the First World War. The classics, especially the ancient Greek heritage, continued to exert an

enormous influence over the way that they understood and theorised international relations.

References to classical literature and political thought or to episodes from ancient history permeated

all of their published writings and reflected a continuing, consistent and pervasive interest in the

classical world and an underlying faith in the constructive value that classical ideas held in the present.

Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern are termed the ‘classicising internationalists’, and the way that they

conceptualised world politics is ‘classicising internationalism’. The ways that they imagined modern

international relations grew out of their admiration for the institutions and civic ideals of the fifth-

century Athenian polis. They desired to transfer the moral cohesion and civic spirit they read onto

ancient Athens to the realm of modern international politics by proposing an internationalised

formulation of the polis as an organisational model for a civic international order. This was intertwined

with an educational ideal that sought to expand civic identities into the global political sphere and

create a politically engaged and internationally minded public in the mould of the Athenian citizen.

For Toynbee, this internationalist project was linked to a need to theorise the dynamics of world

history. By foregrounding the importance of the classical imaginary in these figures’ internationalist

writings, the thesis develops a more rounded understanding of the intellectual and disciplinary history

of international relations, one that emphasises the wider intellectual influences on the discipline’s

foundational theorists. Classical antiquity was a crucial tool as Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern sought

to make sense of international politics during the turbulent interwar years.

4

Declaration

No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application for

another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.

Copyright Statement

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5

The Author

Liam Stowell holds a BA in History from the University of Leeds and an MPhil in Political Thought

and Intellectual History from the University of Cambridge. He is the co-founder of the History of

International Thought Network, which held its inaugural conference in November 2019.

6

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my supervisors, Stuart Jones and Andrew Fear for their invaluable advice and

guidance throughout the thesis. My gratitude goes also to the University of Manchester, who provided

the scholarship that enabled this project to happen and the academic environment in which it

developed.

I am grateful to all those who assisted in the development of my ideas, in particular the thought-

provoking conversations with fellow researchers in the History of International Thought Network, and

to the numerous welcoming and helpful archivists and librarians who assisted my research in

Cambridge, London, Manchester and especially Oxford.

My thanks go also to my family, especially, Dad, my chief proof-reader, as well as to Pan, who helped

in his way.

My greatest debt, with all things, is, of course, to Monique.

7

Introduction

In 1959, the political theorist Bernard Crick wrote that post-war Britain was ‘searching, or dreaming,

of being the Athens of example, now that she is no longer the Rome of power.’1 For Crick, the end of

empire and the rise of American hegemony after the Second World War had forced Britain to come

to terms with the limits of its geopolitical capabilities and encouraged British writers to stop asserting

their own unique political heritage as a universal model. For an earlier generation of liberal

internationalists and classical scholars, Gilbert Murray (1866–1957), Alfred Eckhardt Zimmern

(1879–1957) and Arnold J. Toynbee (1889–1975), writing in the vastly different context of interwar

Britain, the ancient Athenian example had paramount bearing on modern international relations. After

the radical upheaval of the First World War, these intellectuals argued that elements from classical

antiquity could provide the political and intellectual architecture of a peaceful, democratic and

cooperative international order. Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern were convinced that classical ideals,

values and political practices, as well as the diverse historical experience of antiquity, were essential

to understanding world politics and offered a reservoir of intellectual authority and anchorage for an

international system centring on the newly established League of Nations. Their internationalism was

underpinned by their classicism; their classicism was defined by their internationalism.

The ideas, values and political models that Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern located in classical

antiquity, mostly in Greece and above all in Athens, are central to understanding the distinctive manner

in which they conceptualised international relations. This approach to world politics will be termed

‘classicising internationalism’; its three proponents referred to as the ‘classicising internationalists’.

Classicising internationalism was characterised by the constant interplay between ancient and modern.

According to Zimmern, ‘if history proves nothing and predicts nothing… rightly used, it will suggest

a great deal.’2 Zimmern stressed that history was essential to the study of international relations: ‘there

is no frontier between the present and the past and there can be no barrier between the political thinker

and the historian.’3 Murray consistently argued that classical literature contained crucial tools for

understanding modern life. He was convinced of the value of ‘the light thrown by particular phases of

1 Bernard Crick, The American Science of Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1959), p. 244. More recent

accounts date the ascent of American power and the decline of British power to the decade after the First World War.

Adam Tooze, The Deluge: The Great War and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916–1931 (London: Allen Lane, 2014). 2 Alfred Zimmern, Solon & Croesus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1928), p. 43. 3 Alfred Zimmern, The Study of International Relations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931), p. 5.

8

Greek experience upon modern problems of society and conduct and literature.’4 Toynbee concurred,

asserting that ‘the Greek door to the study of history manifestly brings us, when we open it, face to

face with the most searching and urgent questions of our own destiny.’5 For Toynbee, the experience

of ancient history contained an intrinsic moral and internationalist message, that the solution to the

crisis facing contemporary civilisation was to construct a robust international order on ‘some moral

foundation’.6 Indeed, all three figures deployed ancient history, literature and philosophy in their

attempts to theorise the institutional structure, ideals and ethics of international relations. They

interpreted twentieth-century international politics through the lens of classical antiquity and read

ancient history through modern politics and society. They also sought to move beyond the classical

inheritance by translating the political model of the ancient city-state onto a global scale. For the

classicising internationalists, a stable, moral global order must be grounded in the historical experience

of antiquity, above all the civic ideals and institutions of fifth-century Athens.

My central contention is that the Greek and, to a significantly lesser extent, Roman classics provided

a structuring influence on the international political thought of Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern. Recent

historical interpretations of these figures have downplayed the deep and enduring connections between

their readings of classical antiquity and their understanding of modern world politics, largely

portraying this as a reflection of their classical education. However, references to classical political

philosophy and literature or to moralistic episodes from ancient history permeated all of their

published writings and reflected a continuing, consistent and pervasive interest in the classical world

and an underlying faith in the constructive value that classical ideas held in the present. Secondly, the

thesis asserts that disciplinary histories of international relations must adopt a frame of reference that

is attentive to the influence exerted upon theories of world politic by the ideas and practices of other

academic fields, especially history and classical studies. During the first half of the twentieth century,

the classicising internationalists played a vital role in shaping a self-conscious field of inquiry devoted

to study of international politics through their enormous intellectual influence within academic

institutions and internationalist organisations in Europe and America. Yet, these figures

simultaneously thought and wrote about classical antiquity. The development of international relations

theory must therefore be understood in the context of the classicising imaginary of these three thinkers.

Thirdly, this thesis makes a more general contention about British intellectual culture between the

wars. According to Richard Overy, interwar Britain was a ‘morbid age’ marked by a sense of

impending disaster, a loss of faith in Victorian notions of progress, and anxieties concerning the

4 Gilbert Murray, ‘Preface’, in Gilbert Murray, Essays & Addresses (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1921), p. 8. 5 Arnold Toynbee, ‘The Greek Door to the Study of History’, in Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray, ed. by J.A.K.

Thomson and Arnold Toynbee (London: Allen & Unwin, 1936), pp. 293–307 (p. 307). 6 Arnold Toynbee, ‘After Munich: The World Outlook’, International Affairs, 18.1 (1939), 1–28 (p. 16).

9

collapse of civilisation.7 The writings of the classicising internationalists point towards a different

interpretation of how British intellectuals engaged with and made sense of world events during the

turbulent interwar years. For Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern, the integration of classical humanism

and modern political thinking was a future-oriented intellectual endeavour. The classical world was a

source of hope, optimism, and moral and social stability in a period of intense transformation, crisis

and change.

Classicising international relations

This thesis explores the political thought of three British intellectuals who were both classical scholars

and theorists of international relations and seeks to understand the deep connections between these

two sides of their thought. In doing this, I will contribute a more rounded understanding of the history

of British international thought, one that situates the development of liberal theories of world politics

within the complex intellectual worlds and political concerns that animated the proponents of those

theories. It was, of course, common for the classically educated British intellectuals of the early

twentieth century to deploy the classics as a symbolic source of legitimation in political argument, to

admire the products of Greek and Roman culture, or to assert the importance of the ancient world in

seeking to understand the present. The political philosophy and internationalism of early-twentieth-

century intellectuals was often informed by their classical education or, in the case of R.G.

Collingwood (1889–1943), Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (1862–1932) or R.W. Livingstone (1880–

1960), their specialist classical scholarship. Indeed, there was a broader current of British intellectual

opinion that was both internationalist and classically educated. But Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern

were distinct. They were, unusually, recognised as academic experts in both fields. Moreover, the

classics structured the way that they imagined international relations.

The various ways that Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern understood the world were underpinned by a

pervasive classicism. The consistent invocations of the history, ideas and culture of antiquity in their

political writings forms what Christopher Stray identifies as ‘classicising’, a European tradition in

which writers used classical antiquity as an intellectual tool to make authoritative sense of the present.

7 Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London: Allen Lane, 2009), pp. 10–15. Overy’s

interpretation has recently been challenged by Peter Bowler’s more complex reading of the cultural atmosphere of interwar

Britain as one in which people’s confidence in progress was shaken, but not undermined, and where optimism and anxiety

jointly animated the minds of many scientifically minded writers. Peter Bowler, A History of the Future: Prophets of

Progress from H.G. Wells to Isaac Asimov (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017), p. 3.

10

Stray defines classicising as ‘a mode of action in which present interests act on the symbolic resources

of antiquity to produce “classics”.’ This discourse of the classical rests on a specific strategy of

legitimation, in which the symbolic or cultural authority of the ancient past is summoned in order to

construct images of the self against the other, or to reify the imagined boundaries of the social and the

political. Classicising therefore involves the transmission of messages of power, and is functionally

similar to other discourses of power and legitimation, most notably Orientalism. Moreover, like

European images of the Orient, the symbolic repertoire of the classical that is deployed in the act of

classicising has been an enduring presence in the history of European culture, a product of its

combination of power and flexibility. The enormous representative capacity of the classical emerges

from the exemplary achievements of antiquity and their preservation through a long history of

reception in European art, literature and political thought. Conceptual flexibility is offered by the

incorporation of two centres of gravity, Greece and Rome, which can be variously interpreted and

juxtaposed, enabling the re-articulation and redefinition of the classical to meet changing historical

circumstances.8

Classicising internationalism was, in one sense, a worldview: a historically informed and historically

structured approach to understanding the dilemmas facing modern politics and society, dilemmas that

were interpreted as international in scale. Like many of the concepts and normative assumptions of

twentieth-century liberal international theory, it offered a profoundly Eurocentric account of the world,

one embedded within British intellectuals’ notions about the superiority and universality of Western

politics and culture. It was based on the assumption that the classical past, a shared European cultural

heritage, was a source of intellectual inspiration, functional political models, and historical experience

from which modern individuals and societies could draw in order to progress towards greater peace,

prosperity and freedom. Progress was, however, contingent upon recognising the truly praiseworthy,

and therefore paradigmatic, concepts and historical periods from antiquity—especially the civic

politics of fifth-century Athens—and fusing these selectively and pragmatically with the realities of

twentieth-century liberal society. As Zimmern noted, historians and political theorists must ‘be careful

to distinguish the universal from the local and ephemeral element’ within Greek thought.9 The

valuable elements of the classical inheritance, such as communitarian theories of government and

citizenship, had to be disentangled from the unsavoury ideas that arose from the socio-political

conditions of antiquity, for example Aristotle’s argument that slavery is in accordance with nature or

8 Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities and Society in England, 1830–1960 (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1998), p. 10; Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 2003). 9 Alfred Zimmern, ‘Political Thought’, in The Legacy of Greece, ed. by R.W. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1921), pp. 321–52 (p. 325).

11

the near-consistent warfare among the Greek city-states.10 Antiquity was instructive, but not wholly

authoritative.

In a second sense, classicising internationalism was an international political theory grounded in an

appreciation of the civic humanist ideals and institutions of the fifth-century Athenian polis. The

Athenian example was deemed crucial for revitalising modern citizenship on the higher, international

terms and scale appropriate to the newly international era ushered in by global commerce, modern

communications, and the rise of international organisations and institutions. The classicising

internationalists viewed the polis as a more inclusive, ethical and less politically charged category than

the self-contained and adversarial nation-state, and one that had not been so recently drenched in the

blood of Europe’s youth. They desired to transfer the moral cohesion and civic spirit they read onto

ancient Athens to the realm of modern international politics by proposing some expanded notion of

the polis as an organisational model for international relations. They outlined various internationalised

formations of the polis—imagined as a commonwealth, league, republic, or universal city—as a new

focus for civic loyalty and active political participation among the citizens of what they saw as an

interconnected modern world. This was intertwined with an educational ideal that sought to expand

civic identities into the global political sphere and create a politically engaged and globally minded

international public in the mould of the Athenian citizen. Further, the worst impulses of the nation-

state, what they viewed as the irrational passions of nationalism, self-interest and militarism, would

be tempered by an enlarged, internationalised doctrine of civic duty. The allegedly universal ideals

and institutions of the fifth-century Athenian polis were at the core of classicising internationalist

thought and underpinned their rendering of the international as a rational and discursive civic space.

Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern began their intellectual careers as classicists. They all studied and

taught at the University of Oxford and remained strongly associated with that university throughout

their lives. Murray was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford (1908–1936), and the majority of his

book-length publications concerned classical literature or history. Zimmern published two books on

ancient history: The Greek Commonwealth (1911), a ‘political-economy’ of fifth-century Athens that

remained a university textbook until the 1960s; and Solon & Croesus (1928), a collection of essays.

After 1918, Zimmern’s intellectual and public reputation was based on his expertise in international

relations. He was the world’s first professor of international politics at the University of Aberystwyth

(1919–21), and later Professor of International Relations at Oxford (1930–44). The international

scholars Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson considered Zimmern ‘the most influential

10 Aristotle, Politics, 1.1252b. Toynbee was appalled that Plato saw war as the natural condition of human affairs. Toynbee

to Murray, 1 October 1929, The Arnold J. Toynbee Papers Bodleian Library, Oxford, Box 72 (unfoliated).

12

representative of our field’ between the wars.11 Like Zimmern, Toynbee wrote comparatively little

specialist literature on ancient history before 1939: a commentary on Herodotus, an article on the

growth of Sparta, and two collections of extracts from ancient Greek historiography.12 He published

a huge volume of expert commentary on interwar international politics. The annual Survey of

International Affairs (first published in 1925) exerted a significant influence over public opinion and

became an important resource for the British foreign policy establishment.13 Toynbee’s intellectual

interests were wide ranging. This was reflected in his most significant work, the multivolume

philosophy of history A Study of History (1934–61), which outlined a theory of world history based

on the rise and decline of civilisations.

The classicising internationalists were crucial figures in the history of international thought and the

development of the academic discipline of international relations in British universities. They were

among Britain’s most prominent liberal internationalist voices at an important moment in international

history, the emergence of international governing institutions in the aftermath of the First World War.

Indeed, they were deeply involved in debates surrounding the structural design of what would in 1920

become the League of Nations. Murray and Zimmern were involved in wartime Foreign Office

committees dedicated to organising the peace settlement. Zimmern authored a memorandum that had

a considerable influence on the drafting of the League Covenant.14 Toynbee was part of the British

diplomatic delegation at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919–20.15 Throughout the interwar years, the

classicising internationalists were hugely influential figures within the British academic world, the

foreign policy establishment and international organisations and associations in Europe and America.

Zimmern and Toynbee established the British (later Royal) Institute of International Affairs in 1920,

an influential foreign policy think tank that took up headquarters in Chatham House in 1922. Toynbee

acted as the institute’s Director of Studies, a position tied to a research professorship in international

history at the London School of Economics. All three figures participated in various policy panels at

Chatham House. Further, their various academic positions ensured that the classicising

internationalists exercised enormous intellectual power over the formation and early direction of the

academic discipline of international relations. Murray’s authority was particularly crucial in guiding

11 Hans Morgenthau and Kenneth Thompson, Principles and Problems of International Politics: Selected Readings (New

York: Knopf, 1950), p. 18. 12 Arnold Toynbee, ‘On Herodotus III. 90, and VII. 75, 76’, Classical Review, 24.8 (1910), 236–38; Arnold Toynbee, ‘The

Growth of Sparta’, Journal of Hellenic Studies, 33 (1913), 246–75; Arnold Toynbee, Greek Civilisation and Character:

The Self-Revelation of Ancient Greek Society (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1924); Arnold Toynbee, Greek Historical

Thought from Homer to the Age of Heraclius (London: J.M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1924). 13 Toynbee published close to 3,000 works in his lifetime. See, S. Fiona Morton, A Bibliography of Arnold J. Toynbee

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 14 Zimmern, ‘Memorandum Prepared for the Consideration of the British Government in Connexion with the Forthcoming

Peace Settlement’ (1918), The Alfred Zimmern Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Zimmern 82, fols. 38–40. 15 William McNeill, Arnold J. Toynbee, a Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 80–89.

13

appointments to academic positions in this emerging field in Oxford, London and elsewhere.16 From

their various university orbits, their ideas about world politics helped to develop many of the normative

biases of international relations scholarship, especially the focus on the ideas and institutions of

‘international society’ conceived as an extension of domestic civil society and on world politics

defined overwhelmingly as the relations between states within an interstate system.17

As Jeanne Morefield contends, Murray and Zimmern played a pivotal role in erecting the intellectual

edifice of liberal idealist internationalism based on faith in international law and the role of the League

of Nations in world politics, intercultural cooperation, a commitment to prevailing imperial power

relations, and a belief in the civilising power of the spirit. Morefield excludes Toynbee from her

analysis, noting that he did not emerge out of the same tradition of idealist liberal reformism as Murray

and Zimmern and had less direct impact on the League Covenant. Further, Toynbee’s thought was

‘characterised less by an idealist commitment to create a morally righteous international liberalism

than by a scientific desire to catalogue and even predict the cataclysmic rise and fall of civilisations.’18

However, Toynbee’s thinking about civilisation was inseparable from his internationalism. His

philosophy of history was partly a reflection on the nature of the 1930s international crisis and was

underpinned by an urgent moral internationalist message. Moreover, Toynbee must also be credited

for the institutional, academic and political strength of liberal internationalism in interwar Britain.

Through his research role at Chatham House, he had considerable sway over public and establishment

opinion on world politics. Indeed, by 1939, Toynbee was perhaps Britain’s most influential voice on

international affairs. During the Second World War, he led the Foreign Office’s Press and Research

Service. Zimmern served as his deputy.

Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern formed a distinctive and coherent group in the history of British

international thought. The primary feature of this unity was their classicism, and the shared conviction

that the institutional and ideological model of the Athenian polis was vitally relevant to twentieth-

century global politics. Additionally, their educational backgrounds, social circles, political

philosophies and institutional orbits all overlapped. They all received a classical education at

prominent public schools and Oxford. A series of initially teacher–student relationships at that

university fostered close personal and professional ties. Toynbee married Murray’s daughter Rosalind

in 1913. Further, like many British intellectuals, they worked for the British state during the First

16 Jeanne Morefield, Covenants Without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2005), p. 10. 17 On the normative assumptions of mid-twentieth century IR theory, see Ian Hall, Dilemmas of Decline: British

Intellectuals and World Politics, 1945–1975 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), pp. 50–51. 18 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, pp. 10–12.

14

World War. They negotiated a shared world comprised of educational and political institutions in

Oxford and London: academic associations such as the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies

and the Classical Association; foreign policy and imperial think-tanks like the Royal Institute of

International Affairs; international organisations, especially in the field of intellectual cooperation;

British political associations, including the League of Nations Union (LNU) and the Workers’

Educational Association (WEA); the clubs and personal circles of the British political establishment

and intellectual elite, notably the Oxford college, the Athenæum and the British Academy; and

international educational institutions and the various conferences in the emerging field of international

studies. All three were important figures in the community of internationalists and intellectuals that

developed in Geneva during the 1920s.

During the interwar years, the classicising internationalists outlined broadly similarly liberal-idealist

and civic visions of global order centring on international governing institutions, cooperative ethics,

and open diplomatic practices, what internationalists referred to as ‘the new diplomacy’.19 They all

championed the League of Nations, although Zimmern became more vocally critical after the League’s

weak response to the Manchurian and Abyssinian crises. Horrified by war, they supported

international disarmament efforts and the interwar peace movement, although they believed that

collective military action was justified and necessary in certain situations. They were, therefore,

‘pacificists’ not pacifists.20 They were convinced of the possibility of ‘progress’ in international

affairs, placing faith in the power of an international public opinion to build and underpin an enduring

and peaceable international order. Moreover, for the most part, classicising internationalism was self-

consciously centrist. Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern engaged with the British political establishment

regardless of the governing party, although they usually supported the Liberal Party and favoured

Liberal and Labour politicians. Their writings also sought to persuade what Arthur Marwick has

termed British ‘middle opinion’, a progressive consensus on the social and political questions of the

1930s.21 Indeed, these figures pitched support for the League as something that was part of a contested

political arena yet simultaneously above partisan politics, a reflection of the deep imprint of republican

19 The new diplomacy emphasised open, public discussion and international cooperation. Internationalists opposed this to

the ‘old diplomacy’ of Great Power politics, national interest, the balance of power and secretive agreements, which they

blamed for the outbreak of war in 1914. See Harold Nicolson, Sir Arthur Nicolson: A Study in the Old Diplomacy (London:

Constable & Co, 1930); Hall, Dilemmas of Decline, pp. 92–93. 20 Martin Ceadel, ‘The Peace Movement Between the Wars: Problems of Definition’, in Campaigns for Peace: British

Peace Movements in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Richard Taylor and Nigel Young (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 1997), pp. 73–99. 21 Arthur Marwick, ‘Middle Opinion in the Thirties: Planning, Progress and “Political Agreement”’, English Historical

Review, 79.311 (1964), 285–98. See also, Helen McCarthy, ‘Leading from the Centre: The League of Nations Union,

Foreign Policy and “Political Agreement” in the 1930s’, Contemporary British History, 23.4 (2009), 527–42 (pp. 527–

28).

15

notions of the common good and the corrupting influence of private (national) interest upon their

theories of cooperative internationalism.

Toynbee was more radical than Zimmern or Murray, and an intellectual outlier in the wartime Foreign

Office, where he argued for an entente with Bolshevik Russia and for national self-determination in

the post-Ottoman Near East.22 Conversely, Murray and Zimmern immediately viewed Russian

communism as a major international threat. In early 1919, Zimmern sought the help of Lord Bryce in

establishing a society to publicise information on the new ‘barbarous tyranny’ in Russia.23 The young

Toynbee’s radicalism waned, and he became increasingly hostile to Russian communism, which he

feared could drastically reconfigure Western civilisation in a manner similar to the Christianisation of

the later Roman empire.24 Toynbee also critiqued state sovereignty and nationalism in stronger terms

and more consistently than either Murray or Zimmern, although all three viewed militaristic

nationalism as a major barrier to international peace. In 1914, Toynbee told Murray that, ‘if you are

going to have international cooperation you have got to sacrifice complete independence of action.’25

In 1930, he argued that, ‘we have to retransfer the prestige and the prerogatives of sovereignty… from

the local national states by which sovereignty has been usurped, with disastrous consequences, for

half a millennium, to some institution embodying our society as a whole.’26 By contrast, Zimmern’s

1918 draft for post-war international government involved institutional structures with no direct

sovereign power.27 Zimmern argued that internationalism was only achievable through national

distinctiveness, and criticised cosmopolitanism as a deracinated ideal.28 Murray’s internationalism

was self-consciously cosmopolitan. He disliked the sovereign nation-state and argued that assertions

of self-determination should be quashed if they encouraged war.29 Murray and Zimmern criticised the

right of states to wage war, but their internationalism failed to seriously challenge the supremacy of

sovereign statehood, instead arguing that the League activities should be based on the voluntary action

of states.30 Both were concerned above all to maintain British imperial sovereignty against the

22 McNeill, pp. 76–77; Gabriel Paquette, ‘The Impact of the 1917 Russian Revolutions on Arnold J. Toynbee’s Historical

Thought, 1917–34’, Revolutionary Russia, 13.1 (2000), 55–80 (pp. 65–67). 23 Zimmern to Lord Bryce, 12 February 1919, The James Bryce Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Bryce 156, fols.

165–166. 24 Arnold Toynbee, ‘Historical Parallels to Current International Problems’, International Affairs, 10.4 (1931), 477–492

(pp. 486–88). 25 Toynbee to Murray, 31 August 1914, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 26 Arnold Toynbee, ‘World Sovereignty and World Culture: The Trend of International Affairs Since the War’, Pacific

Affairs, 4.9 (1931), 753–78 (p. 759). 27 Zimmern, ‘Memorandum Prepared for the Consideration of the British Government in Connexion with the Forthcoming

Peace Settlement’ (1918), MS Zimmern 82, fol. 38. 28 Alfred Zimmern, Learning and Leadership: A Study of the Needs and Possibilities of International Intellectual Co-

Operation (Geneva: League of Nations, 1927), p. 30. 29 Gilbert Murray, ‘Self-Determination of Nationalities’, Journal of the British Institute of International Affairs, 1.1 (1922),

6–13. 30 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, pp. 175–204.

16

potential encroachments of international government and the increasingly strident anti-colonial

liberation movements that had emerged in British territories after 1918. Conversely, Toynbee was a

regular critic of the destructive impact of European imperialism on global cultures, the immorality and

violence of imperial realpolitik, and the dehumanising rhetoric of colonisation.31

The classicising internationalists also expressed different identities as internationalist intellectuals,

which were reflected in their main interwar academic chairs. Murray considered himself primarily a

classical scholar, and engaged with world affairs through public addresses and his extensive work for

internationalist institutions and associations, above all the LNU and the League’s Committee on

Intellectual Co-operation (CIC). Foreign affairs was a secondary, although interrelated, intellectual

concern, and one that took up increasing amounts of Murray’s time and energy. Zimmern was also

engaged in transnational institutional and educational life, primarily through the International Institute

for Intellectual Co-operation (IIIC). He identified primarily as a political scientist and international

relations specialist, albeit a historically minded one. Toynbee viewed himself as an international

historian and later a universal historian in the mould of Polybius. Yet, all three figures were what

Stefan Collini terms ‘public moralists’, intellectuals who attempted to persuade their contemporaries

to live according to their own professed ideals and who addressed an audience that was not merely

sectional or local.32 The classicising internationalists used their public platforms and intellectual

reputations in Europe and America to argue for a moral liberal international order based on ancient

Greek ideals. As a prominent voice in Liberal Party politics and British public life who regularly

lectured in Europe and America, Murray was perhaps ‘Britain’s most distinguished and well-known

scholar’ during the first half of the twentieth century.33 Toynbee was never involved in party politics,

admitting to possessing a ‘temperamental inhibition against supporting institutions or causes’.34 But

Toynbee viewed his academic work as part of a wider ethical and political project to develop the

internationalist spirit and uphold international peace. For Toynbee, ‘the teaching of history

internationally’ was essential to developing ‘a spirit of international co-operation, peace and good-

will.’35 Zimmern agreed about the purpose of scholarly research, and propounded a similar message

in his inaugural address at Oxford: ‘we are seeking indeed to understand the modern world in order

that we may minister to its unity.’36 Moreover, the classicising internationalists felt that they spoke to

and for a transnational public comprised of the academic and associational networks of politically

31 Ian Hall, ‘“The Toynbee Convector”: The Rise and Fall of Arnold J. Toynbee’s Anti-Imperial Mission to the West’, The

European Legacy, 17.4 (2012), 455–69. 32 Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp.

2–3. 33 Overy, p. 25. 34 Toynbee to Murray, 21 April 1928, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 35 Toynbee, ‘Inaugural Lecture as Professor of International History’ (1926), p. 1, Toynbee Papers, Box 3. 36 Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, pp. 22–23.

17

conscious American and European intellectuals, as well as what Murray described in 1920 as ‘the

public opinion of the world’, a loosely defined (but allegedly numerically dominant) mass of ordinary

people in countries around the world that the classicising internationalists were convinced were

committed to peace, cooperative internationalism and the League of Nations.37

This thesis contests the numerous recent historical assessments of Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern that

divide their thought into two distinct phases: their pre-war classical scholarship and their specialisation

in international relations after 1914. Wartime work for the British state was doubtless important in

motivating the classicising internationalists’ growing interest in world politics and their personal

engagement in internationalist organisations, institutions and associations. Their critiques of

nationalism, state sovereignty and traditional diplomatic practices hardened in the face of the

unprecedented destruction in France. Nonetheless, this apparent shift in intellectual attention from the

classical world to international politics has coloured recent interpretations of the classicising

internationalists. Their regular engagement with classical literature is portrayed as a reflection of their

social milieu, of the British intellectual and political elite’s educational grounding in classical studies.

Jeanne Morefield views Murray’s and Zimmern’s classicism as part of their educational formation in

the Oxford idealist school of T.H. Green (1836–82) and Benjamin Jowett (1817–93), a tradition in

which liberalism was read through the Greek and Roman classics.38 Cornelia Navari argues that

Toynbee’s interest in the rise and decline of civilisations was a product of his Oxford classicism.39

Luca Castellin recognises that Toynbee was prone to interpolate classical analogies into his

descriptions of contemporary events, especially in the Surveys.40 However, the regular parallels that

Toynbee drew between ancient and modern history are seen by Castellin as literary devices, a natural

response to a problem from someone whose education had been dominated by classical studies. My

research challenges these interpretations and contends that, as these figures’ intellectual attention

pivoted from antiquity to international relations, they remained convinced of the enduring importance

of the classical world and its particular relevance to the dilemmas and opportunities of twentieth-

century internationality.

37 Gilbert Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, in Essays & Addresses (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1921), pp. 183–200 (p. 200).

For the history of transatlantic internationalist networks in the 1920s, see Daniel Gorman, The Emergence of International

Society in the 1920s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1–5. 38 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, p. 76. 39 Cornelia Navari, Public Intellectuals and International Affairs (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters Publishing, 2013), p.

118. 40 Luca Castellin, ‘Arnold J. Toynbee’s Quest for a New World Order: A Survey’, The European Legacy, 20.6 (2015),

619–635 (p. 623).

18

Contextualising international relations

This project aims to make an important contribution to the intellectual history of British liberal

internationalism. It is not primarily concerned with interwar perceptions of what is known as ‘classical

civilisation’, a term that denotes the culture, ideas and events of the period covering, and uniting, the

history of the ancient Mediterranean between the seventh century BC and the fifth century AD, as well

as the academic study of that period. Instead, it focuses on how the ideas and historical experience of

classical antiquity were deployed in modern political argument. Civilisation provides this thesis with

its conceptual framework, a lens that enables us to think about how ancient and modern interact.

Moreover, civilisation was an idea, or a constellation of ideas, that enabled the classicising

internationalists to integrate their admiration of ancient Greece within modern theories of politics. By

uniting the ancient city-state and the modern international system under rubric of civilisation, they

established the conceptual foundation for their arguments for an internationalised Athenian civic spirit.

The classicising internationalists’ fusion of the ancient civic republican heritage with the new realities

of modern internationality influenced the discourses of international relations that emerged and

formalised during the first half of the twentieth century. Thus, the thesis stresses the significance of

the languages of political thought and the relationship between thought and action. It assumes that

ideas, languages and perceptions matter in international relations: how world politics was and is

conceived and described both shapes and influences political analysis and practical programmes.

Indeed, as Duncan Bell argues, the ‘essentially archaeological’ methods of intellectual history can be

useful to the historian of international thought by ‘elucidating the concepts through which human

collectivities organise and constitute themselves and the meaningful shift(s) in such understandings.’41

Further, following the assumptions and methodologies of Skinnerian linguistic contextualism, I

emphasise the historical contingency of political vocabularies and seek to understand political rhetoric

by being attentive to both the context of writing and the context of reception. In Skinner’s words, ‘the

understanding of texts… presupposes the grasp both of what they were intended to mean, and how

this meaning was intended to be taken.’42 As a theory of politics, classicising internationalism reflected

a series of intellectual, political, social, economic and cultural contexts and sought to shape at least

some of those contexts.

41 Duncan Bell, ‘Language, Legitimacy, and the Project of Critique’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, 27.3 (2002),

327–50 (p. 332). 42 Quentin Skinner, ‘Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas’, History and Theory, 8.1 (1969), 3–53 (p. 48).

19

Classicising internationalist thought reflected an early-twentieth-century intellectual context defined

by a ‘new self-consciousness of the internationality of everyday life.’43 During the nineteenth century,

developments in communications technologies, notably electricity and steam power, propelled the

global expansion of trade and opened up greater opportunities for cross-border sociability and

cooperation. Public recognition of a shrinking world, what H.G. Wells (1866–1946) termed the

‘abolition of distance’, provided the infrastructure and motivation for the emergence of international

associations, organisations and congresses like the International Red Cross (1863), the Universal

Postal Union (1874), or the Hague peace conferences (1899 and 1907).44 Politically conscious

intellectuals and politicians also began to discuss the emergence of an ‘international society’ centring

on the transnational movements of people and ideas and the activities of the new international

institutions. In 1906, the economist J.A. Hobson (1858–1940) asserted that transnational capitalism

and faster communications had pushed human consciousness in an irrevocably international direction:

The world is as large as we by our practical experience and our imaginative experience and

sympathy choose and are able to make it… Everyone, to-day, as we say familiarly, lives at the

end of a telegraph line, which means… that anything happening in the most remote part of the

world makes its immediate impression upon the society of nations.45

By the early twentieth century, the growing consciousness of contemporary internationality

encouraged intellectuals to reconsider the nature of state sovereignty and question the validity of the

traditional diplomatic assumptions of intrigue, national interest and the balance of power. These were

deemed archaic, incompatible with an integrated international economy in which peoples and states

had common rather than competing interests.46 As Norman Angell (1872–1967) wrote in 1914, ‘the

political ideas which at present shape the conduct and determine the attitude of one State to another…

are the outcome of certain abstract theories at variance with the facts.’47

Global trade and modern communications, the transnational spread of ideas facilitated by mass

literacy, and the growing acceptance of democratic politics in Britain encouraged advocates of a ‘new

internationalism’ that emphasised the importance of free commerce, international law and institutions,

43 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), p. 14. 44 H.G. Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind (London: William Heinemann, 1932), p. 2. Wells first

approached this idea in H.G. Wells, Anticipations, 2nd edn (London: Chapman & Hall, 1902), p. 136. 45 J.A. Hobson, ‘The Ethics of Internationalism’, International Journal of Ethics, 17.1 (1906), 16–28 (p. 17); Duncan Bell,

‘On J.A. Hobson’s “The Ethics of Internationalism”’, Ethics, 125.1 (2014), 220–22. 46 Quentin Skinner, ‘The Sovereign State: A Genealogy’, in Sovereignty in Fragments: The Past, Present and Future of a

Contested Concept (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 26–46 (pp. 42–43); Andreas Osiander, ‘Re-

Reading Early-Twentieth‐Century IR Theory: Idealism Revisited’, International Studies Quarterly, 42.3 (1998), 409–32

(pp. 415–16). 47 Norman Angell, The Foundations of International Polity (Toronto: William Briggs, 1914), p. xv.

20

and public opinion in underpinning international peace and cooperation.48 Indeed, Edwardian

intellectuals proposed various models of transoceanic, international or continental political

communities, for example H.G. Wells’s rational world state.49 As Osiander and Sluga argue, these

internationalist projects and modes of thinking rested on modernist arguments about the unprecedented

nature of industrial capitalism and global interconnectivity.50 However, the writings of the classicising

internationalists disrupt the interpretation of the new internationalism as an overtly modernist mode

of thinking. Although these three figures viewed the League of Nations system as an unprecedentedly

modern political development, they interpreted this as an expansion of the scale in which politics is

enacted, not necessarily a completely new departure for political theory. For Zimmern, ‘Aristotle,

Locke, and the whole lineage of political thinkers up to the present generation have… not been

specifically concerned with our particular problem—the problem of law and order for the world’; yet,

simultaneously, ‘either all that the political thinkers of the past, from Aristotle onward, have taught us

about politics is invalid or it has applications to the contemporary world.’51 As science and trade

appeared to shrink the globe and modern communications replaced the ancient town crier, the

classicising internationalists felt that a transnational community based on the personal ties, cooperative

social relations and civic spirit of the ancient city-state had become a practical model for modern

international relations. They reimagined Greek civic ideals on the global scale appropriate to modern

understandings of scope of the political.

This thesis takes a historico-contextual approach to the history of international thought, placing

writings about world politics in their wider social, cultural, political and intellectual contexts. The

same approach is applied to the disciplinary history of international relations. The subsequent chapters

emphasise how disciplinary histories must foreground the deep entanglement between theories of

international relations and other fields of study, especially the classics. International relations theory

coalesced into a distinct academic discipline during the first half of the twentieth century through the

work of a diverse group of primarily, but not exclusively, British and American thinkers, most of

whom had academic interests in other fields, including Norman Angell, Léon Bourgeois, Hedley Bull,

E.H. Carr, J.A. Hobson, Hersch Lauterpacht, Hans Morgenthau, Reinhold Niebuhr, Paul Reinsch, and

Martin Wight.52 This intellectual diversity was downplayed in subsequent disciplinary histories by

48 Frank Trentmann, ‘After the Nation-State: Citizenship, Empire and Global Coordination in the New Internationalism,

1914–30’, in Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire, and Transnationalism, c.1880–1950, ed. by Kevin Grant, Philippa

Levine, and Frank Trentmann (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 34–53 (p. 35). 49 This idea appeared in Wells’s fiction and non-fiction. See, for example, H.G. Wells, Outline of History (London: Cassell,

1920). 50 For this reading of idealist internationalism, see Osiander, p. 409; Sluga, pp. 2–3. 51 Alfred Zimmern, ‘The Problem of Collective Security’, in Neutrality and Collective Security, ed. by Quincy Wright

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1936), pp. 3–89 (p. 15,57). 52 Although the majority of these theorists were associated with British or American universities, Stöckmann argues for

the vital contribution of continental, especially French and German, thinkers to the development of international relations.

21

figures like Hedley Bull, who sought to legitimise a particular way of theorising international

politics.53 They attempted to create an authoritative collective disciplinary memory centring on a great

debate between rival ‘idealist’ and ‘realist’ schools of thought. Idealist internationalists placed faith in

the role of international law and institutions in world politics, desired to abolish war, and believed in

reason and progress in international relations. This position (sometimes referred to as ‘liberal-idealist’)

was associated with Norman Angell, Leonard Woolf, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and Philip Noel-

Baker, as well as Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern. Beginning in the 1930s, idealists engaged in, and

allegedly lost, a debate with ‘realist’ theorists of international relations such as E.H. Carr, Karl

Mannheim, Hans Morgenthau, Georg Schwarzenberger and Martin Wight. Whilst there is no settled

definition or consensus of realism, mid-century realists tended to adopt a Hobbesian view that human

nature is concerned overwhelmingly with security and emphasise the role of power, anarchy and the

state in international politics.54 For many realist thinkers, the outbreak of war in 1939 evidenced the

reality of power politics and national security and the ineffectiveness of international institutions.

The present thesis is situated within a strand of historical thinking about the theories and practices of

world politics that Bell has termed the ‘historiographical turn in international relations’, as well as the

increasing focus on the history of international political thought from within the field of intellectual

history.55 Using the contextual and discursive methodologies of intellectual history, much recent

scholarship has challenged the assumptions of the traditional disciplinary history of international

relations.56 The notion of a continuous tradition of international thought that incorporates Thucydides,

Hobbes and Machiavelli alongside modern figures like Carr has been rightly criticised.57 A more

nuanced picture has emerged, one that stresses the complexity and diversity of early-twentieth-century

international thought as well as its close relationship to the European imperial project. Long and

Wilson argue that the interwar idealists have been caricatured rather than read, with little notice given

Jan Stöckmann, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism in the Study of International Relations, 1900–1939’, History Compass,

15.2 (2017), 1–13 (pp. 4–6). 53 Hedley Bull, ‘The Theory of International Politics 1919–1969’, in The Aberystwyth Papers, ed. by Brian Porter (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1972), pp. 33–36. More recent examples include A.J.R. Groom, André Barrinha, and William

Olson, International Relations Then and Now: Origins and Trends in Interpretation (New York: Routledge, 2019), pp.

104–34; John Mearsheimer, ‘E.H. Carr vs. Idealism: The Battle Rages On’, International Relations, 19.2 (2005), 139–52. 54 For a recent overview of the rise of realism in academic international relations, see Hall, Dilemmas of Decline, pp. 39–

47. On the problems with disciplinary history, see J.S. Dryzek and S.T. Leonard, ‘History and Discipline in Political

Science’, American Political Science Review, 82.4 (1988), 1245–60. 55 Duncan Bell, ‘International Relations: The Dawn of a Historiographical Turn?’, British Journal of Politics &

International Relations, 3.1 (2001), 115–26. 56 See, for example, Lucian Ashworth, A History of International Thought (New York: Routledge, 2014); Brian Schmidt,

The Political Discourse of Anarchy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998); Historiographical Investigations

in International Relations, ed. by Brian Schmidt and Nicolas Guilhot (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019). 57 See the introduction to Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations, ed. by David Long

and Brian Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), p. 8. On the role of the classicising

internationalists in shaping the modern perception of Thucydides as an expert on international relations, see Neville

Morley, ‘Legitimizing War and Defending Peace: Thucydides in the First World War and After’, Classical Receptions

Journal, 10.4 (2018), 415–34 (pp. 429–31).

22

to the cross-fertilisation of idealist and realist conceptions of world politics in the writings of Zimmern

or even Carr.58 Indeed, Zimmern himself acknowledged this merging of approaches, noting in 1936

that ‘Bryce, Acton, Wilson, Root, and Masaryk will go down in history as part of the advance guard

of what is today a far larger company… realists in observation, idealists in aims and motive.’59

The present thesis emphasises the ways in which early-twentieth-century international thought has

been intertwined with longstanding European political, economic and imperial priorities. Historians

have increasingly demonstrated a postcolonial sensitivity to the Western-centric and imperialist nature

of international relations theory, international institutions and international law. Antony Anghie and

Martti Koskenniemi assert the central place of perceptions of cultural difference, especially the

discourse of civilisation, in the historical development of modern international law.60 John M. Hobson

argues that the history of international theory after c.1760 presents a series of Eurocentric conceptions

of world politics that promote the West or Europe as the sole proactive subject of, and the ideal and

normative referent in, world politics.61 Mark Mazower stresses the connections between the

administrative personnel and intellectual proponents of twentieth-century international institutions and

European imperialists, and the continuities between theories of international and imperial order.62

Likewise, Glenda Sluga notes that Europeans were hugely overrepresented in the League of Nations’

bureaucracy, and that League administrators were self-consciously committed to what they termed

‘civilisational’ representation.63 David Long and Brian Schmidt argue that imperialism was central to

early-twentieth-century discourses of international relations.64 Jeanne Morefield contends that a

spiritual vision of liberal universalism enabled Murray and Zimmern to occlude any serious

consideration of, or challenge to, international and imperial power dynamics.65 Indeed, despite the

various universalising tendencies and claims of its proponents, classicising internationalism was never

truly global. It remained limited by the exclusionary hierarchies of race, empire, class, civilisation and

power that structured much early twentieth century international and imperial thought.

Acknowledging the reality of British global and imperial decline, all three tied Britain’s political,

cultural, economic and imperial position in the world to the fate of the League of Nations.

58 Peter Wilson, ‘Introduction: The Twenty Years’ Crisis and the Category of “Idealism” in International Relations’, in

Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed, ed. by David Long and Peter Wilson (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 1–24 (p. 16). 59 Zimmern, ‘Collective Security’, pp. 87–88. 60 Antony Anghie, ‘The Evolution of International Law: Colonial and Postcolonial Realities’, Third World Quarterly, 27.5

(2006), 739–53; Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 127–52. 61 John Hobson, The Eurocentric Conception of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760–2010 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2012). 62 Mark Mazower, Governing the World: The History of an Idea (London: Allen Lane, 2012), pp. 128–31, 165–71. 63 Sluga, p. 60. 64 Long and Schmidt, pp. 9–10. 65 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, p. 206.

23

As an intellectual history, this thesis explores the public articulation of ideas about politics and society.

The classicising internationalists used their writings to influence public perceptions of international

relations and government foreign policy. Consequently, the source base is comprised largely of the

classicising internationalists’ published writings on international relations and ancient history. These

figures worked out their ideas on international politics largely through books and academic articles,

collections of essays, public addresses and contributions to newspapers. Murray, Zimmern and

especially Toynbee published an enormous amount of material between the wars. For reasons of

manageability, their journalistic output—primarily comment pieces, reporting and letters to editors—

does not feature extensively in the subsequent chapters. Although the focus of the thesis lies in the

public domain, the classicising internationalists’ private thoughts and archival materials are useful in

elucidating their thinking about international politics. The papers of Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern

contain lectures and radio broadcasts, unpublished essays, minutes of committee meetings for various

international institutes and societies, and prospectuses for academic conferences and education

programmes. Further, as prominent public intellectuals and influential voices among the British

political establishment, the classicising internationalists corresponded with numerous

internationalists, intellectuals and politicians, for example James Bryce (1838–1932), Lionel Curtis

(1872–1955), Ramsay MacDonald (1866–1937) and Graham Wallas (1858–1932). The classicising

internationalists’ voluminous correspondence with these figures and each other unveils their personal

opinions on important events and figures as well as more unguarded comments on their hopes or fears

for the future. Their letters often reveal the depth to which the ancient past structured their engagement

with the modern world.

Periodisation and structure

This thesis covers a period stretching from the first decade of the twentieth century to the outbreak of

the Second World War, but focuses largely on the years between 1919 and 1939. The First World War

was crucial in propelling the classicising internationalists towards a systematic intellectual

engagement with world politics. Nonetheless, their pre-war classical scholarship is essential to

understanding their later international thought. During the interwar years, they wrote widely on

international relations, devoted a huge amount of their time and energies to the work of international

organisations and think tanks, and became in the process among Britain’s most prominent and

influential commentators on foreign affairs. I conclude the thesis in 1939 for two reasons. Firstly, the

24

classicising internationalists became less influential in the field of international relations after the

Second World War.66 Secondly, classicising internationalist thought changed significantly as a

consequence of that conflict.

Although active in the initial discussions surrounding the establishment of the United Nations during

the mid-1940s, the classicising internationalists were only briefly involved in the inner workings of

international institutions after 1939. Given his prominent research position in the wartime Foreign

Office, Toynbee was part of the British delegation to the peace conference in spring 1946, but resigned

in July after becoming disappointed at the inability of the Allied powers to conclude satisfactory peace

treaties. In response to his burgeoning transnational fame as a world historian, he retired from Chatham

House in 1955 to focus on his public engagements and philosophy of history.67 Murray helped to

merge the League’s CIC, which was dissolved in 1946, into UNESCO. He supported the United

Nations but was disturbed by its significant communist presence and criticised its support for

decolonisation.68 Zimmern headed the Preparatory Commission for UNESCO, wrote its draft

constitution, and was its first director. He was, however, shortly replaced by the biologist Julian

Huxley.69 Indeed, the key roles in the direction of post-war international institutions and organisations

went to a new cadre of internationalists who were not so implicated in the political failures of the

League of Nations.

The classicising internationalists’ influence within academic discipline of international relations

declined after 1939 as they were repeatedly criticised by an increasingly assertive and ascendant

school of realist thinker in Britain and America. Along with Norman Angell and Leonard Woolf, they

were the main targets of E.H. Carr’s powerful and enduring attack on liberal-idealist internationalism

in the Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939). For Carr, these internationalists were ‘utopians’ who overestimated

the role of law and morality and underestimated the role of power in international relations, and

ignored how ‘morality is the product of power’. Moreover, their claims to universalism obscured the

underlying reality that their prescriptions for global order were hierarchical and often reflected and

defended European political, economic and imperial interests.70 In 1948, Murray recognised a

66 Toynbee was a renown public intellectual in the 1940s and 1950s, but this was based on his reputation as a world

historian and the large post-war readership for A Study of History. Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, 12 vols (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1934–1961). 67 McNeill, pp. 201–2, 206. 68 Francis West, Gilbert Murray, a Life (London: Croom Helm, 1984), p. 243. 69 John Toye and Richard Toye, ‘One World, Two Cultures? Alfred Zimmern, Julian Huxley and the Ideological Origins

of UNESCO’, History, 95.319 (2010), 308–331. 70 E.H. Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 2nd edn (London: Macmillan and Co., 1941), pp. 54–56, 82. I concur with Carr on

this point. This project stresses the connections between idealist internationalism and European imperial thinking.

25

changing academic mood, writing that ‘moral ideals were out of place in politics; liberalism an out-

dated luxury, collective security a will-o’-the-wisp; small nations militarily negligible and bound of

necessity to obey their betters; and the politics of power the only reality.’71

The escalating international crisis of the 1930s and the failings of the collective security system

propelled a shift in classicising internationalist thought towards religious spirituality and a more statist

internationalism. These processes will not be investigated extensively in the subsequent chapters

because they were largely a response to the collapse of the League project with which this thesis is

primarily concerned. Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern were all swept up in the Christian revival in

1930s England. They championed the ecumenical movement, which gained the support of many

liberal intellectuals despondent at the failures of political internationalism.72 A heightened religiosity

marked their later writings. Zimmern began to emphasise the role of spiritual values and religious duty

in world affairs.73 As McIntire notes, Toynbee moved from liberal agnosticism to an Augustinian

conception of man’s relation to God, which was evident in his writings from 1939.74 After the outbreak

of war, Toynbee increasingly found solace in mysticism and a universalist Christian spirituality. In

1942 he reconceptualised the relationship between religions and civilisations in world history, and he

devoted the later volumes of the Study of History to outlining a global syncretic religion of love.75

After 1939, even the fiercely agnostic Murray endorsed the idea and reality of a Christian civilisation.

He stressed how international liberalism was the successor to a ‘Hellenic and Christian’ tradition that

was threatened by a resurgent barbarism.76 Moreover, the classicising internationalists’ conceptions

of world order underwent a significant shift. From 1943, Murray advocated state-driven international

cooperation based on the coordination of scientific expertise for democratic ends.77 Horrified by the

advent of the nuclear age, Zimmern proposed a world government with a permanent executive body

to regulate and control nuclear technology, a regime of world law, and a unified global citizenry.78

Likewise, Toynbee recognised that atomic weapons had fundamentally altered the traditional theories

of international security. His immediate reaction to the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to

call for an assertive ‘world government’ that could contain the destructive, civilisation-ending

71 Gilbert Murray, From the League to U.N. (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 7. 72 Hall, Dilemmas of Decline, p. 75. 73 Alfred Zimmern, Spiritual Values and World Affairs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939). The religious elements in

Zimmern’s thought, which have been ably investigated in Tomohito Baji, ‘Commonwealth: Alfred Zimmern and World

Citizenship’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Cambridge, 2016), pp. 115–38. 74 C.T. McIntire, ‘Toynbee’s Philosophy of History: His Christian Period’, in Toynbee: Reappraisals, ed. by C.T. McIntire

and Marvin Perry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), pp. 63–92. 75 McNeill, p. 179; Hall, Dilemmas of Decline, p. 75. 76 Gilbert Murray, The Anchor of Civilization (London: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 29. 77 Mazower, Governing the World, pp. 202–3. 78 Baji aside, few historians have explored Zimmern’s political thinking after 1945. Baji, ‘Commonwealth’, pp. 142–50.

26

potential of nuclear energy.79 All three figures now placed faith in an ascendant America, not Britain,

as the benevolent hegemon underpinning the post-war global order.

The thesis is structured thematically. A product of this is that each chapter gives different weight to

one or more of the classicising internationalists. The first chapter contextualises classicising

internationalist thought in early-twentieth-century British society, politics and culture. It explores the

position of classical studies in early-twentieth-century British intellectual life. Challenged

institutionally and ideologically by rising disciplinary pluralism, academic professionalisation and

organisation, the growing authority of the sciences, and the democratisation of the British national

polity, classical studies was by 1914 a discipline on the defensive. This chapter also explores the

classicism of Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern. It outlines their distinctive interpretation of the fifth-

century polis as a political form that, reimagined through the lens of contemporary internationality,

could provide the framework for a modern civic international order. The subsequent chapters

investigate prominent aspects of classicising internationalist thought: civic republicanism, public

opinion and education, and the meaning and direction of history. The second chapter foregrounds

Zimmern and argues that republican political thinking—with its characteristic focus on civic virtue,

duty, citizenship, the public and the common good—was a crucial and somewhat neglected influence

on British liberal internationalism. The interwar years represented an important moment in the history

of the Anglophone republican tradition, one that has been overlooked due to a reluctance among

historians of political thought to conceptualise republicanism beyond the parameters of the state. The

third chapter examines questions of the international public, civic education and the intellectual in the

classicising internationalist imaginary. Few intellectual historians explore the central place of

education in these figures’ political thought. This chapter contends that education, especially civics,

was a central concern for the classicising internationalists and was crucial to their conceptions of

international order. All three stressed the importance of public opinion in upholding international

peace and outlined or participated in a vast array of public education initiatives that sought to develop

something resembling the informed, politically engaged Athenian citizen on an international stage.

Their thinking about education was intertwined with a classically inspired conception of the

intellectual as a paternalistic leadership figure in global politics. The final chapter focuses largely on

Toynbee and asserts that recent scholarly interpretations overlook the profound impact that his

engagement with ancient Greek historical thought had upon his philosophy of history. Toynbee’s

thinking about the history of civilisations was inseparable from his internationalism, and both were

underpinned by his classicism. He stressed that the history and ideas of Greece were vital intellectual

tools for understanding the modern experience, the place of the West in world history, and the nature

79 Toynbee to Murray, 15 August 1945, Toynbee Papers, Box 72.

27

and meaning of the 1930s international crisis. Indeed, throughout the early twentieth century, Murray,

Toynbee and Zimmern interpreted modern politics and society through the lens of classical antiquity.

28

Chapter I – The ancient past and the international present:

classical Greece and global order

Thucydides with his long and detailed account of an inter-tribal or inter-municipal war, decked out

with sham speeches which were never delivered: Plato with his imaginary Utopia… Aristotle with his

laborious investigations into the municipal pathology of his day… what have we to do with all this in

an age of world problems and conflicts and of not merely continent-wide but international ideas and

projects of organization?

Alfred Zimmern, ‘Political Thought’, 1921.1

As a highly regarded classical scholar, an influential voice in discussions surrounding the creation of

the League of Nations, and the world’s first professor of international relations, Zimmern was well

positioned to recognise the substantial differences between the politics of ancient Greece and his own

time. Like many British commentators and political theorists, he conceived the international system

centring on the League of Nations as something profoundly new: a break from older diplomatic

practices, an alternative to national competition and the balance of power, and an unprecedentedly

global form of political organisation. The scale and focus of life and thought in the Greek city-states

seemed, at first sight, inappropriate to an age characterised by international issues, ideas and

institutions. Yet, for Zimmern, and likewise for Murray and Toynbee, the twentieth century was

entangled with its distant classical past. Although modern political problems were uniquely global,

the product of a century of Western industrial, commercial and imperial expansion, they were not

uniquely international. The people of the classical world, especially the Greeks, had faced comparable

dilemmas. Thus, ancient Greek literature, philosophy and historical experience offered vital lessons

for modern international relations.

This thesis adopts a historico-contextual approach to the disciplinary history of international relations

that situates the theories and theorists of world politics in their wider social, cultural, political and

1 Zimmern, ‘Political Thought’, pp. 321–22.

29

intellectual contexts. International relations theory coalesced into a distinct academic discipline during

the first half of the twentieth century through the work of a number of largely Western intellectuals

who brought the approaches, ideas and concerns of a range of scholarly fields and institutions, and the

limitless diversity of personal experience, to bear on their thinking about the world. Recent

historiography emphasises the ways in which early-twentieth-century international thought was

intertwined with longstanding European political priorities and embedded within the scholarship of

more established subjects. Mark Mazower stresses the ideological and personal connections between

the emergence of international institutions in the aftermath of the First World War and theorists of

imperialism.2 Likewise, David Long and Brian Schmidt argue that imperialism was central to early-

twentieth-century discourses of international relations.3 As Ian Hall notes, before the mid-1960s, few

people who thought and wrote about international relations in Britain were professional, specialist

scholars: most were simultaneously philosophers, lawyers, diplomats, journalists, sociologists,

politicians, historians or classicists.4 This chapter draws upon this body of literature. Above all, it

follows the contention of Collini, Winch and Burrow that the early history of an academic discipline

can only be understood within a wider frame of reference, one that incorporates the ideas of

practitioners in other fields.5 In its methodologies, ideas, institutions and academic personnel, early-

twentieth-century international relations theory was entangled with more established fields of study,

especially history and the classics.

Through their intellectual and institutional influence within the British academic world and foreign

policy establishment, and their work for prominent international administrative organisations in

Britain and Geneva, the classicising internationalists played a vital role in shaping international

relations into a self-conscious field of inquiry devoted to study of international politics. Moreover, the

ways that these figures understood the world were underpinned by a pervasive classicism. The

emergence of academic international relations must therefore be understood in the context of the

classicising imaginary of three of the discipline’s foundational theorists. By 1920, classical studies in

Britain was very much in decline, its intellectual and cultural authority challenged by the rise of

professional academic scholarship, the theories and methodologies of the social and natural sciences,

and the emergence of a democratic national polity.6 But Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern remained

convinced that the classical past was vitally pertinent to the internationality of their historical moment.

Crucially, the ancient Greeks offered ways of thinking about politics that were fundamental to modern

2 Mazower, Governing the World, pp. 128–31, 165–71. 3 Long and Schmidt, pp. 9–10. 4 Hall, Dilemmas of Decline, pp. 8–11. 5 Stefan Collini, Donald Winch, and J.W. Burrow, That Noble Science of Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1983), pp. 3–4. 6 This process has been expertly charted in Stray’s Classics Transformed.

30

attempts to theorise a stable global order centring on the international society of states. Firstly, the

Greeks conceptualised order in a holistic sense that the classicising internationalists felt was

appropriate to thinking about the structure of global politics. Greek universalism offered a way to

transcend the political ideologies and national boundaries that shaped a contested modern political

arena. Secondly, civic republican concepts and values, especially public spirit, were deemed crucial

for revitalising citizenship on the international terms and scale appropriate for an interconnected

modern world. The allegedly universal ideals and institutions of the fifth-century Athenian polis

underpinned the classicising internationalists’ imagining of the international as a civic space.

For the classicising internationalists, the Athenian polis fused the social, the ethical and the political

into a morally cohesive political association marked by a deep civic consciousness. The emphasis on

civic duty and activism in Athenian political practice and Aristotelian philosophy had successfully

reconciled the individual with the social whole, resolving a philosophical tension that exercised the

minds of many British neo-Hegelians who felt that government and community had become

disassociated by the modern separation of state from civil society.7 Moreover, an expanded polis could

act as the framework for a peaceful liberal international order based on cooperative ethics and

international citizenship. Athenian civic consciousness would help to overcome the tension between

global economic integration and the politically fragmented world of independent nation-states, giving

moral direction to the international project encapsulated in the League of Nations. Yet, intriguingly,

the viability of this classicised rendering of the international rested upon very modern developments

in technoscience. As faster communications appeared to shrink the globe, a modern transnational civic

community based on the personal ties and cooperative social relations that characterised the Greek

city-state became theoretically plausible.8 Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern variously conceptualised

the League of Nations system as a polis, republic or a Greek confederation of city-states, all of which

they interpreted as socially, morally and politically integrated civic communities. Indeed, for the

classicising internationalists, the Athenian polis and modern international politics spoke to one another

in multiple ways. This entangling of ancient Greece and modern internationalism is central to

understanding their thought, as well as the broader disciplinary history of international relations

This chapter situates classicising internationalism in its ideological and institutional contexts. The first

section explores the position of the classics—a term that encompasses both the academic study of the

7 On neo-Hegelianism, see David Boucher and Andrew Vincent, British Idealism and Political Theory (Edinburgh:

Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 8 Aristotle argued that the city-state could not function if its population exceeded a certain size, noting that the crier for a

large state would need ‘the voice of a Stentor’, the mythical herald of the Greek forces during the Trojan War. Aristotle,

Politics, 7.1326b.

31

classical world and invocations of classical symbolism and ideas in artistic and literary culture—in

British politics, society, education and culture during the early twentieth century. The second section

sketches the intellectual and institutional worlds of the three classicising internationalists. The third

section focuses on their classicism, in particular their interpretation of the fifth-century Athenian polis

as a model society, an ordered community marked by its civic morality. For Murray, Toynbee and

Zimmern, the polis was the essence of the classical inheritance and vitally relevant to the international

present and future.

The classics in crisis

Shortly after the abolition of the compulsory Greek language requirement for attending Oxford in

1920, the classical scholar and educationalist R.W. Livingstone published The Legacy of Greece

(1921), an edited collection of essays on the classical inheritance. Like many British classicists,

Livingstone responded to the diminishing intellectual authority of his discipline by reasserting the

contemporary value of the classical inheritance: ‘this book … aims at giving some idea of what the

world owes to Greece in various realms of the spirit and the intellect, and of what it can still learn

from her.’9 Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern were among the contributors to Livingstone’s volume,

and, at least in 1921, were tied to a shaken and embattled discipline experiencing something of an

existential crisis. Half a century of social, political and cultural transformation had ensured that by

1920 the classics had surrendered their once dominant place in British culture, education and

intellectual life. From the 1870s, the elitism of classics and its practitioners seemed increasingly out

of touch with a democratising national polity. Moreover, the hegemony of classical studies in British

education was slowly eroded by the emergence and professionalisation of new fields of inquiry, such

as geography, modern history, anthropology and the natural sciences, whose modes of thinking

challenged the humanist assumption that the classical past was a source of permanent authoritative

value.10 Anxious to protect the integrity and intellectual pre-eminence of the classics from these

ideological and institutional threats, embattled twentieth-century classicists had to reimagine and

defend their subject matter in different terms. The classicising internationalists responded to these

challenges by emphasising the dynamic living heritage of Greece against mid-Victorian assertions of

the static, timeless value of antiquity and the methods of modern academic disciplines. They viewed

the Athenian political inheritance as fundamental to Edwardian attempts to construct an inclusive and

9 R.W. Livingstone, ‘Preface’, in The Legacy of Greece, ed. by R.W. Livingstone (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1921),

p. iii. 10 Stray, pp. 106–12.

32

rational social democratic politics and, after 1914, the imperative to build and secure a peaceful

international order.

During the mid-nineteenth century, the classics were unrivalled as a source of authoritative knowledge

and moral exemplar in British intellectual culture and occupied a dominant position in elite educational

institutions. The ancient universities in England both had prestigious classics courses with large

intakes of students. The Classical Tripos at Cambridge and, in particular, Literae Humaniores at

Oxford (known as ‘Greats’) had far-reaching social and cultural influence. Murray, Toynbee and

Zimmern all read classics at Oxford, which was an important component of the education of the British

intellectual and political elite. Literae Humaniores was a four-year course divided into two sets of

examinations. Classical Moderations tested students’ abilities in ancient Greek and Latin language

and grammar and their knowledge of classical literature more generally. The final two years, the Greats

course, involved the detailed study and criticism of a series of texts covering history, ethics,

metaphysics and political philosophy. The Greats curriculum included writings from modern and

ancient authors, and students were encouraged to make comparisons between them. The prominence

of classical studies in education was critical in making antiquity a key symbolic resource through

which the Victorian educated public structured their understanding of the contemporary world.11

From the mid-nineteenth century, British classics experienced a gradual but marked decline in cultural

and intellectual influence. The institutional and ideological supremacy of the classics in universities

was under attack as new disciplines and more modern modes of thinking challenged the intellectual

predominance of classicism. Royal commissions sent to investigate Oxford and Cambridge in the

1850s and 1870s recommended the creation of new honours courses in law, history and science,

although the new disciplines still had to establish a claim to provide a liberal education on the Greats

model.12 For instance, advocates of the creation of an independent English degree at Oxford such as

John Churton Collins (1848–1908) portrayed the academic study of literature as a ‘modern’ Greats

course that would, like classical studies, introduce its students to the ideas and practices of effective

statesmanship.13 The commissions also precipitated a number of reforms to the curriculum and the

conditions of university teaching. At Oxford, the redistribution of college income and the creation of

faculty boards produced an academic organisation in a more recognisably modern sense. The

secularisation of fellowships and the end of prohibitions on marriage for fellows opened greater

11 Frank Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 6, 15. 12 Before 1872, the new honours course at Oxford could only be taken after completing Greats. 13 Emily Jones, Edmund Burke and the Invention of Modern Conservatism, 1830–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2017), pp. 203, 213–19.

33

possibilities for a lifelong academic career and led to the development of a professional community

of academic classicists. The establishment of learned journals, such as the Journal of Hellenic Studies

(1880), were symptomatic of the emergence of a more defined cadre of classical scholars. However,

the title ‘Hellenic Studies’, delineated an area of academic interest wider than Greek language and

reflected a scholarly field in the midst of a lasting ideological transformation. Professionalisation,

specialisation and disciplinary organisation were accompanied by widening conceptions of what

constituted classical studies: the expansion of scholarship beyond the text and the incorporation of

methodologies and evidence from other disciplines, especially archaeology, anthropology and the

natural sciences.14

During the 1890s and 1900s, various associations were founded for new fields of study, for example

Modern Languages (1892), Geography (1893) and Science (1901). These were run largely by teachers,

who pressed for the expansion and consolidation of their subjects at the expense of the classics. Indeed,

in institutional terms, the monopoly of the classics over higher education was undermined by the mere

existence of alternative disciplines within the academic marketplace, as well as their growing

professionalisation and organisation. The creation of the Classical Association in 1903 reflected these

threatening trends. It was founded and run by academics and acted primarily as a defensive body

committed to managing the institutional decline of classics, what Murray, a future president, referred

to as an ‘orderly retreat’.15 Nonetheless, rising disciplinary pluralism pushed classical studies onto the

defensive in ideological terms. The theoretical underpinnings of the sciences and social sciences

attacked the legitimacy of classics and of classicising as a non-contingent source of explanatory power.

In particular, scientific naturalism, which asserted an inert nature without moral content, threatened

humanist notions of a world with intrinsic meaning. The scientific method, which postulated

progression towards a future truth, undermined the validity of the humanist commitment to ideals that

held a permanent authoritative value. The growing authority of the methods and ideas of these areas

of knowledge, especially scientific naturalism, attacked the status of classical studies as an all-

encompassing, exemplary subject. The rise of the sciences accelerated during the First World War,

when a vocal group of pro-science opinion, including H.G. Wells and Edwin Ray Lankester, critiqued

14 Stray, pp. 133–38. On the rise of disciplinarity in classical studies, history and art history, see also James

Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press,

2015), pp. 274–327. The wider context of professionalisation is explored by James Kirby, who challenges the narrative of

disciplinary professionalisation in British historical scholarship between 1870 and 1920. There was, he argues, no simple

transition from amateur or literary history to professional or scientific history, and instead a high degree of overlap between

these categories. James Kirby, Historians and the Church of England: Religion and Historical Scholarship, 1870–1920

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 5–9, 66–74. 15 Stray, pp. 247–49.

34

the classical basis of English education and argued that the German emphasis on technical education

made them better equipped for military victory.16

These external ideological challenges were matched by transformations within classical studies itself.

Firstly, increased attention to archaeology broadened the scope of classical scholarship beyond its

traditionally strict focus on the text.17 Archaeological excavations uncovered the mundanities and

struggle of daily life in ancient Greece, challenging mid-Victorian depictions of a sophisticated unitary

civilisation centring on fifth-century Athens where all was ‘sweetness and light’.18 The rise of

archaeology was also crucial in in the emergence of the serious academic study of Rome from the long

shadow of Victorian Hellenism and the consequent shifting of the symbolic centre of gravity of

classical studies from Greek to Latin. Oxford Hellenists were more resistant to archaeology and the

scientific approaches of German research than the group of increasingly professional and specialist

Roman scholars like Henry Pelham, Francis Haverfield and J.L. Strachan-Davidson, who viewed

Roman history as a tool for unpicking the dilemmas of British imperialism.19 Secondly, the growing

popularity of historicist textual criticism, fortified by archaeological discoveries, encouraged scholars

to place classical texts within a specific temporal location and cultural, economic, social and political

context, which undermined their sense of timelessness and, as Stray argues, ‘declassicised’ them. Mid-

century assertions of the static, eternal value of the classics were becoming increasingly indefensible

in the context of the late-Victorian relativity of value, the scientific challenge to the cultural authority

of the classics, and the growing emphasis on material culture within classical studies. The

professionalisation and specialisation of scholarship and the increasingly organised nature of

university life encouraged the rise of conceptions of the ancient world as something distinct, rather

than as a mirror of modern reality.20

As new academic disciplines emerged and formalised and university curricula diversified, classicists

felt the need to stress the continued relevance of their subject matter in the modernist terms deployed

by anthropology, sociology and the natural sciences. What Turner terms ‘evolutionary humanistic

Hellenism’ was Murray’s intellectual response to the changes in academic practice and ideology that

16 Stray, pp. 83–84, 106–12, 264–68; L. Simpson, ‘Imperialism, National Efficiency and Education, 1900–1905’, Journal

of Educational Administration and History, 16 (1984), 28–36. 17 Stray, p. 229. 18 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (London: Macmillan, 1942), pp. 19–20. 19 Oswyn Murray, ‘Ancient History, 1872–1914’, in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. by Michael Brock and

M.C. Curthoys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), VII, 333–60 (pp. 338–53); Heather Ellis, ‘Proconsuls, Guardians and

Greats Men: The Indian Civil Service and an Education in Empire, 1880–1914’, 2019, 1–29 (p. 5). 20 Stray, pp. 209, 117–18.

35

had been cemented by the first decade of the twentieth century.21 Although Regius Professor of Greek

at Oxford, Murray was part of the ritualist school of classicists surrounding Jane Harrison at

Cambridge, who applied the methods of sociology, psychology and anthropology to the study of

ancient myth, religion and drama.22 In response to the intellectual challenge posed by evolutionary

science, Murray reconceptualised Hellenism as a living reality, a dynamic and progressive spiritual

force. Hellenism was a civilising process that propelled societies out of unreason and barbarism

towards a self-controlled rational freedom: ‘the peculiar and essential value of Greek civilization lies

not so much in the great height which it ultimately attained, as in the wonderful spiritual effort by

which it reached and sustained that height.’23 The Greek legacy was not located in artistic or cultural

achievements, splendid though they were, but in the constant process of forging a sophisticated,

rational civilisation from the raw materials of primitive barbarism. Hellenism provided guidance and

direction in the seemingly chaotic and random process of historical change postulated by scientific

naturalism. Instead of outlining an eternal standard that was resistant to relativity, Murray asserted

that Hellenism must be constantly reinterpreted by each successive generation, who press the wisdom

of Greece into the service of the political and social needs that define their contingent historical

circumstances and values. In the internationalist mood of 1921, he stated that, ‘it is not anything fixed

and stationary that constitutes Greece: what constitutes Greece is the movement which leads… to the

Stoic or fifth-century ‘sophist’… who looks on all human creatures as his brethren, and the world as

“one great City of gods and men”.’24 According to Murray, for the people of the twentieth century,

the spiritual message of Greece was tied to liberal values, social reform and the quest for international

peace. Murray’s Athenians were, therefore, the original humanitarians and internationalists: ‘in the

oldest of all Greek tragedies [Aeschylus’ Suppliant Women] we find laid down, not as an original idea

but as part of the traditional moral code, a plea for international arbitration.’25

Faced by institutional and ideological transformations, Edwardian classicists repackaged the timeless

value of antiquity to match the growing academic acceptance of the reality of social, political and

historical change. Both Zimmern and Toynbee incorporated sociological, psychological and

anthropological methodologies into their scholarship. Henri Bergson’s evolutionary idealism was

central to Toynbee’s philosophy of history and Murray’s interpretation of the Stoic concept of phusis

21 Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, pp. 17, 75–77. 22 On Murray and the ritualist school, see Robert Parker, ‘Gilbert Murray and Greek Religion’, in Gilbert Murray

Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics, ed. by Christopher Stray (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2007), pp. 81–102. 23 Gilbert Murray, The Rise of the Greek Epic (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), p. 9. 24 Gilbert Murray, ‘The Value of Greece to the Future of the World’, in The Legacy of Greece, ed. by R.W. Livingstone

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 1–23 (p. 15). 25 Gilbert Murray, Liberality and Civilization (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1938), p. 58. Aeschylus, Suppliant Women,

line 700.

36

as a directional growth process.26 Inspired by Murray and Graham Wallas, Zimmern incorporated

arguments about the irrational side of human nature and the tensions of civilised life into his

description of the degeneration of Athens after the death of Pericles.27 Twentieth-century classicists

were simultaneously forced to respond to the vast, ongoing changes to the British national polity after

the 1867 Reform Act.28 As Stray argues, classical studies in Britain belongs within a context of social

and cultural hierarchy. Many of the students and admirers of the classics were self-consciously elitist.

Moreover, the cultural authority of the classics, sustained through elite education in public schools

and the ancient universities, provided a marker of social distinction and bourgeois identity.29 Before

1914, nearly all entrance scholarships for Oxford and Cambridge were devoted to the classics (and

mathematics). Thus, classical studies offered the primary route to academic ascent for students from

less affluent families. The classicising internationalists both reflected and challenged this exclusivity.

All three went to prestigious public schools and gained classical scholarships to Oxford. They

continued to associate the classics with the educational and social institutions of the British

establishment. Zimmern told an audience of Oxford students in 1932 that the Greek polis was ‘a sort

of club’ based on ‘college spirit’, and that ‘the English public school affords a good introduction to

the study of the Polis.’30 Yet, the classicising internationalists also argued that the elitism of the

classics was inappropriate to Britain’s mass democracy and increasingly literate population. They

placed Greece at the centre of the movement for British social and democratic reform.

In 1910, Murray wrote to The Times denouncing contemporary classics as a ‘class badge’ that

occluded the intrinsic worth of Greek culture.31 His numerous translations of ancient Greek tragedy

and his editorship of the Home University Library series of low-priced studies by prominent academics

intended to address how the privileging of ancient languages made classical knowledge inaccessible

to ordinary working people.32 Murray also led a group of liberal dons who advocated abolishing the

compulsory Greek requirement to attend Oxford and Cambridge. In an address to the Salt School in

Shipley in 1917, he bemoaned how the absence of facilities for young working men to learn Greek

prevented many able students from entering university.33 Zimmern was a more vocal, and particularly

26 Murray, ‘The Stoic Philosophy’, p. 102. 27 Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth: Politics and Economics in Fifth-Century Athens, 1st edn (Oxford: The

Clarendon Press, 1911), p. 429. 28 José Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: A Social History of Britain, 1870–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1993), pp. 14–16. 29 Stray, pp. 19–23, 118. 30 Zimmern, ‘Lecture to Literae Humaniores Students’ (June 1932), MS Zimmern 142, fols. 116–17. 31 Murray, letter to The Times, 24 November 1910, quoted in Stray, p. 224. 32 Barbara Goff, ‘The Greeks of the WEA: Reality and Rhetoric in the First Two Decades’, in Greek and Roman Classics

in the British Struggle for Social Reform, ed. by Henry Stead (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), pp. 216–34 (p. 226).

Murray had translated ten plays by the end of 1911, and 29 across his career. See West, pp. 85–88. 33 Murray, ‘An Educated Nation’ (1917), p. 3, The Gilbert Murray Papers, Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Murray 391,

unmarked folio.

37

radical, presence in the largely unsuccessful Edwardian reform movement at Oxford. Convinced that

the ancient universities were failing to meet the needs of twentieth-century Britain, a group of Oxford

scholars and graduates agitated for a public enquiry into Oxford and Cambridge and the incorporation

of the sciences and social sciences into the curriculum. Zimmern was part of the ‘Catiline Club’, a

group of younger dons committed to the reinvigoration of working class education, raising educational

standards at the university, reforming the curriculum and entrance exams, and broadening the social

intake of students through the provision of scholarships to the needy. Membership was comprised of

university and social reformers including Arthur Acland, R.W. Livingstone, R.H. Tawney and William

Temple.34 Somewhat characteristically, the club took its name from classical history: the Roman

senator and patrician Catiline, who conspired to overthrow the power of the aristocratic Senate in the

mid-first century BC before being exposed by Cicero.

Toynbee, who graduated in 1911, was understandably less prominent in Edwardian debates on

university reform. He did, however, deliver lectures for the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA),

an organisation founded by Alfred Mansbridge in 1903 to expand education among the British

working class.35 The WEA aimed ‘to articulate the educational aspirations of Labour’ and to create a

‘system of humane education for adult workers, both men and women’.36 It received significant

support from Oxford dons, including Murray and, prominently, Zimmern. As Goff contends, the WEA

offered liberal classicists battered by intellectual and institutional challenges and the prospect of

radical political change a new space in which to justify classical studies as a model of a demanding,

sophisticated and inclusive culture.37 Acknowledging both recent archaeological discoveries and the

ascendant labour movement, Murray argued in 1910 that Greek literature was a natural pursuit for the

working classes because the Greeks had themselves combined material poverty with high culture.38

Murray was concerned about the obstacles that working people faced in elite British education, but

also viewed Greek language as essential to the study of ancient Greece. He stressed the importance of

the translator and interpreter in disseminating the message of Greece. In a series of articles on ancient

Greece published in the WEA’s journal The Highway in 1909 and 1910, Zimmern asserted that the

WEA was both the inheritor of Greece and essential to building a modern egalitarian democracy based

on Athenian ideals. Like the Athenians, the WEA saw politics as the gateway to the arts and sciences.

Thus, ‘there are more true Greeks in the WEA than in all the classical universities and schools of

34 Janet Howarth, ‘The Edwardian Reform Movement’, in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. by Michael Brock

and M.C. Curthoys (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), VII, 821–54 (pp. 823–30); Lawrence Goldman, Dons and Workers:

Oxford and Adult Education Since 1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp. 109–11. 35 Toynbee to Zimmern, 8 September 1914, MS Zimmern 14, fols. 72–73. 36 R.H. Tawney, ‘An Experiment in Democratic Education’, Political Quarterly, May 1914, reprinted in R.H. Tawney,

The Radical Tradition (London: Pelican, 1966), p. 80. 37 Goff, p. 232. 38 Murray, ‘Working-Men and Greek’, The Labour Leader, 4 March 1910, p. 132.

38

England put together.’39 Unlike Murray, Zimmern was convinced that Greek language was not

essential to understanding Greek culture, and that the obsession with language was a barrier to

disseminating the message that Athens held for British democracy, which he explored further in his

classical scholarship.

The classicising internationalists felt that the Athenian political inheritance was particularly relevant

to Edwardian political and social reform and Britain’s emerging mass democracy. For Murray, fifth-

century Athenian politics was marked by the emphasis placed on arête, which he defined as the

combination of both civic virtue and human goodness that was essential to political liberty. Ancient

Athenian civic spirit had a practical significance for the ethics of modern politics by offering an ideal

of the virtuous, politically engaged citizen devoted to the common good. The Athenian ‘devotion to

the City or Community produced a religion of public service. The City represented a high ideal, and

it represented supreme power.’40 Murray hoped that the ‘true teaching’ provided by the WEA, which

foregrounded ‘the spirit of social service’ would shape Britain into a similarly educated nation of

civic-minded citizens.41 Likewise, Zimmern looked to the working classes and the WEA to create ‘the

ideal of an Educated Democracy’ based on an Athenian-inspired ‘education in citizenship’.42 For

Zimmern, adult education through consistent active engagement in the life of the community was a

unique feature of Athenian democracy, but was essential to effective citizenship in any age. A deep

reverence for custom, ancestry and tradition, and the high degree of civic participation in Athenian

democracy fostered the unique historical achievement of Athens: the intertwining of politics and

morality in the citizen’s pursuit of their duty to the commonwealth, which was both the highest object

of civic life and a necessary precondition of individual freedom. In the polis, ‘the citizen stands, free

and independent, face to face with the city.’43 For Zimmern, the WEA was playing a vital role in

reviving the Athenian ideal of public service as the highest form of virtue and the path to individual

fulfilment. Indeed, both he and Murray felt that, through the activities of the WEA and the scholarship

of civic-minded classicists like themselves, the political ideals of Athens could help to revitalise

modern democracy and citizenship. After the First World War, these convictions also framed their

conceptions of international order.

39 Zimmern, ‘The Greeks and Modern Life’, The Highway, ii, 20 (1910), p. 135. 40 Murray, ‘The Stoic Philosophy’ (1915), reprinted in Gilbert Murray, Stoic, Christian and Humanist (London: G. Allen

& Unwin, 1940), p. 92. 41 Murray, ‘An Educated Nation’, p. 10, MS Murray 391. 42 Alfred Zimmern and J.D. Wilson, Report to the Board of Education on the Workers’ Educational Association and the

Problem of Adult Education (c.1914), MS Zimmern 118, fol. 67. 43 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 76, 67.

39

From the late nineteenth century, the intellectual and institutional standing of the classics in British

culture and education was in decline. The elitism of classical studies at the ancient universities was

attacked by figures within and outside the discipline who considered this inappropriate to a democratic

nation. Ideologically, the emergence and formalisation of fields of study that challenged traditional

humanist arguments about the value of the classics placed classicists on the defensive. This situation

worsened during the First World War, when the importance of scientific research to the effective

prosecution of the war effort strengthened critiques of the classical basis of British education. Murray

certainly felt the strain, stressing in 1917 that ‘there is no true clash between Letters and Science.’44

Pressure grew for a government committee to investigate classical studies, especially after committees

were set up in 1916 on the teaching of science and modern languages in schools. A Prime Minister’s

Committee on Classics was eventually appointed in 1919. By the time it published a report in 1921,

compulsory Greek had been abolished in both Oxford and Cambridge.45 The classicising

internationalists remained concerned to protect the integrity and intellectual authority of their shaken

discipline from this array of ideological and institutional challenges. They stressed the formative

capacity of a classical education, and its role as a gateway to other subjects of study, especially

international relations.46 Murray’s emphasis on the dynamic heritage of Greece marked a shift from

mid-nineteenth-century proclamations of the timeless value of antiquity, but still represented an

assertion of the contemporary relevance of the classical world. For the classicising internationalists,

ancient Greece contained a reservoir of ideas for modern society and politics. The Athenian civic

heritage could underpin Britain’s emerging social democracy and revitalise modern citizenship by

establishing it on the basis of duty and responsibility. Reimagined through the lens of contemporary

internationality, the Greek polis also provided an intellectual framework for a stable international

order.

The lives of the classicising internationalists

The abolition of compulsory Greek was emblematic of both the marginalisation of the classics in

British culture and the ideological reorientation of classical studies from Greek to Latin.47 Thus, the

classicising internationalists’ growing engagement with world politics after 1918 coincided with a

time of acute crisis for classical scholarship, one that was particularly severe for philhellenists.

44 Murray, ‘An Educated Nation’, p. 6, MS Murray 391. 45 Stray, pp. 264–68. 46 Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, p. 21. 47 Stray, pp. 1, 269–70.

40

Capturing a beleaguered mood, Zimmern noted in 1921 that ‘our classical devotees, faced with

criticism and competition from many quarters, should be acquiring both a greater humility and a

greater seriousness.’48 Indeed, the academic positions of the classicising internationalists reflected a

transformed intellectual landscape. By the mid-1920s, only Murray held a chair in classical studies.

Murray resigned this in 1936, a consequence of his growing focus on international politics—he told a

correspondent how ‘the League has ruined my Greek.’49 Nonetheless, the classicising internationalists

continued to draw upon a rich tradition in British intellectual culture whereby the moral value of

history and precedent was used to make authoritative sense of the present. As their intellectual

concerns pivoted from antiquity to international relations, they remained convinced of the enduring

importance of the classical world and its particular relevance to the dilemmas and opportunities of

twentieth-century internationality.

Many recent historical assessments of Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern divide their careers into two

distinct phases: initially classical scholars, they redirected their attention to international relations as

a consequence of the First World War. Wartime work for the British state certainly sparked their more

systematic engagement with world politics. Moreover, revulsion at the destructiveness of the conflict

catalysed their critiques of militaristic nationalism and some of the traditional assumptions of

European diplomacy. Paul Millett contends that Zimmern made little use in his international writings

of the ideas that were central to The Greek Commonwealth.50 Peter Wilson accepts the importance of

ancient Greek concepts like logos (reason) in Murray’s political thinking, but sees Murray’s approach

to linking the classical and modern political worlds as highly selective and unsystematic.51 Francis

West argues that Murray never believed that there was a direct lesson to be learned from Greece.52

Gordon Martel dismisses wholesale the classical influences on Toynbee’s historical thought. He notes

that a classical education was the norm for the early-twentieth-century British intellectual elite, yet

few thinkers applied such systematic thinking to the philosophy of history and only Toynbee produced

an interpretation of the rise and fall of world civilisations.53 This historiography suggests that an

interest in the classics faded into the background as Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern asserted their

intellectual identity as experts on international relations.54 This section argues against this

48 Zimmern, ‘Political Thought’, p. 326. 49 Murray, quoted in West, p. 209. 50 Paul Millett, ‘Alfred Zimmern’s The Greek Commonwealth Revisited’, in Oxford Classics: Teaching and Learning,

1800–2000, ed. by Christopher Stray (London: Duckworth, 2007), pp. 168–202 (p. 181). 51 Peter Wilson, ‘Gilbert Murray and International Relations: Hellenism, Liberalism, and International Intellectual

Cooperation as a Path to Peace’, Review of International Studies, 37.2 (2011), 881–909 (p. 901). 52 West, p. 210. 53 Gordon Martel, ‘The Origins of World History: Arnold Toynbee Before the First World War’, Australian Journal of

Politics & History, 50.3 (2004), 343–56 (p. 347). 54 Baji outlines an important corrective, stressing the influence of Zimmern’s interpretation of Greek civilisation on his

internationalism. Baji, ‘Commonwealth’, p. 6.

41

interpretation, sketching the lives of these figures and emphasising how the classical imaginary

remained central to their international thought.

Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern regularly acknowledged their intellectual debt to the classics, and the

depth to which it structured their thinking about modern politics and society. This shared classicism,

and the particular focus on the institutional and ideological lessons of the Athenian polis, united these

figures into a distinctive group within the history of British international thought. Yet their worlds

overlapped in a variety of personal, philosophical and political ways. All three had similarly elite

educational backgrounds in the British public school system and won prestigious classical scholarships

to Oxford. Through a series of initially teacher–student relationships fostered at Oxford, they became

and remained close acquaintances and colleagues. Murray taught Zimmern, who referred to him as

‘my old master and friend the Regius Professor.’55 Murray and Zimmern both taught Toynbee.

Toynbee dedicated a chapter to Zimmern in his 1967 autobiography Acquaintances.56 As an

undergraduate, Toynbee attended a weekly open house for promising students hosted by the Murrays.

Murray became a father figure to Toynbee, whose own father was by this point extremely ill. Murray

admired the young Toynbee, was sympathetic to his political causes, and thought of him as a surrogate

son who was destined for a career as a classical scholar.57 These ties became familial when Toynbee

married Murray’s daughter Rosalind in 1913.

Before 1914, these figures all lived and taught in Oxford and corresponded regularly. Toynbee and

Murray exchanged letters on family matters, politics, religion, liberalism and civilisation, which

continued after Toynbee’s relationship with Rosalind ended in the 1940s. Zimmern and Murray

regularly discussed university matters before 1914. They corresponded less after the First World War,

as Murray became more involved with the League of Nations Union (LNU) and Zimmern’s

organisational work placed him in continental Europe. As an undergraduate, Toynbee wrote to

Zimmern to discuss the classics, liberalism and modern nationality.58 They remained close until 1950,

when Zimmern blamed Toynbee for the political ineffectiveness of Chatham House and attacked his

philosophy of history as an ‘opiate sending people into a dreamland of fanciful speculation about the

rise and downfall of civilizations’.59 This marked a significant change of heart from Zimmern, who in

1913 had presciently told Toynbee, ‘I think we are going to be able to help one another a great deal in

55 Zimmern, ‘Lecture to Literae Humaniores Students’ MS Zimmern 142, fol. 67. 56 Arnold Toynbee, Acquaintances (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 49–61. 57 McNeill, p. 27; West, p. 166. 58 See the letters from Toynbee to Zimmern 1909–10, in MS Zimmern 12, fols. 60–62, 107, 135–37. 59 Zimmern to Toynbee, 13 July 1950, Toynbee Papers, Box 86 (unfoliated).

42

the years to come.’60 Indeed, the classicising internationalists often sought one another’s advice on

their academic work and gave lectures and papers at the political and academic institutions with which

they were variously associated. Toynbee and Zimmern also held academic positions in London and

Oxford that were secured for them on the basis of a recommendation from Murray. Nonetheless,

outside of contributions to edited volumes and their joint participation in policy discussions at

Chatham House, they rarely collaborated directly. They primarily read and commented on drafts of

books and articles. Murray praised the manuscript for The Greek Commonwealth, although he also

noted how Zimmern would ‘sometimes make too light of the value of your subject’.61 Both Murray

and Zimmern read the manuscripts for the early volumes of A Study of History, what Toynbee then

referred to as his ‘Book of Nonsense’.62

Collaboration occurred primarily through their participation in similar organisations, associations and

movements, although each figure had differing foci of attention and authority. They were members of

the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies and the Classical Association (Murray was president

of both). They were also central to the associational life of interwar British internationalism through

Chatham House, the LNU, and other organisations affiliated to the League of Nations. Socially, all

three figures moved in the institutional and personal circles of the British political and intellectual

elite—the Oxford college, the Athenaeum club and the British Academy—although Toynbee was,

through Rosalind, also part of the Bloomsbury group of radical modernist writers and artists.63 These

shared worlds ensured that the classicising internationalists’ primary terms of reference and social

milieu were those of the English intellectual and political establishment.

Gilbert Murray

Gilbert Murray (1866–1957) was born into an Irish-Australian family near Canberra. After moving to

England and attending the Merchant Taylors’ School, he read Greats at St John’s College, Oxford

(1884–88), before gaining a fellowship at New College. In November 1889, Murray married Lady

Mary Howard, daughter of Rosalind Stanley of Alderley and George Howard, heir to the earldom of

Carlisle. Marriage into a Whig aristocratic family ensured that Murray was quite wealthy.64 It also

60 Zimmern to Toynbee 29 May 1913, Toynbee Papers, Box 86. 61 Murray to Zimmern, 6 July 1910, MS Zimmern 12, fol. 158. 62 Toynbee to Zimmern, 8 June 1932, Toynbee Papers, Box 86. 63 McNeill, pp. 78–79. 64 Gilbert Murray, ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, in Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography, ed. by J. Smith and

Arnold Toynbee (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1960), pp. 23–103 (p. 99); West, p. 178.

43

impacted his liberalism, which, as Toynbee later argued, was profoundly aristocratic.65 A burgeoning

academic reputation as the outstanding classical scholar of his generation saw Murray appointed as

Professor of Greek at the University of Glasgow in 1889.66 Murray viewed this position as a chance

to combat academic specialisation and a narrow technical focus on textual scholarship in the study of

ancient Greek. His inaugural lecture stressed that ‘Greece and not Greek is the real subject of our

study. There is more in Hellenism than a language.’67 Grasping classical Greece as a whole was central

to elucidating its lessons for a progressive, liberal modern civilisation. After resigning in 1899, Murray

wrote two poorly received plays and translated Greek tragedy for the modern stage.68 A growing status

in public and intellectual life was confirmed when he returned to Oxford in 1908 as Regius Professor

of Greek.

Unusually for a radical liberal, Murray immediately supported British involvement in the First World

War, viewing it as Britain’s duty to protect civilisation from Prussian barbarism. Murray was part of

Foreign Office cultural missions to counteract pro-German feeling in Sweden and America in 1916,

and in 1917 he joined the Board of Education.69 His public standing grew during the war. Nonetheless,

what Murray would later describe as a generational ‘ordeal’ shattered his worldview and deeply

affected his personal life.70 Murray, like Toynbee, felt keenly the wartime deaths of young Oxford

scholars and pupils, and feared the social consequences of this loss of talent. The Murray family was

also torn apart by the deaths of three of their five children, Agnes, Denis and Basil, between 1922 and

1937, which they interpreted as residual effects of the war.71

By 1920 Murray was the foremost Hellenist in England. The interwar period also saw Murray’s

expanded involvement in world politics, primarily through the LNU, which he chaired from 1923 to

1938.72 A prominent voice in Liberal Party politics, and a Liberal candidate in the 1919 Oxford

University by-election, Murray’s growing focus on international politics was partly a response to the

65 Arnold Toynbee, ‘The Unity of Gilbert Murray’s Life and Work’, in Gilbert Murray: An Unfinished Autobiography,

with Contributions by His Friends, ed. by J. Smith and Arnold Toynbee (London: Allen & Unwin, 1960), pp. 212–20 (pp.

214–15). 66 Murray, ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, pp. 31–51, 92–93. 67 Gilbert Murray, The Place of Greek in Education (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1889), p. 13. 68 West, pp. 85–108. 69 West, pp. 151–52. 70 Gilbert Murray, The Ordeal of This Generation: The War, the League & the Future (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1929),

p. v. 71 West, pp. 162–66. Murray’s two other children were Rosalind and Stephen. 72 West, pp. 142, 199–204; Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and

Internationalism, c.1918–45 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), pp. 2–5. Toynbee argued that Murray was

thinking about a post-war League of Nations from August 1914. Toynbee, ‘The Unity of Gilbert Murray’s Life and Work’,

p. 219.

44

collapse of the Liberal Party as an electoral force in 1922.73 Despite domestic setbacks, Murray felt

that his liberal vision remained achievable internationally. Murray was part of the 1921–22 South

African delegation to the League of Nations Assembly. He joined commissions on humanitarianism

and disarmament before taking a more intellectually definitive position as the vice-president of the

Committee of Intellectual Co-operation (CIC), a forerunner to UNESCO, in 1922.

Murray’s intellectual and political influence lessened after 1939, although his standing in public life

remained high. He was a founding member of Oxfam in 1942. He supported the United Nations as the

successor to the League, but became disillusioned with its ineffectiveness, intervention in domestic

affairs, and support for decolonisation.74 By the time of his death in 1957, he had become a symbol of

the Victorian era, an image he embraced.75 Indeed, Murray’s worldview was largely Victorian and

aristocratic, committed to ideas of progress, convinced of the superiority of certain civilisations and

cultures, and critical of what he saw as the mediocritising tendencies of mass democracy. His

internationalism was profoundly hierarchical, structured by the limits of liberal universalism and

imperial discourses of civilisation. He praised the mandates system, which provided the legal basis for

the Allied powers to administer German and Ottoman colonial territories after 1918, justifying this as

‘the sacred trust of civilisation’.76 Although similarly complicit in the racist assumptions of early

international relations theory, both Zimmern and Toynbee were far more critical of attempts to

construct international order on the basis of racial difference.77 All three figures, however, failed to

acknowledge the international power dynamics underlying the collective system. Murray saw Britain

and later America as the heirs to the classical tradition and the benevolent anchors of world order and

civilisation, both of which were threatened by nationalism, militarism, anti-colonial liberation and

socialism.

Unlike Toynbee and Zimmern, Murray published no book-length treatment of world politics, and

classical literature remained his primary academic focus. He approached international politics largely

though LNU pamphlets and public lectures. Whilst Zimmern saw himself as a political scientist and

Toynbee as an international historian, Murray’s internationalism was that of an organiser, activist and

73 Toynbee to Murray, 24 March 1919, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 74 On British internationalists’ disillusionment with the UN, see Mazower, Governing the World, pp. 214–43. 75 Gilbert Murray, ‘A Victorian Looks Back on Twenty-Five Years’, The Listener, 13 November 1947, pp. 809–10. 76 Murray, Ordeal, p. 220. 77 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 207–49; Alfred Zimmern,

The Third British Empire (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), pp. 85–86. On the role of race, racism and white

supremacy in the early history of international relations, see Robert Vitalis, ‘Birth of a Discipline’, in Imperialism and

Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations, ed. by David Long and Brian Schmidt (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 2005), pp. 159–82.

45

authoritative public voice. By his own admission, he remained intellectually a classicist. Admiration

for the institutions and ideals of Athens united his classical scholarship, internationalist administrative

work, and conviction that civic duty and service to the community must underpin international

relations. Lecturing on the future of international liberalism in 1937, Murray asked his audience, ‘to

excuse an old Greek professor, who can never quite escape from the spell of those great teachers and

writers who have been his life’s companions.’78

Alfred Zimmern

Alfred Zimmern (1879–1957) was born in Surrey to an English mother and German-Jewish father.

Although raised according to the Protestant principles of his mother, his father having converted to

Christianity, Zimmern retained a sense of his Jewish identity.79 Zimmern studied at Winchester before

reading Greats at New College, Oxford (1898–1902). He stayed on as a lecturer in ancient history,

becoming a tutor and fellow in 1904.80 Zimmern left his fellowship in the summer of 1909 to travel to

Greece, where he wrote his only major piece of original classical scholarship, The Greek

Commonwealth. This work traced the economic and political development of Greece, culminating in

a glowing, and highly idealised, depiction of Periclean Athens. It was also an intervention in

contemporary debates on citizenship and empire.

Zimmern returned to a lectureship in sociology at the LSE. He became involved in the Zionist

movement in Britain and America during the 1910s, which shaped his conception of international

order based on a de-racialised and de-politicised commonwealth.81 Zimmern was concurrently part of

high-level Edwardian debates on imperial reform through the Round Table (founded in 1909), a group

of colonial administrators and intellectuals who advocated the federal union of the British empire.

Zimmern’s classical scholarship was influential as the Round Table’s formulated its designs for a

British commonwealth in 1915–16.82 Zimmern remained active in both the Zionist movement and the

Round Table until the early 1920s.

78 Murray, Liberality and Civilization, p. 18. 79 Tomohito Baji, ‘Zionist Internationalism? Alfred Zimmern’s Post-Racial Commonwealth’, 13.3 (2016), 623–651 (pp.

634–35). 80 D.J. Markwell, ‘Sir Alfred Zimmern Revisited: Fifty Years On’, Review of International Studies, 12.4 (1986), 279–92

(p. 279). 81 Baji, ‘Zionist Internationalism?’, pp. 634–43. 82 John Edward Kendle, The Round Table Movement and Imperial Union (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975),

pp. 160, 171.

46

Between 1912 and 1915, Zimmern was an inspector for the Board of Education, after which he began

working in government administration.83 In 1916, he joined the Reconstruction Committee at the

Foreign Office to coordinate industrial supplies. He moved to the Political Intelligence Department in

1918 and was placed in charge of the section investigating the peace settlement. The war was critical

in Zimmern’s growing intellectual consideration of world politics. He was, alongside Murray,

involved in the research of the Phillimore Committee, set up by Lloyd George in 1918 to study the

viability of the numerous peace plans that had appeared during the war.84 In late 1918, Zimmern

authored an important memorandum on international administration which, along with the Phillimore

report, formed the basis of the ‘Cecil draft’ that the British took to the Paris Peace Conference in

1919.85 Thus, Zimmern had a direct influence on the structural design of the League of Nations. He

proposed an international organisation focused on judicial, administrative and investigatory activities

directed by regular conferences and a secretariat, with administrative bodies to deal with socio-

economic problems such as health, industrial conditions, transit, commerce, and inter-racial conflict.

The League was to publicise its activities, and the conduct of members was subject to the will of

popular opinion. Crucially, however, none of the League’s major organs had supra-governmental

sovereignty: ‘the League of Nations involves associated action by the various States without any

derogation of their sovereignty.’86 Zimmern’s memorandum was a technocratic policy document,

although one written by a classical scholar. Reflecting on the memorandum in the mid-1930s, he

reiterated its classical underpinnings: ‘the League of Nations system, like the Athens of Solon, would

be based on a firm foundation of order and social solidarity.’87

Zimmern was appointed to the Wilson Chair in International Politics at Aberystwyth in 1919. He

resigned after an affair with a colleague’s wife, Lucy Barbier, whom he married in 1921. Work in

international organisations occupied Zimmern for the rest of the 1920s. He and Lucy established a

summer school in international relations in Geneva in 1924. From 1926 to 1930, Zimmern was the

deputy director of the Paris-based International Institute for Intellectual Co-operation (IIIC), which

was affiliated to the League’s CIC, chaired by Murray. From these institutional orbits, Murray and

Zimmern coordinated the League’s efforts in the field of intellectual cooperation and education. They

worked to develop the academic study of international relations through conferences, promote the

League in schools and universities, and cultivate among the public what Zimmern termed the

83 Julia Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities in Britain Since 1850 (Manchester: Manchester University

Press, 2001), p. 92. 84 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, pp. 177–79. 85 Markwell, p. 280. The memorandum was reprinted in Alfred Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law

(London: Macmillan, 1936), pp. 189–208. 86 Zimmern, ‘Memorandum Prepared for the Consideration of the British Government in Connexion with the Forthcoming

Peace Settlement’ (1918), MS Zimmern 82, fol. 38. 87 Zimmern, The League and the Rule of Law, pp. 192–93.

47

‘international mind’.88 Zimmern used his position to advocate a vision of international citizenship

based on the civic activism of fifth-century Athens, an argument central to one of his lesser-studied

works, Learning and Leadership (1927).

During the 1930s, Zimmern surveyed the disintegration of the League-based international order from

the Montague Burton Chair of International Relations at Oxford. In 1936, he published The League of

Nations and the Rule of Law, considered by later scholars to be one of the most refined works of

interwar idealist internationalism.89 Zimmern was knighted in the 1936 New Year honours list.90 He

also became more vocally critical of the League, especially its hamstrung responses to the Manchurian

and Abyssinian crises. Reflecting a darkening international political context, Zimmern’s late-1930s

writings were steeped in an Augustinian pessimism and religiosity. He became part of the ecumenical

campaign from the mid-1930s, and increasingly advocated federal Atlanticist solutions to global order.

Zimmern served as deputy director of the Foreign Office Research Department during the Second

World War—the director was his former student, Toynbee.91 After the war, he headed the Preparatory

Commission for the creation of UNESCO, wrote UNESCO’s constitution, and was its short-lived first

director.92 Zimmern now advocated global government and began to view America as Athens

reincarnate, the liberal hegemon underpinning global stability.93 Throughout his career, Zimmern’s

internationalism was underpinned by his interpretation of Athenian civilisation. As a public

intellectual, he spoke as a ‘political and social philosopher concerned with the significance for the

world of to-day of the life and institutions of Ancient Greece.’94

Arnold J. Toynbee

Arnold Joseph Toynbee (1889–1975) was born into a prominent intellectual family. He was named

after his uncle, the economic historian and social reformer Arnold Toynbee (1852–83). The younger

Toynbee won scholarships to Winchester and Balliol (1907–1911). After graduating, he travelled in

Italy and Greece for a year before returning to Balliol as a tutor. Toynbee married Rosalind Murray in

1913. He was set on an academic career until the First World War, and this ‘shattering of the Victorian

88 Alfred Zimmern, ‘The Development of the International Mind’, in Problems of Peace (Geneva: Geneva Institute of

International Relations, 1927), pp. 1–17 (p. 1); Daniel Laqua, ‘Transnational Intellectual Cooperation, the League of

Nations, and the Problem of Order’, Journal of Global History, 6.2 (2011), 223–47. 89 Brian Porter quoted in Markwell, p. 279. 90 ‘The New Year Honours’, The Times, January 1, 1936, p. 12. 91 Markwell, p. 281. 92 Toye and Toye. 93 Alfred Zimmern, ‘Athens and America’, Classical Journal, 43.1 (1947), 3–11. 94 Zimmern, ‘Lecture to Literae Humaniores Students’, MS Zimmern 142, fol. 75.

48

illusion of stability’ was critical to his intellectual development.95 Toynbee quickly became

disillusioned with academic life, and left Oxford in May 1915 to write government propaganda.96 In

October 1915, he was assigned to work with Lord Bryce compiling evidence on the Armenian

genocide, which launched a longstanding interest in Near Eastern politics.97 Toynbee joined the

Political Intelligence Department at the Foreign Office in 1917, where he was responsible for

gathering intelligence on the Middle East.98

Toynbee was part of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, slotting nicely into a

company of ‘half dons half diplomatists.’99 He was tasked with discovering the scope of American

policy in the Near East, but became quickly disillusioned with the conference, telling Murray of his

‘feeling of impotence and of groping in the dark’ in the face of diplomatic realpolitik.100 He was

furious at Lloyd George and the Allied powers for dismantling the Ottoman empire and abandoning

their promises of self-determination for the Arab peoples of the Middle East.101 Indeed, unlike Murray

and Zimmern, Toynbee remained fiercely critical of the violent and destabilising consequences of

Western imperialism on non-Western societies.102

After the war, Toynbee’s intellectual reputation grew significantly, and he became an influential

commentator on international affairs. From 1919 to 1924, he was the Koraes Professor of Modern

Greek and Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College, London. He resigned amidst

public acrimony over his pro-Turkish newspaper reports and academic writing.103 In July 1920,

Toynbee, Zimmern and the Round Table figures Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr established the British

Institute of International Affairs. What later became known as Chatham House was dedicated to the

study of international questions, informing public opinion about world politics, and, above all,

advising and influencing the British foreign policy establishment.104 From 1926 to 1955, he was

Director of Studies, a position tied to a chair in international history at the LSE.

95 Arnold Toynbee, Experiences (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp. 186–202. 96 Toynbee to Murray, 31 May 1915, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 97 Toynbee to Murray, 25 October 1915, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 98 McNeill, p. 75. 99 Toynbee to Murray Toynbee to Murray, 29 January 1919, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 100 Toynbee to Murray, 22 February 1919, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 101 Toynbee to Murray, 3 March 1920; Toynbee to Murray, 26 October 1920, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 102 Toynbee, Study, I, p. 157; Hall, ‘Toynbee’s Anti-Imperial Mission’. 103 Richard Clogg, Politics and the Academy: Arnold Toynbee and the Koraes Chair (London: Cass, 1986), pp. 76–86. 104 Inderjeet Parmar, ‘Anglo-American Elites in the Interwar Years: Idealism and Power in the Intellectual Roots of

Chatham House and the Council on Foreign Relations’, International Relations, 16.1 (2002), 53–75.

49

In 1924, Toynbee was commissioned to write the Institute’s annual Survey of International Affairs, a

task he continued until 1950. The Surveys reflected the broadening scope of Toynbee’s historical

imagination. This process continued as he began to compose his intellectually definitive philosophy

of history, A Study of History (1934–61), which charted the rise and decline of various historical

civilisations. The early volumes of the Study were well received in the 1930s, and cemented Toynbee’s

reputation as a prominent public intellectual. In March 1936, he was granted an interview with Adolf

Hitler, who saw Toynbee as a shaper of public opinion. Toynbee reported on the meeting to Anthony

Eden at the Foreign Office.105 But the 1930s were personally hard on Toynbee. The collective system

upon which he had placed his hopes for the future of civilisation collapsed. Indeed, the Study was a

long and highly personal articulation of Toynbee’s growing disillusionment with the incapacity of the

League and his fears surrounding another potentially catastrophic European war. His relationship with

Rosalind also broke down, especially after her conversion to Catholicism and the suicide of their son.

Toynbee’s intellectual response to personal and political tragedy was the deepened religiosity and

mysticism that marked his later writings.

Unlike Murray and Zimmern, Toynbee’s reputation soared after the war, although this was based on

his historical moralising rather than his expertise on international relations. The publication of an

abridged edition of the Study in 1946 broadened Toynbee’s global readership. A cover story

in Time magazine in March 1947 made him a household name. After a number of intellectually

damaging critiques from professional historians and philosophers like Karl Popper and Hugh Trevor-

Roper, Toynbee’s fame receded, and he returned to writing on the classical world.106 His most

significant work in this field, Hannibal’s Legacy was published in 1965 and explored the effect on

Roman life of Rome’s military victory over Carthage. Toynbee considered himself primarily a world

historian in the mould of Polybius. But he never forgot his debt to the classics, and ascribed his holistic

interpretation of human affairs to a consistent intellectual engagement with antiquity.107

105 McNeill, p. 172. Toynbee’s report is located in the Toynbee Papers, Box 76 (unfoliated). 106 Alexander Hutton, ‘“A Belated Return for Christ?”: The Reception of Arnold J. Toynbee’s a Study of History in a

British Context, 1934–1961’, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire, 21.3 (2014), 405–24 (pp. 408–

13). 107 Toynbee, Experiences, pp. 107–8.

50

The international Athens

In his 1931 inaugural address at Oxford, Zimmern stressed that the study of international relations

must be in tune with the methods and lessons of history: ‘there is no frontier between the present and

the past and there can be no barrier between the political thinker and the historian.’108 Indeed, as Ian

Hall argues, history and historians played a crucial role in the early development of academic

international relations. Historians were a major source of foreign policy insight and public comment

on world affairs. Historians like Agnes Headlam-Morley, Charles Webster, Llewellyn Woodward and

Toynbee occupied prominent chairs in international studies. Many international relations experts

asserted some methodological overlap between their discipline and history.109 Through Murray,

Toynbee and Zimmern, classical studies exerted a similarly important influence on the discipline of

international relations. These intellectuals grounded their thinking about world politics in their

readings of Greek history. This section explores the classicising internationalists’ conceptions of the

ancient world, focusing upon the place of Athens in their classical imaginary. As a morally cohesive

and ordered democratic society of politically informed and civic-minded citizens, the Athenian polis

offered an alternative to conceptions of international order based on the self-contained and adversarial

nation-state. An international Athens provided the organisational foundations of a stable, civic global

order.

In February 1916, Toynbee was considering whether to apply for the newly established Bywater

Professorship in Byzantine and Modern Greek Language and Literature at Oxford. He told Murray, ‘I

don’t see Byzantine Literature being pursued as fine art’.110 It was indeed common for early-twentieth-

century classicists to assign qualitative significance to different historical periods, social structures or

cultural achievements—this was reflected in the privileging of certain topics in university courses and

scholarship. The classicising internationalists transposed their own modern liberal and internationalist

sensibilities onto their readings of ancient history, and accepted uncritically the existence of a

hierarchical canon of classical literature. As Murray noted in 1927, ‘the Classical Tradition… implies

that… there have been ages and individuals with greater powers than others.’111 Indeed, as public-

minded intellectuals and moralists, they largely spurned the historicist emphasis on disinterested and

contextually relative interpretations of historical material, a methodology that was gaining ground in

classical scholarship from the 1870s. They viewed antiquity as a living heritage, a series of different

108 Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, p. 5. 109 Hall, Dilemmas of Decline, pp. 8–11. Woodward succeeded Zimmern as Montague Burton Professor (1944–47).

Headlam-Morley followed Woodward (1948–1970). Webster was the Stevenson Professor of International History at the

LSE (1932–1953). 110 Toynbee to Murray, 13 February 1916, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 111 Gilbert Murray, The Classical Tradition in Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 261.

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histories from which various moral and political lessons could be drawn. Thus, Toynbee hoped to

rescue the Bywater Professorship from detached historicism: ‘one would try to save it from being

antiquarianism and make it fill a real need of the times.’112 For Zimmern, ‘a University is not a cloister.

Knowledge, in the modern world, cannot be divorced from civic responsibility.’113

All three intellectuals viewed Athens in the period between the defeat of Persia in 479 and the outbreak

of the Peloponnesian War in 431 as the apogee of ancient politics and culture. They also used the

terms ‘Athens’ and ‘Greece’ interchangeably, the latter encompassing what was essentially an

Athenian cultural heritage. Yet, for many classicists, late republican Rome and the early empire

(roughly 146 BC to 180 AD) stood alongside Athens as exemplary periods characterised by humanistic

virtues, political freedom, public spirit, imperial strength, or intellectual and cultural vitality. As

Murray noted in 1907, ‘the Greeks round about the fifth century B.C., and the Romans of the centuries

just before and after the Christian era, have been peculiarly the Classics, and other writers have been

admitted to various degrees of classic dignity in proportion as they approached to the two great

periods.’114 The construction of these periods as paradigmatic was reflected in the nineteenth-century

Literae Humaniores curriculum, which included Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato’s Republic, Aristotle’s

Ethics and Logic, Livy, and Tacitus.115 However, the classicising internationalists conceived the

classical inheritance as fundamentally Hellenic, centring upon the literary products of the ‘intellectual

metropolis, Athens’: Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle and the tragedians.116 They considered the

praiseworthy aspects of the Roman inheritance, republican politics and early-imperial architecture and

literature, to be largely derivative of Greek ideas, aesthetics and poetry. This in itself followed the

conclusions of the Augustan lyric poet Horace, who noted the powerful Greek influence on Roman

high culture.117 For Zimmern, Rome’s republican politics mimicked earlier Greek theoretical

innovations: ‘Just as Cicero copied out the political theory of Aristotle, so Caius Gracchus, with an

imperial metropolis under his charge, took his cue from the political practice of the diminutive cities

of Greece.’118 Zimmern instead grounded his civic vision of international politics in the Athenian

republican heritage, suggesting that the Roman concept of res publica was in essence a Greek idea,

‘the Common Thing’.119 The Roman precedent was taken as proof that the political theory of the Greek

city-states was compatible with larger political units and with imperial and international order.

112 Toynbee to Murray, 13 February 1916, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 113 Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, p. 26. 114 Murray, Rise, p. 3. 115 Oswyn Murray, ‘Ancient History, 1872–1914’, p. 316. 116 Zimmern, ‘Political Thought’, p. 323. 117 Horace, Epistles, Book II, lines 156–57. 118 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 346. 119 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 10.

52

This picture of Athens and the late Roman republic as eras of relative political freedom—an argument

that partially involved downplaying, as many classicists did, the disenfranchisement of women and

the existence of slavery—was enmeshed into modern liberal preoccupations with political liberty and

social order. The classicising internationalists deemed free political structures to be an essential

precondition of the vibrant intellectual culture that they admired in Athens. A humanist concern with

liberty framed their opinions of the Hellenistic age and later Roman empire as eras despotism, political

turbulence, cultural decadence and social decline. All three followed Edward Gibbon (1737–1794)

and a long tradition within the modern reception of Rome which argued that the empire stifled Rome’s

intellectual creativity and republican civic spirit, encouraging a protracted and violent collapse.

Zimmern rejected Rome’s ‘instrument of bureaucracy and despotism’ as an unsuitable model for

British imperialism, urging imperial reformers to draw upon ‘the rich civic life of ancient Athens’.120

For Toynbee, the ascension of Augustus in 31 BC symbolised Rome’s transformation into a ‘universal

state’, the political form characteristic of all declining civilisations.121

Like late imperial Rome, the Hellenistic age inaugurated by the death of Alexander in 323 BC had a

strong imaginative resonance with social, cultural and political decline. For Murray, this was, ‘a period

based on the consciousness of manifold failure’ of both Olympian universalism and the free city-state,

which proved unable to check the rising power of the ‘semi-barbarous military monarchies’ of

Macedon. With the collapse of free politics, mankind’s attention shifted away from the welfare of the

state and towards mysticism, pessimism and the irrational.122 Murray judged the intellectual and

political developments of the Hellenistic era as ‘un-Hellenic… a clear symptom of decadence from

the free intellectual movement and the high hopes which had made the fifth century glorious.’123

Zimmern concurred, noting that ‘after Alexander, the discussion of politics ceased to be real’.124

Societal and cultural decline followed the process of intellectual deadening that attended the loss of

(Athenian) political liberty. Yet, Murray simultaneously believed that the ethics and cosmopolitanism

of the ancient Stoics, a Hellenistic school of philosophy founded by Zeno in third-century Athens,

could provide the theoretical underpinnings of cooperative, civic-minded international relations.

120 Alfred Zimmern, ‘Ethics of Empire’, The Round Table, 3.11 (1913), 484–501 (pp. 496, 501). 121 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume VI (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 6. 122 Gilbert Murray, Four Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), pp. 17–18, 103. 123 Gilbert Murray, The Five Stages of Greek Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1925), p. 142. 124 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 59.

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When Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern classicised modern politics, they did so primarily through the

lens of ancient Athens, the society that formed the substance of their conception of the classical.

Zimmern’s international writings often invoked fifth-century Athens or Aristotelian political

philosophy. Murray asserted the power of Hellenism, defined through Athens and Stoicism. Toynbee

deployed a broader range of historical precedents than Zimmern or Murray. He regularly cited the

Roman poet Lucretius, and saw a parallel between the global ascent of the modern West and the rise

of Roman power in the ancient Mediterranean. This partly reflected Toynbee’s unique intellectual

priorities, in particular his concern to understand the deep history of Westernisation. From the early

1920s, as Toynbee’s thinking about history became more generalised and philosophical, he began to

understand ancient history in broad, sweeping terms as the lifecycle of a distinct classical civilisation.

The ‘tragedy of Greece’, the story of the birth, growth, apogee, decline and collapse of Graeco-Roman

(or ‘Hellenic’) civilisation, provided a blueprint onto which he mapped the rise and fall of civilisations

throughout world history.125 Unlike Murray and Zimmern, Toynbee increasingly viewed the classical

past as a unity that could shed light on the universal dynamics of history. Nonetheless, he remained

convinced that the fifth-century marked the apogee of Hellenic civilisation, which declined from 431

BC, and that Athens represented, ‘“the Hellas of Hellas”: the country whose êthos was the

quintessence of Hellenism.’126

The classicising internationalists’ depictions of Athens often echoed the idealism of mid-Victorian

Hellenists like Matthew Arnold. Zimmern’s The Greek Commonwealth, his most extensive

exploration of fifth-century Athenian politics and society, concluded that this was ‘the richest and

happiest period in the recorded history of any single community.’127 The aspects of Athenian culture

and society that offended Murray’s liberal reformist sensibilities—slavery, the subjugation of women

and homosexuality—were not part of the true spirit of Hellenism, but ‘the remnants of that primaeval

slime from which Hellenism was trying to make mankind clean.’128 Moreover, like many liberal

humanists, they excluded ‘ordinary’ Greeks from their discussions of Greek civilisation.129 They

instead focused on political ideals and high culture or grand sweeps of historical narrative, from which

they drew a series of political lessons. They largely ignored the subordinate position of women and

downplayed the cruelties of Athenian slavery. Zimmern condemned the brutal Spartan helot system,

but argued that Athenian slaves were comparatively well-treated and considered socially equal ‘fellow

workers’.130 His contentions were criticised by reviewers—otherwise favourable to his work—who

125 This was first outlined in Arnold Toynbee, The Tragedy of Greece (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921). 126 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume II (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 38. 127 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 426. 128 Murray, Rise, p. 16. 129 Stray, p. 226. 130 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 110, 388–89.

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highlighted the appalling conditions in Athens’ silver mines.131 Zimmern was concerned to outflank

the conservative critique outlined by G.B. Grundy, who argued that Athenian direct democracy was

an illegitimate political form because it was only rendered possible by the institution of slavery.132 For

Zimmern, and also for Murray, the reasoned political argument, moral virtue and civic spirit of

Athenian political culture was central to revitalising modern politics. Athens represented a democratic

social order in which citizens worked for the common good of society but, crucially, accepted the

leadership of the city’s public-minded aristos, its best men. This opinion followed Thucydides’

contrasting depictions of Pericles as a wise and farsighted politician-intellectual and Cleon as an un-

educated, violent, warmongering demagogue.133 It also reflected Thucydides view of Pericles as the

natural leader of democratic Athens, whose citizens followed Pericles’ higher authority, an

interpretation that was emphasised in Benjamin Jowett’s 1881 translation.134 For a group of liberal

intellectuals who, like Jowett, were anxious about Britain’s emerging democracy, Athens represented

a model of social order and civic activism that could provide the bedrock of a new national polity.

Yet, for the classicising internationalists, the polis simultaneously represented a form of a universal

order.

A similar idealism underpinned Zimmern’s interpretation of the Athenian empire as the vehicle for

pan-Hellenic liberty. An alliance of Greek city-states, commonly referred to as the Delian League,

was formed in 478 BC to liberate Greek cities in Asia Minor and defend against renewed Persian

aggression. Its congresses and treasury were located on Delos, until Pericles relocated the treasury to

Athens in 454. The League was increasingly dominated by Athens, which used its superior naval

forces to keep the smaller states in line, and became, according to the early-twentieth-century Irish

historian J.B. Bury (1861–1927), a vehicle for Athenian imperial ambitions.135 Yet, for Zimmern, the

Delian League was a commonwealth, a union of freely associated city-states who willingly accepted

the moral, political and cultural superiority of Athens. Athens was ‘recognized as a model State’ and

became through the Delian League ‘an education to Greece’. Moreover, as ‘the first great civilized

attempt to form a state of many cities’, it held lessons for later theorists of international order.136

Zimmern’s interpretation of the Athenian empire influenced Edwardian imperial reformers, as well as

131 H.J. Cunningham, ‘Review’, English Historical Review, 27.107 (1912), 533–35 (p. 534). 132 On Grundy, see Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, pp. 248–51. 133 Thucydides, 2.65, 4.21. 134 Thucydides, 1.117–19. See also, Alexandra Lianeri, ‘Translation and the Establishment of Liberal Democracy in

Nineteenth-Century England’, in Translation and Power, ed. by Maria Tymoczko and Edwin Gentzler (University of

Massachusetts Press, 2002), pp. 1–24 (pp. 20–21). Jowett’s translation was used by the classicising internationalists. 135 J.B. Bury, A History of Greece (London: Macmillan, 1914), p. 397. A similar interpretation was outlined in E.M.

Walker, ‘The Confederacy of Delos, 478–463 B.C.’, in The Cambridge Ancient History, ed. by Frank Adcock and S.A.

Cook (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), V, 33–67 (pp. 59–61). 136 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 186–87, 180. The phrase ‘education to Greece’ comes from Pericles’ Funeral

Oration, Thucydides, 2.35–46. The Greek Commonwealth quoted the entire speech, pp. 195–204.

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the internationalism of Murray and Toynbee. Moreover, the idealistic and flawed interpretation of the

Delian League as a free association of city-states under the moral leadership of Athens found in

Zimmern’s scholarship seeped into the classicising internationalists’ view of modern international

order. Downplaying the coercive power of Athens worked in tandem with disregarding the hierarchical

design of the League of Nations.

The three classicising internationalists were convinced that the holism that they took as characteristic

of Greek thought and implicit in the concept of civilisation should be central to any attempt to serve

the intellectual and political needs of modern international society. According to Zimmern, order was

the supreme political ideal and ‘the ultimate condition of all human affairs.’137 Uniquely, the Greeks

placed local problems of social and political order within a broader holistic worldview, and

conceptualised order in a universal sense that was relevant to organising modern global politics:

‘Artists and thinkers by nature, lovers of order and reason, they asked for harmony in the world without

as in the world within. “Order” and “world” are the same word (κόσμος [cosmos]) in their language.’138

The organising principle of world order, an idea central to almost all interventions in international

political theory, was, therefore, a legacy of ancient Greece.139 As a political community, Athens had

successfully reconciled the individual with the social whole. Its empire was underpinned by a liberal

universalism and an ethical commitment to education, free trade and the rule of law. As a free

association of independent city-states under the moral leadership of Athens, the fifth-century Delian

League transposed the constituent parts of the city-state onto an international stage and offered a model

for imperial and global order. Zimmern rooted his theories of world order in the civic republican

principles and notions of community drawn from his reading of classical Greece in an attempt to

reconcile political liberty and social stability on the international stage.

In a lecture to Literae Humaniores students in 1932, Zimmern, then Professor of International

Relations, argued that the innovative political theory and practices of the Athenian polis were central

to understanding international politics. The League of Nations extended the ideals and higher purpose

of the polis to the world:

When Aristotle spoke of the city as the most authoritative association… comprehending or

embracing… all others he was using language which to-day could only be applied to the

League of Nations or some similar body representative of the family of States. It is only on

137 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 9. 138 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 104. 139 See, for example, Henry Kissinger, World Order (London: Penguin, 2015), p. 9.

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such a scale and through some such instrumentality as this that the full purpose of the Polis

can be achieved.140

Zimmern stressed the enduring significance of the polis as a political form, one that defied a

contemporary translation and encompassed far more than the modern idea of the state. The cluster of

civic values and institutions that surrounded the polis represented ‘the citizen body drawn together

into a political way of life’, defined by the organic union of ‘the political and the social, government

and the community’, concepts that Zimmern felt had become disassociated by the modern separation

of state from civil society. The polis was, in the eyes of its citizens and great philosophers, ‘both a

political and social unit… a political and social whole—a political and social universe.’ Consequently,

Athenian citizens saw their political duty and way of life as members of society as complementary

endeavours. This enabled the articulation of a historically unique combination of ‘individual

responsibility and corporate association’ which, to Zimmern, represented ‘all that is implied in the

term “public”—public life, public spirit, public opinion, public service, the public.’141 The polis

harmonised the individual and corporate identities of its members and fused the ethical, political and

social, creating a morally cohesive association defined by liberty, civic spirit and human flourishing.

Moreover, by interpreting politics as public affairs, the pursuit of ambitions and needs that citizens

held in common, as opposed to modern emphasis on individual interests in an atomised society, Greek

political thinkers ‘aimed at universality’, and achieved this through the local individuality that came

with the citizenship of a particular city-state. Whereas modern political thought began from the

individual and worked outwards to theorise state and society, the Greeks set ‘the interests of the

community or state above those of the individual.’142 Thus, despite its localised scale, the polis offered

a way to achieve internationality through the nation and resolve the tension at the heart of twentieth-

century world politics: the discordance between a global economy and the organisation of world

politics on the basis of the particularist nation-state.

Murray also invoked the Greek ordering principle of cosmos. He argued that the world experienced

oscillating times of ‘Chaos’ and ‘Cosmos’. Periods of Cosmos, like nineteenth-century Britain, were

marked by the dominance of liberalism, moral and intellectual stability, and the absence of violence

in political affairs. The First World War unleashed a time of Chaos characterised by the disordering

forces of nationalism, war and socialism, ‘the breakdown of political machinery’, and the erosion of

customs and traditions.143 Cosmos also framed Murray’s theory of international citizenship and civic

duty centring on a cosmopolitan universal city. In 1912, Murray outlined four stages of Greek religion.

140 Zimmern, ‘Lecture to Literae Humaniores Students’, MS Zimmern 142, fol. 126. 141 Zimmern, ‘Lecture to Literae Humaniores Students’, MS Zimmern 142, fol. 87. 142 Zimmern, ‘Political Thought’, pp. 323, 329. Emphasis in original. 143 Murray, Ordeal, pp. 170–80.

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In 1925, after the League of Nations had become a regular feature of political life, he elaborated a fifth

stage centring on the philosophical schools of the fourth century BC. Stoic physics gave the world a

universal order (cosmos) and an evolutionary purpose (phusis) directed towards ‘Aretê, the perfection

of each thing.’144 The Stoic idea of universal human brotherhood was also an antidote to inward

looking nationalism. However, Athens shadowed Murray’s invocations of Stoic universalism. In a

1915 lecture, he depicted Stoicism as a Hellenic product marked by philosophic rationalism. Stoicism

was both a revival and culmination of fifth-century Hellenism, an attempt to ‘rebuild a new public

spirit, devoted not to the City, but to something greater’ after the destruction of the city-state model

by Alexander.145 In a 1919 lecture at the University of Manchester, Murray noted how,

ancient philosophers are particularly strong on this… conception of human goodness as being

the quality of a good citizen. The world or the universe is one community, or, as they call it,

one city; all men, or perhaps all living things, are citizens of that city, and human goodness

consists in living for its good.146

The Stoic universal city, the ‘One Great City of Gods and Men’, provided Murray with a conceptual

tool through which he translated the civic activism of fifth-century Athenian polis onto a global or

civilisational scale appropriate to modern international relations. Thus, the modern international

system was an expression of the spirit of the Aristotelian polis, a cooperative society that secured

people from want and enabled its citizens to live as flourishing political individuals. In the divided

world of the late-1930s, the polis also delineated the frontier between liberalism and a resurgent

barbarism: ‘Refugees amid this new return of ancient savagery, we nations that believe in civilization

must build our city wall, we must form that Polis which men build in order to live, and keep rebuilding

and re-forming in order to live well.’147

The classical past was central to Toynbee’s attempt to theorise both international relations and the

dynamics of historical change. Toynbee asserted a classicised rendering of world order based on the

Hellenistic idea of the ecumene, the known or inhabited world. A modern ‘oecumenical

commonwealth… a Western equivalent for the Hellenic οίκουμένη [ecumene]’ was needed to uphold

peace and international order.148 The notion of commonwealth was vital to Zimmern’s political

thought, but the ecumene was a Hellenistic idea and, unlike Toynbee and Murray, Zimmern was

generally unwilling to incorporate later Greek writers into his thinking, viewing them as less civic

144 Murray, Five Stages, p. 126. 145 Murray, ‘The Stoic Philosophy’, p. 93. 146 Gilbert Murray, ‘Satanism and the World Order’, in Essays & Addresses (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1921), pp. 203–

21 (p. 203). 147 Murray, Liberality and Civilization, p. 91. Aristotle, Politics, 1.1252b. 148 Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume IV (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 6.

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minded and, consequently, un-Hellenic. Whilst writing The Greek Commonwealth, Zimmern told

Graham Wallas that he relished the ‘chance of getting my knife into the people who repeat the parrot

phrases of the 4th century writers (who are ascetics in their solution) as if they were truly Hellenic or

applicable to modern life.’149 Yet, Toynbee’s conception of international order drew upon Zimmern’s

depiction of the Athenian commonwealth. In his thinking about history and international relations,

Toynbee translated models drawn from the ancient city-states onto a global and civilisational scale.

Ancient federations, leagues and empires, especially the Roman empire and the Delian League, were

models for modern international order. In a 1932 lecture in Massachusetts, Toynbee argued that the

contemporary global economy had a Roman precedent. Rome was, like modernity, a highly organised,

‘industrialised’ society. Moreover, the ‘scale of political organization’ in modern and Roman times

was similarly global: ‘the Roman World, like our world, was the World in its inhabitant’s eyes.’150

The key difference was the basic unit of international politics. Whilst modernity was an age of nation-

states, Roman imperial order was based on the continental union of a multitude of tiny city-states. The

Roman model was advantageous in a functional sense, as sovereignty was located at the supra-state

level, and was therefore aligned with the transnational nature of the ancient Mediterranean economy,

and ideologically, because its foundational unit, the city-state, was less totalitarian and violent than

the nation.

Of the three classicising internationalists, Toynbee was the most overt in his criticism of the nation-

state, in particular the ‘state idolatry’ encouraged by nationalism. State worship was, Toynbee argued,

an affliction common to the modern West, but was particularly powerful in Nazi Germany.151 City-

state idolatry was also a decisive factor in the violent decline of the Hellenic world.152 Toynbee often

used biblical language to describe the nation-state, a reflection of his particularly acute emotional

response to the First World War. His internationalism was marked by a determination to end the state’s

monopoly on legitimate violence through international warfare and the distribution of justice. One

approach was through multilateral disarmament treaties, which Toynbee compared to the Pax Romana

of early imperial Rome.153 But he also argued for a new theory of state, one in which political

sovereignty was transferred upwards to some international institution that encapsulated the global

scale of modern sociability and economics. By removing the political functions of the nation-state,

and expanding its cultural and economic purpose, states ‘which started their careers in a rather sinister

149 Zimmern to Graham Wallas, 5 January 1910, The Graham Wallas Papers, The British Library of Political and Economic

Science, London, Box 1/46, fols. 7–9. Emphasis in original. 150 Toynbee, ‘A British View of World Economic Order’ (1932), pp. 5–6, Toynbee Papers, Box 3. Emphasis in original. 151 Arnold Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1933 (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 111–20. 152 Arnold Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1931 (London: Oxford University Press, 1932), p. 6; Toynbee, Survey,

1933, p. 115; Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 261. 153 Arnold Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1929 (London: Oxford University Press, 1930), p. 21.

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way as killing-machines’ could be transformed into something resembling Zimmern’s depiction of the

Athenian commonwealth, ‘local associations for mutual benefit.’154 Toynbee’s historical model were

the confederations of ancient Greek city-states, the Achaean Confederacy and the Delian League, that

had successfully balanced ‘traditional city-state autonomy’ with collective action through ‘the

common Government of the federal union.’155

This emphasis on the legacy of the fifth-century united the classicising internationalists and

underpinned their thinking about world politics. Their internationalism was marked by the conviction

that, despite the expanded, international scale of modern political affairs, the Greek city-state provided

institutional and ideational models for theorising international order. But such arguments were made

plausible by uniquely modern developments in economics and technoscience. By the early twentieth

century, British intellectuals accepted that the speed of modern communications had fundamentally

altered human conceptions of distance. Many thinkers felt that the global spread of commerce had

created an international economy defined by interdependent interests. Yet, a profound tension existed

between the integrated global economy and the political organisation of the world into independent

nation-states, each asserting their own national interests within the anarchical international system.

This encouraged intellectuals to outline programmes for the creation of transnational, regional or

global political communities, for example the world state models proposed by H.G. Wells or Aristide

Briand’s plans for a European union. The classicising internationalists recognised the central tensions

of modern international politics, what Toynbee defined as a secular struggle between the parochial

forces of nationalism and the oecumenical forces of democracy and industrial capitalism.156 Yet, they

believed that, as science and trade integrated the world and modern communications replaced the

ancient town crier, the ancient city-state model could be applied to modern international relations. For

Zimmern, ‘modern science has made the world one place’, so ‘social salvation’ must be sought in ‘this

new City of the World’.157 Indeed, these figures variously deployed the polis as a framework for

understanding and structuring the international as a civic space. Athenian civic humanism was central

to Murray’s attempts to elaborate a new ethics for interwar international politics centring on a universal

city. Zimmern’s Greek commonwealth and Toynbee’s ancient leagues reflected the constituent parts

of the city-state on a larger, potentially global scale. These models were all underpinned by similar

convictions about the nature of classical inheritance: that world order must be constructed on civic

154 Toynbee, ‘World Sovereignty and World Culture’, p. 771. 155 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 268. 156 Toynbee, Survey, 1931, pp. 16–17. 157 Zimmern, ‘Political Thought’, p. 351; Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, p. 18.

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republican principles, and that, in Zimmern’s words, ‘the City… [is] the quintessence of what Greece

has meant to mankind.’158

Conclusion

As classicists, Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern were part of an embattled academic discipline

experiencing an intense period of transformation and an irreversible decline in cultural and intellectual

authority. Yet, they remained convinced of the contemporary importance of the classical world. They

reinterpreted the classical inheritance in the context of modern global integration, asserting that

classical civilisation had a specific, political legacy which both towered above antiquity’s numerous

great cultural achievements and was particularly relevant to thinking about world politics: the fifth-

century Athenian polis. Before the First World War, Murray and Zimmern deployed the political ideals

and institutions of the polis to frame their thinking about education and British social democracy. After

1914, the philosophy and historical experience of antiquity were central as all three classicising

internationalists began to theorise global order. These figures felt that the ancient world had grappled

with international questions that were similar to those facing modernity, especially how to overcome

the tension between universal ideals and the organisation of the world into independent states. Indeed,

their distinctive position of the classicising internationalists in both classical scholarship and the

disciplinary history of international relations rested on this entangling of ancient Greece and modern

internationalism, in particular their understanding of the polis as an institutional form that was

accessible in their own international historical moment. Their internationalism was marked by the

conviction that, despite the expanded, international scale of modern political affairs, the Athenian polis

remained central to theorising international order. But this classicising of world politics also worked

to legitimise an international system underpinned and dominated by Western economic and imperial

power. By grounding the international in historical time, the polis became simultaneously a normative

model for cooperative international relations and an ideal type, the image of a future global order to

work towards.

158 Zimmern, ‘Lecture to Literae Humaniores Students’, MS Zimmern 142, fol. 69.

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Chapter II – ‘The res publica with which it is our duty to

concern ourselves… extends to the ends of the earth’:

citizenship, civic virtue and the international republican

moment

For Alfred Zimmern, the League of Nations was inaptly named. The French title La Société des

Nations came closer to the true spirit of an organisation based on a shared ethic of social cooperation.1

Zimmern believed that the ‘internationalisation’ of modern life—the deepening integration of the

world economy, growing transnational personal networks and the emergence of international

government institutions and a political community in Geneva—represented an unprecedented

challenge for political theory and statesmanship. The language, concepts and ideals of the classical

republican tradition in political thought provided a crucial intellectual reservoir for Zimmern as he

sought to understand the nature, authority and function of the new experiment in international

government.2 Zimmern’s major piece of classical scholarship, The Greek Commonwealth (1911),

praised the civic humanism of ancient Athens. After the First World War he sensed an opportunity to

apply Athenian civic ideals to the radically new realities prevailing in international politics. Zimmern

imagined the international system centring on the League as a nascent classical republic in the civic

humanist mould, a political community with a coherent, active and ‘patriotic’ citizenry who

demonstrated a profound civic consciousness, a sense of duty to the collective good of the international

community. His vision of a peaceful world order rested upon internationalised formations of civic

republican concepts, especially citizenship, civic virtue and the common good. Zimmern’s writings

suggest that the emergence of international organisations after 1918 represents a significant moment

in the history of Anglophone republican thought, and the existence of an important tradition of

theorising republicanism beyond the state.3

It is the contention of this chapter that core aspects of both Murray’s and Zimmern’s international

thought were underpinned by a powerful strain of republican political thinking, with its characteristic

1 Zimmern, The League and the Rule of Law, p. 2. 2 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 10. 3 The classic history of republican thought is J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought

and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). This chapter follows the bulk of the

historiography on republicanism in using the terms ‘civic republicanism’ and ‘classical republicanism’ interchangeably.

62

focus on civic virtue, duty, citizenship, public affairs and public welfare. Their ‘civic internationalism’

drew on the language, ideals and values of the republican political tradition, including the

identification of liberty with self-government; reverence for the civic virtues deemed necessary for

citizens to play an active and effective role in public life; emphasis on the importance of public service;

a classicised educational ideal and programmes designed to encourage participatory citizenship; the

belief that true liberty can be actualised only through activities conducive to human flourishing; and a

commitment to subordinating private interest to the common good.4 Many of these ideals were present

in a number of early-twentieth-century liberal and collectivist philosophies, such as R.H. Tawney’s

Christian socialism, the writings of prominent Fabian thinkers like Graham Wallas and Sydney and

Beatrice Webb, the philosophical idealism of Bernard Bosanquet, or the ecumenical movement that

emerged in the 1930s. The classicising internationalists were distinctive in that they consciously

invoked ancient Greece as a model upon which to base contemporary politics and international

relations: Murray looked to Stoic philosophy and the ‘One Great City of Men and Gods’, Zimmern to

the fifth-century Athenian commonwealth. Above all, they were convinced of the need for an active,

well-informed and participatory citizen body infused with a deep civic consciousness for the effective

functioning, security and longevity of the League of Nations.

This chapter seeks to expand the historical range and the spatial and conceptual scale of the republican

tradition traced by J.G.A. Pocock in The Machiavellian Moment (1975).5 Republican ideals were

important to the international institutions and organisations that the classicising internationalists

helped to create and with which they were closely involved throughout their careers. They were also

central to the public discourse surrounding the League as political thinkers sought to understand and

theorise global government. This encourages us to extend into the twentieth century the history of

Atlantic republicanism, especially considering that the creation of the League of Nations was largely

an Anglo-American enterprise driven by British and American thinkers, diplomats and statesmen.6

Moreover, this moment held the potential to have a lasting impact on the workings of international

government and scholarly understandings of international relations. The classicising internationalists

exercised enormous intellectual power over the formation and early direction of academic

4 Eugenio Biagini, Citizenship and Community: Liberals, Radicals and Collective Identities in the British Isles, 1865–1931

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 22–23; Quentin Skinner, ‘The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty’,

in Machiavelli and Republicanism, ed. by Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizo Viroli (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1990), pp. 293–309 (pp. 294–96, 303). 5 Pocock, pp. 3–4. 6 Mazower, Governing the World, pp. xvi–xviii. President Woodrow Wilson and the British diplomat Lord Robert Cecil

were the dominant voices in the Inter-Allied Commission on the League of Nations which drafted the League Covenant

in early 1919. The Foreign Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office Records, National Archives, Kew, FO/608/240.

Daniel Gorman traces the emergence of an idea of ‘international society’ from Anglo-American intellectual networks and

a transnational exchange of ideas, but challenges the idea of an ‘Anglo-American moment’ in 1920s internationalism.

Gorman, pp. 4–5.

63

international relations and the theoretical underpinnings of interwar liberal internationalism from their

positions within international institutions and the British academic world.7 An important and

underappreciated moment in the history of Anglophone republicanism has been overlooked because

of a deficiency in the theoretical scope of republican thinking: a reluctance among historians of

political thought to conceptualise republicanism beyond the parameters of the state.8

Jeanne Morefield’s extensive interrogation of Murray and Zimmern acknowledges the presence of an

‘international civic sensibility’ in their writing. Nonetheless, in Morefield’s analysis, Murray’s and

Zimmern’s republican heritage is overshadowed by an emphasis on the contradictions that emerged

within their liberalism as they tried to reconcile liberal universalism with a hierarchical vision of world

order.9 The expansion of Murray’s and Zimmern’s liberalism into international politics was

accompanied by the extension of the republican elements in their political thought to the international

sphere. Thus, this chapter builds upon Quentin Skinner’s refutation of the ‘false dichotomy’ that

political theorists have constructed between liberal individualism and the Aristotelian tradition by

expanding the field of inquiry to the international.10 Further, it will apply to twentieth-century liberal

thinkers Eugenio Biagini’s contention that Victorian liberalism was both individualist and republican,

for these were ‘different facets of the same tradition.’11 Classicising internationalism forms part of a

longer history of republican influences on British liberalism charted by Biagini, Duncan Bell and

Stuart Jones.12

Murray’s and Zimmern’s distinctive republican internationalist vision owed much to their consistent

intellectual engagement with the history and ideas of antiquity. It also formed part of a broader debate

among British internationalists on the future of citizenship and sovereignty in an international age and

coincided with an important stage in the conceptual history of the state.13 Consequently, this chapter

engages with what David Armitage has termed ‘the pre-history of globalisation’.14 In their invocations

7 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, pp. 10, 176–87. 8 Nicholas Onuf’s investigates the place of republican ideas in international political thought during the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, but overlooks the impact of republican thinking on the creation and theorising of international

institutions during the twentieth century. Nicholas Onuf, The Republican Legacy in International Thought (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998). 9 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, pp. 10, 99. 10 Skinner, ‘Republican Liberty’, p. 293. 11 Eugenio Biagini, ‘Neo-Roman Liberalism: “Republican” Values and British Liberalism, Ca. 1860–1875’, History of

European Ideas, 29.1 (2003), 55–72 (p. 58). 12 Biagini, Citizenship and Community; H.S. Jones, ‘The Civic Moment in British Social Thought: Civil Society and the

Ethics of Citizenship, c. 1880–1914’, in Welfare and Social Policy in Britain Since 1870: Essays in Honour of Jose Harris,

ed. by Lawrence Goldman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 29–43; Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain:

Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton University Press, 2007), pp. 138–49. 13 Trentmann, p. 38; Skinner, ‘The Sovereign State’, pp. 42–43. 14 David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 1.

64

of the ‘interdependence’, ‘integration’ and ‘interconnectedness’ of the modern world, Murray and

Zimmern were grappling with the essence of a concept for which politics was yet to create a term,

‘globalism’.15 Yet, classicising internationalism was never truly global, and it remained structured by

the exclusionary hierarchies of race, empire, civilisation and power. Murray’s and especially

Zimmern’s civic internationalism grew out of and reflected the responsibility politics of liberal

imperialism. Both figures imagined a global order underpinned by British imperial hegemony. As

such, this chapter draws upon a body of literature that stresses the mutuality between British

imperialism and twentieth-century internationalism and the continuities between liberal theories of

empire and international government.16

This chapter explores Murray’s and Zimmern’s political thought, but focuses largely upon Zimmern,

who more readily appealed to the language, ideas and values of the republican tradition. It will begin

by outlining the republican themes in late-Victorian and Edwardian political and social thought and

then examining Zimmern’s classical scholarship. The following sections explore firstly Zimmern’s

and then Murray’s republican-inspired internationalism, focusing on their theories of international

community and citizenship. Murray and Zimmern connected the local, national, imperial and

international and, in Murray’s case, the universal by arguing that the category of the civic—especially

its iteration in the classical Greek polis—provided an ideal model for a responsible and cooperative

ethic of international politics. They understood international citizenship in ethical, not political, terms,

emphasising the neighbourly duties of individual citizens to the international community as opposed

to outlining a doctrine of international political rights. Zimmern theorised global order through the

Athenian commonwealth and the notion of an international public space or res publica. Murray drew

upon ancient philosophical universalism, most notably the Stoic idea of the ‘One Great City of Gods

and Men’. Their civic internationalism represented an innovation in international political theory and

an important and underappreciated moment of internationalisation for the republican political

tradition.

15 On globalism, see Or Rosenboim, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United

States, 1939–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017). 16 Mazower, Governing the World, pp. 128–37; Duncan Bell and Casper Sylvest, ‘International Society in Victorian

Political Thought: T.H. Green, Herbert Spencer, and Henry Sidgwick’, Modern Intellectual History, 3.2 (2006), 207–38;

Long and Schmidt, pp. 1–20.

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Genealogies: citizenship, community and the republic before 1914

There has been growing historical interest in republicanism since the publication of Pocock’s seminal

work The Machiavellian Moment in 1975. Pocock argues that the revival of the classical republican

political thought by Renaissance Italian thinkers like Machiavelli left a paradigmatic legacy. Civic

humanist ideas of balanced government, virtue, citizenship, political participation and the cultivation

of martial virtues re-emerged in the political languages of seventeenth-century England and

eighteenth-century America. For Pocock, virtue lies at the centre of the interpretative scheme of

republican thought. The republic or polis is ‘a structure of virtue’: what virtuous citizens do in common

is a republic. The idea of virtue derives from the Greek concept of arête, which Pocock translates as

‘civic excellence’, and the Latin virtus denoting the qualities of personality in its dealings with fortune

(circumstance), often military strength.17 Republican theorists hold that civic virtue, the group of

ethical qualities that underpin the practice of citizenship, and public spirit, an individual’s commitment

to the welfare of the collectivity, are the essential guarantors of liberty.18 ‘Corruption’ entails the

absence or scorning of virtue by placing private interests above the good of the community, which

leads to political collapse. Republican thinkers have repeatedly asserted the delicate nature of civic

virtue, its vulnerability to corruption, and the fragility of a republican ideal that constantly confronted

its own ‘temporal finitude’, the seemingly inevitable tendency of political systems to decline.19

Historians emphasise different strands of thinking on the nature of republican virtue. Pocock argues

that for the fifteenth-century civic humanists, ‘aretē and virtus alike came to mean, first, the power by

which an individual or group acted effectively in a civic context; next, the essential property which

made a personality or element what it was; third, the moral goodness which made a man, in city or

cosmos, what he ought to be.’20 Drawing upon the ancient Greek democratic heritage and the writings

of the philosophers of the polis, the tradition known as ‘neo-Athenian republicanism’ stressed the

intrinsic value of civic engagement for the self-fulfilment of citizens as human beings.21 Quentin

Skinner identifies another line of republican thinking inspired by Roman writers such as Cicero, Livy

and Sallust which foregrounded the instrumental importance of virtue as the quality needed to defend

the liberty of the republic and its people. In this ‘neo-Roman’ formulation, the Latin virtus, its Italian

derivative virtù, and the terms ‘civic virtue’ and ‘public spiritedness’ used by the English republicans,

17 Pocock, pp. 333–552, 184–85, 37. 18 Civic virtue and public spirit have overlapping meanings, and are often used interchangeably. Public spirit is commonly

associated with the English republican tradition. 19 Pocock, p. vii. This cyclical view of political systems comes from Plato, Republic, 543a–569c. 20 Pocock, p. 37. 21 The history of ‘neo-Athenian’ republicanism has been explored in Eric Nelson, The Greek Tradition in Republican

Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

66

‘denote the range of capacities that each one of us as a citizen most needs to possess’ that enable

citizens to serve the common good and maintain their liberty.22 As philhellenists who associated

ancient Rome with the loss of liberty and human creativity, Murray and Zimmern drew

overwhelmingly on the Athenian republican heritage.

Pocock’s narrative of the republican tradition culminates in revolutionary America. Later scholarship

has extended this history into the nineteenth century. Stefan Collini argues that Victorian political

thought contained ‘survivals and mutations’ of the earlier language of civic humanism, highlighting

the similarities between the Victorian idea of character and eighteenth century conceptions of virtue.23

The republican influences on Victorian liberalism have traditionally been obscured by a historiography

that associated liberalism with Hobbesian negative liberty or emphasised the utilitarian inheritance.24

Stuart Jones challenges this, arguing that J.S. Mill (1806–1873) regularly asserted the importance of

civic virtue as a means to combat a natural tendency towards corruption in public affairs and political

decline.25 Eugenio Biagini contends that a republican ethos pervaded both academic and popular

liberalism during the nineteenth century. Republican notions are found in the political philosophies of

Mill and T.H. Green, and even seeped into economic thought, long seen as the domain of classical

liberalism, through the writings of Alfred Marshall (1842–1924). On the popular level, republican

themes emerged in enthusiasm for the ideas of the Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Mazzini (1805–

1872), the idealisation of republican countries such as seventeenth-century England and the

contemporary United States, and the popularity of civic militias in British towns from the 1850s to the

1870s.26

The republican imprint on philosophical idealism is more widely acknowledged by historians.27 Jose

Harris argues that the pivotal source of idealist social thought was Greek philosophy, especially

Plato.28 In T.H. Green’s communitarian liberalism, citizenship was seen as a duty that required the

22 Skinner, ‘Republican Liberty’, pp. 300–303. On the distinctions between ‘protective’ and ‘developmental republicanism,

see David Held, Models of Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2006), pp. 35–36. 23 Collini, pp. 108–10. 24 Most prominently, Isaiah Berlin, ‘Two Concepts of Liberty’, in Four Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). 25 H.S. Jones, ‘John Stuart Mill as Moralist’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 53.2 (1992), 287–308 (pp. 298–99). 26 Biagini, ‘Neo-Roman Liberalism’, pp. 61–71. For Biagini, Green and Mill’s republicanism is ‘neo-Roman’, despite their

preference for the didactic lessons of Athenian history. 27 For the influence of the British republican tradition on nineteenth-century idealism, see Duncan Kelly, ‘Idealism and

Revolution: T.H. Green’s Four Lectures on the English Commonwealth’, History of Political Thought, 27.3 (2006), 505–

42. 28 José Harris, ‘Political Thought and the Welfare State 1870–1940: An Intellectual Framework for British Social Policy’,

Past & Present, 135 (1992), 116–41 (p. 127).

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exercise of virtue instilled through education and legislation.29 From his position as Professor of Moral

Philosophy at Oxford, Green amassed a huge intellectual following—including Arthur Acland,

Bernard Bosanquet, Edward Caird, John MacCunn and John Mackenzie—through which his ethical

ideal filtered into many aspects of British social, political and historical thought. Indeed, Murray,

Toynbee and Zimmern were undergraduates at a time when classical studies at Oxford was dominated

by the idealism of Green and his mentor, the Regius Professor of Greek Benjamin Jowett.30 Green and

his disciples encouraged a wide-ranging public and academic discussion of citizenship and the virtues

that underlay its practice in the half-century before 1914. During what Jones terms the ‘civic moment’

in British social thought, the dominant formulations of citizenship pivoted on Green’s moral notion of

the good citizen as someone with an altruistic commitment to public service and the common good.31

Political developments during the early twentieth century—the growth of mass democracy, imperial

anxieties, the national efficiency movement, and public education—made ‘citizenship a category of

thought and association to which an increasingly large number of values and experiences adhered.’32

For example, the Workers’ Educational Association, widely supported by Oxford dons, aimed to

‘prepare’ the soon-to-be enfranchised working populations for the ‘responsibilities’ of democratic

political leadership.33

As Julia Stapleton notes, ‘the ideal of citizenship inspired much new creative scholarship, not least in

the study of Greek and Roman antiquity’, of which Zimmern’s 1911 work The Greek Commonwealth

was a prime example.34 Despite its broad title, the book was a history of fifth-century Athens, which

Zimmern considered a model society. Whilst eighteenth and early nineteenth century classical

scholarship tended to warn of the destabilising effects of Athenian democracy, positive depictions of

Athens became prominent in British historiography as democracy emerged as an accepted

constitutional form in the later nineteenth century.35 As Frank Turner notes, Zimmern saw in Athens

‘a sense of the good civic life’ that emerging democratic states like Britain ‘might wisely seek to

emulate.’36 The Greek Commonwealth is comprised of three parts: the first examines Mediterranean

29 T.H. Green, Lectures on the Principles of Political Obligation (London: Longmans Green, 1895), p. 130. Berlin sees

Green as the key advocate of the positive the concept of liberty, which emphasises social duty and, Berlin argued, tended

towards authoritarianism. Berlin, pp. 22–25. 30 W.H. Walsh, ‘The Zenith of Greats’, in The History of the University of Oxford, ed. by Michael Brock and M.C. Curthoys

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), VII, 311–26 (pp. 320–24). 31 H.S. Jones, ‘The Civic Moment’, pp. 32–33, 42. See also Tom Hulme, ‘Putting the City Back into Citizenship: Civics

Education and Local Government in Britain, 1918–45’, Twentieth Century British History, 26.1 (2015), 26–51. 32 Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, p. 368. 33 Goldman, Dons and Workers, pp. 2, 105–6. 34 Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities, p. 39. 35 The key classicist behind this development was George Grote. Peter Liddel, ‘European Colonialist Perspectives on

Athenian Power: Before and After the Epigraphic Explosion’, in Interpreting the Athenian Empire, ed. by Nikolaos

Papazarkadas, Robert Parker, and John Ma (London: Duckworth, 2009), pp. 13–42 (p. 13). 36 Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, p. 261.

68

geography; the second outlines the development of Athenian democracy, culminating with Pericles’

Funeral Oration; and the third focuses on Greek economics. The book concludes with an account of

the spiritual corruption and political decline of Athens after the death of Pericles in 429 BC. Zimmern

presented a moral vision of Athenian politics that balanced civic duty and activism with a commitment

to individual liberty under the mantra ‘to serve is to be free’. Athens was a vibrant and egalitarian

participatory democracy characterised by a ‘vigorous public opinion’ and its citizens’ dedication to

public affairs.37 The Athenian citizen’s life was depicted in Hegelian terms as a process of constant

‘training in citizenship’ from the family to the academy, to political engagement and public service in

the assembly, and ending with patriotic sacrifice in battle. Indeed, unique among historical societies,

Athens had united ‘Politics and Morality, the deepest forces of national and of individual life’ in a

common ideal, ‘the perfect citizen in the perfect state’. Athens also stood at the head of an empire of

‘liberty’—a commonwealth—that spread its superior model of free political institutions and acted as

both ‘an education to Greece’ and, Zimmern hoped, modern Britain.38

The Greek Commonwealth culminates with a republican narrative of decline: Cleon’s demagogic

warmongering corrupted public affairs and incurred the general moral degeneration of the Athenian

citizenry, epitomised by the violent sack of Melos in 416 BC. This was followed by a hubristic

invasion of Sicily, defeat to Sparta in the Peloponnesian Wars (431–404 BC) and the end of Athenian

liberty.39 But Zimmern also sought to disentangle civic humanist values from influential narratives of

political collapse. In Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89), which

retained a deep hold on the British political imagination well into the twentieth century, there was an

intrinsic antagonism between empire and civic humanism.40 The growth of empire sapped the civic

virtue that had defined the Roman republic (traditionally dated 509–27 BC) and led to Rome’s long

and violent decline.41 For Zimmern, the degeneration of Periclean Athens was not the result of the

temporal logic of republics outlined by Gibbon or the inevitable cycle of political decline found in

Plato. Instead, it was blamed on a plague that devastated the city in 430 BC, from which ‘Athens

awoke to find her spirit seared.’42 Zimmern depicted the plague as a psychological and philosophical

37 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 420–44, 191, 62. The emphasis Zimmern placed on the various societies,

organisations and hobbies that comprised Athenian civic life was unique among contemporary classical scholarship.

Jeanne Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism: Anglo-American Decline and the Politics of Deflection (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2014), p. 45. 38 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 62, 67, 426, 187–88, 424; Jeanne Morefield, ‘“An Education to Greece”: The

Round Table, Imperial Theory and the Uses of History’, History of Political Thought, 28.2 (2007), 328–61. 39 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 429–37. 40 On Gibbon’s enduring intellectual influence, see Adam Rogers and Richard Hingley, ‘Edward Gibbon and Francis

Haverfield: Traditions of Imperial Decline’, in Classics and Imperialism in the British Empire, ed. by Mark Bradley

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 189–214. 41 Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, ed. by J.B. Bury, 6 vols (London: Methuen

& Co., 1909), IV. 42 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 425.

69

watershed: it ended the rational thought and civic spirit that characterised Athenian politics. Thus,

Zimmern’s historical narrative locked Periclean Athens in time. Absolved of its links to a short-lived

republic, Athenian civic humanism could be revived for contemporary politics.

Certain that ancient history provided constructive lessons for modernity, Zimmern viewed The Greek

Commonwealth as a contribution to a wider public discussion of citizenship and civic values. Whilst

writing the book in the summer of 1910, he told Graham Wallas that, ‘of course I want most of all to

make people think about the nature of the XXth century πόλις [polis].’43 Zimmern’s work was also

received as a present-minded intervention in public debate. A reviewer in The Spectator praised him

for outlining an alternative to modern modes of government which reduced the ethical complexities

of citizenship to the act of voting at intermittent intervals and thereby undermined ‘that living sense

of immediate participation in the work and welfare of the community without which there can be no

real citizenship.’44 When the First World War gave greater urgency to questions surrounding citizens’

rights and duties and the relationship between the citizen and the state, Zimmern felt that his classical

scholarship had become even more pertinent. In the preface to the second edition, published in 1915,

he noted how the war had brought ‘Britain face to face, for the first time since she has become a

Democracy, with the full ultimate meaning of the civic responsibilities, both of thought and action,

with which, in the narrower field of the City State, the fifth-century Athenians were so familiar.’45

This opinion was shared by military recruiters, who used extracts from Zimmern’s translation of

Pericles’ Funeral Oration in recruitment posters on the London Underground.46

The liberal picture of Athens found in The Greek Commonwealth reflected the ideas of the mid-

Victorian classicist, George Grote (1794–1871). In his History of Greece (1846–56), Grote offered a

philosophical interpretation of Athenian power as a balance between duties and liberty.47 Likewise,

Zimmern viewed the Athenian empire as a vehicle for wider Greek liberty. Zimmern’s Athenian

empire-commonwealth was primarily an educational endeavour, spreading Athenian civic ideals and

models of politics to all the Greek city-states.48 Any sense of the self-interested or acquisitive political

incentives behind Athens’ rise to imperial hegemony were absent. Given that many British historians

43 Zimmern to Graham Wallas, 5 January 1910, Wallas Papers, Box 1/46, fols. 7–9. 44 ‘The Greek Commonwealth (Book Review)’, The Spectator, 4 November 1911, pp. 745–46 (p. 745). 45 Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth, 2nd edn (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1915), p. 5. 46 Morley, p. 426; Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 193–204. The full Funeral Oration was published in 1915 in an

anonymously authored pamphlet entitled The Ideal of Citizenship, the same title as the chapter in which the speech appears

in The Greek Commonwealth. Thucydides, 2.35–46. 47 Liddel, pp. 18–19, 28–29; Frank Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority: Essays in Victorian Intellectual Life

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 322–61. 48 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 186–90, 448.

70

and political theorists used ancient empires as a mirror through which to discuss modern British

imperialism, Zimmern’s idealistic view of Athens was not uncommon.49 Neither was such an

interpretation of the Athenian empire wholly dominant in early-twentieth-century classical studies.

For example, J.B. Bury argued that the desire to maintain naval supremacy in the Aegean underpinned

Athenian imperial expansion.50 The depth of Zimmern’s admiration of Athens was also unusual

enough to be worthy of comment. Contemporary critics noted ‘the author’s idealizing tendency’ and

his ‘rather roseate view of the motives animating Athens’.51 The historian H.J. Cunningham wrote that

the treatment of slaves in Athens’ silver mines scarcely accorded with Zimmern’s interpretation of

slaves as ‘fellow workers’ who shared a level of social equality with artisans and citizens.52

Zimmern approached Greek history using the ‘newer methods of social inquiry’ that he felt many

classicists neglected, conceiving of his work as a political economy of ancient Athens.53 Alongside

literary sources, he used evidence from inscriptions discovered over the course of the nineteenth

century and collated in E.L. Hicks’s Greek Historical Inscriptions (1882).54 Zimmern’s classical

scholarship also bore the imprint of the tradition of historical geography associated with Edward

Freeman and influential at late-Victorian and Edwardian Oxford.55 Freeman contended that geology,

climate and topography shaped the varied development of political institutions across Europe.56 Early

twentieth century scholars such as J.L. Myres and Toynbee argued for the integration of geography

into classical studies.57 The Greek Commonwealth reflected this trend: the first part was devoted to

the geography, climate and soil of Greece which Zimmern believed formed ‘a permanent background

to Greek life and thought’ and was essential to the development of Athenian democracy. Toynbee also

drew a map of Attica for the second edition. As Zimmern noted, his focus on ‘geographical and

economic conditions’ and the inclusion of evidence from recent archaeological discoveries

‘distinguishes the Greece of modern scholarship from the Greece of Grote and our grandfathers.’58

49 Eva Hausteiner, ‘Managing the World: Conceptions of Imperial Rule Between Republicanism and Technocracy’,

History of European Ideas, 42.4 (2016), 570–84; Sarah Butler, Britain and Its Empire in the Shadow of Rome (London:

Bloomsbury, 2012); Krishan Kumar, ‘Greece and Rome in the British Empire: Contrasting Role Models’, Journal of

British Studies, 51.1 (2012), 76–101. 50 Bury, History of Greece, p. 397. 51 George Willis Botsford, ‘Review’, Classical Weekly, 5.14 (1912), 109–10 (p. 110); P.A.S, ‘Review’, Journal of Hellenic

Studies, 43.1 (1923), 68–69 (p. 68). 52 Cunningham, p. 534; Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 375–89. 53 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 5. 54 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 85, 100–102, 145, 172, 174, 182, 258, 270, 278, 354–57, 366; A Manual of Greek

Historical Inscriptions, ed. by E.L. Hicks and G.F. Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1903). 55 Baji, ‘Commonwealth’, pp. 23–31. 56 Edward Freeman, The Historical Geography of Europe (London: Longmans Green, 1881), p. 2. 57 Baji, ‘Commonwealth’, p. 29. 58 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 16, 62, 5.

71

Aside from the title, the term ‘commonwealth’ appears only four times in The Greek Commonwealth,

most importantly in Zimmern’s translation of Pericles’ eulogy to the Athenian war dead who ‘gave

their bodies to the commonwealth’.59 It was rare for twentieth-century classical scholars to translate

the Greek word koine (‘common’) as a noun instead of the usual translation that the Athenians died

‘in common’. As Morefield contends, Zimmern’s translation implied the existence of a common

political object that gave the Athenians’ sacrifice coherence and, crucially, invoked the English

republican tradition. Zimmern used the term commonwealth to outline a conception of Athenian civic

patriotism practised by freedom-loving individuals whose devotion to the community was fuelled by

shared customs, traditions and values developed through a life lived in common.60 Further,

commonwealth encapsulated Zimmern’s organic conception of the state. Zimmern accepted

Aristotle’s dictum that the polis was the highest form of political association, and traced its

development from the seventh century BC to its culmination in fifth-century Athens.61 He held that,

despite its failure, the Athenian commonwealth was a higher, separate political entity beyond the

aggregate of its individual members that embodied the common good and through which individuals

could realise their liberty and personality.62 As a ‘non-coercive’ political association above partisan

city-state politics, commonwealth became a useful tool for Zimmern’s later thinking about global

order beyond the nation-state.

Zimmern’s notion of Athenian commonwealth was influenced by the ideas of Lord Milner (1854–

1925) and the Round Table society for imperial reform. The Round Table was established in 1909 by

a group of intellectuals and colonial administrators (known as ‘the Kindergarten’) who surrounded

Milner during his time running colonial South Africa (1897–1905). Anxious about Britain’s global

position after the Boer War, and faced with the rise of Germany and the USA, Round Table figures

argued that the British empire could avert decline only through an ‘organic union’, by strengthening

the spiritual, political and cultural bonds with the Dominions. The society advocated a federal union

of the British empire in which the Dominions and Britain had equal authority over foreign policy, and

was particularly active between 1909 and the early 1920s.63 Zimmern was a student at New College,

Oxford when Milner’s influence there was at its peak, and his undergraduate essays reflect this.64

59 The quote is found in Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 202. See also, pp. 77, 131. Thucydides 2.43.2. 60 Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism, pp. 47–48. Zimmern’s translation of Thucydides was close to the 1628

translation by Thomas Hobbes. Baji contends that Zimmern grounded his reading of the Athenian commonwealth in

Edmund Burke’s account of the relationship between politics and private ethics. For Zimmern, Athenian citizenship

depended upon both political virtues and pre-civic moralities, especially fellowship. Baji, ‘Commonwealth’, pp. 6–7, 52–

54. Zimmern cited Burke in the section entitled ‘The Elements of Citizenship’. Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 55,

77. On the reception of Burke, see Emily Jones, Edmund Burke. 61 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 59, 77. Aristotle, Politics, 1.1252a1–7. 62 Baji, ‘Commonwealth’, pp. 48–50. 63 Kendle, pp. 9–12, 22–71, 107–14. 64 See, for example, Zimmern, ‘United Britain’ (unpublished, c.1905), MS Zimmern 135, fols. 124–69. Morefield, Empires

Without Imperialism, p. 40.

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Zimmern joined the Round Table in 1910. In 1913–14 he began attending meetings of the London-

based inner circle (known as ‘moots’) alongside leading figures Lionel Curtis, Philip Kerr and

Zimmern’s former student Reginald Coupland.65 Zimmern’s classical scholarship was influential in

1915–16 as the London group formulated their designs for a British commonwealth based on citizens

assuming greater responsibility for public affairs.66

Zimmern’s imperial writings advocated public duty and devotion to the common good of the imperial

community, drawing heavily on his reading of fifth-century Athenian citizenship. In this sense, he can

be placed within the tradition of ‘civic imperialism’ outlined by Duncan Bell. Late-nineteenth-century

thinkers like J.R. Seeley, Goldwin Smith and J.A. Froude deployed civic humanist ideas in their

writings on imperial order. They emphasised public duty, altruism and virtuous patriotism at the

imperial level.67 Froude, for example, argued that in order for the British empire to avoid repeating

the decline of Rome, Britain must create a global polity of individuals exhibiting virtuous republican

characteristics.68 Writing anonymously in the Round Table’s journal in 1913, Zimmern outlined a

similarly republican vision of imperial unity in which the empire’s citizens engaged in a ‘common

endeavour in the fulfilment of the moral obligations which their membership of the Empire entails.’

However, Zimmern’s model was not Rome but ‘the independent City States of the past’: thirteenth-

century Florence and especially ‘the rich civic life of ancient Athens’.69 Zimmern’s conceptions of the

British and Athenian empire-commonwealths were, therefore, mutually constitutive. Through

displacing the problems facing the British empire to the temporal safety of ancient Greece, Zimmern

could work out his own liberal theory of imperialism without having to face the illiberal realities of

contemporary empire, endemic violence, systematic inequality and the absence of freedom.70

Zimmern’s engagement with the Round Table when he was writing The Greek Commonwealth, and

the parallels that he drew between ancient Athenian and modern British life, suggest that the book

was, as Morefield argues, a mediation on contemporary empire. Yet, Morefield overlooks how pivotal

Athens remained to Zimmern’s later internationalism, and instead foregrounds the influence of British

idealism. The empire was, after all, ‘a league within the larger League, a society within that larger

65 E.W.M. Grigg to Zimmern, 14 February 1914, MS Zimmern 14, fols. 46–47. The central committee was concerned to

include ‘stronger representation of Liberal opinion’ and strengthen their links to the WEA. 66 Kendle, pp. 160, 171. 67 Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, p. 139. 68 Duncan Bell, ‘Republican Imperialism: J.A. Froude and the Virtue of Empire’, History of Political Thought, 30.1 (2009),

166–91 (p. 180). 69 Zimmern, ‘Ethics of Empire’, p. 496. 70 Morefield, Empires Without Imperialism, pp. 33, 59.

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society.’71 In the book’s immediate context and reception, the civic humanist ideals that Zimmern

located and admired in fifth-century Athens were interpreted as crucial to revitalising modern

citizenship and the British empire. In the internationalist intellectual climate after 1918, Athenian civic

values became critical to Zimmern’s republican rendering of the international and his theory of

citizenship. Zimmern’s involvement with the Round Table ended in the mid-1920s as he became more

concerned with international politics and coordinating the League’s efforts in the field of intellectual

cooperation. Yet, as an ideal deemed unpartisan and requiring a sense of higher loyalty, Zimmern

found the Athenian commonwealth particularly suited to theorising global order. Athens represented

a polity separate from and, crucially, above partisan national politics. Indeed, both Zimmern and

Murray drew on the rich republican heritage of the classical world, the republican themes within

British liberalism and the Edwardian discourse of the civic, when theorising international politics after

the First World War. Civic duty, public welfare, self-sacrifice, altruism and responsibility underpinned

both Zimmern’s notion of a global republic and Murray’s idea of the ‘One Great City of Men and

Gods’.

Civic internationalism and citizenship

The interruption of Victorian security by the First World War pushed many British historians towards

greater public and political engagement.72 Both Murray and Zimmern actively supported the war. In

1915, Murray authored a pamphlet defending Britain’s pre-war foreign policy.73 The conflict with

Germany almost immediately persuaded Zimmern that ‘the chief political task before mankind’ lay in

‘extending the range and the meaning of Democracy and Citizenship, Liberty and Law’.74 Indeed, the

war reoriented Murray’s and Zimmern’s political thought towards a systematic consideration of

international politics. This was part of a wider shifting of intellectual concern among liberal

intellectuals like Toynbee, Norman Angell, Arthur Salter and Leonard Woolf. For these thinkers, the

theory of inviolable state sovereignty was inapplicable to an interconnected modern world.75 Inspired

by their wartime government experience in inter-Allied cooperation, the ‘new internationalists’

71 Zimmern, Third British Empire, p. 63.. 72 Reba Soffer, Discipline and Power: The University, History, and the Making of an English Elite, 1870–1930 (Stanford:

Stanford University Press, 1994), p. 47. 73 Gilbert Murray, The Foreign Policy of Sir Edward Grey (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915). Murray also supported the

rights of conscientious objectors, supporting a number of prominent individual cases including Clive Bell, Bertrand Russell

(Murray’s cousin by marriage) and Stephen Hobhouse. See West, p. 161. 74 See, Greek Commonwealth, 2nd edn, p. 5. 75 Skinner, ‘The Sovereign State’, pp. 42–43.

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emphasised the importance of cooperation and coordination in international relations.76 They also

desired to bring an end to the secretive diplomacy that they saw as the cause of the war and to enshrine

the principle of ‘publicity’ in international affairs.77 This group had sizeable influence over the British

establishment and public opinion through journalism and radio, academic chairs, personal connections

with the political elite, and their positions in British party politics.78 Further, these figures, especially

Toynbee and Zimmern, were prominent in the Royal Institute for International Affairs (founded 1920),

which provided the British foreign policy-making community with expert guidance on world affairs.79

Murray and Zimmern were central to the construction of the intellectual edifice of the ‘new

internationalism’. However, their international thinking bore the lasting imprint of their earlier

classical scholarship. Zimmern’s interpretation of fifth-century Athens and Murray’s writing on Greek

religion and philosophy continuously shaped how they theorised global order.

During the interwar years, Zimmern the classicist became perhaps the most widely known and

influential expert on international affairs in British public life.80 He was Wilson Professor of

International Politics at Aberystwyth (1919–21), the first academic chair in international relations, and

Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford (1930–44). Murray remained Regius

Professor of Greek at Oxford until 1936 and was a titanic public figure.81 His personal networks and

intellectual prestige were behind the appointment of pro-League voices to various academic positions

in the emerging field of international relations.82 Murray joined the wartime movement for a League

of Nations in 1915. In 1919, he was appointed deputy chairman of the newly formed League of Nations

Union (LNU), a mass organisation committed to increasing public support for international

institutions, becoming chairman in 1923. With a membership that peaked at 406,000 in 1931, the LNU

was a major presence in interwar political culture.83 Both Murray and Zimmern were also closely

involved in the workings of the League of Nations, especially in the field of intellectual cooperation.

Murray was part of the League’s Committee on Intellectual Co-operation from its foundation in 1922,

chairing the organisation from 1928 to 1939. Zimmern was deputy director of the League-affiliated

International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation between 1926 and 1930.84

76 Trentmann, pp. 35–41. 77 Mazower, Governing the World, p. 116; Susan Pedersen, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of

Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 77–103. 78 Murray was elected to the National Liberal Federation in 1920. Laski was offered a cabinet position in the early 1920s,

and was part of the Labour National Executive Committee from 1937–49. He was chairman of the Labour Party in 1945–

46. 79 Parmar, pp. 53–56. 80 Markwell, p. 279; Trentmann, p. 36. 81 Overy, p. 25. 82 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, p. 10. 83 West, pp. 199–204; McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, pp. 2–5. 84 Laqua; Toye and Toye.

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Murray’s and Zimmern’s search for new international ethics operated within an Edwardian frame of

reference centring on republican notions of civic duty, virtue and citizenship. Their civic visions of

global order were grounded in their knowledge of the classical world. Consequently, Murray and

Zimmern formed a distinctive grouping within the ‘new internationalists’. For Zimmern, the

international system was a republic with a distinct citizenry and a forum for discussing public affairs,

the League of Nations. Zimmern’s internationalism expanded civic ideals to the international sphere,

a process seen in his pre-war imperial thought. Murray, drawing on ancient philosophical holism, in

particular the ideas of the Stoics, portrayed the international as a universal city in which human

difference was transcended for the common good and dutiful citizens dedicated themselves towards

maintaining global order.85 Both argued that the internationalisation of civic virtue would strengthen

the bonds of the international community and ensure that national and international governance was

directed towards the realisation of the common good, not the interests of individual states. This

classically inspired civic internationalism was Murray’s and Zimmern’s unique contribution to a

broader public debate on the future of citizenship and sovereignty in an international age. The next

section will analyse Zimmern’s international republicanism. The subsequent section addresses

Murray’s concept of the ‘One Great City’.

Zimmern and the international res publica

During the early twentieth century, many intellectuals asserted that modern science and technology

had led to the reduction or destruction of distance. For Zimmern, shrinking distances had

simultaneously widened the political sphere. But the enlargement of politics beyond the civic arena in

which ancient Greek philosophers lived and thought did not render Greek ideas irrelevant. Civic

republican ideals must be made to fit with the international nature of modern economic life, for ‘the

economic organisation of the world has outstripped the development of its citizenship and

government.’86 This section will explore, firstly, how Zimmern connected the civic and international

through the notion of expanding circles of political association and civic responsibility; and, secondly,

his contention that the preservation of peace depended on an international citizenry channelling a civic

frame of reference and cooperating for the common good. From the late 1920s until the mid-1930s,

85 Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, p. 183; Murray, Liberality and Civilization, p. 43. 86 Alfred Zimmern, ‘German Culture and the British Commonwealth’, in Nationality and Government (London: Chatto &

Windus, 1915), pp. 1–31 (p. 23).

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Zimmern argued that a global order could be constructed in accordance with the republican ideals of

the fifth-century Athenian polis.87 This was a period marked by optimism in internationalist circles

about the political capacity of the League and the possibility of averting another European war.88 In

the mid-1930s, when the League’s architecture began to crumble under pressure from militarist

powers, Zimmern stepped back from the universalism of his original international vision. Nonetheless,

the same enlarged republican ideals of public spirit and civic obligation underlined his more restricted

plan for a collective security apparatus centring on the Atlantic democracies, their colonial possessions

and the Dominions.

During the 1920s, a large number of politically conscious American and European intellectuals and

public figures began to discuss the emergence of an international society centring on the League of

Nations.89 This international society had grown out of the increasing sociability of the world’s peoples

through modern communications and the global spread of trade and commerce in the century before

1920, what Glenda Sluga refers to as ‘the objective facts’ of early twentieth century internationalism.90

British internationalists like Norman Angell, J.A. Hobson and Leonard Woolf saw growing

transnational sociability as a radical departure from the traditional play of international relations as

conceptualised in Hobbesian terms of power, interest and security.91 The classicising internationalists

repeatedly stressed that global economic interconnectedness and interdependence underpinned an

emergent international community or society. Toynbee argued that ‘the social life of mankind is

becoming internationalised’ into a ‘single great cooperative society’ united by a ‘World Sovereignty’

and a ‘World Culture’.92 Murray and Zimmern argued that the connectivity and interdependence of

the modern world resembled the sociability typical of the Greek polis. This provided the theoretical

basis for their internationalisation of civic virtue. Murray, drawing on Stoic ethics and cosmology,

portrayed this nascent international community as ‘the One Great City of Gods and Men’. The One

Great City was based on the ‘consciousness of ultimate solidarity among the peoples of the earth’

which Murray believed ‘has really begun to penetrate the minds of ordinary practical politicians’ and

was consequently playing an active role in modern politics.93 Zimmern more explicitly aligned himself

with the Aristotelian republican tradition.

87 Zimmern used the terms ‘Greek’ and ‘Athens’ as synonyms, largely referring to the classical period of Athenian history

between the defeat of the second Persian invasion of Greece in 479 BC and the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War between

Athens and Sparta in 432 BC. 88 Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro, The Internationalists: And Their Plan to Outlaw War (London: Allen Lane, 2017). 89 Gorman, pp. 1–3. 90 Sluga, pp. 13–17. 91 Osiander, pp. 409–10, 427. 92 Toynbee, ‘World Sovereignty and World Culture’, p. 754. This idea coexisted, somewhat uneasily, within his pluralistic

schemata of civilisations. 93 Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, p. 200.

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In his inaugural address at Oxford in 1931, Zimmern asserted that ‘an inexorable law… has made us

members of the body politic of the world. Interdependence is the rule of modern life. International

relations are the warp and woof of the modern community.’94 Zimmern deployed classical republican

political languages to depict the modern world as an integrated society in which cooperative action

should be prioritised over the interests of individual sovereign states. Commerce and technoscience

had created on a global scale the interpersonal contacts and intimacy, and the concomitant notion of

duty to the collective good, found in ancient city-states: ‘economic relations have created the

rudiments of a world-wide πόλις [polis].’95 Yet, there was a clear linguistic deficiency that arose from

Zimmern’s application of republican discourse to international politics. Envisaging an international

republic required a conceptual and rhetorical framework that operated on a larger plane than that

provided within traditional republican thought, with its focus on smaller political communities like

the Greek polis or the city-republics of Renaissance Italy.96 Nor was this discursive gap sufficiently

filled by the writings of the civic imperialists, whose visions of a federal empire often centred on

Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy.97 Zimmern, who had a German-xJewish father and was personally

active in the Zionist movement during the 1910s, was critical of using race as the foundational category

of imperial or global order.98

In order to connect local forms of association and sociability to an international context, Zimmern

imagined the relationship between the local, national, imperial and international as a series of

concentric circles of association and experience. The rights and responsibilities of good citizenship

were first received and enacted in the city, but each further level had its own compatible theory of

citizenship. Victorian political theorists like Mill and Green viewed the nation and national patriotism

as compatible with, and necessary to, a cosmopolitan commitment to humanity.99 This idea was also

prominent in interwar discussions of civic education, for example Florence West’s Stepping Stones to

Citizenship (1923).100 Indeed, the entangling of political communities was a common argumentative

move for international thinkers. It had the further effect of portraying the international as an inevitable

political form, an argument shadowing Zimmern’s repeated assertion that modern life was

94 Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, pp. 14–15. 95 Alfred Zimmern, Quo Vadimus? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), p. 7. Outside of his classical scholarship,

Zimmern used the terms republic, commonwealth and polis interchangeably. 96 Michael Walzer, ‘Citizenship’, in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. by Terrence Ball, James Farr, and

Russell Hanson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 211–19 (pp. 214–16). Aristotle, Politics, 7.1326b.

Montesquieu aside, few thinkers reflected on the relevance of republican government to large territorial states. Held, p.

39. 97 Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays on Liberalism and Empire (Princeton University Press, 2016), pp. 182–207. 98 Zimmern, Third British Empire, pp. 84–85; Baji, ‘Zionist Internationalism?’, p. 624. 99 Georgios Varouxakis, ‘“Patriotism”, “Cosmopolitanism” and “Humanity” in Victorian Political Thought’, European

Journal of Political Theory, 5.1 (2006), 100–118 (pp. 113–14). 100 Hulme, pp. 36–37.

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international. As Sluga notes, twentieth century internationalism was interpreted as nationalism writ

large.101 This reflected the enduring influence of Mazzini’s vision of the nation as one of a number of

ever-widening forms of political association that would eventually encompass all humanity.102

Mazzini was cited throughout Zimmern’s political writings and in The Greek Commonwealth.103

Given the latter’s subject matter, however, Zimmern drew more directly upon Aristotle, who viewed

the polis as the culmination (telos) of smaller forms of association like the family and village (deme).

Zimmern saw Athenian nationality as the highest of a series of circles of loyalty, including the family

and village. Further, the robust civic activism that characterised Athenian citizenship emerged out of

these smaller allegiances and their associated customs.104 This idea filtered from Zimmern’s classical

scholarship into his internationalism: the ‘international mind’, the habit of thinking about modernity

in international terms, was actually ‘the international attitude in the national mind.’105

Throughout the interwar period, Zimmern maintained that, in addition to nationality, a civic frame of

reference was essential to the smooth functioning of international relations. Republican themes

characterised Zimmern’s engagement with the institutional and personal circles of the British policy-

making establishment. He wrote in a 1934 memorandum for a Chatham House committee that ‘the

collective system requires… that this public spirit and sense of civic obligation should be enlarged, so

that the individual should feel an active and personal responsibility towards the world-community.’106

He also made this case at the 1931 Problems of Peace conference in Geneva. Running annually

between 1926 and 1938, these conferences were organised by the Geneva Institute of International

Relations and attended by an international, but largely Western, group of intellectuals, politicians and

League officials including the Swiss diplomat and director of the Mandates Commission, William

Rappard; James Brown Scott of the Carnegie Institute; the political thinker Harold Laski; Salvador de

Madariaga, the chief of the Disarmament Section of the League Secretariat; and the Japanese diplomat

and statesman Nitobé Inazō, director of the International Bureaux Section of the League.107 These elite

101 Sluga, p. 156. 102 Giuseppe Mazzini, A Cosmopolitanism of Nations: Giuseppe Mazzini’s Writings on Democracy, Nation Building, and

International Relations, ed. by Stefano Recchia and Nadia Urbinati (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009). 103 Alfred Zimmern, ‘Education and International Goodwill’, in The Prospects of Democracy (London: Chatto & Windus,

1929), pp. 52–75; Alfred Zimmern, Nationality and Government (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918), pp. xvi, 1, 65;

Zimmern, ‘The International Mind’, p. 7; Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 136; Alfred Zimmern, Europe in

Convalescence (London: Mills & Boon, 1922), pp. 38–39. See also Zimmern, ‘Some Impressions of Italy’, (unpublished,

1905), MS Zimmern Box 136, fols. 39–72. 104 Aristotle, Politics, 7.1326b. Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 63, 65–68. 105 Zimmern, ‘The International Mind’, p. 1. 106 Zimmern, ‘The British Commonwealth and the Collective System’, A Memorandum of the Royal Institute of

International Affairs (25 June 1934), MS Zimmern 97, fol. 4. 107 For an overview, see Peter Lamb, ‘The British Left in the Problems of Peace Lectures, 1926–38: Diversity That E.H.

Carr Ignored’, International History Review, 36.3 (2013), 1–20.

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and largely European audiences were well-versed in classical literature, especially Aristotle.108

Addressing the conference, Zimmern argued that local administration (at the level of the village, for

example) was based on a defined territory and the shared experience, ideals and interests of people

within that territory. Moreover, local moralising and socialising agencies like the church, family and

professional associations ensured that the local community was ‘the nursery of public spirit… the

training-ground of democracy—the natural school of liberty.’ The neighbourhood was important to

late-Victorian and Edwardian discussions of citizenship. But Zimmern differed from earlier social

theorists by arguing that ‘a community does not necessarily require a territorial base’, opening the

possibility for a geographically discontinuous community such as the Jewish diaspora or an

international society. It was, however, crucial that people retain a local mindset when acting as

members of an international community. Thus, Zimmern sought to transfer the moral cohesion and

civic spirit he saw in the Greek polis to the realm of international relations, for ‘it is the things that are

common to all the persons within an area that are the natural basis of government and public

organization.’109

Zimmern connected the local forms of political participation and human association idealised within

republican thought to a new international environment by stressing the importance of civic institutions

and political practices to international politics. Civic ideals provided an ideal model for cooperative

international ethics, for local people effectively worked together for the welfare of all: ‘The watchword

of local citizenship is not Power… Local areas therefore cannot become involved in conflicts of power.

There is no balance of power between the Cantons of Geneva and of Vaud, and the watchword in such

a community of citizenship is therefore not “Power” but simply “Service”.’110 This partly echoed the

enthusiasm for local self-government found in Alexis de Tocqueville and in Edward Freeman’s

writings on federalism.111 The choice of Switzerland also acknowledged the visibly important place

of Geneva in interwar international politics. Geneva was the location of the League’s headquarters

and a thriving community of internationalist organisations, institutes and associations.112 However,

Zimmern’s ideas drew upon the tradition of republican thinking emphasised by Skinner, which

stressed the importance of the citizenry’s sense of common good and public service to the longevity

of the polity.113 Zimmern integrated this ideal into the discursive apparatus of interwar

108 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, pp. 375–76. See, for example, Inazō Nitobé, Japan: Some Phases of Her Problems and

Development (London: E. Benn, 1931), p. 129. 109 Alfred Zimmern, ‘Europe and the World Community’, in Problems of Peace, Sixth Series (Geneva: Geneva Institute

of International Relations, 1931), pp. 114–33 (pp. 116–18). 110 Zimmern, ‘Europe and the World Community’, p. 118. 111 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, pp. 221–23. 112 Sluga, pp. 45–78. 113 Skinner, ‘Republican Liberty’, pp. 300–303.

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internationalism, offering global formations of civic virtue and public service, underpinned by an

international legal framework, as an alternative to the balance of power.

Zimmern’s republican political vocabulary was allied to the internationalist language of cooperation

and coordination. In a 1927 address at Chatham House, he argued that ‘Sovereignty faces inward and

marshals its forces against “the foreigner”… Co-operation looks outward, and transforms what has

been strange and “foreign” into elements of working collaboration for recognized common

interests.’114 The intellectual context was provided by the rise of international legal and political

institutions, which generated considerable scepticism among British intellectuals about the viability

of the sovereign state as the master concept of political analysis.115 Zimmern opposed ‘social’ and

cooperative republican virtues to sovereignty, which he defined as an expression of partisan interest

that would encourage the collapse of the global polity, itself a republican political motif. The League

Covenant was a social contract that decreed that ‘it should be anti-social for a country to take too

decided and individual an initiative in regard to a question which affects other countries.’116 Zimmern

reasserted this argument after Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in October 1931, the first time a great

power had challenged the League of Nations. The League’s limp response to the crisis outraged

internationalists and League advocates. Zimmern wrote a number of articles about Manchuria,

criticising the League’s inability to marshal ‘moral forces’ against Japan and advocating economic or

military sanctions in order to prove that ‘the Covenant is something more than a scrap of paper’.117 At

a public lecture in November 1931, he argued that the ‘Roman’ doctrine of national sovereign rights

represented ‘vested interests neglectful of the general good… an anti-social influence on the body

politic of the world.’118 Sovereignty was embedded in the archaic nation-state, whilst an international

republic implied devotion to a higher, global loyalty more aligned with the realities of twentieth

century internationality. International cooperation, the concept at the heart of interwar liberal

internationalism, was for Zimmern a modern rendering of the classical republican principle of the

common good.

114 Alfred Zimmern, ‘The Prospects of Democracy’, in The Prospects of Democracy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929),

pp. 313–75 (p. 331). 115 Skinner, ‘The Sovereign State’, pp. 42–43; Trentmann, p. 38. 116 Alfred Zimmern, ‘The Influence of Public Opinion on Foreign Policy’, in Problems of Peace, Third Series (Geneva:

Geneva Institute of International Relations, 1929), pp. 299–320 (p. 318). On the links between partisanship and corruption

in republican thought, see Held, p. 35. 117 Zimmern, ‘The Action of the Council in the Manchurian Dispute’ (unpublished, June 1932), MS Zimmern 98, fols. 43–

52; Zimmern, ‘The Right Policy in the Far East’ (22 October 1932), MS Zimmern 98, fols. 53–58. 118 Zimmern, ‘Render Unto Caesar’, a lecture at Manchester College, Oxford (1931), MS Zimmern 27, fol. 86.

81

Zimmern imagined the international as a republican space in which the ideals of duty, virtue and

cooperation would secure international peace and encourage human progress. In Learning and

Leadership (1928), Zimmern’s manifesto for an internationalist civics education, he wrote:

The world war, bringing to a sudden culmination the development of a century, has extended

our field of study from the local plane to the international. The res publica with which it is our

duty to concern ourselves, if we wish to retain control over our environment, extends to the

ends of the earth. The political interdependence of the world is the most important fact in the

post-war international situation. But our eyes, accustomed to a miniature canvas, obstinately

resist the enlargement of scale.119

Despite the use of the Latin term ‘res publica’, Zimmern was not invoking ancient Rome, whose

political legacy he condemned as oppressive and militaristic and the inspiration for Prussianism.120

Instead, he was thinking about the lively discursive nature of Athenian democratic politics. For

Zimmern, the Ciceronian concept of the res publica, defined as ‘a common concern for the republic’,

and its antecedent, the Athenian idea of ‘the Common Thing (το κοινόν)’, the shared political interests

of a citizenry, ‘expresses for us more clearly than the balder appellation “The State” the intimate

association which such interests involve for every member of the body politic.’ The most appropriate

modern translation for both was ‘public opinion’, a term Zimmern used to imply the collective good.121

Faith in the power of public opinion to restrain the self-interested actions of individual states was a

central component of much liberal international thinking between the wars, certainly before the 1931

Manchuria crisis.122 Even realist theorists like E.H. Carr (1892–1982) acknowledged the power of

mobilised public opinion.123 Zimmern reflected this discourse, although in his formulation public

opinion was interwoven with the theoretically distinct concept of the public interest. He argued that

functional international government should be grounded in publicity, the condition of practising

international affairs in public and in common, not the coercive apparatus of the state.

Zimmern’s use of the terms ‘republic’, ‘res publica’, ‘commonwealth’, and ‘common interest’ also

arose from a classical liberal anxiety over state authority. Whilst working for the Foreign Office in

1918–19, Zimmern authored a memorandum that influenced the drafting of the League of Nations

Covenant. In this memorandum, none of the proposed League’s organs had supra-governmental

sovereignty. Instead, the League’s organisational structure was a system of regular conferences, like

the old Concert of European powers, but with an obligation to make discussions and treaties in

119 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 10. 120 Zimmern, ‘German Culture and the British Commonwealth’, p. 19. 121 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, pp. 9–10. 122 Daniel Hucker, Public Opinion and the End of Appeasement in Britain and France (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), p. 8. 123 E.H. Carr, ‘Public Opinion as a Safeguard of Peace’, International Affairs, 15.6 (1936), 846–62 (p. 857).

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public.124 Throughout the interwar years, Zimmern argued against proponents of a world state like

H.G. Wells.125 Zimmern feared a centralised global state would suppress individuality and local

diversity, preventing the assimilation of citizens into the life of their civic and national communities

and thereby hindering the development of an international outlook.126 He also critiqued Murray’s

cosmopolitanism as hegemonic, arguing in a 1932 lecture at the University of Edinburgh that

cosmopolitanism encouraged the ‘standardization of humanity in the name of Brotherhood’.127 Partly

channelling the ideas of Round Table imperialists, Zimmern argued that world order should be built

upon ‘unity in diversity – an organic unity but not a uniformity.’128 For historically unprecedented

international institutions to become the source of civic devotion, order could not be imposed from

above. It must instead be built upon the informal and unsystematic organisations characteristic of

Athenian politics: ‘the world community must be based on a growth from underneath; it must be the

natural unfolding of organization, from the ground upwards, from the sphere in which the individual

can learn at first hand what public service is.’129

Zimmern imagined a global ‘community of many various minor communities’, all of which retained

cultural and political ties to their distinctive localities. This echoed his portrait of the world of the fifth-

century Greek poleis.130 In Greek society, each city-state’s ‘fierce love of independence’ did not

preclude a pan-Hellenic identity or collective action, for example in the campaigns to liberate eastern

Greek cities from Persian rule undertaken by the Delian League, an alliance of Greek cities led by

Athens. Indeed, Zimmern saw the quest for a rational international order as part of the Athenian

inheritance. Zimmern argued that the Athenian empire-commonwealth developed from the Delian

League’s principle of a voluntary association of independent city-states who worked together for the

common good. It ‘stood, not only for freedom from the barbarian [Persia], but for freedom of

intercourse and freedom of trade.’131 As such, Athens offered a structural model for the League of

Nations, which Zimmern envisaged as an associational and legal framework that guaranteed free trade,

cooperation and peace, as opposed to a statist international order: ‘it is the organisation of the hue and

cry—and nothing more.’132 This classicising of international politics was evidently more theoretically

robust and consistent than what Polly Low describes as Zimmern’s ‘fairly non-specific sort of

124 Zimmern, ‘Memorandum Prepared for the Consideration of the British Government in Connexion with the Forthcoming

Peace Settlement’ (1918), MS Zimmern 82, fols. 38–40. 125 Zimmern, ‘Collective Security’, p. 11. Wells saw a world state as the culmination of human history. Wells, Outline of

History, pp. 1157–59. 126 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 34. 127 Zimmern, ‘The Cosmopolitan, the International, and the Universal’, Oxford (1932), MS Zimmern 142, fol. 18.

Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, p. 17. 128 Zimmern, ‘Render Unto Caesar’, MS Zimmern 27, fol. 87. 129 Zimmern, ‘Europe and the World Community’, p. 119. 130 Zimmern, ‘Europe and the World Community’, p. 120. 131 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 280, 104, 184. 132 Zimmern, The League and the Rule of Law, p. 177.

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intellectual cross-fertilisation’ between ancient and modern interstate relations.133 The republic (or

commonwealth), civic virtue and duty, and a communitarian antagonism to individual rights offered

an adaptable conceptual framework through which to theorise international organisation without

advocating a centralised world state with far-reaching political power. Moreover, these concepts gave

a sense of democratic legitimacy and egalitarianism to a global order that continued to be defined by

imperialism and Great Power politics, primarily through the idea of international citizenship.

Zimmern placed huge emphasis upon the need to foster an active and well-informed international

citizenry infused with a deep sense of civic duty for the effective functioning and longevity of the

League of Nations. A sense of ‘embryonic world citizenship’ already existed among the people within

national and international institutions and organisations willing to cooperate to prevent war.134

Through guidance and education, this core group would expand the consciousness of international

society throughout the world. The development of an active citizenry that operated beyond the

confines of state boundaries and was committed to a global common good would replace hard power

as the sovereign authority in the international system and act as the sanction of international law.

Indeed, Zimmern saw international citizenship as vital to the League’s political power.135 However,

republican citizenship entailed a democratic right to engage in political decision making, often directly

as in Athens. Civic rights sat uneasily alongside Zimmern’s unwillingness to infuse the League of

Nations with the political authority of a state. Further, global democratic emancipation was difficult

to reconcile with Zimmern’s lifelong support for British imperialism. Instead of drawing on a liberal

tradition of citizen rights, Zimmern’s elaborated a moral conception of the virtuous international

citizen modelled on the rational, politically engaged and informed Athenian.136 A discourse of ethical

citizenship gave crucial democratic legitimacy to Zimmern’s hierarchical vision of global order.

In The Greek Commonwealth, the Athenians’ deep personal connection with their city developed into

a relationship of love, which formed the basis of a strong sense of civic duty.137 The international

citizen must also ‘become familiar with the anatomy and physiology of that larger world’ in order to

become a responsible and rational international actor demonstrating ‘sufficient knowledge’ and ‘sound

133 Polly Low, Interstate Relations in Classical Greece: Morality and Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2007), p. 17. 134 Zimmern, The League and the Rule of Law, p. 177. 135 Baji, ‘Commonwealth’, p. 122. 136 Richard Dagger, ‘Republican Citizenship’, in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, ed. by Engin Isin and Turner Bryan

(London: Sage, 2002), pp. 145–58; Peter Schuck, ‘Liberal Citizenship’, in Handbook of Citizenship Studies, ed. by Engin

Isin and Turner Bryan (London: Sage, 2002), pp. 131–44. 137 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 63, 69.

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judgement’ in political affairs.138 Zimmern emphasised the international citizen’s sense of duty,

altruism and self-sacrifice, placing these within a neo-Athenian republican framework that stressed

political participation as essential to individual flourishing. His arguments also echoed the Edwardian

social theorists who divorced the concept of citizenship from its connections with the state, defining

citizenship as the sacrifice of personal interest for the common good. Invoking both this tradition and

Greek and English republican ethics, Zimmern noted that ‘what we call “public spirit” is a moral

quality, a particular and highly specialized form of unselfishness. It involves a concentration upon the

public welfare of a zeal and a devotion which the non-political man… prefers to bestow elsewhere.’139

Yet, what constituted public welfare had to be enlarged to align with modern internationality. As such,

Zimmern imagined a monolithic and largely homogeneous international public which he assumed

would provide unwavering support for the League.

Zimmern’s ethical theory of citizenship was underpinned by his concern that international institutions

and the principle of self-determination had created a common political language through which to

attack the British empire. This anxiety deepened after the empire was rocked by a series of political

crises and revolts in Ireland, Egypt and India during the early 1920s.140 Zimmern believed that ‘the

ominous words Minority Rights’ were unnecessary in ‘a community where the common things are

really common’.141 Thus, Zimmern associated upholding the prevailing international order, replete

with its imperial hierarchies and asymmetries of power, with the global common good. As he wrote

in 1936, ‘citizenship, in the only true sense of the word, takes its origin in this rudimentary sense of

common responsibility for public order.’142 This was combined with a depoliticised, spiritual

definition of nationality that sought to undermine the emancipatory implications of the principle of

self-determination.143 As E.H. Carr noted in 1939, idealist arguments that individuals have an

obligation to subordinate self-interest to the good of the international community rested on personal

intuitions about ethics. The harmony of interests doctrine invoked by internationalists like Zimmern

and Norman Angell was a ‘moral device’ used by privileged groups ‘to justify and maintain their

dominant position.’144 Recent historians criticise Carr’s oversimplification of liberal internationalist

thought.145 Nonetheless, Zimmern’s theory of international citizenship reflected the discourse of 1920s

internationalism, which was characterised by both its aspirations to international democracy and the

138 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 15. 139 Alfred Zimmern, ‘The Things of Martha and the Things of Mary’, in The Prospects of Democracy (London: Chatto &

Windus, 1929), pp. 95–115 (p. 99). 140 Tooze, The Deluge, pp. 374–93. 141 Zimmern, ‘The Cosmopolitan, the International, and the Universal’, MS Zimmern 142, fols. 63–64. 142 Zimmern, The League and the Rule of Law, p. 177. 143 Baji, ‘Zionist Internationalism?’, pp. 643–49. 144 Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, pp. 54–56, 80. 145 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, pp. 2–3; Wilson, ‘“Idealism” in International Relations’, pp. 1–14; Osiander,

pp. 409–11.

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entrenchment of European imperialism.146 However, the theoretical underpinnings and articulation of

Zimmern’s civic internationalism suggest that the republican heritage of ancient Greece shaped the

languages and arguments of interwar liberal-idealist internationalism as much as classical liberal

notions of the harmony of interests.

By the mid-1930s, world government and world citizenship were calling cards of a smaller scale.147

Germany and Japan withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933. Italy followed suit in 1937, having

invaded Ethiopia in 1935. Political setbacks meant that the League was less central to prominent

internationalist initiatives like the Pacific regionalism advocated by Mary Woolley or Clarence Streit’s

world federalism. The rise of totalitarian powers so overtly opposed to the League dampened

Zimmern’s advocacy of a global republic and his writings assumed a more critical tone. The shift in

his thinking began in January 1932, when he used a public lecture at the University of Edinburgh to

‘dismiss the dressed-up nothing which masquerades as World-mindedness and return to… what I

called the idea of sentiment of Patriotism.’148 Lecturing at the University of Chicago in 1936, he

condemned people who continued to cling to the ‘Wilsonian programme of a universal league’ despite

the fact that ‘reality is rudely breaking upon this dream world.’ The events of the 1930s were evidence

that the public ‘cannot be educated into a world-social consciousness’ and that internationalists should

‘discard once and for all the notion of world-citizenship’ as a relic that ‘belongs to the history of the

misguided years which we have just put behind us’.149 Zimmern recognised the material limitations

of using moral pressure to secure international peace. In 1934, his universalism was replaced by a

bipolar view of world politics based on the division between ‘welfare states’ like democratic Britain

and ‘power states’ such as totalitarian Germany, Italy and Japan.150 This antitheses attracted criticism

from William Rappard, a leading member of the League Secretariat, who presciently noted that

Zimmern ignored the coercive underpinnings of British imperialism: ‘an Irishman or an Indian or an

Egyptian would hardly accept your definition of Great Britain as being only a welfare state’.151

Nonetheless, after the Abyssinian crisis had further eroded the League’s authority, Zimmern called for

the creation of a ‘welfare bloc’ of morally superior Atlantic states including Britain, France, Belgium,

the Netherlands, the Scandinavian countries and the USA, as well as the British Dominions. This

community would be strategically powerful as it possessed the lion’s share of global resources, a huge

146 Patricia Clavin, ‘Conceptualising Internationalism Between the World Wars’, in Internationalism Reconfigured:

Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars, ed. by Daniel Laqua (London: Bloomsbury, 2011), pp. 1–

14 (p. 9). 147 Sluga, p. 75. 148 Zimmern, ‘The Cosmopolitan, the International and the Universal’, MS Zimmern 142, fol. 26. 149 Zimmern, ‘Collective Security’, pp. 57, 18, 28. 150 Zimmern, Quo Vadimus?, p. 32. Zimmern adopted the definition of welfare and power states found in William Temple,

Christianity and the State (London: Macmillan and Co., 1928), pp. 169–74. 151 William Rappard to Zimmern, 9 April 1934, MS Zimmern 34, fols. 40–41.

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population and controlled international trade.152 Furthermore, it would also offer a moral ideal,

democracy, towards which non-members could aspire, encouraging global progress.

The intellectual context for Zimmern’s plan was provided by the 1930s vogue for international

federalism among British and American intellectuals, for example Clarence Streit’s Union Now (1939)

which cited The Greek Commonwealth.153 Zimmern’s classical scholarship remained central to his

own plans for an Atlantic collective security apparatus, which was grounded in the same enlarged

republican ideals of public spirit and civic obligation. For Zimmern, ‘collective security is a

democratic notion’ that ‘implies the recognition of the need for common effort’ in the material and

moral spheres. Pooled military security provided strategic defence, but it also encouraged moral

growth by basing international order on the development of ‘a common sense of responsibility.’ The

League of Nations had failed primarily because the public was not sufficiently informed of the

obligations that collective security demands of individual citizens. Furthermore, the League

incorporated non-democratic societies who were unused to cooperative and responsible politics. By

including only democratic political societies based on ‘everyday civic co-operation’, and encouraging

education in the rights and responsibilities of international citizenship, the new collective security

system would prove more politically robust than the League whilst advancing internationalist ideals

of cooperation and responsibility.154 Like Zimmern’s earlier conceptions of global community and

international citizenship, his proposal for an Atlantic community emerged from a civic republican

emphasis on the importance of collective civic action for the common good.

A classically inspired republican language of civic activism and duty infused Zimmern’s international

thought. This encourages some reassessments of recent historiographical discussions of Zimmern,

which tend to treat his early classical scholarship and later internationalism as distinct phases of his

career. Paul Millett, for example, contends that Zimmern made little use in his international writings

of the material and ideas that were central to The Greek Commonwealth.155 Likewise, by placing

Zimmern squarely within the tradition of liberal reformism, Morefield undervalues the impact that

Zimmern’s classical background had upon his international thought.156 Zimmern’s interpretation of

ancient Athens was central to his civic humanist theory of international community and citizenship,

upon which rested his notion of a progressive, peaceful and liberal international politics. Moreover,

republican ideas did crucial discursive work within Zimmern’s international theory. They provided

152 Zimmern, ‘Collective Security’, pp. 72, 62. 153 Clarence Streit, Union Now (London: Jonathan Cape, 1939), p. 374. 154 Zimmern, ‘Collective Security’, pp. 4–5, 9, 24–25, 26. 155 Millett, p. 181. 156 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, pp. 3, 24–55.

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democratic legitimacy as Zimmern sought to distance his internationalism from the idea of a world

state or a post-imperial order.

Murray and the ‘One Great City of Gods and Men’

Zimmern’s Athenian-inspired civic internationalism was not unique. Toynbee argued that British and

American naval policy in the 1920s was dictated by ‘international public spirit’ and ‘enlightened

national self-interest’.157 Further, Zimmern’s use of the Athenian commonwealth as a framework for

global order was distinctive, but not exceptional. In A Study of History, Toynbee praised the ancient

Greek leagues and confederacies as model solutions to the recurrent historical challenge of building

an international order that could accommodate global political, economic and social forces. For

Toynbee, civilisations were ‘dynamic movements’ that evolved through their ability to respond to

certain ordeals. The decline of civilisations was caused by the failure of ‘creative minorities’ to

respond to the problems posed by ‘deified parochial states’. Unrestrained state sovereignty encouraged

internecine warfare and the emergence of a despotic and intellectually stagnant ‘universal state’, the

archetype of which was the Roman empire. Like Zimmern, Toynbee viewed the Delian League—as

well as the Boeotian League (c.550–335 BC) and the third-century Aetolian and Achaean

confederacies—as models for international order, arguing that classical civilisation would have

averted collapse if these structures had endured. The Greek leagues had limited the sovereignty of

their constituent city-states by integrating them into a federation based on ‘voluntary agreement’,

collective security and international economic intercourse.158 This echoed the description of the

Athenian empire of liberty in Zimmern’s classical writings. However, Toynbee stressed the functional

benefits of the ancient Greek federations rather than the civic humanist ideals that were pivotal to

Zimmern’s vision of the Athenian, imperial and global commonwealths. Indeed, Toynbee rarely

invoked the language of classical republicanism as Zimmern did, and the analysis of his political and

historical writings therefore belongs in a separate chapter. Toynbee viewed Plato’s Republic as an

authoritarian enterprise directed by a parasitic guardian class, asserting that Plato’s desire to censor

artists paralleled the actions of contemporary fascist regimes.159 Conversely, Murray, the subject of

the present section, echoed Zimmern in stressing the importance of civic duty to the functioning of the

international system. Yet Murray drew upon an additional classical precedent to Zimmern, the Stoic

157 Arnold Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1928 (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), p. 5. 158 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 135, 169–88; Toynbee, Study, IV, pp. 209, 308–10; Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History, Volume

V (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 189. On ‘creative minorities’, see Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History,

Volume III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1934), pp. 232–48. 159 For Toynbee, Aristotle and Plato reflected the intellectual stasis typical of Greek thought and history after Pericles. See,

Toynbee, Study, III, pp. 96–100. On Plato’s censoring of artists, see Plato, Republic, 401b, 595a.

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notion of human fraternity within a cosmos, which he fused to Athenian civic ideals. His concept of

the ‘One Great City of Men and Gods’ extended civic ethics to the entire world, arguing that duty and

virtue were fundamental to a universalist commitment to human harmony and international peace.

The classical inheritance provided Murray with the collection of ideas and values that structured his

political thought and gave his work moral coherence. As Toynbee later reflected, Murray’s ‘work for

peace was an expression of his life-long liberalism… He identified both the Hellenic genius and the

modern Western genius with the liberal spirit, and so identified them with each other. This was the

master idea that gave unity to all his pursuits.’160 There was a deeply republican tenor and inspiration

to Murray’s liberalism, especially in his positive notion of freedom as an individual’s duty to the

community and the importance that he placed upon arête (virtue) in politics.161 Civic republican

themes of activist citizenship, virtue and the common good also underpinned Murray’s international

ideal, the ‘one Great City of which all men are free citizens’.162 Murray was deeply concerned by the

‘strife’ that he believed had transformed modern politics into a generational ordeal.163 His

internationalism foregrounded classically inspired notions of cosmic harmony and civic duty as a

counterweight to various threats of political and social disorder, from rampant nationalism and

economic uncertainty to the rise of Bolshevism and the crisis of parliamentary democracy. Yet,

Murray’s civic internationalism was inspired by distinctly Western traditions of thinking about

politics, was heavily gendered, and was limited by the categories of race, empire, civilisation and

power.

For Murray, the cosmopolitan ideals of human fraternity and the One Great City defined the classical

inheritance: ‘what constitutes Greece is the movement which leads… to the Stoic or fifth-century

“sophist”… who looks on all human creatures as his brethren, and the world as “one great City of gods

and men”.’164 This also provided the conceptual framework for Murray’s interwar theory of

international relations, which emphasised individuals’ and states’ obligations to a global community:

All those of us who have listened to the voices of the great philosophers of antiquity are

familiar with their famous conception of the universe as One Great City of Gods and Men.

That conception became the formative principle of most of the higher thought of the Roman

160 Toynbee, ‘The Unity of Gilbert Murray’s Life and Work’, p. 212. 161 Murray, Liberality and Civilization, p. 43; Gilbert Murray, ‘A Survey of Recent World Affairs’, in Problems of Peace,

Eighth Series (Geneva: Geneva Institute of International Relations, 1933), pp. 1–16 (p. 5). This coexisted with negative

ideas of freedom based on a constellation of rights that was more characteristic of the classical liberalism of Locke. Murray,

‘Self-Determination of Nationalities’, p. 8. 162 Murray, Liberality and Civilization, p. 43. 163 Murray, Ordeal, pp. 13–40. 164 Murray, ‘Value of Greece’, p. 15.

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Empire. It lay at the centre of their ethics, interpreting the duty of man towards all creation as

identical with the duty of a patriotic citizen towards the city or country in whose love and

service he lives.165

The idea of a single global polity originated in Plutarch (c.46–c.120 AD), one of Murray’s ‘higher’

Roman thinkers. According to Plutarch, Alexander the Great desired ‘to render all upon earth subject

to one law of reason and one form of government and to reveal all men as one people’, an ambition

unfulfilled due to his early death.166 Murray also invoked the conflicting earthly and heavenly cities

in St Augustine’s City of God (426 AD), which became influential among British internationalists like

Zimmern, Toynbee and Lionel Curtis as war with Germany beckoned in 1938–39.167 Stoic and later

Christian discourses of brotherhood were an intellectual inspiration for much cosmopolitan

international thought from at least the eighteenth century.168 The ideal of human fraternity featured

prominently in the official language of, and public discourses surrounding, the League of Nations,

despite the continuation of European imperialism.169 Stoic philosophy was also the subject of a number

of internationalist-minded interventions in British classical scholarship between the wars. William

Tarn (1869–1957) traced the Stoic idea of the ‘unity of mankind’ from Alexander to its culmination

in the ‘common ideal’ that united Rome under Claudian and Diocletian.170 Ernest Barker (1874–1960)

argued that the conceptual origins of the Roman empire were Hellenistic, emerging from Stoic notions

of a ‘universal society’ or ‘world state’ and Alexander’s pursuit of ‘a single cosmopolis of the

inhabited earth’.171 The multi-volume Cambridge Ancient History (1924–1939) concluded that the

Roman empire was the ‘system in which the internationalism of the ancient world had culminated.’172

Murray was unwilling to assign such an legacy to Rome, whose autocratic political system he

despised, or to the ‘self-confident, self-righteous, unimaginative’ Roman people.173 He drew

internationalist implications from ancient Greek thought, and well before the international turn in

165 Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, p. 183. 166 Plutarch, Moralia, 330d. 167 St Augustine, City of God, XIV.28. The Augustinian influence on Zimmern can be seen in Zimmern, Spiritual Values

and World Affairs. Curtis’s plan for an international commonwealth also drew heavily on Augustine. Lionel Curtis, Civitas

Dei: The Commonwealth of God (London: Macmillan, 1939). By the late 1930s, Toynbee viewed the Civitas Dei as ‘the

end and object of human existence’. Toynbee to Lionel Curtis, 24 May 1938, The Lionel Curtis Papers, Bodleian Library,

Oxford, MS Curtis 12, fols. 142–143. 168 Mazower, Governing the World, pp. 31–62; Martha Nussbaum, ‘Kant and Stoic Cosmopolitanism’, Journal of Political

Philosophy, 5.1 (1997), 1–25 (pp. 4–5). For an intellectual history of cosmopolitanism, see Cosmopolitanism in the Age of

Globalization: Citizens Without States, ed. by Lee Trepanier and Khalil Habib (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky,

2011). 169 Mazower, Governing the World, p. 154. 170 W.W. Tarn, Alexander the Great and the Unity of Mankind (London: Humphrey Milford, 1933), p. 13. 171 Ernest Barker, ‘The Conception of Empire’, in The Legacy of Rome, ed. by Cyril Bailey (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 1923), pp. 45–89 (pp. 48, 51). 172 ‘Epilogue’, The Cambridge Ancient History, ed. by Frank Adcock and S.A. Cook, 12 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1939), XII, p. 700. 173 Murray, Rise, p. 91.

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British historical scholarship after 1918.174 In his inaugural lecture at the University of Glasgow in

1889, Murray argued that Greece provided a reservoir of experience and learning that was essential to

understanding modern civilisation.175 This conviction animated Murray’s major pre-war classical

writings which, as Michael Lang notes, were reflections on modern global integration.176 In The Rise

of the Greek Epic (1907), Murray used poetry to trace the moral growth of Greece from ‘savagery’ to

a single Hellenic civilisation.177 His later political writings described a modern ‘civilization which was

almost a unity’.178 In Four Stages of Greek Religion (1912), Murray argued that Greek philosophy and

religion culminated in something resembling an international moment. An age of spiritual ignorance

evolved into an ‘Olympian’ age defined by an attempt to bring ‘intellectual order’ to the Greek world.

Between the eight and the fifth centuries BC, Hellenism emerged as a distinct ‘ideal and a standard of

culture’, with the Persian Wars (499–449 BC) representing the ‘self-realization of the Greek tribes as

Hellenes against barbarians.’ However, residual tribal loyalties continued in Greek political life,

leading to constant warfare: ‘The City worship was narrow; yet to broaden it was, except in some rare

minds, to sap its life. The ordinary man finds it impossible to love his next-door neighbours except by

hating those who are next-door-but-one.’179 Thus, the Greeks failed to overcome the tension between

an international ideal and political organisation into separate city-states within the poleis. The

Hellenistic period was defined by consciousness of this defeat, not the burst of world-unifying

Alexandrian creativity outlined by Tarn or Barker. What Murray, borrowing a phrase from J.B. Bury,

called a ‘failure of nerve’ led to the rise of the irrational, a growing focus on the afterlife and, fatally,

‘an indifference to the welfare of the state.’180

Whilst the cross-fertilisation between international politics and ancient history was multidirectional

for Toynbee and Zimmern, Murray’s international thought was shaped by his understanding of the

classical past. Wartime service in the Foreign Office was a strong formative influence on Toynbee’s

and Zimmern’s internationalism. As the oldest of the three classicising internationalists, aged 48 in

1914, Murray’s Hellenist-inflected liberalism was well developed by the time that he, Toynbee and

Zimmern became personally engaged in international politics.181 Nonetheless, Murray was deeply

affected by the First World War, and he blamed the conflict for the deaths of three of his children

between 1922 and 1937.182 Murray was also more deeply involved in Liberal Party politics than

174 On the internationalist moment in British historiography, see McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations,

pp. 103–25. 175 Murray, The Place of Greek in Education, pp. 13–14. 176 Michael Lang, ‘Globalization and Global History in Toynbee’, Journal of World History, 22.4 (2011), 747–83 (p. 758). 177 Murray, Rise, pp. 1–28, 114–35, 151–52. 178 Murray, ‘Recent World Affairs’, p. 1. 179 Murray, Four Stages, pp. 81–89, 59–60, 92. 180 Murray, Four Stages, pp. 8, 103. The final stage was the pagan revival in the fourth century AD. 181 Wilson, ‘Gilbert Murray and International Relations’, p. 899. 182 West, pp. 162–66.

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Toynbee or Zimmern. He ran as the Liberal candidate in the Oxford University constituency by-

election in March 1919, losing to Unionist and medieval historian Charles Oman.183 He was elected

to the National Liberal Federation in 1920, and gave an important address on the meaning of liberalism

to Liberal candidates in the 1924 election.184 The sharp decline of the Liberal Party, the rise of

socialism among the British progressive left and in Bolshevik Russia, and the fall of democratic

regimes across Europe after 1918 proved to Murray that civilisation was in crisis.185 The post-war

collapse of political liberalism encouraged Murray to emphasise liberal spirituality (‘liberality’) as a

key feature of classical and modern civilisation and a unifying principle of international politics.186

Murray, a committed agnostic, portrayed any political dynamic he thought was undermining global

order as ‘Satanism, the spirit of unmixed hatred towards the existing World Order, the spirit which

rejoices in any widespread disaster.’187 This evil could be countered through the ordering and holistic

principle of the Hellenic cosmos which infused modern liberal ideals and institutions like the League.

Murray’s political writings drew upon the internationalist messages of his classical scholarship. He

saw parallels between the excessive parochialism of the Greek city-states and modern nationalism.

Lecturing at the London School of Economics in 1918, Murray compared the world-historical

significance of the war with Germany and the Peloponnesian War. Both were contested between a

military monarchy (Germany, Sparta) and a democratic sea power (Britain, Athens). They were also

conflicts of an unprecedented scale and ‘uncompromising ferocity’ that shocked their respective

societies, Europe and ancient Greece.188 Greek history also offered models for transcending interstate

conflict. Murray’s interwar insistence on stability and progress in domestic and international affairs

echoed his earlier emphasis on the importance of intellectual order to the social, moral and political

growth of Greece. He framed this using the Stoic concepts of ‘Cosmos’ and the ‘One Great City’,

alongside his earlier focus on the fifth-century as the apogee of Hellenism. In 1925, Murray elaborated

a fifth stage of Greek religion, situated between the Olympian age and the failure of nerve, to which

cosmology was central. Advances in Greek astronomy during the fourth century BC encouraged the

development of a coherent theory of the universe as a ‘Cosmos’ structured by laws that gave existence

both order and purpose (phusis, or ‘a living and conscious evolution’).189 Although the Greeks’

anthropocentric theory of the universe was later disproved by Copernicus, Murray believed that its

183 Toynbee to Murray, 24 March 1919; Toynbee to Murray, 26 March 1919, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 184 Gilbert Murray, ‘What Liberalism Stands For’, Contemporary Review, 128 (1925), 681–97; West, p. 182. 185 Murray, Ordeal, p. v. On interwar Liberal politics, see Michael Freeden, Liberalism Divided (Oxford: Clarendon Press,

1986). 186 Murray, Liberality and Civilization, p. 25. 187 Murray, ‘Satanism’, p. 215. On Murray’s agnosticism, see Murray, ‘Autobiographical Fragment’, pp. 26, 83. 188 Gilbert Murray, ‘Aristophanes and the War Party’, in Essays & Addresses (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1921), pp. 31–

55 (pp. 32–33). 189 Murray, Five Stages, p. 125.

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moral underpinnings, that virtue was essential to growth, were profoundly true and relevant to modern

international relations.190 Indeed, Cosmos represented a ‘true moral and spiritual order’ in which the

world was conceived as a single city populated by global citizens.191

Like Zimmern, Murray viewed the sovereign nation-state as an antagonistic and outdated political unit

and national self-determination as a dangerous principle that increased the risk of war and threatened

British hegemony.192 He felt that Greek holism was uniquely applicable to theorising global order

beyond the nation-state and the precarity of the balance of power. Lecturing in 1937, he argued that

‘my old Greek philosophers… held that human society, rightly conceived, was not a chaos of warring

interests but a Cosmos, an ordered whole, in which every individual had his due share both of privilege

and of service.’193 Thus, Cosmos was opposed to the Hobbesian state of nature. In its attempts to

transcend international anarchy, the League of Nations represented the beginnings of a new ‘world

cosmos’ and a step on an evolutionary path towards the One Great City.194 International institutions

echoed the balance between a realistic interest in ‘life itself’ and the moral desire to improve it that

Murray had long viewed as central to Greek civilisation and progress.195 Consequently, unlike

Zimmern, Murray remained committed to the League well after the collapse of the international

system in the mid-1930s, writing a defence of intellectual co-operation’s power to transcend national

differences as late as 1944.196 Although the political and economic crises of the 1930s revealed that

the League was an ‘infirm cosmos’ hampered by the persistence of state sovereignty, the League’s

work in public health, disarmament, intellectual cooperation and preventing human trafficking proved

that people should keep their faith in the League project.197

As Morefield argues, theorising a global city enabled Murray to argue that liberal spirituality

transcended human difference for the common good, which now extended to the whole world.198

However, Morefield underplays the depth of the classical republican influences on Murray’s

internationalism, and the links between his classical scholarship and international thought. Writing in

190 Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, p. 184. 191 Murray, Liberality and Civilization, p. 44. 192 Murray, ‘Self-Determination of Nationalities’, pp. 12–13. 193 Murray, Liberality and Civilization, p. 43. 194 Murray, ‘Recent World Affairs’, p. 2; Murray, Liberality and Civilization, pp. 45–46. 195 Murray, Rise, pp. 25–27. 196 According to Murray, the League’s intellectual cooperation efforts had been hamstrung by a lack of funding and a

narrow educational scope. Gilbert Murray, ‘Intellectual Co-Operation’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political

and Social Science, 235 (1944), 1–9. 197 Murray, ‘Recent World Affairs’, pp. 2, 16. 198 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, p. 115.

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the Edwardian civic moment, Murray emphasised the collectivist political and social philosophy of

the Athenian polis as central to the enduring legacy of Greece:

This religion of the Polis was… in the later ages of Greece, the best, and is to us the most

helpful, of ancient religions… it implies in each citizen the willing sacrifice of himself to

something greater than himself.… Its rules of conduct are based not on obedience to imaginary

beings, but on serving mankind; not on observance of taboos, but on doing good.199

Uniquely, the polis provided space for activities conducive to spiritual development, such as virtue,

alongside the operation of human agency and reason. After 1918 he saw the privileging of collective

duty over individual rights in the polis as a more stable and peaceable foundation for international

order than the nation-state. Murray imagined world order through liberal spirituality and a republican

distrust of partisan interests: ‘the spirit of world order, the spirit which subordinates the nation’s

immediate interest to the interest of the whole community of nations.’200 Through the metaphor of the

One Great City, he outlined an internationalist ethic grounded in Stoic cosmopolitanism, liberal

universalism and the intrinsic moral value of Aristotelian civic activism.

Cosmos and the One Great City were essential intellectual tools through which Murray conceptualised

the world as a harmonious, ordered whole. In global politics, the ordering principle of cosmos that

infused international institutions would overcome international anarchy by reconciling individual

states with the global community. However, as David Harvey argues, modern Western notions of

cosmopolitanism are hegemonic intellectual endeavours, often saturated with religious power, market

concerns, or a particularistic conception of world order.201 The unification of the world through human

fraternity provided Murray with a way of theorising a morally united and peaceful international

community without challenging the rationale of imperialism or elaborating the interventionary

apparatus of a world state.202 Further, like Zimmern, Murray’s emphasis on civic obligation over

democratic rights was underpinned by a concern to maintain British global power. Murray saw Britain

as a benevolent hegemon and the anchor of world order and civilisation, both of which were threatened

199 Murray, Rise, p. 57. 200 Murray, ‘Recent World Affairs’, p. 5. 201 David Harvey, ‘Cosmopolitanism and the Banality of Geographical Evils’, Public Culture, 12.2 (2000), 529–64 (p.

558). 202 Stoic cosmopolitanism played a similar role as an agent of global unification in the anti-statist international thought of

the anarchist geographers Élisée Reclus and Pyotr Kropotkin. Murray was disparaging of Anarchism as a force of disorder,

yet there were significant overlaps between his cosmopolitan and anti-statist views and anarchist internationalism. Murray

perhaps found it difficult to escape the ancient Greek meaning of anarchy as ‘without rule’ (αναρχία), which jarred with

his insistence on social and political order. Gilbert Murray, ‘National Ideals’, in Essays & Addresses (London: G. Allen &

Unwin, 1921), pp. 160–82 (p. 170). On Kropotkin and the Stoics, see Jim MacLaughlin, Kropotkin and the Anarchist

Intellectual Tradition (London: Pluto Press, 2016), p. 5. On Reclus, see Federico Ferretti, ‘Evolution and Revolution:

Anarchist Geographies, Modernity and Poststructuralism’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 35.5 (2017),

893–912 (p. 900).

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by the radical forces of global chaos: nationalism, militarism, anti-colonial resistance, socialism and

the ‘infinite disturbing factor’ of war.203 Following the neo-Athenian civic humanists, Murray stressed

that virtue entailed moral goodness, as well as the movement towards the spiritual perfection of man

that was only possible through political engagement.204 For Murray, ‘loyalty’ was ‘the central and

typical virtue’ which attached itself, ‘towards the most important active whole of which he is a

member.’ In ancient Greece, this whole was the city-state; in the modern world, it was the One Great

City, which redirected civic ethics to mankind as a whole. The good citizen in the global polis would

foster international cooperation by acting in a neighbourly, ‘understanding’ manner towards people

from other countries and fighting against the satanic forces of global disorder. Thus, Murray’s moral

conception of citizens living within the One Great City was underlined by a heavily politicised theory

of international duty, in which morality (or ‘goodness’) was interpreted as loyalty to the existing global

order: ‘goodness is the same thing as harmony with or loyalty to the World Order.’205

According to his biographer, Francis West, Murray was brought up from an early age to suspect

authority.206 This contention does not hold for Murray’s internationalism. Murray agitated for the

rights and protection of the dispossessed populations in British colonial territories.207 However, he

also told Liberal Party candidates in 1924 that ‘we do not believe in the equality of all nations; we

believe rather in a certain hierarchy, no doubt a temporary hierarchy, of races, or, at least, of

civilizations.’208 Murray did not substantively challenge imperial or international power structures, or

the fundamental arguments about trusteeship, civilisation and racial hierarchy that underlined and

perpetuated these structures. He praised the League’s mandate system, which provided the legal basis

for the Allied powers to administer German and Ottoman colonial territories after 1918, as a

revolutionary shift in the nature of imperialism from exploitation to education.209 Indeed, he saw

imperial mandates as a step towards peace and equality in the One Great City.210 Thus, failing to

acknowledge the imperial and international power dynamics underlying the collective system, Murray

reasserted the same gradated conception of world politics common to nineteenth-century liberal

internationalists.211 For Murray, combatting the forces of chaos was essential to preserving liberal

civilisation and the classical tradition. This could be achieved only through the One Great City and an

internationalised version of the civic ‘religion of the Polis’, the nexus of the republican ideals of civic

203 Murray, ‘Self-Determination of Nationalities’, p. 13; Murray, Anchor of Civilization, pp. 19, 29. 204 Murray, Five Stages, p. 125. On virtue and goodness in the republican cosmos, see Pocock, p. 37. 205 Murray, ‘Satanism’, pp. 204, 211. 206 West, p. 10. 207 Gilbert Murray, ‘The Exploitation of Inferior Races in Ancient and Modern Times’, in Liberalism and Empire, by

Francis Hirst, Gilbert Murray, and J.L. Hammond (London: E. Brimley Johnson, 1900). 208 Murray, ‘What Liberalism Stands For’, p. 688. 209 Murray, Ordeal, p. 220. 210 Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, pp. 194–97. On the League Mandates system, see Pedersen, pp. 3–4, 11. 211 Bell and Sylvest, pp. 207, 232–33.

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duty, virtue and service to the community that Murray praised throughout his writings.212 Indeed,

Murray’s internationalism reaffirmed the emphasis on intellectual order and civic obligation found in

his classical scholarship. His united ‘theory of international duty and a scheme of international co-

operation’ echoed Zimmern’s fusion of the political languages of liberal internationalism and the

republic.213

Conclusion: an international Machiavellian moment

Duncan Bell asserts that civic imperialism was a late but marked flowering of republicanism that in

its geographical reach and political ambition, if not its purity and sophistication, ‘can be seen as the

apotheosis of this enduring and ever mutating political idiom.’214 Murray’s and Zimmern’s civic

internationalism represents a continuation of the tradition of republican imaginings of world politics

that, in its global, as opposed to British and imperial, scope has a greater claim to represent the apogee

of republican thought. For Murray and Zimmern, the established fact of modern economic

interdependence provided an opportune moment to look back to the classical world for inspiration and

guidance in theorising international institutions. They viewed the polis or republic as a more inclusive,

neutral and less politically charged category than the nation-state. An international city,

commonwealth or republic could be more cooperative and internationalist than a world order built

upon antagonistic national units. The internationalisation of civic virtue would strengthen the bonds

of the global community by encouraging individuals and states to work cooperatively for common

interests. Murray’s and Zimmern’s thought encourages us to extend into the twentieth century the

temporal range and spatial and conceptual scale of the Atlantic republican tradition identified by

Pocock. Moreover, given their close involvement in the formation and early direction of the League

of Nations and its affiliated institutions, and their role interpreting international government for the

British public, academy and political establishment, this moment held the potential to have a profound

and lasting impact on the workings of international organisation and conceptualisation of modern

politics.

Murray and Zimmern viewed the advent of the League of Nations as a moment of republican

internationalisation, an opportunity to reshape world politics along republican lines. However, they

were simultaneously deeply concerned by transformations to the global economic and political order

after the First World War, especially the decline of British economic hegemony, the advance of

212 Murray, Rise, pp. 57–58. 213 Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, p. 200. 214 Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain, p. 138.

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Bolshevism, and the rise of anti-colonialist resistance. As Morefield argues, their internationalisms

were ‘framed largely in response to… what they sincerely believed to be the rapid unravelling of order

and stability on a global scale.’215 An ethically defined republican international citizenship and its

associated civic virtues, in particular duty, was deployed by Murray and Zimmern to provide

democratic legitimacy for a liberal global order that upheld European imperialism and failed to move

away from conceptualising international affairs through the lens of Great Power politics. Murray’s

and Zimmern’s civic internationalism was never truly global, being structured by their reluctance to

challenge prevailing hierarchies of race, empire and international power. Their fusion of the discourses

of liberal internationalism and the classical republic created a political language in which international

institutions with limited supra-state sovereignty appeared emancipatory, progressive and new.

215 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, p. 96.

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Chapter III – Public opinion, civic education and intellectual

leadership in international affairs

Let us not look to force. Force is against us: and there is no sillier spectacle than the sight of the weak

appealing to force against the strong. We have no force. We have only the power of putting facts and

questions before the public opinion of the world.

Gilbert Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, 1920.1

The classicising internationalists’ civic vision of world politics involved the imagining of a

transnational public that could operate in the international public spheres and spaces recently opened

up by the League. The public was an essential motif as Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern attempted to

conceptualise international relations beyond the sovereign state. All three argued that the moral

pressure of public opinion should supersede material power as the sovereign force within the

international system and act as the sanction of international law. Public opinion and publicity also

underpinned their imagining of the League of Nations as a new international order and a new form of

diplomacy. However, the classicising internationalists believed that at present public opinion was not

sufficiently internationalist. Only a handful of politicians, academics and League officials possessed

what Zimmern termed the ‘international mind’. Nor would an international outlook emerge

autonomously among the peoples of the world in an age of nationalism, where civic loyalty was

directed towards the nation-state. As such, the full potential of public opinion to secure a progressive

international order was deferred to the future. Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern argued that

internationalist civic educational programmes were needed to instruct the public in the rights and

responsibilities of international citizenship and to increase public commitment to peace, the League

and international cooperation. They proposed or enacted a wide range of educational initiatives with

the aim of developing a politically engaged and globally minded international citizenry. But these

educational programmes were interwoven with their conceptions of the intellectual as a leading actor

in world politics, as the guardian of international order and the educator of the international public.

1 From ‘Orbis Terrestris’, a lecture delivered to the Geographical Association and published in Murray, Essays &

Addresses, p. 200.

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Faith in the civilising role of public opinion in international relations was an important component of

much liberal international thinking between the wars.2 This was coupled to the belief that education

in the principles and duties of international citizenship was essential to the functioning of collective

security and the preservation of world peace. As the former Foreign Secretary and Labour Party leader

Arthur Henderson wrote in 1934, ‘Perhaps the most vital element in our peace crusade is the adequate

education of the young in world citizenship. For if we are to achieve a lasting peace based on the

system of collective security, the whole concept of citizenship must be changed.’3 Numerous

internationalist associations and organisations made efforts to persuade ordinary citizens to think in

more global terms.4 The classicising internationalists were convinced of the need to educate and

mobilise public opinion in support of the League, and engaged in a variety of educational initiatives

between the wars. As chairman of the League of Nations Union (LNU), the largest interwar

internationalist organisation in Britain, Murray oversaw internationalist educational programmes in

British schools and universities. These were calculated to increase public knowledge of, and support

for, the purpose and philosophy of the League.5 Toynbee’s contribution was mainly through his

research work at the Royal Institute of International Affairs and his journalistic output.6 Toynbee

authored the Institute’s annual Survey of International Affairs, which he hoped would develop a more

‘scientific’ understanding of world politics among political decision-makers and the British public.7

Along with his wife, Lucie, Zimmern established a postgraduate school for the study of international

relations in Geneva which quickly outgrew its strict academic brief and transformed into a model for

the practice of truly cooperative international relations based on transcultural ‘understanding’.8

Zimmern, who had been prominent in the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA) before the war,

was convinced that education was an important source of international goodwill.9 The classicising

internationalists’ educational work and thought was inspired by, and mimicked, British approaches to

civics education—education in the rights and responsibilities of good citizenship—but moved the

notion of citizenship beyond its traditional national borders. After the First World War, they applied

a characteristically Edwardian preoccupation with civic education for political responsibility to

international relations.

2 Hucker, p. 8; Wilson, ‘“Idealism” in International Relations’, pp. 7–9. 3 Arthur Henderson, The Schoolmaster (1934), quoted in Derek Heater, Citizenship: The Civic Ideal in World History,

Politics and Education (London: Longman, 1990), p. 139. 4 Heater, Citizenship, p. 141. 5 McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, pp. 103–25. 6 In a letter to Murray discussing Toynbee’s role as the author of the annual Survey, James Headlam-Morley noted that

Toynbee had demanded to be allowed to continue writing for The Economist alongside his research work with the Institute.

Headlam-Morley to Murray, 25 June 1927, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 7 Toynbee to Zimmern, 8 June 1932, Toynbee Papers, Box 86. On scientism at Chatham House, see Parmar, pp. 55–56. 8 Geneva School of International Studies information pamphlet (undated, but probably 1927), MS Zimmern 87, fol. 14. 9 Zimmern, ‘Education and International Goodwill’.

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The international is as much of an ‘imagined community’ as the nation.10 National and international

publics are similarly socially constituted, or imagined, entities.11 Consequently, interwar politics was

marked by many competing assumptions about the composition of British and international opinion.

The international public that Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern invoked in their writings was distinctive

in its classical inspiration and articulation through the language of republican political theory. The

international citizen was well-informed concerning current affairs and able and willing to engage

actively, discursively and rationally in the political life of the international community. Collectively,

these citizens constituted ‘a fine body of public opinion with high ideals’.12 Their historical model was

the active and informed citizenry of fifth-century Athens that Zimmern described in The Greek

Commonwealth, and was therefore symptomatic of the cross-fertilisation of ancient and modern ideas

that characterised classicising internationalism.13 The classicising internationalists’ educational

initiatives sought to develop something resembling the Athenian citizen on an international stage.

Their classical background gave them a particular take on the formative role of education in the

creation of an active citizenry. They emphasised the individual’s civic duty to the international

community and held that a political education that mimicked that of ancient Athens would help to

secure peace and uphold international order at a time when democracy and liberalism were coming

under increasing pressure in the 1930s. However, the classicising internationalists simultaneously

viewed the mass public as susceptible to nationalist passion and a potentially destabilising factor in

world politics. These concerns reflected Plato’s depiction of the demos as a ‘large and powerful

animal’ driven by irrational desire.14 Classical thought, especially Plato, also underpinned the

classicising internationalists’ views of the place of the citizen in the hierarchy of international power.

The international public was not a body of emancipated and emboldened political actors, but rather a

group of responsible and virtuous citizens deferent to the wisdom and guidance of the cadre of

bureaucrats and intellectuals working for international organisations or in the emerging academic field

of international relations. Assertions of the civilising power of public opinion and the importance of

international education were simultaneously a claim to intellectual and political leadership in world

affairs.

10 On the international as an imagined community, see Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 16; Sluga, p. 150. For nations as imagined communities, see Benedict Anderson,

Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983). 11 J.D. Peters, ‘Historical Tensions in the Concept of Public Opinion’, in Public Opinion and the Communication of

Consent, ed. by Theodore Glasser and Charles Salmon (New York: The Guildford Press, 1995), pp. 3–32 (p. 16). 12 Alfred Zimmern, Public Opinion and International Affairs (Manchester: Co-operative Union Limited, 1931), p. 8. 13 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 193–204. Zimmern quoted Pericles’ Funeral Oration in its entirety in a chapter

entitled ‘The Ideal of Citizenship’. See also, Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 10; Alfred Zimmern, ‘Education for

World Citizenship’, in Problems of Peace, Fifth Series (Geneva: Geneva Institute of International Relations, 1931), pp.

304–19. 14 Plato, Republic, 493b.

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The present chapter examines questions of the international public, civic education and the intellectual

in the classicising internationalist imaginary. Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern are recognised as crucial

in the development of international relations as a distinct and self-conscious academic discipline.

However, few intellectual historians explore the central place of education in their political thought.

Their consistent and active engagement in educational programmes and institutes is similarly

overlooked, with the exception Helen McCarthy’s history of the LNU.15 Murray’s and Zimmern’s

educational writings do not feature prominently in Morefield’s examination of their liberalism.16

Likewise, Tomohito Baji does not explore Zimmern’s practical educational initiatives before the post-

1945 movement to create UNESCO—the Geneva School is mentioned only in passing.17 Peter Wilson

examines Murray’s thinking about education and intellectual cooperation, but not the educational

initiatives that he advocated and enacted through the LNU.18 Toynbee’s views on education are

overlooked by historians of his international thought such as Luca Castellin, Ian Hall, Michael Lang

and Cornelia Navari, are absent from William McNeill’s 1989 biography, and do not feature in

investigations of Toynbee’s philosophy of history.19 It is the contention of this chapter that education,

especially civics, was a central concern for Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern and is essential to

understanding their international thought. The first section outlines the theoretical position of public

opinion in classicising internationalist thought. The second section evaluates the nature and object of

the classicising internationalists’ educational work. The final section examines the classicising

internationalists’ conception of the intellectual as a crucial leadership figure in global politics.

Public opinion and global order in classicising internationalism

E.H. Carr argued in The Twenty Years’ Crisis (1939) that an overriding concern with British national

interests lay behind the universalising rhetoric of the liberal idealism of internationalists like Norman

Angell, Leonard Woolf, Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern.20 But Carr’s enduring caricature of these

‘utopians’ who naively downplayed the supremacy of real power in international relations did not do

15 McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, pp. 103–25. 16 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords. 17 Baji, ‘Commonwealth’, p. 108. 18 Peter Wilson, ‘Retrieving Cosmos: Gilbert Murray’s Thought on International Relations’, in Gilbert Murray Reassessed:

Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics, ed. by Christopher Stray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 239–

50 (p. 891). 19 Ian Hall, ‘“Time of Troubles”: Arnold J. Toynbee’s Twentieth Century’, International Affairs, 90.1 (2014), 23–36;

Lang; Navari; Castellin; McNeill. On Toynbee’s philosophy of history, see Paquette; Toynbee and History: Critical Essays

and Reviews, ed. by Ashley Montagu (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1956). 20 Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, pp. 54–80.

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justice to the complexity and range of interwar idealist opinion.21 In A Study of History, Toynbee

offered a sophisticated materialist critique of imperialism, asserting that Westerners’ devaluation of

non-Western culture was a consequence of Europe’s ‘rather sudden and sensational’ ascent to imperial

and economic hegemony.22 Murray and Zimmern were less willing to recognise the illiberalism and

violence underpinning Britain’s empire, however they were not wholly blind to political power

realities. With the ‘monstrous severity’ of the Athenian sack of Melos in mind, Murray noted that

‘there is no sillier spectacle than the sight of the weak appealing to force against the strong.’23 The

classicising internationalists also clearly understood that a prime cause of conflict was the sovereign

right of nation-states to wage war. Undermining this doctrine was central to their internationalism. As

Toynbee declared in 1931, ‘this fetish of local national sovereignty is our intended victim.’24 The

classicising internationalists recognised, to varying extents, the role that power and national interest

played in international politics, but imagined a more peaceable, progressive alternative based on the

ethical duties of citizenship and interstate cooperation in the economic, political and intellectual

spheres. Their ideas belong to the tradition of cultural internationalism traced by Akira Iriye, a theory

of international relations which holds that cooperation through transnational cultural and intellectual

activities is as vital to the promotion of peace as collective security, international law, economic

exchange or diplomacy.25

The faith that Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern placed in the pacifying role of public opinion and

education in international relations was a manifestation of cultural internationalism. They couched

these principles in two interrelated temporal discourses, one of novelty and another of progress

towards an ideal international socio-political order. Situated within time, the League of Nations

represented both innovation and advance. The ‘new order’ of international affairs brought about by

the cooperative ethics and institutional mechanisms of the League was contrasted regularly to the ‘old

diplomacy’ of Great Power politics, national interest, the balance of power, state sovereignty and

secretive agreements that they believed had characterised international relations before the First World

War.26 The aristocratic personnel and mentality of the Foreign Office, and its resistance to institutional

change, public pressure and external party-political interference, were particular loci of criticism.27

Toynbee, for example, hoped that ‘in the new order which we are striving to bring into being, the

21 Wilson, ‘“Idealism” in International Relations’, p. 15. 22 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 150–53. 23 Murray, ‘Aristophanes and the War Party’, pp. 39–40; Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, p. 200. Thucydides, 5.84–116. 24 Toynbee, ‘World Sovereignty and World Culture’, p. 758. 25 Iriye, p. 3. 26 For an early overview of the ‘old diplomacy’, see Harold Nicolson’s biography of his father. Nicolson, pp. x, 92–97. 27 T.G. Otte, ‘Old Diplomacy: Reflections on the Foreign Office Before 1914’, Contemporary British History, 18.3 (2004),

31–52 (pp. 31–33). Otte challenges the picture of the nineteenth-century Foreign Office as a bastion of the old diplomacy.

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political functions of the local national state may dwindle almost to vanishing point.’28 This was part

of a broader historical development encapsulated by what he believed was ‘the general

acknowledgement, by the peoples and Governments of Europe, that the future belonged to the

League.’29 For Murray, ‘the League is both the symbol and the instrument of that new world for which

we are all working.’30 In 1928, Zimmern described the League in idealist terms as a profound

innovation in global politics and human affairs, ‘an outward and visible symbol of the new order to

which the people were to attune their minds.’31 Zimmern was writing at a time when the 1925 Locarno

Treaties and the 1928 General Treaty for the Renunciation of War (the Kellogg–Briand Pact) had

generated considerable optimism in internationalist circles surrounding the potential end of war as an

instrument of foreign policy. After the collapse of free trade in 1931 and damaging reversals in

Manchuria and Abyssinia, his attitude dampened, as did those of Murray and Toynbee. In the mid-

1930s, Zimmern portrayed the League as an imperfect balance of ‘the Old Diplomacy—and something

more… the New Order—and something less.’ He viewed his time as an age of transition in politics

and political science, invoking Gramsci’s concept of ‘interregnum’.32 Nonetheless, Zimmern remained

convinced that the overall trends in international affairs were advancing towards peace and

cooperation. The League remained ‘at one and the same time, a makeshift in a disordered present and

a gesture, and maybe more than a gesture, towards a more harmonious future.’33 Educational schemes

to create an active international citizenry were vital to providing the institutional mechanisms of the

League with democratic legitimacy and political backbone.

Writing in 1918, Murray, stirred by the imaginative possibilities of post-war reconstruction, argued

that in a future League of Nations, ‘members will meet in quite a different spirit from that of an

ordinary Diplomatic Conference of the old sort.’ He differentiated ‘wise and trustworthy’ League

bureaucrats inspired by international cooperation from the old style of ‘diplomatists, each representing

his own nation and bound to act in its interests.’34 Criticism of traditional diplomatic practices had

moved to the forefront of wartime British political discussion due to the activities of the Union of

Democratic Control (UDC), a radical anti-war organisation composed of left-leaning intellectuals and

politicians like J.A. Hobson, E.D. Morel and Ramsay MacDonald. The UDC argued for parliamentary

control over foreign policy and the end to secret diplomacy.35 Murray attended UDC meetings in 1915,

28 Toynbee, ‘World Sovereignty and World Culture’, p. 771. 29 Arnold Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1930 (London: Oxford University Press, 1931), p. 7. 30 Gilbert Murray, The League, Manchuria and Disarmament (London: League of Nations Union, 1931), p. 16. 31 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 11. 32 Zimmern, The League and the Rule of Law, pp. 482, 278; Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks

(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2001), p. 556. 33 Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, p. 18. 34 Gilbert Murray, The League of Nations and the Democratic Idea (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1918), pp. 24–25. 35 Marvin Swartz, The Union of Democratic Control in British Politics During the First World War (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1971), p. 25.

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but told Lord Bryce of his anger at their attacks on Britain’s foreign policy in 1914.36 He later argued

that discretion was essential to treaty negotiations.37 Unlike many UDC figures, Murray had become

increasingly part of the Liberal political establishment during 1910s, appearing on a list of peers to be

created during the 1910–11 People’s Budget crisis and being offered a knighthood (which he declined)

in 1912.38 Morel, by contrast, broke with the Liberal Party when he formed the UDC. Bryce, another

establishment figure, agreed with Murray: ‘you are quite right about “secret diplomacy”, to such a

Europe as ours it is inevitable.’39 Zimmern also believed that secret negotiations were a necessary part

of diplomatic practice. Nonetheless, Murray and Zimmern both accepted that the results of

negotiations must be publicised and debated in parliament before any treaty was ratified.40 In the

interwar years, they argued that public discourse was an essential feature of the advancing

democratisation of international affairs.

For many commentators, the fundamental novelty of the League system was that it enshrined the

principle of publicity in international affairs. The workings of the League were defined by open

governmental processes, public debate on political issues, and the ostensible accountability of

representatives in the Assembly to the court of public opinion. Murray framed this using the classical

Greek concept of logos (λόγος), which he translated as the ‘power of language’ which ‘implies reason,

persuasion, interpretation, and which settles differences instead of the armed hand.’41 The

internationalist implications of this were clear. In 1920, Murray contended that logos was the basis of

duty and righteousness, specifically towards one’s neighbours.42 Murray cited the Roman Neoplatonist

philosopher Porphyry of Tyre (c.234–c.305), who outlined a tiered system of interconnected spiritual

and civic virtues that sought to encourage philosophic salvation, promote the principles of good

citizenship, and revitalise a shaken Roman empire.43 Logos was also central to Murray’s address to

the General Council of the League of Nations Union in 1924, which became a twopence LNU

pamphlet disseminated to a broader public audience. Murray argued that ‘the League Way’ was based

on the principle of legal tribunal and logos, the ‘Greek belief that something might be said to console

both parties in a conflict and solve difficulty.’44 Thus, the essence of the League movement was

conference, not conflict. The League represented a rational and discursive international public space

36 Murray to Lord Bryce, 23 September 1915, MS Bryce 109, fol. 13. 37 Murray, The League and the Democratic Idea, p. 11. 38 West, p. 143. 39 Bryce to Murray, 19 September 1915, MS Murray 125, fol. 16. 40 Murray, The League and the Democratic Idea, p. 11; Zimmern, Public Opinion and International Affairs, pp. 2–3. 41 Murray, Rise, p. 92. 42 Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, p. 189. 43 Michael Simmons, Universal Salvation in Late Antiquity: Porphyry of Tyre and the Pagan–Christian Debate, Oxford

Studies in Late Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 219–23. Porphyry was portrayed as an

unoriginal, anti-Christian thinker in an influential early-twentieth-century biography by J. Bidez, Vie de Porphyre (Ghent:

E. van Goethem, 1913). 44 Gilbert Murray, The World and the League (London: League of Nations Union, 1924), pp. 3–4.

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modelled on the ideals of Greek civilisation and the politics of the Athenian agora. However, Murray

did not acknowledge the socially limited nature of ancient democratic politics, that Athenian

citizenship excluded women and a large slave class. He divorced the praiseworthy ideals of the

classical inheritance from the negative aspects of the specific historical context of antiquity. Indeed,

underpinning Murray’s interpretation of the democratic novelty of League internationalism were

paternalistic views of the distribution of expertise and power in international society. Logos was tied

to Murray’s Platonic assumption that intellectual leadership was the best mode of international

government. He looked ‘to intellectual co-operation among men of good will for the restoring of our

lost Cosmos and the ultimate wise guidance of the world.’45

The commitment to transparency and public debate has been recognised by historians like Mark

Mazower and Susan Pedersen as one of the League’s most important and original innovations.46 The

League was structured as an international parliament, with an Assembly and Council, and the language

of democratisation was central to the League’s presentation of its activities.47 For Murray, League

publicity had had a revolutionary effect on the practice of international politics by providing an

alternative locus of power to military force: ‘the world has not yet sounded or measured the immense

power of mere publicity. … Publicity is the only new weapon which the League possesses, but if

properly used it may well prove to be about the most powerful weapon that exists in human affairs.’48

Toynbee agreed, praising the critical role of public opinion in the movement for the 1928 Kellogg–

Briand Pact as ‘a noteworthy departure from the diplomatic tradition of Western international

society.’49 However, Toynbee recognised that the international public was not the only, or the most

powerful, force in world politics. The 1932 Disarmament Conference, which failed to impose

limitations on armaments, represented a victory for ‘war-experts’ over internationalist opinion.50

Whilst Toynbee argued that the transfer of power from national electorates to economic experts

promoted international cooperation, increased technocracy in security policy went against both the

ecumenical spirit of the industrial age and the pacifism of global public opinion by exacerbating

military tensions and nationalist feeling.

Zimmern portrayed public opinion in similar moralistic terms, telling the 1931 Co-operative Congress

that ‘the machinery to stop war… is not armies and navies; it is simply the power of public opinion

45 Murray, Ordeal, p. 197. 46 Mazower, Governing the World, p. 116; Pedersen, pp. 77–103. 47 Clavin, p. 9. 48 Murray, ‘Orbis Terrestris’, p. 199. 49 Toynbee, Survey, 1928, p. 10. 50 Arnold Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1932 (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), p. 179.

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placed in the hands of statesmen with moral authority.’51 Zimmern also viewed publicity and

citizenship as intrinsically educational. Drawing on Aristotelian moral philosophy, he argued that the

international public sphere centring on the League Assembly created greater opportunities for

individual citizens to engage in international politics, which was essential to human flourishing and

the good life. Indeed, ‘Governments and “Leagues of Nations” are simply instruments, and their sole

purpose is to serve human needs, to set individuals free to find fulfilment in their own lives.’52

Zimmern contended that an international public opinion characterised by a republican civic spirit must

become, in an undefined way, the sanction of international law within the collective system, in the

same way that the support of public opinion authorised laws in constitutional democratic states. It was

‘“the sanction of public opinion” which stands behind the organized form of the community’ in

constitutional democracies, which also rely on ‘the “public spirit” of the ordinary citizen to promote

observance of law.’ The collective system of the League required that ‘this public spirit and sense of

civic obligation should be enlarged, so that the individual should feel an active and personal

responsibility towards the world-community.’53 In the wake of British universal suffrage, Zimmern

felt that a notion of a public power gave democratic legitimacy to a radical experiment in international

government. Yet, in applying democratic concepts to the international arena, Zimmern focused on

their ethical implications, ensuring that they were shorn of any emancipatory political substance.

Zimmern’s interpretation of publicity, democracy and citizenship as an intrinsically valuable political

education sought to reconcile a Platonic vision of international government with a democratising age.

Several socio-political and economic developments combined to push the concept of public opinion

to the forefront of interwar political discussion. The academic and popular interest in internationalism

in Europe and North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was intertwined

with the growing sense of the power of public opinion that accompanied the growth of literacy and

the flow of ideas and people across national borders. Modern communications and technology,

especially steam power and electricity, increased global trade, and the establishment of international

institutions and associations like the Universal Postal Union (1874), created more accessible

international public spheres and spaces and encouraged much debate on the sociological reality of

internationality. For contemporaries, the Hague peace conventions of 1899 and 1907 demonstrated

the ability of public opinion to generate real political investment in international law and institutions

as a means to preserve peace.54 Emboldened internationalists in an age of publicity and literacy

advocated for a greater democratic voice in international affairs. The First World War increased public

51 Zimmern, Public Opinion and International Affairs, p. 6. 52 Zimmern, ‘Europe and the World Community’, p. 120. This is a marked example of the influence of ‘neo-Athenian’

republican ideals on Zimmern’s conception of international affairs. 53 Zimmern, ‘The British Commonwealth and the Collective System’ (25 June 1934), MS Zimmern 97, fol. 4. 54 Sluga, pp. 2, 11–23.

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interest in foreign policy, evident in the wartime campaign of the UDC and the post-war debate over

culpability for the 1914 July crisis. The advent of mass internationalist organisations like the Women’s

International League for Peace and Freedom (1915) and the LNU (1918) added to the sense that the

public should not be isolated from the government’s security and foreign policy decisions. This

context was linked to developments in British politics and society. Public opinion was a central term

in British political debate from the mid-nineteenth century. The decline of aristocratic authority and

the rising middle and working class influence in society, franchise extensions, and the growing labour

movement during the early twentieth century proved to politicians that public opinion, expressed

through elections, had significant power in Britain’s new mass democracy.55

Public opinion was an important motif in British political discourse between the wars. Yet, as Hucker

argues, ‘there are multifarious public opinions rather than a single homogenous [sic] public opinion.’56

The classicising internationalists’ conception of an internationalist-minded public was one of a number

of competing visions of what constituted British public opinion, for example from the pacifist

movement or the segments of the British right that were critical of disarmament and the League. British

opinion as expressed through the press, an influential medium for contemporary politicians and voters

(as well as historians) to gauge public attitudes, was divided on many aspects of foreign policy,

especially defence and disarmament.57 The classicising internationalists recognised this, disparaging

the segments of the press and public that they felt were hostile to internationalism and the League in

their private correspondence and public addresses.58 Nonetheless, as political actors and public

intellectuals, they deployed the notion of an internationalist public to gain legitimacy for their own

views as a representative expression of wider public opinion. Thus, an international public must also

be moved by a sense of duty that manifested itself in a commitment to League principles. For

Zimmern, ‘efforts to improve international relations’ must be ‘backed up by an instructed and

idealistic public opinion.’59 Moreover, following the argumentative techniques of Victorian

commentators, the classicising internationalists did not deem all segments of public opinion equally

important or worthy. They believed that reasonable, educated opinions should be privileged as

representative of true public opinion.60 In December 1914, Zimmern expressed his hope that ‘Inter-

State Law … be enthroned with the necessary powers to maintain justice between the peoples and

55 Catherine Krull and B.J.C. McKercher, ‘The Press, Public Opinion, Arms Limitation, and Government Policy in Britain,

1932–34: Some Preliminary Observations’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 13.3 (2002), 103–36 (pp. 105–8); James Thompson,

British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 56 Hucker, p. 9. 57 Krull and McKercher, p. 118. 58 Zimmern to H.G. Wells, 19 January 1932, MS Zimmern 28, fol. 40; Zimmern, ‘Education for World Citizenship’, p.

313. See also, Toynbee to Murray, 11 September 1927, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 59 Zimmern, ‘Public Opinion’, p. 299. 60 Thompson, pp. 56–80.

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governments of the world’ by reviving it on a basis of ‘modern democracy, modern nationality, and

modern educated public opinion.’61 Likewise, the League Assembly did not directly represent the

demos, but reflected and guided public opinion in an echo of Victorian notions of an educated public

opinion led by Parliament. The classicising internationalists imagined public opinion as a rational and

informed actor that had been instructed in a particular way of thinking, what Zimmern referred to as

the ‘international mind’.

Zimmern believed that the great changes that had marked what he saw as the progressive development

of English history—the Reformation, the Glorious Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution—had

been affected by revolutions of the mind.62 His understanding of the transformative potential of the

international mind reflected the application of this whig conception of history to international politics.

The international mind was equated to living ‘in a room with windows open on a wide prospect over

the world.’ It was an expression of intellectual character based on a desire to develop a more mature

and mutual understanding between nations, peoples and groups: ‘a power of reaching out across one’s

own country to the people whose roots are in a different soil.’63 The international mind was a form of

silent majority as defined by Hucker, a mainstream of public opinion which allegedly existed beneath

the surface of contemporary politics and onto which the classicising internationalists projected their

own ideals.64 Belief in the existence of some sort of international mind was characteristic of much

interwar international thought. The American diplomat and educator Nicholas Murray Butler coined

the term in 1912 to describe the novel ‘friendly and cooperative’ internationalist mentality or ‘habit

of thinking’ that he witnessed among twentieth-century diplomats and businessmen.65 It parallels H.G.

Wells’s concept of the ‘World Brain’, a global knowledge system or encyclopaedia that all peoples

could access in order to deepen their understanding of current affairs.66 As a vision of international

community, the international mind also echoed the nineteenth-century ideas of Benjamin Constant,

Richard Cobden and Herbert Spencer, who held that the natural consequence of global commerce was

the growth of mutual knowledge and a sense of shared transnational concerns.67 For Zimmern, people

must ‘learn how to stretch a girdle of thought and of sympathy round the entire world.’68 Thus, the

extension of the geographical and social scope of the international mind was a great moralising and

61 Zimmern, ‘German Culture and the British Commonwealth’, p. 24. 62 Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities, p. 94. 63 Zimmern, ‘The International Mind’, pp. 2–3. 64 Hucker, p. 17. 65 Nicholas Murray Butler, The International Mind: An Argument for the Judicial Settlement of International Disputes

(New York: Scribner, 1912), p. 102. Butler was president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace from 1925

to 1945. Bentley argues that notions of a Liberal ‘mind’, conceived as a metaphysical totality, held great explanatory power

and persuasiveness in British political discourse after 1914. Michael Bentley, The Liberal Mind, 1914–1929 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1977), pp. 2–3. 66 H.G. Wells, World Brain (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1938), pp. 244–45. 67 Iriye, pp. 26–27. 68 Zimmern, ‘The International Mind’, p. 13.

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civilising political force that underpinned peaceful cooperation between human groupings. Yet, as

Morefield argues, by assigning supreme transformative power to the realm of ideas, Zimmern was

able to claim the potential universality of his brand of liberal-idealist internationalism whilst

simultaneously solidifying notions of cultural difference and hierarchy that upheld colonial

structures.69 Indeed, the figure who Zimmern believed best possessed an ‘international attitude’ before

1914 was the architect of late-Victorian imperialism in southern Africa, Cecil Rhodes.70

The classicising internationalists all accepted that some form of international consciousness, opinion

or mind was a powerful actor in global politics. These ideas were closely linked to their institutional

involvement with the international intellectual cooperation movement. Zimmern’s initial lecture on

‘The Development of the International Mind’ was split in two when it was published as part of the

1926 Problems of Peace series. The second half was entitled, ‘The League and International

Intellectual Co-operation’ and detailed the League’s activities in this sphere.71 Intellectual cooperation

was based on the assumption that the key to peace was developing international ‘understanding’,

mutual and unprejudiced knowledge of different cultures, primarily through the cooperation of cultural

elites from across the globe.72 As the leaders of national and international institutes, chairs of national

and international committees, and important public intellectuals, the classicising internationalists

exerted an enormous influence over the international intellectual cooperation movement both in

Britain and Geneva.

In 1921 the League Council agreed to set up a Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (CIC), which

first met in 1922 and included distinguished intellectuals like Henri Bergson (the first chairman),

Albert Einstein, Marie Curie, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, and Hendrik Lorentz. Gilbert Murray was the

committee’s original vice-chairman and was chairman from 1928. Zimmern was deputy director of a

sister institute, the Paris-based International Institute for Intellectual Co-operation (IIIC), established

in 1926 with French government finances.73 Together these bodies represent the intellectual and

institutional origins of UNESCO. Toynbee was not involved in the administrative work of these

institutes, but felt that his academic interest in the contact between civilisations was part of the same

intellectual project of ‘finding a modus vivendi between the West and other cultures’.74 As Daniel

Laqua observes, the intellectual cooperation movement was driven by a multi-faceted and

69 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, p. 132. 70 Zimmern, ‘The International Mind’, p. 6. 71 Alfred Zimmern, ‘The League and International Intellectual Co-Operation’, in Problems of Peace (Geneva: Geneva

Institute of International Relations, 1927), pp. 144–50. 72 Iriye, pp. 58–61. 73 Zimmern, ‘Intellectual Co-Operation’, p. 144. 74 Toynbee to Murray, 27 October 1924, Toynbee Papers, Box 72.

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interconnected quest for order in global politics, scholarly knowledge and the contact between

civilisations. It sought to preserve regional stability in Europe, establish control over the everyday

conditions of intellectual life, structure and classify scholarly knowledge, and define the social

position of intellectuals.75 The classicising internationalists hoped that the ideal of international

understanding held by people in influential positions in national politics, culture and the press would

filter outwards throughout the peoples of the world. Thus, they considered intellectual cooperation to

be as vital to the maintenance of peace as multilateral efforts in political organisation, economics and

security. Progress in this sphere of international relations was manifest. As Zimmern wrote in 1926,

the ‘academic Locarno’ of intellectual cooperation had become ‘an accomplished fact before the

political Locarno.’76

As Iriye contends, cultural internationalism was an ‘intellectual proposition’ insulated from

international realpolitik.77 For Zimmern, the international mind reflected a way of thinking reasonably

and rationally about the world but, crucially, denoted an group of people who thought in this open-

minded way.78 Zimmern asserted that there existed an ‘increasing body of persons for whom

international thinking is a must’, most of whom were members of an intellectual or cultural elite,

although many businessmen had also evolved an international attitude through the requirements of life

in a globalised economy. Thus, the universal potential of the international mind operated alongside a

stricter social and scholarly definition, specifically intellectuals engaged in the academic study of

international relations or in subjects like history, geography, sociology and economics that had a

bearing on international affairs.79 Like the League itself, the actual internationality of Zimmern’s

group was severely limited. It consisted of people like the diplomats, administrators and intellectuals

that attended the Problems of Peace lectures, the forum in which Zimmern first outlined his theory of

the international mind. These were mostly Western men and women (but primarily men) trained in

European or North American universities and working in international organisations or the League’s

bureaucracy or as academics. They were largely committed to the imperial civilising mission, which

was consistent with the founding principles of the League itself. Indeed, as Sluga argues, by

emphasising shared values and political objectives across cultures and races, international mindedness

was formulated in opposition to the calls for national liberation from politically marginalised peoples

that characterised interwar international politics.80

75 Laqua, pp. 224–26. 76 Zimmern, ‘Intellectual Co-Operation’, p. 150. 77 Iriye, p. 60. 78 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, p. 127. 79 Zimmern, ‘The International Mind’, pp. 5, 2–3. 80 Sluga, p. 65.

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Those in possession of the international mind were not primarily conceived by Zimmern as

technocrats, but rather as model international citizens who held leadership positions in international

affairs as a consequence of their philosophic knowledge and civic virtue, defined as commitment to

international cooperation. These individuals had achieved the fulfilment of man as an international

political animal, for the intellectual horizons of the Aristotelian polis had been outgrown. They

encouraged philosophic reflection and observation, but were distinguished from the detached

academic, a figure Zimmern despised.81 Their role was inherently public and educative. As Zimmern

told the 1928 Problems of Peace conference, it was up to the present group of intellectuals and

internationalists to spread the international mind among the world’s peoples, ‘to enlarge the vision

and the understanding of the citizen… and to make him feel, all day long, that he is living in a larger

world.’ Moreover, this task was deemed critical in strengthening the League’s mechanisms and

securing international peace: ‘when you have built up an instructed and responsible public opinion,

the material agencies will surely follow.’82 In arguing that ‘such men must not only be philosophers

mediating in the study: they must occupy key positions in the modern community’, Zimmern was

likely thinking of the philosopher-king in Plato’s Republic.83 Indeed, the pivotal role of public opinion

in idealist international thought resonated with the classicising internationalists’ desire to reaffirm the

social and political position of the intellectual in the modern age.

In his history of the idea of public opinion in Victorian political culture, James Thompson asserts that

nineteenth-century commentators defined democracy as a social group as well as a political system,

and moved easily between these two meanings. Nineteenth-century notions of the public were also

conceptually distinct from that of the electorate.84 Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern constructed the

international democratic public sociologically, as a core feature of the international political

community not an electorate with any tangible or direct political power. This public was both a group

comprised of existing civic-minded international citizens and a latent global social force working for

peace and stability. But the classicising internationalists interpreted the international public

dualistically. Public opinion was the sole moral sovereign force in the international system and a

guarantee against repeating the diplomatic mistakes that led to war in 1914. Yet, they simultaneously

imagined the public as an unwieldy and uncontrollable force of mass passion, susceptible to

propaganda, demagogy and militarist nationalism, drawing upon Plato’s depiction of the demos as an

81 Stapleton, Political Intellectuals and Public Identities, pp. 102–4. 82 Zimmern, ‘Public Opinion’, pp. 308, 320. 83 Zimmern, ‘Collective Security’, p. 87. Plato, Republic, 473d. 84 Thompson, pp. 3–4.

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irrational and violent many-headed beast.85 Throughout the interwar period, they interpreted the

widespread public support for the creation of the League in the immediate aftermath of the First World

War as evidence of continued public commitment to collective security and internationalism. Their

reading of British public opinion as overwhelmingly, if quietly, internationalist was static: it did not

change substantially in response to important material transformations in interwar geopolitics, such as

the British public’s evident lack of appetite to enforce the League Covenant during the Manchurian or

Abyssinian crises.86 This is an example of what Hucker terms a ‘residual representation’ through

which British and French political elites defined public opinion. Residual representations drew upon

a person’s ideas about the tendencies within public debate over a number of years and tended to

become rigid, persuasive assumptions that refuse to react to fluctuations in opinion or changing

political circumstances.87 However, the classicising internationalists also constantly feared that

politically or numerically influential sections of public opinion were not sufficiently internationalist

and would abandon the League for national gain. What remained consistent was their belief that the

public was not quite ready to direct international affairs and needed to be educated in the

responsibilities of international citizenship. In the meantime, the political leadership and educational

and moral guidance of a philosophic elite of rational internationalists was essential to keeping mass

passions in check and increasing public support for the League of Nations.

‘The ideal of an Educated Democracy’: the civic ideal in international

education

The classicising internationalists believed that an international public must be brought into being and

enlightened in order to fulfil its role as the arbiter of international relations and global justice. In

Zimmern’s opinion, people should be ‘trained to regard international co-operation as the normal mode

of carrying on human affairs’ by those who already possessed the qualities of the international mind.88

Throughout the interwar period, these figures supported or directly participated in an array of

educational initiatives designed to increase public knowledge of the ideals and practices of the League

and to develop international citizens. Murray, as chairman of the LNU, embarked on a programme of

pro-League education in schools and agitated for the revision of textbooks. Murray also authored a

number of LNU pamphlets designed to increase knowledge of, and support for, the League of Nations.

85 Plato, Republic, 493b. 86 Carr noted the British public’s distaste for military intervention in Abyssinia. Carr, ‘Public Opinion’, p. 858. 87 Hucker, pp. 10–12. 88 Zimmern, ‘Europe and the World Community’, p. 304.

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Toynbee viewed his research work at Chatham House, in particularly the annual Survey of

International Affairs (first published in 1925), as educational, for it provided the British public with

the facts about the international situation.89 The Surveys were received as such, with one reviewer

noting that ‘these books should be on the desk of every speaker, writer, student, and citizen interested

in international affairs.’90 These works were crucial in the dissemination of internationalist ideas, and

allowed Toynbee to set the terms of public debate on world politics.91 Zimmern encouraged

international exchanges of teachers and students and international academic conferences. He

established a postgraduate institute, the Geneva School of International Studies, to foster

internationalist ideals in future generations of political leaders, intellectuals and public figures. Murray

and Zimmern held leadership positions in committees on intellectual cooperation. Moreover, all three

figures were crucial in the formalisation and direction of international relations as an academic

discipline. Like many early international relations specialists, they viewed their discipline as an

integral part of the broader League project. For example, the endowment for the Wilson Chair of

International Politics, first held by Zimmern, defined its subject as ‘Political Science in its application

to International Relations with special reference to the best means of promoting peace between

nations.’92 The present section addresses the classicising internationalists’ educational thought and

work. This was inspired largely by Edwardian approaches to citizenship education as training in

political responsibility, but moved the focus of civic loyalty beyond the boundaries of the nation-state.

Civic education was central to classicising internationalism, for an activist global citizenry would

provide the League of Nations with vital political authority. As the international context darkened in

the 1930s, these figures maintained a determined focus on education as a framework for global

stability.

The classicising internationalists’ educational thought and programmes drew heavily upon the

traditions and ideas of the Edwardian civic education movement, especially the Workers’ Educational

Association. In 1903, Alfred Mansbridge founded the WEA to provide adult education to the British

working class. Accepting universal suffrage as inevitable, Mansbridge hoped the association would

equip the working classes for the responsibilities of political leadership and ‘make ready and prepare

the Democratic Mind.’93 Classics and classicists were a persistent presence in WEA rhetoric and

89 See G.M. Gathorne-Hardy’s preface to the first Survey. Arnold Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1920–1923

(London: Oxford University Press, 1925), p. v. 90 Charles Martin, ‘Review of The World After the Peace Conference and Survey of International Affairs, 1920–1923, by

Arnold J. Toynbee’, American Political Science Review, 19.4 (1925), 831–33 (p. 833). 91 Christopher Brewin, ‘Arnold Toynbee, Chatham House, and Research in a Global Context’, in Thinkers of the Twenty

Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed, ed. by David Long and Peter Wilson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), pp.

277–301 (p. 283). 92 The text from the endowment for the Wilson Chair, quoted in Schmidt, p. 155. 93 Alfred Mansbridge, ‘Co-operation, Trade Unionism and University Extension’, (1903), quoted in Goldman, Dons and

Workers, p. 106.

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teaching activities. Murray read his translation of Euripides’ Medea to a WEA summer school in

1911.94 Indeed, like many Oxford academics, the classicising internationalists were active in the

WEA.95 Toynbee lectured on nationality for the WEA in 1914.96 Zimmern was a prominent leader,

authoring a 1908 report on university extension with R.H. Tawney and running the WEA’s Summer

School in 1909.97 In May 1911, Zimmern delivered four WEA lectures at University College, London

on the contemporary importance of ancient Greek citizenship, a central concern of his classical

scholarship and the philosophy of the WEA. Zimmern’s object was to ‘draw suggestions from a

society which, more than any other of which we have historical records, made the best of its individual

citizens.’ His lecture equated fifth-century Athenian democracy with all ancient Greece, a recurrent

argumentative move, and drew heavily upon Aristotelian moral philosophy and the civic humanist

conviction that the life of the active citizen is the highest available to man. For Zimmern, Rome and

Greece had left distinct legacies. Whilst the lesson modern statesmen took from Rome was the

‘necessity of securing for their fellow-citizens the minimum requisites of civilised life’, the moral

arising from ancient Greek statecraft was that the state should ensure its citizens’ personal

development and the good life or encourage citizens to flourish through their own actions. The Greek

ideal that public service was the highest form of virtue and the path to individual fulfilment had until

recently, been considered an ‘imaginary fairyland’.98 The activities of the WEA offered a chance to

revive these ideas.

In a report to the Board of Education on the WEA, Zimmern and J.D. Wilson wrote that the movement

was building ‘the ideal of an Educated Democracy.’ This was placed within the context of recent

advances in the franchise, but was also consciously inspired by republican ideas of virtue and

eudaimonia:

Democracy also needs—what no Democracy save those of the ancient world has ever

possessed—such a system of education for its adult citizens, engaged in the active life of the

community, as will enable them to maintain unimpaired their intellectual freshness and vigour

and to face with wisdom and courage the problems for which as citizens they have assumed

the responsibility.99

94 Goff, p. 221. 95 Lawrence Goldman, ‘Intellectuals and the English Working Class 1870–1945: The Case of Adult Education’, History

of Education, 29.4 (2000), 281–300 (p. 292). 96 Toynbee to Zimmern, 8 September 1914, MS Zimmern 14, fols. 72–73. 97 Workers’ Educational Association, Oxford and Working-Class Education (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1908);

Goldman, Dons and Workers, pp. 105, 122, 143–45. 98 Programme for a series of lectures entitled ‘Ancient Greece and Modern Problems’, University of London University

Extension Board, MS Zimmern 118, fols. 49–50. 99 Alfred Zimmern and J.D. Wilson, Report to the Board of Education on the Workers’ Educational Association and the

Problem of Adult Education (c.1914), MS Zimmern 118, fol. 67.

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Civics education would strengthen Britain’s developing democracy by fostering an active concern for

the res publica among the working class: ‘the success of democracy depends… upon its creation

among its members of a deep feeling of responsibility for the public good.’ Moreover, education in

the responsibilities and duties of citizenship was interpreted as ‘a continuous activity, to be carried on

throughout life’.100 These ideas had parallels in The Greek Commonwealth, where Zimmern described

the Athenian citizen’s life as a process of constant ‘training in citizenship’ through the family,

academy, agora and in battle.101 They also arose in Zimmern’s later writings, revealing the enduring

importance of Greek civilisation to his international thought. Learning and Leadership (1928),

Zimmern’s manifesto for international civics education, outlined a seven-stage programme of public

education for world citizenship—through the family, school, university and professional research—

that would integrate subsequent generations into the life of the international community and work to

develop greater enthusiasm for international cooperation.102 These principles informed the workings

of Zimmern’s Geneva School, which as a postgraduate research institute represented the highest stage

of international education.103 Moreover, working class education was seen as an avenue for mutual

cooperation, and provided a model for developing a cooperative internationalist ethic:

Just as men cannot live well unless they learn to live together: just as they cannot act effectually

unless the learn to act in concert: so they cannot reflect, or make decisions or exercise the

higher powers of the mind and spirit unless they learn to co-operate in thought with those who

are like-minded with themselves.104

Zimmern’s educational schemes also echoed the practices and ideals of British civics education, which

sought to mould the public into an active, informed and rational citizenry capable of the responsible

use of its new political power for the public good, but relocated the focus of civic devotion to the

international community. Education in world citizenship involved the harmonisation of the individual

100 Zimmern and Wilson, Report to the Board of Education, MS Zimmern 118, fol. 67. 101 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 67. Goff notes that outside of the summer schools, the classics had a modest place

in the WEA curriculum and were rarely taught in seminar classes. Nonetheless, the classics held significant rhetorical

power among the WEA’s founders and teachers. Allusions to ancient literature or history were prominent in contributions

to association’s journal, The Highway. Goff, pp. 216–22. 102 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, pp. 26–66. 103 By 1927 Zimmern’s Geneva School offered a programme of four different courses. Two ‘Coordination Courses’ of

integrated seminars and lectures gave postgraduates detailed knowledge of the ideas and practices of international relations.

The first examined international problems, stressing the study of the forces encouraging international competition and

conflict, such as nationalism, imperialism, geography, propaganda, race and class. The course went on to explore the

culture and institutions of the modern world’s most powerful states, as well as that of ancient Greece. Zimmern’s purpose

was to ‘show culture as one of the formative influences on the foreign policies of nations.’ The second coordination course

emphasised ‘the forces which make for international order, cooperation and union’, and examined the historical

development and contemporary workings of international institutions and international law. In addition, the School ran

‘Contact Courses’ to introduce undergraduate students to ‘the general problems of international relations… in a more

elementary way.’ ‘Special Courses’ ran for two weeks in September and were open to the general public. These consisted

of lectures in which a faculty member would interpret the daily work of the current session of the League of Nations. The

School also organised public lectures delivered in either English or French by prominent internationalists, academics and

diplomats. 104 Zimmern and Wilson, Report to the Board of Education, MS Zimmern 118, fol. 70.

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with the new reality of international society and, above all, ‘a training in responsibility.’105 Fostering

a sense of civic duty was crucial to creating an activist global citizenry that would provide the League

of Nations with political authority and strengthen the seemingly insecure liberal democracies.

The classicising internationalists’ insistence on educating citizens in their international duties must be

contextualised within a perceived crisis of democracy.106 The interwar years witnessed the collapse of

democratic regimes in Italy, Spain and across Eastern Europe, and increasingly vocal theoretical

critiques of parliamentarianism. In 1923, the German jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt

confronted what he saw as the ‘numerous parliamentary and democratic illusions’ and attacked the

inertia, incompetence and corruption of Weimar democracy.107 Oswald Mosley, the leader of the

British Union of Fascists, railed against the inability of parliament to deal with the fallout from the

1931 economic depression, especially unemployment.108 A series of BBC talks entitled ‘Can

Democracy Survive?’ was delivered by the liberal internationalist Leonard Woolf in 1931.109 For

Mosley, Schmitt and many others, the inefficiency of parliamentary government was further exposed

by the rise of seemingly ‘successful’ alternative political systems in Bolshevik Russia, Fascist Italy

and later Nazi Germany. The classicising internationalists’ educational activities were part of a broader

drive in interwar Britain in favour of civics education as a means to bolster support for the League of

Nations and, in the 1930s, educate the public in order to secure democracy against the rising tide of

fascism. Particularly prominent was the industrialist and former Liberal MP Ernest Simon’s

Association for Education in Citizenship (founded in 1934), of which Zimmern was vice-president.110

Zimmern’s international public was discursive, rational, and politically engaged, like the active and

informed citizen of fifth-century Athens or the internationalists that surrounded him in Geneva,

Oxford, London and Paris. Thus, many of Zimmern’s educational schemes were tilted towards

influencing academic and political elites, for ‘the future of international relations, and therefore of

civilization itself, depends in a peculiar degree on the internationalists.’111 The activities and outputs

of Chatham House, of which Toynbee was Director of Studies, similarly targeted policy-making

circles in Europe and North America.112 Zimmern’s proposals for educating the general public were

105 Zimmern, ‘Europe and the World Community’, p. 304. 106 Zeev Sternhell, The Birth of Fascist Ideology: From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1994), pp. 131–59, 233–58; Joseph Femia, Against the Masses: Varieties of Anti-Democratic Thought

Since the French Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 67–102. 107 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (London: MIT Press, 1988 [1923]), p. 20. 108 Oswald Mosley, The Greater Britain (London: BUF, 1932). 109 McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, p. 26. 110 ‘Spirit Of Greece And Rome’, The Times, 7 January 1938, p. 7. 111 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 56. 112 Parmar, p. 57.

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intellectually elitist, condescending and paternalistic, reflecting his conflicted view of public opinion.

For Zimmern, the general public needed experiential and educational development in order to operate

effectively in global politics. People must read books, magazines and several international newspapers

and travel widely to develop personal contacts among peoples of different nationalities.113 The

disparity between the critical political role of public opinion in the interwar global order and the small-

scale, intellectually elitist nature of the classicising internationalists’ educational efforts represents an

important paradox, especially considering that recent scholarship stresses the importance of grassroots

approaches to citizenship and peace education in interwar Britain.114 It is further surprising given that

public educationalists like Ernest Simon, Patrick Geddes and Charles Higham discussed a classical

ideal of citizenship that was similar to, and possibly inspired by, Zimmern’s Greek scholarship.115 As

public intellectuals with significant influence over the British academic and political establishment,

the classicising internationalists placed much faith in the ability of intellectual and cultural elites to

shape public opinion in an internationalist direction. Yet, they also attempted to deepen understanding

of the aims and ideals of the League among a wide cross-section of British society and teach the public

to recognise the imperative and technical difficulty of resolving international problems, encouraging

agreement on shared policy directions.

In 1924, the League created an umbrella organisation to combine and direct the efforts of the its

various educational committees and commissions. The Liaison Committee of the Major International

Associations was located in the IIIC in Paris.116 As deputy director of the IIIC, Zimmern held

significant sway over the League’s education strategy. He encouraged international exchanges of

teachers and students in order to foster transnational friendships and cross-cultural understanding.

Ideally, all secondary school teachers would have had an international placement before reaching the

age of 30, whilst a foreign teacher would be a constant presence in every school.117 This represented

a continuation of the moral assumptions about the civilising power of education which infused the

pre-war peace education movement. The New Education Fellowship, which began in various

European countries and the United States around 1900, sought to develop an ‘international mind’. It

held teachers to be the key agents for spreading ideas of international amity among national

populations and that internationality was sociologically demonstrable by the number of transnational

113 Zimmern, ‘Public Opinion’, p. 315. 114 B.J. Elliott, ‘The League of Nations Union and History Teaching in England: A Study in Benevolent Bias’, History of

Education, 6.2 (1977), 131–41; McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, pp. 103–25. 115 Hulme, pp. 35, 40. 116 Eckhardt Fuchs, ‘The Creation of New International Networks in Education: The League of Nations and Educational

Organizations in the 1920s’, Paedagogica Historica, 43.2 (2007), 199–209 (pp. 201–3). 117 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 32.

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relationships between teachers.118 Zimmern viewed teacher exchanges through the lens of civics

education. They would expose children to ‘the relation between subjects of school study and the life

of community’, fostering civic virtue and an appreciation for the close links between scholarly

knowledge and the common good.119

Zimmern argued that secondary school subjects like history, geography, and foreign languages, ‘have

for their definite aim the promotion of international understanding.’120 Toynbee also placed faith in

the power of ‘the teaching of history internationally’ to mould world citizens and combat nationalist

sentiment.121 Indeed, many British historians impressed deeply held internationalist convictions onto

their interwar work, for example the medievalist Eileen Power.122 These arguments paralleled more

mainstream approaches to civics education in early twentieth century Britain. Belief in the political

and civic importance of history encouraged a broad movement to rewrite school textbooks, which, as

Fink notes, became something of a ‘worldwide crusade’ during the interwar period. Further motivation

came from British internationalists’ assumption that excessively nationalistic tendencies in education

had contributed to the militant intellectual atmosphere of 1914.123 Commentators argued that an

international age required histories that stressed narratives of common humanity, economic and social

interchange, or international cooperation. As Murray wrote in The Times, ‘to teach the history of

modern Europe without knowledge of the Covenant… would be like telling the story of the wars

between England and Scotland without realising that those countries are now united.’124 Indeed,

Murray’s League of Nations Union was at the forefront of internationalist educational activities. The

LNU’s Education Committee established a sub-committee on history in 1920 which included Robert

Jones, F.S. Marvin and James Headlam-Morley and was supported by historians like Power and R.H.

Tawney. Yet, the LNU campaign to internationalise the school history curriculum was met with

resistance by the Board of Education in May 1924, when the chairman, Murray’s lifelong friend

H.A.L. Fisher, rejected calls for an inquiry into the nationalist content of textbooks.125 This occurred

despite the Board of Education supporting an indirect approach to citizenship education through

traditional subjects like history against calls for a more direct approach from Ernest Simon in the

1930s.126

118 Eckhardt Fuchs, ‘Educational Sciences, Morality and Politics: International Educational Congresses in the Early

Twentieth Century’, Paedagogica Historica, 40.5–6 (2004), 757–84 (pp. 774–75). 119 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 36. 120 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 35. 121 Toynbee, ‘Inaugural Lecture’ (1926), Toynbee Papers, Box 3. 122 McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, p. 106. 123 Clinton Fink, ‘Peace Education and the Peace Movement since 1815’, Peace & Change, 6.1‐2 (1980), 66–73 (p. 69). 124 Murray, The Times, 25 July 1927, p. 10, quoted in McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, p. 116. 125 Elliott, pp. 132–33. 126 Hulme, pp. 36–43; Guy Whitmarsh, ‘The Politics of Political Education: An Episode’, Journal of Curriculum Studies,

6.2 (1974), 133–42 (pp. 134–36).

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Consequently, the classicising internationalists’ educational initiatives took place largely outside state

systems of education, which was characteristic of twentieth-century English civics education.127

Moreover, the LNU’s grassroots and indirect efforts had some success. The Education Committee

organised lecture series in schools, produced two internationalist films, and published leaflets and

pamphlets. Lacking the resources to commission and produce textbooks, the LNU instead proposed

internationalist-minded authors to publishing houses. The fate of the LNU’s history sub-committee is

itself indicative of the weight of the faith that British internationalists placed in education as driver of

peace, which increased as the institutional mechanisms of the League of Nations became less effective

in managing international problems in the 1930s. After a decline in its activities in the late 1920s,

when international agreements offered real hope for an enduring European peace, the sub-committee

reformed in the less confident atmosphere of 1931 to assess the balance between warfare and

international cooperation in new history textbooks. It remained active throughout the 1930s, holding

a summer school in 1932 and publishing a pamphlet for teachers entitled History Teaching and World

Citizenship in 1938.128

Zimmern’s 1930 suggestion that ‘only historians… could remove the ill-will between nations’

appeared to be a widely held view among British intellectuals.129 The most commercially successful

experiment in textbook revision was H.G. Wells’s Outline of History (1920), which was ‘written

primarily to show that history as one whole is amenable to a more broad and comprehensive handling

than is the history of special nations and periods.’130 Wells presented the story of humanity from the

origins of civilisation to the present day within a progressive narrative that stressed peoples’ common

primitive ancestry and saw the construction of an educated global state as the culmination of history.

Despite his opposition to Wells’s world state, Murray acted as an academic collaborator for the

Outline, along with the zoologist and evolutionary biologist Edwin Ray Lankester, the classicist and

philosopher Ernest Barker, and the explorer H.H. Johnston.131 The Outline was a bestseller, which

Wells attributed to the existence of ‘an immense reading public in the world which was profoundly

dissatisfied with the history it had learnt at school.’132 Indeed, Wells was less intellectually elitist than

the classicising internationalists, and spoke to what Marwick terms progressive ‘middle opinion’, a

127 Derek Heater, ‘The History of Citizenship Education in England’, Curriculum Journal, 12.1 (2001), 103–23 (pp. 105–

10). 128 Elliott, pp. 133, 138. 129 Alfred Zimmern, ‘The League of Nations and the Teaching of History’, New Era, X (1930), 71–72. 130 Wells, Outline of History, p. v. Emphasis in original. 131 Matthew Skelton, ‘The Paratext of Everything: Constructing and Marketing H.G. Wells’s “The Outline of History”’,

Book History, 4 (2001), 237–75 (p. 241). 132 Wells, The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind, p. 10.

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constituency of agreement on interwar social and political issues like the need for economic planning,

the peace movement and opposition to fascism.133 Zimmern was sceptical of Wells’s commercial

success and suspicious of any book that claimed to be a bible on the subject of world history, arguing

that the Outline represented national history masquerading as a universal outlook. For Zimmern, ‘the

teacher is everything; the book is nothing.’134 Thus, his own efforts were tilted towards educating

influential moral and civic instructors who could diffuse the international spirit to the wider public:

teachers, academics, politicians and the British foreign policy establishment, public figures, and the

press. Nonetheless, Zimmern was concerned to tap into Wells’s large reading public and engage wider

segments of middle opinion, urging Wells to write a positive review of Lucie Zimmern’s 1932 book

Must the League Fail? and to use his sizeable public influence to advocate League-based solutions to

the international crisis.135

Helen McCarthy argues that the LNU’s educational work and organising style were animated by

confidence that the British public were an intelligent and rational influence on political discussion.136

Despite his prominent position in the executive structure of the organisation, Murray’s ideas differed.

Murray struggled to adapt a paternalist liberalism to the political realities of mass democracy.

Although he welcomed the expansion of suffrage in domestic politics, his political thought reveals

little concern to extend democracy to the realm of international government, nor any real desire to

appeal directly to the demos. As he wrote to Sir Frank Heath, the Honorary Secretary of the British

National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, ‘I feel again the great importance of getting at the

man at the top, especially if he is a man of reasonable intelligence.’137 Indeed, Iriye’s analysis of

cultural internationalism as an intellectual proposition holds for the classicising internationalists’

educational thought. They distinguished between expert and public opinion: whilst they believed that

an informed and active public could influence governments in general principles, such as maintaining

peace, it was up to experts to provide executive methods, technical details and public leadership. This

distinction between broader principles and technical expertise was, as McCarthy notes, present within

the LNU and reproduced in its internal organisation.138 Yet, the classicising internationalists’ ideal

expert prioritised philosophic wisdom over technical proficiency, invoking Auguste Comte’s call for

a priesthood of positive philosophers to coordinate and integrate the totality of knowledge, which they

133 Marwick, pp. 285–98. 134 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 35. On Zimmern and Wells’s disagreement about a world state, see H.G. Wells

to Lucie Zimmern, 16 January 1933, MS Zimmern 32, fol. 12. 135 Zimmern to H.G. Wells, 19 January 1932, MS Zimmern 28, fol. 40. 136 McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, p. 6. 137 Murray to Frank Heath, 1 November 1938, quoted in Wilson, ‘Retrieving Cosmos’, p. 907. On Heath, see Iriye, p. 61. 138 McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations, p. 25.

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saw as a corrective to academic specialisation.139 A holistic understanding of the integrated nature of

world politics was essential to inform the actual workings of international government. They looked

to create such a class of people through universities, research institutes, intellectual cooperation and

the academic discipline of international relations, as the first step in the global diffusion of

internationalist principles.

The classicising internationalists’ public educational schemes coexisted alongside a more top-down

strategy to capture state institutions and press opinion. Universities, research institutes and committees

on intellectual cooperation were the vanguard of international progress, vital sites for developing and

diffusing the international mind through public education. These institutions were united in their social

composition, being dominated by elite-educated European men, and the sense of international

intellectual fraternity. Indeed, the transnational exchange of knowledge and intellectual collaboration

was seen as a natural part of university life. For Zimmern, a university was a national institution and,

‘in a peculiar sense international, for its very title “Universitas” suggests that ideal of the unity and

universality of knowledge which transcends all national distinctions and unites scholars in all

communities and in every form of intellectual discipline in a common spirit of integrity and in a

common search for truth.’140 Zimmern’s historical precedent was a Comtean vision of the spiritual

and intellectual unity of the universities of medieval Christendom: ‘Oxford was international before

she was national.’141 Yet, Zimmern evidently also had in mind his personal experience of reading

Greats at early-twentieth-century Oxford, with its idealist ethos of public service and a long-standing

Platonic undertaking to train public servants and political leaders: ‘the mission of the university is to

provide plenipotentiaries of the highest rank.’142 The university was both the inspiration for, and site

of, the harmonious interactions between widening circles of human association and community—the

local, national and international—that were central to Zimmern’s civic internationalism and his vision

of international intellectual leadership. In broadening one’s mental horizons, universities offered a

national platform for the development of international understanding.

In 1924, Zimmern and his wife, Lucie, established a series of League-affiliated summer schools held

in the Conservatory of Music in Geneva. The Zimmerns’ Geneva School was linked to the early

planning for the Graduate Institute of International Studies, founded in 1927 by the diplomats William

139 Auguste Comte, System of Positive Polity, trans. by Frederic Harrison, 4 vols (London: Longmans Green, 1875), vol.

2, pp. 284–5. Comte was the subject of ‘What is Permanent in Positivism’, a lecture delivered by Murray in 1939 and

reprinted in Murray, Stoic, Christian and Humanist, pp. 153–89. 140 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 39. 141 Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, p. 4. 142 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 41; Walsh, VII, p. 317.

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Rappard and Paul Mantoux (who was part of the Geneva School’s faculty).143 The School emphasised

elite formation and intellectual cooperation and represented the higher echelon of Zimmern’s twofold

approach to education. True to the underlying principle of intellectual cooperation, the School’s

journal was entitled Comprendre. It was first published in 1932 under the initiative and editorial

stewardship of Lucie Zimmern, with Alfred authoring the lead article. The School’s activities reflected

Zimmern’s belief that the League of Nations was both a political institution and a site for knowledge

production and exchange, a ‘focus and centre for thought’ and an active and multifaceted ‘element in

the international life of the world’.144 Indeed, the School had a specific academic purpose, ‘to break

down the barriers which the progress of specialization and traditional forms of academic organization

in many countries oppose to the comprehensive and all-round study of the contemporary world.’145

The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the rapid advance of disciplinary

specialisation and professionalisation in academic research.146 The ill-effects of specialisation were a

persistent theme in British intellectual discourse, with the fracturing of traditional subject areas into a

variety of sub-disciplines a particular locus of criticism. Zimmern told an audience at Armstrong

College, Newcastle in 1924 that he was appalled ‘at the herd of professors and lecturers and at the

minute subdivision of departments’ that he witnessed in the modern university.147 He contrasted Greek

philosophical holism to modern specialist research: ‘one feels inclined to ask what Plato and Aristotle

would do if they came back and found the multitudinous rags and tatters into which industrious

specialists have divided the seamless garment of their thought.’148 The Geneva School’s 1932

prospectus reveals Zimmern’s classical inspiration and nostalgia for a lost unity of knowledge.

Reflecting on the School’s origins, Zimmern noted,

It was founded in the belief, growing out of the study of ancient Greece, that what is most

needed for the understanding and practical handling of international affairs is neither the

development of special disciplines, nor the imparting of information on current events, but a

method of approach combining the knowledge and high standard of the specialist with a

constant sense of the variety and complexity of the modern world.149

Indeed, in 1927, ancient Greece was covered in a module on the ‘Culture and Institutions of the Main

Countries’, alongside lectures on modern Britain, France, Germany, the ‘Moslem World’, India, China

143 ‘Report on the Seventh Session of the Geneva School’ (1930), MS Zimmern 87, fol. 5. 144 Zimmern, ‘The International Mind’, p. 5. 145 Geneva School information pamphlet (1927), MS Zimmern 87, fol. 14. 146 For an account of this development within classical studies, see Stray, pp. 141–66. 147 Zimmern, ‘Education and International Goodwill’, p. 69. 148 Zimmern, ‘Education and International Goodwill’, p. 69. 149 Geneva School Prospectus, 1932, MS Zimmern 87, fol. 6.

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and Japan.150 For Zimmern, Greek institutions offered a blueprint for an international commonwealth.

Likewise, Greek education offered both a model of training in citizenship and an alternative to rising

currents of specialisation. Indeed, Zimmern cast the discipline of international relations as a classically

inspired antidote to specialisation. The student of international affairs was required to have a broad

knowledge of global events and forces, and of the history, politics and culture of various countries.

The epistemological generalism in Zimmern’s definition of international studies (international

relations) sought to consolidate the discipline by distancing it from political science. The Geneva

School quickly transformed into a specialised post-graduate institution for the study of international

relations. It was one of five international institutions that formed part of the Permanent International

Studies Conference, and the only one to hold an executive seat at this conference.151 The School

defined its students as members of a clear and distinctive cohort, publishing lists of students between

1925 and 1929.152 Moreover, it maintained contact, at least ostensibly, with its alumni, many of whom

had taken prominent academic, administrative, diplomatic or political positions in their respective

countries or Geneva. The School’s literature portrayed itself at the vanguard of disciplinary formation,

developing its students ‘from a stray body of seekers for information to a community of graduate

students applying academic standards to a new body of knowledge.’153 This was part of a wider

movement to establish the study of international relations within the academy. Zimmern, as the first

holder of the Wilson Chair of International Politics at Aberystwyth (1919–21) and Professor of

International Relations at Oxford (1930–44), formed a core part of this project. As Chatham House’s

Director of Studies and Professor of International History at the London School of Economics (these

positions were ‘joint ventures’), Toynbee was also important in the developing discipline, although he

continued to define himself primarily as a historian.154 Through personal and intellectual influence,

Murray engineered the appointment of pro-League voices, including Toynbee and Zimmern, to

various relevant academic positions in London and Oxford.155 Indeed, during the interwar years, many

prominent academics in the nascent field of international relations used their positions and public

influence to promote cooperative internationalism through the League’s institutional structures. The

list of topics covered in sessions of the Geneva School reflected this by centring on the workings of

international government; the varied activities of the League; and the history of international law,

150 Plan for the 1927 Session of the Geneva School, MS Zimmern 87, fol. 2. 151 Geneva School information pamphlet (1927), MS Zimmern 87, fol. 14. 152 List of Students of the Geneva School, 1925–1929, MS Zimmern 87, fol. 15. 153 Geneva School information pamphlet (1927), MS Zimmern 87, fol. 14. 154 Toynbee, ‘Inaugural Lecture’ (1926), p. 1, Toynbee Papers, Box 3. 155 Morefield, Covenants Without Swords, p. 10.

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arbitration and administration. But Zimmern’s vision went further, viewing the international expert as

the guardian of the international community.

The educational thought and schemes developed by Murray, Toynbee and especially Zimmern drew

upon the traditions, ideas and practices of the Edwardian civics education movement, with which they

were involved through the WEA, but relocated the focus of civic devotion to the international

community. National citizenship was defined as a step on the road to world citizenship, which offered

moral and spiritual progress on the individual and political plane. Their educational schemes, which

were designed to be implemented outside state education systems, sought to teach the international

public the rights and responsibilities of world citizenship before it assumed its sovereign role in the

global order. But, unlike much citizenship and peace education in interwar Britain, the classicising

internationalists combined bottom-up approaches to education with a more elite-centred strategy that

sought to impress the benefits of cooperative internationalism upon the minds of individuals in

positions to influence national governments and domestic opinion. This disparity between the

importance of public opinion in the thought of the classicising internationalists and their intellectually

elitist strategies to educate that opinion reveals their limited conception of the democratisation of

international affairs. These figures prioritised the development of liberal and philosophically

enlightened international minds among people in key positions of political and intellectual influence

above the creation of an educated and assertive mass public. Despite their faith in the power of public

opinion, the classicising internationalists were largely concerned with the place of the intellectual in

the hierarchy of international power. They sought to establish a paradigm of a truly cooperative

international relations directed by rational, civic-minded and educated philosophers, instead of an

international technocracy based on anti-intellectual scientific expertise or a robust democratic

internationalism.

The internationalist as philosopher-king: the democratic crisis and

intellectual leadership in international relations

The classicising internationalists’ faith in the power of public opinion to restrain the military actions

of individual states was severely tested by the realpolitik of the 1930s. The Japanese invasion of

Manchuria in October 1931 was the first, and most shocking, blow to advocates of the League. As

E.H. Carr noted, Manchuria and the collapse of free trade in 1931 shattered the idealist internationalist

edifice by proving that condemnation by public opinion was an ineffective restraint on the unilateral

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actions of states.156 For the classicising internationalists, the 1930s represented a time of intense crisis.

Toynbee named 1931 the ‘annus terribilis’ that ended post-war stability, and compared his time to the

collapse of ancient Rome. Various local or regional problems were part of a modern ‘world crisis’

characterised by the ‘confluence of all human affairs… into a single turbulent stream.’157 Zimmern

was severely critical of the League Council in his extensive writings about Manchuria, which he

viewed as a crucial test of whether ‘the Covenant is something more than a scrap of paper.’158 The

economic and financial depression following the 1929 Wall Street Crash, the Manchurian crisis, the

growing power of a revanchist Nazi Germany, and the comparatively waning strength of Europe’s

liberal democracies all contributed to a rising sense of chaos among British intellectuals and

internationalists. This deepened after 1934 as the balance of power in Europe swung further away

from pro-League countries like Britain and France, and after League sanctions against Italy for the

1935 invasion of Abyssinia pushed Mussolini into a closer alliance with Germany. Commentators

such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb, G.D.H. Cole, J.M. Keynes and John Strachey began discussing a

potentially terminal crisis in modern capitalism. Others like H.G. Wells feared that liberal democracy

could not command the kind of devotion and self-sacrifice seen by supporters of regimes in Italy and

Germany.159 The failure of the 1932 Disarmament Conference, the largest internationalist gathering

since 1919, was particularly galling for the classicising internationalists, who had long advocated a

thorough reduction of states’ military capacities. Yet, they viewed the 1930s crisis as both political

and intellectual. Its roots lay in the fragmentation of scholarly knowledge and the increasing separation

of scholarship from public affairs. Their proposed solution similarly united the political and the

intellectual by advocating a stronger leadership role for intellectuals in international affairs.

This section assesses the democratic implications of the international and educational thought of

Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern, focusing on their conceptions of the role of the intellectual in

international affairs. The classicising internationalists treated the domestic and the international as

integrated. Yet, they simultaneously sought to insulate foreign policy and global governance from any

direct pressure from a mass public, arguing that the international was a space in which only the truly

knowledgeable, League technocrats and internationalist-minded intellectuals, should control political

decision making. Thus, underpinning their internationalist educational schemes were differential

interpretations of democracy at the national and international level. The political developments of the

immediate post-war period—universal male suffrage and the declining political fortunes of the Liberal

Party—rendered liberal paternalism less appropriate to domestic British politics, but the absence of a

156 Carr, Twenty Years’ Crisis, p. 48. 157 Toynbee, Survey, 1931, pp. v, 2. 158 Zimmern, ‘The Right Policy in the Far East’ (October 1932), MS Zimmern 98, fols. 53–58. 159 Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1999), pp. 21, 66–68, 106–40; Overy,

pp. 50–92.

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robust democratic apparatus in international government ensured that a vision of elite intellectual

leadership remained achievable internationally. These figures argued that, whilst the public was prone

to self-interested nationalism, internationalists and technocrats in international government

institutions and organisations in Geneva worked together to advance international cooperation,

preserve peace and secure the global order, therefore demonstrating their duty to an international

public good. An ethical interpretation of democratic citizenship as part of an intrinsically valuable

political education in civic responsibility was part of the classicising internationalists’ attempt to

reconcile a Platonic vision of international government with a democratising age.

Despite assigning public opinion an essential role in global politics, the classicising internationalists

were critical of the application of democratic practices to international politics and the ability of the

public to make informed, rational decisions about international events. For Zimmern, democracy

struggled to function effectively in international politics for several reasons, all of which reveal his

casual intellectual elitism. Firstly, the public was largely apathetic about world politics. The modern

demos failed to live up to Zimmern’s idealisation of Athenian political participation: ‘Public opinion

at the present time does not function in foreign affairs. It is not active; it is inert; it is acquiescent; it is

largely indifferent.’160 Yet, public indifference was understandable because international politics

existed outside of the range of personal experience for the majority of people. According to Zimmern,

a deep personal connection with the polis formed the basis of the strong civic activism that

characterised Athenian citizenship.161 Likewise, modern democracy functioned because the individual

voter made decisions based on their intimate knowledge of the temperament, institutions, traditions

and ‘general atmosphere’ of their country. The broader public, with no lived experience of the

workings of international politics, were unable to grasp the importance of international affairs in an

interconnected modern world. Consequently, international government could never be based on the

‘sure judgement of the man-in-the street.’162 Secondly, the rapid pace of international events meant

that the public were often ill-informed: ‘in foreign affairs… the man in the street is nearly always

behind the times as regards the facts.’163 The average voter came to decisions too slowly to effect

constructive change, encouraging political gridlock: ‘what he actually does is to sabotage, to use a sort

of power of veto rather than to contribute positively to the solution of questions.’164 For Zimmern,

efficiency and democracy were incompatible in the realm of international politics. He restricted

160 Zimmern, ‘Public Opinion’, p. 299. 161 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, pp. 63, 69. 162 Zimmern, ‘Public Opinion’, pp. 300–301. 163 Zimmern, Public Opinion and International Affairs, p. 1. 164 Zimmern, ‘Public Opinion’, pp. 302–3.

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opportunities for direct political participation in international affairs, justifying his position as a

necessary compromise between dictatorship and political deadlock.

Zimmern was convinced of the ‘difficulty of harmonising the democratic control of foreign affairs

with a far-sighted and consistent policy’ and the danger that democracy posed to international

cooperation. Elected governments would always be tempted by nationalist policies that kept the

domestic electorate contented.165 Murray was similarly suspicious of the nationalistic instincts of the

demos. Public opinion was a volatile power in international politics, for ‘under the present democratic

system, the existence of every Government depends on its popularity with the people of its own

country’ and, therefore, ‘the opinion of foreigners does not count.’166 Murray had earlier described the

outbreak of nationalism in 1914 as an ‘immense stimulation of the Herd or Group Instincts’. Although

he insisted that this could be a force for political good, Murray invoked the French psychologist

Gustave Le Bon’s condemnation of the crowd as an agent of intellectual mediocrity: ‘by this process

of killing out thought the Herd sinks all its members in itself and assimilates them to an average.’167

Murray remained concerned that internationalism could be corrupted by the powerful sway of

nationalist opinion. In 1918, he feared that a future League might easily become hamstrung by

delegates ‘exposed to the full blast of public opinion at home—of chauvinism, nationalism, aggressive

finance, natural prejudice.’168 Murray’s aristocratic anxiety continued into the interwar years. In Five

Stages of Greek Religion (1925), he praised Plato’s critique of democracy and democratic statesmen

as ‘ministers to mob desires.’169 Returning to Plato in 1928, Murray bemoaned the continued

prevalence of nationalist opinion, ‘every Government is possessed by a devil, the devil of the massed

and organized selfishness of its nation.’170

Although sceptical, Murray hoped that public opinion would be a progressive force in global politics,

an alternative to self-interested nationalism. However, he did not view the new international order as

a radical democratic project. Indeed, democratic apparatus impeded international cooperation. For

Murray, ‘the principle that will solve the problem of war is not Democracy, but Internationalism’

which he defined in cosmopolitan terms as ‘the growth of brotherhood within each nation, and

brotherhood between the nations’. What Murray desired in international affairs was a very particular,

165 Zimmern, The League and the Rule of Law, pp. 484–86. 166 Murray, Ordeal, p. 60. 167 Gilbert Murray, ‘Herd Instinct and the War’, in The International Crisis in Its Ethical and Psychological Aspects, by

Eleanor M. Sidgwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1915), pp. 22–45 (pp. 24, 38); Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A

Study of the Popular Mind (Kansas: Digireads Publishing, 2008 [1895]). 168 Murray, The League and the Democratic Idea, pp. 25–26. 169 Murray, Five Stages, pp. 108–9. 170 Murray, Ordeal, p. 191.

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civic humanist understanding of democracy as a moral duty to the community: ‘the essential doctrine

of Democracy is that each man, as a free human soul, lives of his free will in the service of the whole

people.’ This marked the potential revival of a classical ideal: ‘In certain ancient Greek cities a man,

before casting a vote, swore in the presence of the gods that he was voting to the best of his judgement

for the good of the whole city. And that is still the spirt in which every good citizen ought to vote, and

as a rule does vote.’171 Murray was alluding to the Heliastic oath sworn by jurors in Athenian law

courts, which was reconstructed in the work of the German philologist Max Fränkel.172 The workings

of the League of Nations embodied Murray’s civic humanist interpretation of the democratic ideal as

a spirit through which a community united for the greater public good. For Murray, the League had

‘discovered the right method for rebuilding our ordered world’, conferences guided by the work of

‘disinterested experts’ free from national prejudice or interests. As such, ‘its essential method is

perhaps wiser than that of Parliament’, and a higher form of spiritual liberal and democratic

governance. But, for Murray, ‘the characteristic instrument by which the League does most of its

work’ was ‘Intellectual Co-operation’.173 The method of government that was superior to that of

political democracy was the leadership of disinterested intellectuals and technocrats fired by the ideals

of international cooperation.

This Platonic vision of international government reflected the classicising internationalists’ personal

intellectual backgrounds within the English public school system and Oxford, both of which have a

history of producing the British ruling class.174 But their scepticism about the effectiveness of

democracy in international politics must be placed in the context of the crisis of legitimacy that

plagued democratic and parliamentary government in interwar Europe. As a lifelong Liberal political

figure, Murray was profoundly affected by the fall of democracies across Europe, as well as the sharp

decline of the Liberal Party as the major progressive force in British politics.175 This political context

convinced Murray that ‘the system which before the war was considered to be essential to civilization,

at any rate if civilization was to advance, is now in the peril of its life.’ Additionally, ‘in the great

parliamentary nations’, Britain and France, democracy was ‘at present working ill.’176 Murray’s

diagnosis was not unique, for parliamentarism was subject to a number of piercing critiques between

the wars, most powerfully by Carl Schmitt.177 Moreover, developments in Europe encouraged many

British liberal intellectuals and politicians to question assumptions about the stability and superiority

171 Murray, The League and the Democratic Idea, pp. 28, 15, 16. 172 Max Fränkel, Die Attischen Geschworenengerichte (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1877). 173 Murray, Ordeal, pp. 190–91. 174 Christopher Watkins, ‘Inventing International Citizenship: Badminton School and the Progressive Tradition Between

the Wars’, History of Education, 36.3 (2007), 315–38 (p. 316). 175 Murray, Liberality and Civilization, p. 15. 176 Murray, Ordeal, p. 181. 177 Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (London: MIT Press, 1988 [1923]).

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of liberal democracy. In 1932, Toynbee wrote that it was easier to discern the drawbacks of democracy

than list its qualities.178 Zimmern noted in 1927 that ‘it is customary to speak of the decline of

Parliaments.’179 The League of Nations, envisaged as a project to retrench democracy, had failed to

stabilise it, instead making democracy’s weaknesses more manifest by proving that it was easier for

international organisations to deal with dictators than elected representatives. The ancient Greeks had,

of course, come to a similar realisation: ‘as Demosthenes said long ago, it is easier to do business with

Philip than with the Athenian democracy.’180 The instability of democracy was a historical fact

demonstrated by the rapid collapse of Periclean Athens, which, for Zimmern, offered a paradigm of

political development. But the crisis of parliamentarism and the growing strength of the revanchist

powers offered the classicising internationalists further proof that the international public was not

mature enough to assume political power.

Zimmern was certain, at least in the 1920s, that ‘the survival of democracy is not in doubt.’ Instead of

a terminal crisis of democracy, Europe was witnessing ‘a crisis of constitutionalism, a crisis in the

conduct of public affairs and in the very art of government.’181 This crisis emerged from the separation

of scholarly knowledge from public affairs under the pressure of academic specialisation and,

therefore, was particularly relevant to the intellectual’s place in the modern world. Indeed, ‘the future

... of democracy… as an effective power in the ordering of human affairs, depends upon its association

with the arts of thought.’182 The classicising internationalists saw a lack of intellectual guidance as a

critical factor in the belligerent atmosphere that sparked war in 1914. Writing in 1918, Murray looked

forward to ‘a recovery of wisdom and uprightness in the public affairs of Europe.’183 For Zimmern,

‘statesmanship has not recovered the control which it finally relinquished in 1914 over the fluid and

tumultuous interaction of human wills and passions which we like to describe fatalistically as

“events”.’ This problem was partly caused by the political realities of representative democracy, which

Zimmern depicted as degeneration towards intellectual entropy:

Statesmen, however wise and far-sighted, are limited in their policies by the public opinion

and the parliaments to which they are responsible. If we are drifting back to barbarism, the root

178 Toynbee, Survey, 1932, p. 176. 179 Alfred Zimmern, ‘Politics as an Idealistic Career’, in The Prospects of Democracy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929),

pp. 263–74 (p. 269). 180 Zimmern, ‘The Prospects of Democracy’, pp. 315–16, 329. The fourth-century Greek statesmen Demosthenes

expressed his exasperation at the incoherence of Athens’ diplomatic relations with Philip of Macedon. For Demosthenes,

‘the people are the most unstable and capricious thing in the world’. It was simpler to understand Philip’s motives, despite

his duplicity, than it was those of the often corrupt ambassadors sent to negotiate with Philip by the Athenian Assembly.

Demosthenes, Speeches, 19.136. My thanks go to Andrew Fear for his help with this translation. 181 Zimmern, ‘The Prospects of Democracy’, p. 313. 182 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 85. 183 Murray, The League and the Democratic Idea, p. 28.

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of the evil is not political but intellectual. It is because the peoples do not understand the

problems of the post-war world that their statesmen are unable to control them.184

Control could only be re-established by statesmen who followed the guidance of intellectuals. Without

uniting the realms of scholarly knowledge and political power, modern politics would continue to be

directionless, as Zimmern implored his readers through a thinly veiled bow to the metaphor of the ship

in Plato’s Republic: ‘With the seas on which it is sailing uncharted, the ship of state cannot be steered.

It can only drift.’185

Zimmern was persistently critical of the tendency he identified among modern scholars to abandon

public life for the ivory tower of the academy. He traced this development to fourth-century Greece:

‘What is the place of the scholar in public affairs? There is a venerable tradition, not yet extinct in our

seats of learning, and tracing back its origins to Plato and Aristotle, that there is no place at all.’186

This was a direct continuation of the musings found in the footnotes of The Greek Commonwealth,

and serves as a rejoinder to Paul Millett’s contention that Zimmern’s later writings made limited use

of the material of this text.187 Of course, Zimmern’s categorisation required some stretch of the

historical imagination, especially considering that Aristotle tutored Alexander the Great. Nonetheless,

Zimmern viewed Plato and Aristotle as ‘the originators of a school of thought or a tradition which

divorced the scholar from the state and immured him, first in a monastery and then in a University.’188

In doing this, they denied the fourth-century polis its most brilliant minds and encouraged the

degeneration of the city-state and the decline of Greek civilisation.189 Similar catastrophic

consequences to modern civilisation would occur if the severance of intellectuals from politics

endured. But some contemporary intellectuals had resisted the trend towards academic isolation, for

example the American historian George Louis Beer.190 Zimmern’s conceptualisation of the public

scholar also had a classical inspiration: ‘[fifth-century] Athens had no place for the two extremes of

solitude, the hermit philosopher and the hermit dictator.’191 Indeed, Zimmern regularly commented

that the Athenian term idiotes was reserved for those ‘so foolish (as the Athenians considered it) as to

withdraw themselves from active responsibility for the public welfare.’ In the divided global climate

184 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 11. 185 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, pp. 89, 15. Plato, Republic, 488a–489d. 186 Alfred Zimmern, ‘The Scholar in Public Affairs’, in The Prospects of Democracy (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929),

pp. 1–15 (p. 2). 187 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 56. 188 Zimmern, ‘The Scholar in Public Affairs’, p. 2. 189 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 59. 190 Zimmern, ‘The Scholar in Public Affairs’, p. 4. 191 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 67.

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of 1936, and after the US Congress had passed the first Neutrality Act in August 1935, Zimmern

offered his Chicago audience ‘neutral’ as an inexact modern translation.192

Toynbee was far less politically active than Zimmern, yet both figures admired the publicly engaged

scholar in the model of Thucydides, who had commanded an expedition to retake Amphipolis from

the Spartan general Brasidas.193 In a letter to Abraham Flexner in 1931, Toynbee wrote that the South

African politician Jan Smuts, Lionel Curtis, the Czech statesmen Tomáš Masaryk, and Gilbert Murray

also united the realms of action and study: ‘their work is in direct relation to the active life of the

world, and this is the secret of its freshness and effectiveness.’ Not coincidentally, these figures were

all prominent internationalists. For Toynbee, the study of international relations in particular enabled

scholars to transcend the academic world through either active political service or by providing expert

opinion for decision-makers. The student of international affairs must be prepared to play a public

role: ‘He needs… to be “in” the word of action but not “of” it. He needs either to stand with one foot

placed in the world of action and the other world of study permanently, or else to be coming and going

constantly between the two worlds.’194 Writing to congratulate Zimmern on his Oxford professorship,

Toynbee reminded Zimmern that his new position connected academia to politics in London, Geneva

and the world.195 Toynbee’s research work at Chatham House had a similar purpose. Many Chatham

House figures assumed that only those who were properly trained could apply a ‘scientific’

interpretation to social or international problems, and that this group had a duty to provide intellectual

leadership by disseminating their knowledge to decision-makers and the mass public.196 Zimmern, an

important figure in the origin and activities of Chatham House, believed that research institutes played

a crucial role in the collaboration between learning and leadership: by raising the tone of public

discussion of current affairs, they were important ‘physicians’ of the body politic.197

For Zimmern, fifth-century Athenians had perfected the partnership between thought and action:

‘Aeschylus to us is a poet and nothing more. To his contemporaries he was first and foremost a

patriot.’198 Yet this union did not last long. After the fall of Athens, ‘the seamless garment of

civilization woven by the Greeks was torn asunder’ and the separation of action from ideas became

‘part of the accepted and traditional order of society.’199 The crisis of modernity stemmed from this

192 Zimmern, ‘Collective Security’, pp. 5–6. See also, Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 67. 193 Zimmern, ‘The Scholar in Public Affairs’, pp. 6–9. 194 Toynbee to Flexner, 6 February 1931, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 195 Toynbee to Zimmern, 9 August 1930, MS Zimmern 24, fols. 51–52. 196 Parmar, p. 57. 197 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 65. 198 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 66. 199 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, pp. 67–68.

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separation. Zimmern’s Geneva School was designed to crush any impulse towards academic isolation

out of its prospective students. In 1932, the first edition of Comprendre asked, ‘Can we stand above

the mêlée at such a time as this? Is it indeed ever justifiable to stand above the mêlée, or to urge others

to do so?’200 Reflecting Zimmern’s concerns that modern education was purely instructive, the School

also represented a microcosm of international political life, ‘not merely a centre of instruction about

the problems of the contemporary world, but itself an international community in miniature.’201

Indeed, Zimmern cast the solutions to democracy’s problems into the international arena: ‘If

democratic government is to continue under modern conditions, it must be provided with leaders

adequately trained to deal with problems of international relations, and a public opinion well enough

informed to support and control an enlightened foreign policy.’ He viewed his project’s social function

in the Platonic terms of the English public school system and ancient universities. The first prospectus

stated, ‘the purpose of the School is to train leaders of public opinion and leaders in international

affairs.’202 During the 1930s, as fascism spread and the League of Nations was increasingly criticised

for its ineffectiveness, Zimmern’s faith in civic education was combined with a classically influenced

paternalism and liberal concern with the dangers of propaganda:

The object aimed at is not alone the advancement of knowledge, still less the indoctrination of

opinion, but the development in every individual member of this highly diversified group… of

the attitudes of mind and spirit which will enable them to cooperate harmoniously in the world

tasks of tomorrow; in Plato’s term, the future “guardians of the city,” the protectors of the

world’s peace.203

Zimmern sought to influence contemporary political affairs by creating a cadre of intellectual-political

leaders that would push state mechanisms and popular opinion across the world in an internationalist,

pro-League direction. The Geneva School combined an educational purpose with a didactic role as a

working model for international politics based on Zimmern’s convictions that civic-minded

intellectuals and international experts should be leading actors of world affairs.

According to the classicising internationalists, the fundamental imbalance in the relationship scholarly

knowledge and popular politics could spell the end of democratic government: ‘unless the modern

world works out a satisfactory relationship between expert knowledge and popular control the days of

democracy are numbered.’204 Echoing a longstanding elitist intellectual critique, Murray and Zimmern

attacked democracy for its supposed tendency towards mediocrity. Murray praised Plato’s critique of

200 Zimmern, ‘Comprendre’, in Comprendre, 1 (1932), p. 22, MS Zimmern 87, fol. 16. 201 Geneva School information pamphlet (1927), MS Zimmern 87, fol. 14. 202 Geneva School Prospectus, 1927, MS Zimmern 87, fol. 2. 203 Geneva School Prospectus, 1934, MS Zimmern 87, fol. 8. 204 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 62.

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democracy as a political system that ‘does not distinguish between higher and lower.’205 His

interpretation of intellectual co-operation as the philosophic guidance of world affairs betrayed a

similarly Platonic ideal of intellectual leadership. Thus, Murray’s claims that public opinion was a

democratising force in international affairs must be weighed against his belief in the superiority of

educated opinion and expertise, of decisions taken by the ‘competent an impartial third person.’

Although a force for good, public opinion contained a divisive and destructive potential, for it was

‘ill-informed’ and ‘apt to be perverted by national interests and prejudices’. Accountability was

therefore a hindrance to good international government: ‘in general I regard the professionals,

independent of public opinion and judged only by their colleagues and superiors, as a pretty sound

influence.’206

Like Murray, Zimmern refused to confront the contradiction between empowering a democratic

society and his vision of intellectual guardianship. Zimmern was concerned by the inability of

democracies to recognise the benefits of more fixed social hierarchies and the repeated sabotaging of

the plans of ‘those who, in normal circumstances, would be recognized as their natural leaders.’207

The solution was clear: ‘the only hope of the survival of our civilization lies in the existence of such

a body of students of international relations and in the willingness of the free peoples to accept their

leadership, even when contrary to their natural inclinations.’208 Further, parliamentary representatives

must listen to both expert knowledge and local opinion, acting as ‘the link between the centre of

political activity and the circumference, between the technical expert and the man in the street.’ Yet,

Zimmern felt that there was no need for electoral mechanisms to make international government

accountable. Commitment to the principle of international cooperation alone proved that the League

acted in the interests of the demos: ‘it is the prime duty of a representative… to keep a constant eye

upon the larger issues of the day, on the general interests of his country and their interdependence with

world-wide movements and forces.’209 Thus, the role of the representative combined interpretation

with education and, crucially ‘supervision’.210 A clear classical inspiration underpinned Zimmern’s

vision. As he wrote in a 1921 article on the legacy of Greek political thought, ‘Our co-operative

relations and activities require to be guided and controlled. Whether the “politician” is a tyrant or a

Minister of the people is not here to the point; the point is that he is the manager of what the Romans

called res publica, the Latin for the good old English word “Commonwealth”.’211 For Zimmern,

205 Murray, Five Stages, pp. 108–9. 206 Murray, Ordeal, pp. 197, 59, 183, 65, 64. 207 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, pp. 15–16. 208 Zimmern, ‘Collective Security’, p. 87. 209 Zimmern, Prospects of Democracy, p. 271. 210 Zimmern, ‘Politics as an Idealistic Career’, pp. 271, 270, 269. 211 Zimmern, ‘Political Thought’, p. 324.

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democracy entailed common effort and therefore encouraged the material and moral progress of

individuals and states. Collective security was itself a democratic notion, not because the people had

any direct say in international politics, but because it required active material and moral work for the

common good.212 Thus, the leadership of an internationalist managerial, technocratic and intellectual

class was democratically legitimate if that class served the common good, the fundamental moral ideal

underlining the democratic spirit but not necessarily typical of the actual practice of democratic

politics.

The notion of a dual crisis in politics and intellectual life was one of a number of argumentative moves

through which the classicising internationalists sought to buttress their preference for epistocratic

leadership in international politics. Indeed, classicising internationalist educational thought was

marked by a concern for the position of the intellectual in world politics. They saw public opinion as

the sole legitimate, democratic sovereign force in international affairs. But their democratisation of

international relations did not necessitate any popular control of the apparatus of international

government. Instead, it referred to the application to global politics of the spirit of democracy defined

as an ethos of public service to the international community. The different meanings the classicising

internationalists assigned to democracy in its national and international contexts underpinned a belief

that international government should be directed by intellectuals with a deeper personal understanding

and experience of the ideals and practice of global administration. The internationalist-minded

intellectual was also a philosopher-king: the educator of the international public and the guardian of

international order.

Conclusion

The classicising internationalists’ political and educational writings reflected the imprint of the

rhetoric of democratisation that characterised British political culture and League-based

internationalism after 1918. They conceptualised an international public that was capable of

expressing its opinions on contemporary affairs through both established national channels for

political representation, such as elections, and the new apparatus of international government in

Geneva. Further, the development of an educated and politically engaged public with some form of

sovereign power within the international system was seen as a democratic development. For Zimmern,

212 Zimmern, ‘Collective Security’, pp. 4–5.

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international cooperation was, like democracy itself, both a collective and individual endeavour in

spiritual and educational development: ‘the opening of the mind to international understanding is

indeed not a special luxury for the few. It is an indispensable concomitant of democracy. It goes with

the vote.’213 Moreover, international public opinion was pivotal in their visions of more peaceful

international relations. However, classicising internationalism contained a liberal distrust of the

capacity of the mass public to govern rationally and wisely, and viewed international government

paternalistically as the realm of intellectual expertise and political guardianship. Influenced by Plato,

these figures connected global order to the social position of intellectuals and refused to confront the

contradiction between empowering a democratic society and their vision of intellectual leadership in

world politics. Thus, the aims of their internationalist educational schemes differed fundamentally

from the domestic civics education from which they took their ideological inspiration. Whilst the

classicising internationalists understood universal suffrage as an inevitable and necessary shift in the

balance of domestic political power, in the international sphere the ideal was to build an

internationalist-minded public deprived of any semblance of direct democratic control, political

representation or responsibility. The classicising internationalists’ educational programmes moved to

align public opinion with the ideas and values of a transnational, but overwhelmingly Western,

bureaucratic and intellectual class. Their brand of cultural internationalism was, pace Iriye, not more

‘globally construed’ after the First World War.214 Its scope remained socially and culturally elitist and

concerned largely with Western political interests. Above all, the classicising internationalists’

educational thought revealed a profound concern with the contemporary public and social role of

intellectuals, in particular the philosophically enlightened expert in international affairs.

213 Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, p. 54. 214 Iriye, p. 58.

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Chapter IV – ‘The Greek door to the study of history’: Arnold

J. Toynbee, international order and the classical inheritance

In The Legacy of Greece (1921), a collection of essays on the ancient Greek inheritance, R.W.

Livingstone stated that, ‘in spite of many differences, no age has had closer affinities with Ancient

Greece than our own; none has based its deeper life so largely on ideals which the Greeks brought into

the world.’1 Similarly convinced of the enduring importance of antiquity, the classicising

internationalists all contributed to Livingstone’s volume. Murray asserted the uniquely contemporary

value of ancient Greek philosophy and culture. Zimmern stressed the enduring legacy of Greek

political thought.2 Toynbee discussed Greek historiography and the course of Greek history, central

intellectual interests of his in the years following the First World War. He argued that the Greek

historical experience provided a model of societal development with key lessons for modernity.

Toynbee’s contribution also foregrounded the concept that would define his political and historical

thought, as well as his intellectual legacy: civilisation.3 The idea of civilisation, and of classical

civilisation in particular, was pivotal to Toynbee’s understanding of the universal dynamics of history,

a subject he explored systematically in A Study of History, published in twelve volumes between 1934

and 1961. In this work, Toynbee elaborated a philosophy of history centring on the rise and fall of

multiple historic and present civilisations, which he viewed as the essential unit of historical study.4

The Study was also a present-minded exercise, a reflection on modern global integration, nationalism

and the rise of Western global hegemony. Its genesis should be interpreted as Toynbee’s personal

intellectual response to the deteriorating international situation of the 1930s, a context marked by the

rise of fascism and the waning authority of liberal internationalism and the League of Nations.

Toynbee’s consistent intellectual engagement with the classical world, especially Greek historical

thought, was essential to the development of his unique philosophy of history and to the

internationalist message that underpinned it. He stressed that the history and ideas of Greece were a

vital intellectual tool for shedding light on the modern experience and the place of the West in world

history. Further, he deployed Greek history in order to understand the nature of, and routes out of, the

1 Livingstone, p. iii. 2 Murray, ‘Value of Greece’; Zimmern, ‘Political Thought’. 3 Arnold Toynbee, ‘History’, in The Legacy of Greece, ed. by R.W. Livingstone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1921),

pp. 289–320. Toynbee’s article covered Greek and Roman history from the eleventh century BC to the seventh century

AD, but referred to this as ‘Ancient Greek civilization’. 4 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 16, 43–44.

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interwar international crisis. As he wrote in 1936, ‘the Greek door to the study of history manifestly

brings us, when we open it, face to face with the most searching and urgent questions of our own

destiny.’5

Given the importance of classical ideals, culture and history to their internationalism, Murray,

Toynbee and Zimmern all had to confront specifically how the classics were relevant to modernity.

They all believed in a living classical pastness that existed in various deposits in the present, what

Michael Bentley has termed the ‘visibility’ of the past.6 In the field of international politics, these

thinkers sought to emphasise and recapture the Greek sense of the world as an ordered whole. They

understood the interconnectedness of the international system as a uniquely modern phenomenon

arising from industrialism, global commerce and the communications revolution. Like many British

idealist internationalists, they were also convinced that there was a profound tension between the

economic integration of the modern international system and the politically fragmented world of

independent nation-states. What makes Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern distinctive was their

conviction that placing classical thinking at the heart of international relations was critical to

advancing the forces of world peace and global integration. Their assumption that classical civilisation

had something to teach modern international relations disrupts recent interpretations of interwar liberal

idealist internationalism as an overtly modernist mode of thinking.7

The classicising internationalists’ conviction that past experience could in some way guide a

seemingly unprecedentedly international modernity required a philosophy of history that could

connect temporally distinct periods and societies. All three intellectuals wrestled with the nature of

history and the relationship between modernity and classical civilisation. But the most considered and

committed engagement with these questions is found in Toynbee’s writing, in particular A Study of

History. This chapter will focus on Toynbee’s thinking about history, international politics and the

connections between antiquity and modernity in his pre-1939 writings. Toynbee was a towering figure

in twentieth century British historiography, a reputation based on his widely read and influential

philosophy of history. The first six volumes of the Study, published in two batches in 1934 and 1939,

were prominently reviewed and well received by contemporary commentators. Sales skyrocketed after

the publication of an abridgement edited by D.C. Somervell in 1947, with 200,000 copies sold by the

late 1950s. Volumes VII–X of the Study were published in 1954, with volume XI appearing in 1959

5 Toynbee, ‘The Greek Door’, p. 307. 6 Michael Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past: English Historiography in the Age of Modernism, 1870–1970

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 203. 7 For this reading of idealist internationalism, see Osiander, pp. 409–32; Sluga, pp. 2–3.

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and volume XII in 1961. During this time, Toynbee became a ‘celebrity historian’ with a significant

public following and intellectual clout in Britain, America and the Far East. But his reputation within

British academia suffered, as professional historians like Pieter Geyl, Elie Kedourie and, most

influentially, Hugh Trevor-Roper subjected Toynbee to damaging critiques for his lack of empirical

methodological rigour, factual inaccuracies, mysticism, seemingly authoritarian tendencies and

popular appeal. Nonetheless, Toynbee’s immense readership and his role as a public intellectual meant

that his interpretation of history had a significant intellectual and cultural influence, being both a social

critique and a mediation on the future of Western civilisation.8 Recent historiographical investigations

of Toynbee examine the Study as a twelve-volume whole, sometimes retrojecting his post-war thought

onto his interwar philosophy of history.9 Yet, Toynbee’s thinking about civilisation and history

underwent a fundamental shift during the Second World War when he reconceptualised the

relationship between civilisation and religion after two personal tragedies, the suicide of his son in

1939 and his divorce from his first wife, Rosalind Murray, in 1946.10 This chapter centres upon his

philosophy of history before 1939, integrating this into the intellectual and political contexts of early-

twentieth-century Europe.

According to Richard Overy, interwar British intellectuals were convinced that civilisation was in

crisis. This was a ‘morbid age’ marked by a sense of impending disaster, a loss of faith in Victorian

notions of progress and the pessimistic artistic and cultural outputs of the Lost Generation. Overy

contends that Toynbee’s philosophy of history was well-received in the 1930s because its central

premise, that modern civilisation was doomed a priori to collapse, reflected a wider social and cultural

malaise.11 Paul Rich and Arthur Hermann also argue that Toynbee’s vision of history was underlined

by doubts about the future of Western society.12 There were notable currents of pessimism in

Toynbee’s thought, especially in what he saw as the modern world’s disregard for classical

humanism.13 He was worried by the potential decline of European global supremacy, what he referred

to as the ‘dwarfing’ of Europe.14 Toynbee also displayed a sense of detachment from the institutions

of his social milieu. In 1930, he wrote to Murray,

I am conscious of having a certain ‘down’ on Western Civilisation and have often tried to think

out why I have it ... I expect it is largely a personal ‘uncorporateness’, which makes me rather

8 Hutton, pp. 408–13. 9 Overy, pp. 36–48. 10 McNeill, p. 179. The change in Toynbee’s philosophy of history appeared in ‘Christianity and Civilization’ (1940). This

was printed in Arnold Toynbee, Civilization on Trial (London: Oxford University Press, 1948), pp. 225–22. 11 Overy, pp. 10–15, 47. 12 Paul Rich, ‘Civilisations in European and World History: A Reappraisal of the Ideas of Arnold Toynbee, Fernand

Braudel and Marshall Hodgson’, The European Legacy, 7.3 (2002), 331–342 (p. 333); Arthur Herman, The Idea of Decline

in Western History (New York: Free Press, 1997), pp. 256–90. 13 Toynbee, Survey, 1933, pp. 4–5; Toynbee, ‘The Greek Door’, pp. 297–301. 14 Toynbee, ‘World Sovereignty and World Culture’, pp. 768–70; Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, pp. 164–83.

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hostile, in the same sort of way, to Winchester and Balliol and the British Empire; partly it is

the effect of the War, which, for anyone of my age, is bound to seem the chief expression of

Western Civilisation, so far, in one’s own lifetime; partly it is the effect of a classical education.

I think I have a tinge of the Renaissance feeling that the Ancient World is the real home of the

human spirit, and that what came after is rather a pity – like dog Latin!15

After the global economic depression and the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 had undermined

the sense of stability that had characterised international politics since 1923, Toynbee became

increasingly wary of a growing ‘world crisis’.16 Nonetheless, Overy, Hermann and Rich misread A

Study of History as an expression of social and cultural fatalism. Before the Second World War,

Toynbee’s philosophy of history was not determinist. Nor was it strictly cyclical, for that would imply

a historical determinism that Toynbee frequently rejected. Indeed, he was critical of using environment

or race to explain the growth or decline of societies.17 Toynbee condemned Oswald Spengler for his

rigid historical determinism, for creating from ‘this handful of facts a universal law.’18 Toynbee argued

that although civilisations tended to follow a certain historical trajectory, this path was not set in stone.

He believed that Western society was experiencing a crisis related to industrialisation, a loss of

morality, the fragmentation of politics through nationalism, and rampant materialism. Yet, before

1939, he held that the West could break out of the cycle of decline that had afflicted past civilisations

by embracing popular sovereignty, education and intellectual cooperation on a global scale.

It is the contention of this chapter that the classical world, especially Greek historical thought, was

central to Toynbee’s philosophy of history before the Second World War. Mid-twentieth-century

critiques of Toynbee recognised the central place of the ancient world in his system of civilisations.

W. den Boer argued that Toynbee remained faithful to his intellectual grounding in the classics by

deploying the overall course of ancient history as a blueprint for the rise and fall of all civilisations.19

Toynbee certainly used the classical past as a model for world history, a methodology that disrupts his

claims of cultural relativism. But more recent historiography has downplayed the classical influences

on Toynbee’s thought. Michael Lang argues that the combination of Darwinian naturalism and

teleological purpose in Henri Bergson’s evolutionary idealism provided the conceptual framework for

Toynbee’s historical logic.20 Others dismiss Toynbee’s classicism as a facet of his education and social

position. Gordon Martel notes that a classical education was the norm among the early-twentieth-

15 Toynbee to Murray, 27 December 1930, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 16 Toynbee, Survey, 1930, pp. v–vi; Toynbee, Survey, 1931, p. 16. 17 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 207–71. 18 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 11. 19 W. den Boer, ‘Toynbee and Classical History: Historiography and Myth’, in Toynbee and History: Critical Essays and

Reviews, by Ashley Montagu (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1956), pp. 221–42 (p. 225). 20 Lang, p. 749.

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century British intellectual and political elite, yet few intellectuals applied such systematic thinking to

the philosophy of history. Thus, we must look elsewhere for the origins of Toynbee’s ideas about

civilisation.21 But, Toynbee’s systematic thinking about the dynamics of history began in the aftermath

of the First World War, at a time when he was particularly engaged with ancient Greek historiography.

Indeed, ancient history and classical civilisation underpinned Toynbee’s interpretation of the modern

world, especially the reflections on globalisation and Western hegemony that shadow A Study of

History. Thucydides’ interpretation of the universal dynamics of fifth-century Hellenic politics and

Polybius’ holistic, integrated analysis of Rome’s rise to power in the second-century Mediterranean

were crucial as Toynbee sought to theorise world history in a time of crisis and change. Thucydidean

political analysis and Polybian holism were crucial as Toynbee sought to theorise world history in a

time of crisis and change. Above all, Polybius inspired the internationalist and optimistic message that

underlay Toynbee’s philosophy of history before 1939, that through institutional adjustment the West

could escape the international crisis.

The first section of this chapter explores Toynbee’s thinking about history, the classical world and the

concept of civilisation from his undergraduate years to the publication of two volumes on Greek

historical thought in 1924, which are central to understanding his later philosophy of history. This

situates Toynbee’s early intellectual development in the political and intellectual contexts of the first

three decades of the twentieth century. The second section investigates Toynbee’s most significant

interwar projects, the Survey of International Affairs and A Study of History, arguing for the influence

of Polybius on the conception, methodology and hopeful internationalist message of these works. The

chapter concludes with some reflections on Toynbee’s place in twentieth century British

historiography.

‘In Greek history I have found the key to my own understanding of

world history’

Toynbee read Literae Humaniores at Balliol College, Oxford between 1907 and 1911.22 His early

thought developed in an intellectual environment troubled by the seemingly precarious future of a

British empire emerging shaken from the Boer War and facing growing competition from the newly

industrialised powers of Germany and America. Anxiety concerning the fate of the empire seeped into

21 Martel, p. 347. 22 McNeill, pp. 21–25.

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Edwardian classical scholarship, especially writings on Rome, to which the British empire was

relentlessly compared by intellectuals, politicians and colonial administrators.23 The work of the

Oxford-based archaeologist Francis Haverfield (1860–1919) can be placed in this context. In The

Romanization of Roman Britain (1905), Haverfield employed the concept of ‘Romanization’, the

civilising mission and ‘peaceful’ assimilative process of the Roman empire, as a mirror and model for

contemporary British imperialism.24 As Duncan Bell argues, many late-Victorian and Edwardian

imperialists used ancient history to claim that the British empire was exempt from the logic of imperial

decline. Thinkers such as Balfour, Bryce, Cromer, Lucas, Seeley and Zimmern believed that modern

progress in science, industry and social organisation offered Britain an ‘escape velocity’ from the

historical precedent of Greek or Roman corruption and social collapse.25 This notion of a potential

escape from the recurring temporal dynamics of human societies re-emerged in Toynbee’s thinking

on civilisations, the nature of history and the future of the West.

Zimmern and Murray were important intellectual influences on the young Toynbee, who as an

undergraduate was taught by both. As Regius Professor of Greek from 1908, Murray was the principal

intellectual force among classicists in Edwardian Oxford. His inaugural address, at which Toynbee

was present, stressed that classical Greece represented the apogee of history, and that scholars must

recognise Hellenism as a living and eternal progressive force.26 Murray and his wife, Mary Howard,

held a regular open house for promising Oxford undergraduates, which Toynbee, who was recognised

by his teachers as the most talented classicist of his intake, often attended. As their personal

relationship deepened, Murray became a father figure to Toynbee, who was distant from his biological

father, especially after the latter’s psychological collapse and the breakup of the Toynbee family home

in 1912. Toynbee was also something of a surrogate son to Murray. This paternal relationship was

solidified when Toynbee married Murray’s daughter Rosalind in 1913.27 A fellow at New College

from 1904 to 1909, Zimmern was a similarly influential teacher and friend. Toynbee attended

Zimmern’s lectures on ancient history, and the two exchanged regular correspondence on personal

and academic matters during Toynbee’s undergraduate years. Toynbee later described Zimmern’s

lectures as one of his ‘most thrilling intellectual experiences’ as a student, noting how Zimmern was

bringing the ancient Greeks to life by arguing that ‘their history—their ideas, ideals, successes,

23 During this period, Arthur Balfour, James Bryce and the colonial administrators Lord Curzon, Sir Charles Lucas and the

Earl of Cromer all wrote books comparing Britain and Rome. For Britain’s imperial technocrats, the size, diversity and

power of the Roman empire meant that Rome provided a model for policy design, identity-building and the legitimation

of large-scale political orders. See, Hausteiner, pp. 571–2, 579–83. 24 Francis Haverfield, The Romanization of Roman Britain, 2nd edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912), pp. 30–38. 25 Bell, Reordering the World, p. 121. 26 Gilbert Murray, The Interpretation of Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1909); West, p. 131. 27 McNeill, pp. 25–28, 32–35; West, p. 166.

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failures, and fate—must have practical significance for us.’28 Zimmern’s pre-war classical scholarship

was certainly present-minded, being a reflection on the nature of democratic citizenship and the future

of British imperialism. Crucially, Zimmern’s example showed Toynbee that an interest in the ancient

and modern worlds ‘could co-exist in the same mind, and that each of them was illuminating for the

other.’29

Murray and Zimmern both believed that politics, culture and philosophy had been more finely

expressed in the Greek, and especially Athenian, historical experience than they were in modernity.

George Grote’s History of Greece (1846–56) had confronted earlier uses of Athenian history as a

prophetic warning against the inevitable corruption of popular government and transformed Athens

into an exemplar for Victorian liberalism.30 Despite academic challenges to Grote from early-

twentieth-century classicists like J.B. Bury, Ernest Barker and T.R. Glover, Periclean Athens retained

its social resonance as something of a golden age in human history.31 For Zimmern, the didactic value

of antiquity rested partly on an assumption that fifth-century Athens was a time of great flourishing in

politics, art, culture and individual life.32 Yet, Murray and Zimmern did not interpret history as a

process of degeneration from an ancient golden age. They held that certain Greek ideas were

exemplary in the form that they took in the specific historical context of antiquity, and that these ideas

also explained a recurrent political typology, contained something resembling an ideal political

structure, or were eternal political truths. They argued for the relevance of studying such durable and

universal ideas at their historical source, in what they saw as the more refined intellectual environment

of the Greek polis. This was fused with a more disciplinary-specific conviction in the importance of

the classicist, whose social role was to understand the essence of ancient, but also timeless, ideas in

the purity of their original form. In 1921, Murray stressed that, ‘there is good cause for some of us in

each generation at the cost of some time and trouble to study such important forces where they first

appear consciously in the minds of our spiritual ancestors.’33 The understanding of ancient history as

‘classical civilisation’ was critical in the formulation of this position, as the universalising tendencies

inherent in the concept of civilisation facilitated explicit or implied connections to modernity,

especially the West. Further, the fact that classical civilisation was studied in the knowledge that this

society had collapsed allowed seemingly concrete political lessons to be drawn from episodes in

ancient history. Whilst the cause and effect of certain political actions and ideas was an open-ended

28 Toynbee, Acquaintances, p. 49. 29 Toynbee, Acquaintances, p. 49. 30 Liddel, p. 13; Collini, Winch, and Burrow, pp. 189–90. 31 Turner, Contesting Cultural Authority, p. 358. 32 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 426. 33 Murray, ‘Value of Greece’, p. 23.

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question as events unfolded in the modern world, causality was allegedly more traceable in the ancient

past.

Toynbee absorbed the Oxford conviction that Hellenism was an authoritative voice in broader

discourses on contemporary politics and society.34 His later historical thinking reflected the influence

of Murray, whose early classical scholarship sketched the moral progress and decay of Greek

civilisation through the lens of religion. Murray did not believe that there was an unbroken line of

development underpinning history: progress and evolution were contingent and cyclical, based on the

organic motion of growth and decay. In 1889, he stated that the Greeks offered a unique reservoir of

experience and learning, for they alone had ‘passed through… almost all the stages of development

we know in the rise and fall of the nations of the world.’35 For Murray, Hellenism was a living reality

and central to understanding contemporary politics and culture.36 The Greek inheritance was also vital

to preserving a rational ordered world and a weapon against civilisation’s potential descent into

barbarism. Likewise, Zimmern wrote in ‘The Study of Greek History’ that, ‘Greek history offers the

student, if his horizon is wide enough, a picture of the entire development, from birth to decay, of a

complete state of civilization.’ This was published as part of a collection of specialist essays on Greek

history that Zimmern had written in c.1909–10 as he worked out what he described as ‘the general

view of Greek life’ found in The Greek Commonwealth.37 Along with ‘History as an Art’, it was likely

‘the defence of the study of history and, more especially, of Greek history’ which Zimmern told

Graham Wallas was part of his original plan for first section of The Greek Commonwealth as he began

writing in Athens in 1909–10.38 Toynbee later made similar statements about the value of antiquity as

a source of political typology and prediction: ‘in Greek history the plot of civilisation has been worked

out to its conclusion’, meaning that the historian could examine various crises of classical history to

determine at what point the decline became irreversible, hoping to avert a similar catastrophe in the

modern world.39 As Collini, Winch and Burrow argue in their account of nineteenth-century political

science, the closed, cyclical character of ancient history offered ‘laboratory demonstrations for the

scientific student of politics.’40 This was the case for the classicist pioneers of the academic study of

international relations.

34 Lang, p. 756. 35 Murray, The Place of Greek in Education, p. 14. 36 Murray, Rise, pp. 1–28. 37 Zimmern, Solon & Croesus, pp. 76, v. 38 Zimmern to Wallas, 5 January 1910, Wallas Papers, Box 1/46, fols. 7–9. Zimmern told Wallas that Part I of his plan for

The Greek Commonwealth focused on the study of history, Part II explored the geography and environment of ancient

Greece, Part III was a commentary on Pericles’ Funeral Speech, Part IV examined the individual Greek citizen, and Part

V dealt with fourth-century Greek thought. Parts I and V did not make the final version. 39 Toynbee, Tragedy of Greece, p. 10. 40 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, p. 190.

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After completing his undergraduate studies, Toynbee visited Italy and Greece between September

1911 and August 1912, an experience that he later described as his ‘second Greek education’.41

Toynbee’s cultural encounter with modern Greece helped to shape his understanding of history.

Zimmern also travelled to Greece after leaving his tutoring position at New College, Oxford in the

summer of 1909.42 He taught at the British School in Athens in 1909–10.43 At the outset of Zimmern’s

trip, Toynbee presaged the exact nature of the disappointment that both Zimmern’s and his own travels

in Greece would stimulate: ‘I don’t expect you will find it [Greece] different at all, but probably

recognise each place as known before, or if it does not tally with one’s own idea, have a set of

grievances against the actual thing for not coming up to the true and ideal picture in your mind.’44

Whilst in Greece, Toynbee and Zimmern became extremely critical of the modern Greek people.

Zimmern wrote to Wallas that, ‘I am sick of the (modern) Greeks… The Greeks are awful.’ He

described a racially motivated sense of superiority, comparing the Greeks to the ‘subject races’ of

empire, and noting how tired he was of ‘feeling better than everybody I meet’ and of Greek pleas for

the British to relinquish their control of Crete. Zimmern expressed greater admiration for the ‘sturdier’

Turks and Arabs, although he also characterised the Turks as ‘a placid people’, drawing on European

tropes of a stagnant and uncreative East. In Zimmern’s opinion, the modern Greeks were incomparable

to their ancient forebears, to the extent that he questioned their depth of their ancestry and whether

they should even be considered members of civilisation. The venom Zimmern directed against the

‘very much bedraggled “Western Civilization”’ that he witnessed in contemporary Greece suggests

that pejorative notions of southern and eastern Europe was an important cultural resource in his

intellectual constructions of a concept of civilisation, both spatially and temporally.45 For Zimmern,

civilisation was defined by and against the ‘Other’ within Europe’s borders, as well as well-worn

images of the ‘Orient’.

The internal southern European ‘Other’ was important in Toynbee’s developing ideas about

civilisation and history. He questioned the ancestral links between classical and modern Greece,

writing to his mother: ‘Were ancient Greeks like the modern? I think not: probably worse off

materially… but it is the moral difference that counts. Then they were the centre of the world… now

41 Toynbee, Experiences, p. 40. Toynbee’s ‘first Greek education’ was his schooling at Wootton Court, Winchester College

and Oxford; his ‘third Geek education’ was a visit to Karachi, Pakistan in 1960 when he witnessed the rebuilding of the

city by the Greek architect, Konstandínos Doxiádis. 42 Markwell, p. 279. 43 Zimmern to Wallas, 1 July 1910, Wallas Papers, Box 1/46, fols. 58–61; Toynbee to Zimmern, 10 January 1910, MS

Zimmern 12, fol. 107. 44 Toynbee to Zimmern, 23 August 1909, MS Zimmern 12, fols. 60–62. 45 Zimmern to Wallas, 1 July 1910, Wallas Papers, Box 1/46, fols. 58–61.

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they are hangers-on of Europe… their best is always a second rate imitation of our second best.’46

Toynbee was disgusted by life in modern Greece and what he viewed as a decadent and lazy Greek

people. He returned to England inspired to write a project to examine the history of the ‘parasitic’

Greek race, whom he now referred to using the ethnic slur ‘dagos’.47 This never came to pass, but

Toynbee later argued for the existence of a distinctive ‘Byzantine Civilization’ centring on south-

eastern Europe and Russia which lacked the Western tradition of the separation of church and state

power.48 Martel considers Toynbee’s travels to Italy and Greece to be vital in his developing

philosophy of history, in particular his division of societies into ‘barbarian’, ‘civilised’, and ‘parasitic’

(although these groupings do not appear precisely in the Study of History) and his emphasis on

forward-looking creativity in civilisation.49 Toynbee’s travels certainly dampened his philhellenism.

However, his second cultural encounter with Greece, when he witnessed atrocities perpetrated by the

supposedly civilised Greek army in Anatolia in 1921, was more decisive in his intellectual

development. In 1919, Toynbee still stressed that the West, modern Greece and eastern Europe had

inherited the same classical Greek spirit.50 By 1924, after his experience in Anatolia and the Koraes

Chair controversy, he instead outlined the existence of a separate Byzantine civilisation.51

Nonetheless, these early encounters with Greece were vital for the classicising internationalists as they

developed their understandings of the relationship between antiquity and modernity. Primarily, they

encouraged a move away from nineteenth-century conceptions of progressive linearity. Neither

Toynbee or Zimmern desired to elaborate a theory of the unity of ancient, medieval and modern history

based on the continued existence of a Greek people because the modern Greeks had failed to live up

to the idealised visions of Greece that abounded in classicist circles in Edwardian Oxford. Nor did

they wish to connect antiquity and modernity through the Byzantine empire, an institution that

straddled the classical and medieval periods but lacked free political structures. Instead, they sought

to explain the contemporary relevance of the classical past through ideas of recurrent societal

development, while retaining a broad liberal optimism concerning human progress.

Like much of his generation, Toynbee’s worldview was greatly shaped by the First World War.

Indeed, he described 1914 as a decisive turning point in his life.52 Toynbee had volunteered to join the

army in 1914 but was rejected due to dysentery, despite being of prime military age and physically

strong. Refusal was, it seems, Toynbee’s intent, for after volunteering again in 1915 he arranged for a

46 Arnold Toynbee to Edith Toynbee, 19 November 1911. Quoted in McNeill, p. 41. 47 Martel, p. 354. 48 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 34–35. ‘Russia’s Byzantine Heritage’, in Toynbee, Civilization on Trial, pp. 164–83. 49 Martel, p. 354. 50 Arnold Toynbee, The Place of Mediaeval and Modern Greece in History (London, 1919), pp. 10–11. 51 Toynbee, Greek Historical Thought, p. v. 52 Toynbee, Experiences, pp. 45–49.

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pacifist doctor to render him ineligible to fight.53 His escape from military service haunted Toynbee,

especially as the fighting in France began to take the lives of many young Oxford men. In 1915, he

wrote to Murray:

[Arthur] Heath’s death makes a turning point in the war to me … When there have been

massacres and destructions, or when my friends have been killed, I have thought ‘It is terrible,

but it is not in vain, if the good wins.’ But Heath being destroyed seems to break through all

that thick rust … and make me see war just as it is – evil and mad, and the world evil and mad

which lets war happen in itself. And the significance of the world suddenly shifts from those

things to the individual, and Heath by himself (though I didn’t know him personally well as

Bob Gibson or Cheesman) outbalances all the things we think we are fighting for.54

According to Ian Hall, the First World War cast a shadow over all Toynbee’s later writings, which

were characterised by an intense emotion driven by both guilt and grief. Toynbee’s office at Chatham

House was decorated with pictures of the friends, colleagues and pupils that had died in the fighting.55

Toynbee also sought to justify his failure to enlist in the army by condemning war as a criminal folly.56

An emotive concern to ‘abolish’ or ‘outlaw’ the institution of war through a collective security

apparatus, public opinion and an international legal order marked much of Toynbee’s thought and

work, appearing regularly in the Surveys and in the Study.57 For Toynbee, the ‘outlawry’ of war was

the ‘principal international goal of human endeavours’ in immediate post-war years—a characteristic

transformation of his own internationalism into a universal creed.58 The pax Romana of the Roman

empire was a functional model, albeit a flawed one, for disarmament and international peace. For the

two centuries after Augustus, Rome banished warfare from the centre of civilisation to the frontier and

reduced armaments to a ‘vanishing point’.59 To Toynbee, this was the key lesson to be absorbed from

later Roman history, not, as Overy suggests, the inevitable tendency of civilisations to decline.60

The interruption of Victorian security by Edwardian social unrest and the First World War pushed

many British historians towards greater public and political engagement.61 Historians were vocal in

53 McNeill, p. 67. 54 Toynbee to Murray, 15 October 1915, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. Arthur Heath was a promising young classicist and

fellow of New College, Oxford. 55 Hall, ‘“Time of Troubles”’, p. 27. Murray also decorated his home with pictures of Oxford fellows and pupils that had

died in the war. West, p. 159. 56 McNeill, p. 78. 57 Arnold Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1926 (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), p. 4; Toynbee, Survey,

1928, pp. 4–6; Toynbee, Survey, 1932, pp. 174–75; Toynbee, ‘Historical Parallels’, p. 479; Toynbee, Study, IV, pp. 153–

55. 58 Toynbee, Survey, 1931, p. 10. 59 Toynbee, Survey, 1928, pp. 4–6; Toynbee, Survey, 1931, p. 6. 60 Overy, pp. 36–37. 61 Paquette, p. 58; Soffer, p. 47.

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their public support of Britain’s war aims and were incorporated into the machinery of the wartime

British state. In May 1915, Toynbee left Oxford and began working on government propaganda,

focusing on influencing American public opinion.62 He produced a number of pamphlets throughout

the war, including The Destruction of Poland (1916), The German Terror in Belgium (1917) and The

German Terror in France (1917). In October 1915, he was assigned to work with Lord Bryce

compiling evidence on the Armenian genocide, an experience that ignited a longstanding interest and

expertise in Near Eastern politics.63 As the war progressed, Toynbee became increasingly dissatisfied

with academic life, admitting to Zimmern that he found the work deadening and was no longer fired

by the Oxford ideal.64 His political work was immediately intellectually fulfilling: ‘I am very glad to

have this job’, he told Murray, ‘I feel I am doing some thing bulky, at any rate.’65 By late 1915,

Toynbee was convinced that he no longer wanted to be an Oxford don.66 He joined the newly

established Political Intelligence Department at the Foreign Office in 1917, working alongside his

friends Lewis Namier and Zimmern, and Edward Bevan, a philosopher and expert on Hellenistic

history.67

Toynbee’s wartime experiences transformed him into a self-conscious public moralist, and encouraged

him to write history with an overtly contemporary political message.68 Thucydides was critical to

Toynbee as he developed a new conception of the role of the intellectual as a figure who navigated

politics and academia. In 1931 he asked Abraham Flexner, ‘have you ever noticed how many of the

really Great historians have been men of action with broken careers?’.69 There were a number of

historians who embodied this—Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Josephus, Ibn Khaldun,

Machiavelli, the first Earl of Clarendon and Émile Ollivier—and contemporary examples in the shape

of Jan Smuts, Lionel Curtis, Tomáš Masaryk and Gilbert Murray.70 However, Thucydides was the

archetype of the politically engaged historian. Thucydides wrote his history of the Peloponnesian War

after being exiled from Athens for failing to relieve the Spartan siege of Amphipolis in 424–23 BC.

According to Toynbee, this first-hand experience of the political upheaval facing wider Greek society,

followed by exile into a more contemplative intellectual life, acted as a catalyst for Thucydides’

‘ambition… to produce “an everlasting possession”—a permanent contribution to knowledge’.71

62 McNeill, p. 72. 63 Toynbee to Murray, 25 October 1915, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 64 Toynbee to Zimmern, 5 April 1915, MS Zimmern, 14, fols. 151–53. 65 Toynbee to Murray, 31 May 1915, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 66 Toynbee to Murray, 26 November 1915, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 67 McNeill, p. 75. 68 Paquette, p. 62; Collini, pp. 1–7. 69 Toynbee to Abraham Flexner, 6 February 1931, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 70 Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Josephus, Ibn Khaldun, Machiavelli, Clarendon and Ollivier later reappear as

examples of ‘creative individuals’ in Toynbee, Study, III, pp. 287–328. 71 Toynbee, Study, III, p. 292.

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Toynbee was convinced that only witnesses to, or participants in, events could grasp their deeper

meaning and essential truth by harmonising an understanding of a particular historical context with

the universal dynamics that emerge from the process of history. Thucydides’ life was an inspiration

for Toynbee’s later idea of ‘Withdrawal-and-Return’, the process that inspired creative individuals

and propelled the social evolution of civilisations.

It is tricky to overlook the autobiographical element implicit in Toynbee’s interpretation of

Thucydides.72 In 1926, Toynbee was appointed as Professor of International History at the LSE, a post

that was combined with the role of Director of Studies at the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

This position turned Toynbee into a politician-historian in a Thucydidean mould. In his inaugural

lecture, he spoke of how an ‘international standpoint’ on history,

is advantageous to the professor-director, because it supplies him with the dual foothold in the

world of scholarship and the world of affairs which every historian requires. … Thucydides, for

instance, began making preparations to write his history at the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War

without renouncing the ambition to play an active part in the great events of his time.73

For Toynbee, Thucydides demonstrated that by bridging academia and political engagement the

historian could play a vital role in constructive political action whilst simultaneously producing

historical writing of ageless intellectual value. The crisis facing the modern West should spur

intellectuals to abandon academic seclusion, turning history into a means of regaining control over

contemporary events. Reacting to a similar sense of historical urgency, Zimmern’s Geneva School of

International Studies encouraged its students to abandon the academic isolation and play an active role

in public affairs. Toynbee saw his intellectual interest in the contact between civilisations as a response

to the same challenge of maintaining good relations between Western states and between global

civilisations.74 But his philosophy of history was also an intellectual feat to match Thucydides and

secure a route into the pantheon of great historians. In his personal correspondence, Toynbee wryly

referred to A Study of History as his ‘magnum opus’.75

Thucydides was central to Toynbee’s evolving understanding of the contemporaneity of classical

history. Specifically, Thucydides refracted through the context of the First World War. Toynbee

72 Morley, p. 431. 73 Toynbee, ‘Inaugural Lecture’ (1926), p. 4, Toynbee Papers, Box 3. The first part of this passage is quoted in Paquette,

although Paquette omits the references to the classics. Paquette, p. 64. 74 Toynbee to Murray, 27 October 1924, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 75 Toynbee to Murray, 21 January 1931, Toynbee Papers, Box 72; Toynbee to Lionel Curtis, 4 March 1932, MS Curtis 6,

fol. 99.

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quickly interpreted the First World War as ‘the Peloponnesian War of Europe’ and the potential onset

of a decline and fall.76 Thucydides had witnessed a stable and prosperous world overtaken by

catastrophe:

I realized [in 1914] that Thucydides had trodden already the path which was opening at this very

moment before our own feet. The war which may prove to be a fatal turning-point in history—

Thucydides had lived through that; and he had realized that he was living thought it; and he had

expressed, in a κτῆμα ϵἰς ἀϵί [a possession for all time], the experiences and thoughts and feelings

which for our generation, in 1914, were present and future.77

Murray agreed, telling an audience at the LSE that ‘the Peloponnesian War… was in many respects

curiously similar to the present war. It was, as far as the Hellenic peoples were concerned, a world-

war.’78 Thucydides had himself interpreted the Peloponnesian War as a Greek civil war in which ‘the

whole Hellenic world was convulsed… and society became divided into camps in which no man

trusted his fellow.’79 Throughout his life, Toynbee remained convinced that his generation had

experienced what was essentially a civil war within a larger international society, just like the

fracturing of Hellenic unity in Thucydides’ time: ‘Homo Occidentalis has made a holocaust of his own

children in our great Western civil war of A.D. 1914–18.’80 Toynbee’s personal and empathetic

identification with Thucydides was integrated into an interpretation of history grounded in the

assumption of recurrent social development. For Toynbee, the First World War proved that

Thucydides and fifth-century Greece were not relics of the past, but an active part of the present.

Thucydides’ political analysis was by his own admission ‘a possession for all time’, a living reality as

well as a description of a specific conflict between Athens and Sparta.81 Consequently, Thucydides

and ancient Greece were central to the future of the modern world. As Neville Morley argues, Toynbee

was driven by a new conception of Thucydides as model for contemporary international relations

theory, one that he, along with Murray and Zimmern, helped to develop and disseminate. This was

tied to a belief that ancient history offered a source of experience from which to derive and evaluate

general principles that could be applied to a range of different periods and societies, but particularly

the modern West.82 But Morley overlooks the centrality of the concept of civilisation to this process.

Toynbee’s understanding of civilisation both eradicated the historical distance between antiquity and

modernity and undermined claims that the modern experience was totally unprecedented. Despite their

diversity in both historical time and geographical space, all civilisations throughout history were

76 Arnold Toynbee to Edith Toynbee, 11 October 1914, quoted in Martel, p. 356. 77 Toynbee, ‘The Greek Door’, p. 303. 78 Murray, ‘Aristophanes and the War Party’, p. 32. 79 Thucydides, 3.82.1, 3.83.1. 80 Toynbee, Study, V, p. 16. 81 Thucydides, 1.22.4. 82 Morley, p. 429.

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‘philosophically’ contemporaneous, and therefore comparable, forms of society.83 The lesson all

civilisations should draw from Thucydides, especially his account of the massacre at Melos, was that

moral change was both a symptom and a cause of social breakdown.84

As an undergraduate Toynbee held to a heroic ideal, instilled partly though a classical education, in

which battle was a means to prove one’s worth.85 The First World War shattered this, yet Toynbee

still found great emotional and intellectual value in classical literature. He told an audience of Oxford

students in 1920 how, ‘I found, in the worst moments of the war, that passages from the classics—

some line of Aeschylus or Lucretius or Virgil, or the sense of some speech in Thucydides, or the

impression of some mood of bitterness or serenity in a dialogue of Plato—would come into my mind

and give me relief.’86 These figures would return to Toynbee time and again as he thought and wrote

about international politics: quotes from classical authors, particularly Lucretius, form the

frontispieces to many volumes of the Survey of International Affairs. The Oxford lecture marked a

turning point in Toynbee’s intellectual development and a change in his understanding of history.

Civilisation moved to the forefront of his thinking. Toynbee asserted that civilisations, the highest

form of social organisation, were created by the dominance of the human spirit over the natural

environment. Ancient Greece and the modern West were seen as one of a number of distinct

civilisations, along with those of China, Egypt, India and Islam. Toynbee now interpreted Greek

history as a ‘tragedy’ in the Aristotelian sense, as a single and complete action with a tragic ending.

This tragedy had a tripartite plot. The first act was one of growth from the eleventh century BC which

culminated in the ‘repulse of Oriental universal empire’ and the creation of ‘an inter-state federation,

the Delian League’ in the fifth century, before a collapsing with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian

War. Toynbee had, it seemed, taken on board the internationalist implications of Zimmern’s history

of the Athenian commonwealth. Act two was a time of chaos marked by the failure of ‘fresh

experiments in federation’ in Seleucid Asia, Italy, Aetolia and Achaea, and the rise of Rome as a world

power. The second act took place between 431 and 31 BC, the dates that would bookend the Hellenic

‘Time of Troubles’ in A Study of History. The third and final act was defined by a ‘rally’ after chaos,

a concept that reappeared throughout Toynbee’s historical thought, and the eventual dissolution of

Greek, not Roman, society in the eighth century AD.87

83 Toynbee, Greek Historical Thought, p. xiii. 84 Toynbee, Study, V, p. 59. 85 McNeill, p. 65. 86 Toynbee, Tragedy of Greece, p. 12. 87 Toynbee, Tragedy of Greece, pp. 4–6, 15–17.

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This plot formed the essence of history, for each civilisation followed a similar pattern.88 Thus,

Toynbee constructed classical history as a monolithic concept based on his idealisation of fifth-century

Athens, with little consideration for later developments in thought. Graeco-Roman history was simply

‘Greek history’, just as in the Study of History ‘Hellenic Civilization’ covered both ancient Greece and

Rome. Indeed, Toynbee asserted that the title ‘Hellenic Civilization’ was not only shorter and less

‘clumsy’ than ‘Graeco-Roman’, but that it was ‘really more accurate, since this society was originally

created by the ancient Greeks or “Hellenes” and the Romans only entered into the “Hellenic”

inheritance at a late date, when the Hellenic Civilization was already in decline.’89 The compound

‘Graeco-Roman’ was misleading because it implied parity in the contribution made to the history of

the ‘Hellenic Civilization’ by both Greece and Rome. However, not all of Greek history was assigned

an equal qualitative weight in the achievements of ‘Hellenic Civilization’. Athens, especially during

the fifth century BC, represented ‘“the Hellas of Hellas”: the country whose êthos was the quintessence

of Hellenism.’ Conversely, ‘Sparta’s un-Hellenic immobility’ meant that ‘the Spartans were veritably

a people without history.’90 A distaste for Rome was a persistent theme in Toynbee’s writings, even

those that dealt directly with Roman history, as a reviewer of Hannibal’s Legacy (1965) remarked.91

This was a common move among Toynbee’s generation of Hellenists, who tended to associate Rome

with both despotism and decline. But, uniquely, Toynbee generalised this and applied it to the

dynamics of civilisation and world history. In the 1930s, the course of Graeco-Roman history formed

the blueprint for Toynbee’s more refined philosophy of the history of civilisations. He later reflected

that ‘in Greek history I have found the key to my own understanding of world history.’92 Further,

Toynbee’s monolithic construction of the classical world structured his understanding of the

contemporary value and political utility of the study of history. As Greek history provided an account

of the complete ‘plot of civilisation’, it presented timely warnings and constructive lessons for a

modern world in flux.93 Knowledge of the whole plot meant that the historian could examine various

crises of classical history to determine at what point decline became irreversible, hoping to avert a

similar catastrophe in the modern world. Indeed, this was the specific and urgent political task and

public role of the historian.

By the early 1920s Toynbee was moving towards a different and unique interpretation of civilisational

time and the relationship between ancient and modern history. In March 1920, he wrote to Murray

88 Toynbee, Tragedy of Greece, p. 6. 89 Toynbee, Study, I, p. 41. 90 Toynbee, Study, II, pp. 38, 69, 78. 91 E. Staveley, ‘Arnold J. Toynbee, Hannibal’s Legacy, The Hannibalic War’s Effects on Roman Life’, Journal of Roman

Studies, 57.1–2 (1967), 244–46. 92 Toynbee, ‘Greek History as the Key to World History’, a lecture to British School at Athens (November 1948), Toynbee

Papers, Box 3. 93 Toynbee, Tragedy of Greece, p. 10.

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that ‘B.C. and A.D. are a false antithesis and no division between cycles of civilisation’.94 Later that

year, he told Zimmern that ‘my interest in history becomes more and more general’ and that he was

developing ‘a programme… to study history through the contact between civilisations’.95 The First

World War, seen by many British intellectuals as a battle for the soul of civilisation, was a key

motivating factor in this intellectual shift.96 For Toynbee, the war was the primary expression of

Western civilisation in his lifetime. However, it was Toynbee’s experiences in the war-torn Near East

that proved decisive. In early 1921, Toynbee travelled to Anatolia to report on the Graeco-Turkish

War (1919–22) for the Manchester Guardian and to observe how Greece was coping with the

administration of an ethnically diverse population in Smyrna.97 The atrocities that he witnessed being

committed by the Greek army in the Yalova region in May 1921 shocked him deeply. These events

undermined the Greek claim to be pursuing a civilising mission in Anatolia and shattered Toynbee’s

own romantic, Oxford-inspired philhellenism.98 Toynbee’s reports on the war and the pro-Turkish line

taken in his later book on the conflict, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey (1922), caused a

sizeable public controversy. At the time, Toynbee held the Koraes Chair in Modern Greek and

Byzantine History, Language and Literature at King’s College, London, a position partially funded by

subsidies from the Greek parliament. This included a personal endowment from Eleftherios Venizelos,

who was Prime Minister in seven Greek administrations between 1910 and 1933.99 These donors and

many academics at the University of London were appalled by Toynbee’s criticism of modern Greece.

Although Toynbee’s position was supported by both Ernest Barker, the principal of King’s College,

and Graham Wallas, Toynbee eventually resigned in early 1924. A defiant and principled letter to The

Times explaining his position included a quotation from Polybius in the original Greek on the

importance of the truth in chronicling public affairs, which was not printed.100

Toynbee held firm to his conviction that the actions of the modern Greeks challenged the trope of

Greek civilisation confronting Turkish (or ‘Oriental’) barbarism that was ‘so deeply rooted in Western

minds’.101 Indeed, the title of The Western Question consciously inverted the familiar notion of ‘the

94 Toynbee to Murray, 9 March 1920, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 95 Toynbee to Zimmern, 2 August 1920, MS Zimmern 16, fols. 109–114. 96 On British intellectual responses to the First World War, see Gregory Moore, ‘The Super-Hun and the Super-State:

Allied Propaganda and German Philosophy during the First World War’, German Life and Letters, 54.4 (2001), 310–30. 97 Clogg, p. 53. 98 Rebecca Gill, ‘'Now I Have Seen Evil, and I Cannot Be Silent About It’: Arnold J. Toynbee and His Encounters with

Atrocity, 1915–1923’, in Evil, Barbarism and Empire: Britain and Abroad, c.1830–2000, ed. by Tom Crook, Rebecca

Gill, and Bertrand Taithe (Basingstoke: Houndmills, 2011), pp. 172–200 (pp. 184–86); Clogg, p. 54. 99 Clogg, pp. 53–107, vi. 100 Toynbee, ‘The Liberty of Professors’, The Times, 3 January 1924, p. 6. The omitted quote is mentioned by Clogg, p.

83. The quotation comes from Polybius, 38.6. 101 Arnold Toynbee, The Western Question in Greece and Turkey: A Study in the Contact of Civilisations (London:

Constable, 1922), p. 328. The Western Question was published before the Greek defeat and the sack of Smyrna in

September 1922.

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Eastern Question’, the name given to Victorian debates on the problems associated with the declining

Ottoman empire. For Toynbee, the East was often a passive or reactive actor in what was largely a

question about the West, and, from a world-historical point of view, the dynamics of civilisations

across time. Thus, Toynbee’s analysis still contained an element of the traditional Western image of

the morbid East succumbing to the creative superiority of Europe. Indeed, despite the expressed

cultural relativism of his philosophy of world history, Toynbee approached the East through a

Western, orientalist gaze. The sources he used for his discussion of world cultures were written

overwhelmingly by Western authors. Nonetheless, Toynbee was certain that events in the Near East

were being propelled by a far deeper historical context, the collision between civilisations of vastly

discordant strength:

The masterful influence of our Western form of society upon people of other civilisations can

be discerned beneath the new phenomena and the old, omnipresent and indefatigable in

creation and destruction, like some gigantic force of nature… The contact of civilisations has

always been, and will always continue to be, a ruling factor in human progress and failure.102

The contact between civilisations was the fundamental and essential factor in human history. Its

modern iteration, the global dominance of the West and the reaction that this provoked, represented

the defining dynamic of contemporary politics, and one that the politically minded historian must seek

to explain and understand. Toynbee interpreted his time in the Near East as one in which he witnessed

first-hand the crisis facing the modern world and the essence of human history, the contact between

civilisations. It was this personal experience of what he saw as a universal historical phenomenon that

Toynbee believed enabled him to write a history that, like Thucydides, fused the local and the

ecumenical and was both timeless and urgently contemporary.

Toynbee infused the inchoate ideas that he had revealed in his correspondence with Murray and

Zimmern in 1920 with his personal experiences in Anatolia and his reading of ancient Greek

historiography, which had taken on a new significance. On the train journey home from the Near East,

he sketched out a formula for a philosophy of history based on the comparative analysis of the rise

and decline of civilisations.103 By 1924, he told Murray that a book ‘on all this business of mine about

civilisations’ was ready to be put to paper.104 Toynbee’s philosophy of history would not appear for

another decade, but in 1924, he published two volumes for The Library of Greek Thought series edited

by Ernest Barker. Greek Civilisation and Character (1924) and especially Greek Historical Thought

(1924) mark a hugely important, and somewhat underappreciated, moment in Toynbee’s intellectual

102 Toynbee, The Western Question, p. xxviii. 103 Gill, p. 194. 104 Toynbee to Murray, 13 January 1924, Toynbee Papers, Box 72.

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development and are critical for understanding his later historical thought. These books are mentioned

once in William McNeill’s biography of Toynbee, and only in passing when discussing the Koraes

Chair controversy. McNeill considers them ‘two elegant little volumes’ with far less impact on

Toynbee’s later thought than, say, Toynbee’s undergraduate essays.105 They are ignored by Luca

Castellin, who sees Toynbee’s use of historical analogy as merely a rhetorical tool.106 Ian Hall does

not mention them in his article on Toynbee’s notion of a ‘Time of Troubles’, despite the fact that this

phrase first appears in Greek Historical Thought and its periodisation in that work (431–31 BC)

remained unchanged in A Study of History.107 Conversely, Michael Lang gives the volumes greater

importance in Toynbee’s shift towards historical relativism and a historical method based on

translating events, ideas and processes between civilisations, although Lang sees Henri Bergson and

Jan Smuts as the major influences on Toynbee’s conception of history.108

These two books are compilations of extracts from ancient Greek sources, to which Toynbee gave

titles that reveal the centrality of Greek historiography to his philosophy of history. The History of the

Romano-Jewish War by Josephus was seen to shed light upon ‘The Conflict of Civilisations’, a

phenomenon Toynbee had personally observed in Anatolia.109 Excerpts from Polybius’ Histories were

included under the titles ‘The Continuity of History’, ‘The Universality of History’, and ‘The Unity

of History’, and ‘Causation the Essence of History’, among others. An extract from Plato’s Timaeus

describing how natural catastrophes repeatedly destroyed human attempts at civilisation was tellingly

included under the title ‘Cycles of Civilisation’. The same passage was cited in volume IV of the

Study, where Toynbee discusses classical theories of history at some length.110 Indeed, Plato’s

presence is felt in Toynbee’s philosophy of history, although less strongly than Polybius and with less

immediate bearing on Toynbee’s internationalism. According to Toynbee, ‘the interpretation of

Human history in these cyclical terms evidently fascinated Plato.’111 A circular theory of political

change based on the periodic motion of the seasons is found in Book VIII of the Republic: ‘all created

things must decay’, and all societies pass through a cycle of successive types of government, from

aristocracy to timocracy, oligarchy, democracy and, finally, tyranny.112 The degeneration of Plato’s

ideal state occurs when the qualities of the guardian class are diluted through poor breeding.113

Toynbee was critical of selective breeding as Spartan social engineering, but incorporated Plato’s

105 McNeill, p. 117. 106 Castellin, p. 623. 107 Hall, ‘“Time of Troubles”’; Toynbee, Greek Historical Thought, p. xii; Toynbee, Study, I, p. 53. 108 Lang, p. 769. 109 Toynbee, Greek Civilisation and Character, pp. 119–30. 110 Toynbee, Greek Historical Thought, pp. 150–59. 111 Toynbee, Study, IV, pp. 24–25. 112 Plato, Republic, 543a–576b, quotation from 546a. 113 Plato, Republic, 546d.

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insight into his own understanding of the role of human agency in the breakdown of civilisations,

noting that Plato blames the decay of his ideal society on ‘a lapse in the sphere of human action: a

failure to meet a challenge with the appropriate response.’114

For Toynbee, the Hellenic world in the fifth and fourth centuries BC and the modern West were both

mature and triumphant societies. This was reflected in their historical writing. Ancient Greek and

modern Western historians approached history through politics, whilst in medieval Christianity the

past was interpreted through the lens of theology and spiritual salvation, ‘projecting an “other-

worldly” scheme into a world of affairs’. For Toynbee, every civilisation had both a historical

development, a ‘career’ or ‘life-history’, and a permanent and historically unique individuality or

‘character’ that made these groupings more than the mere aggregate of their individual members or

the product of local environment.115 Consequently, Western and classical civilisation were not

separated by two millennia of progress, but were historically comparable societies. Indeed, the

contemporary West was at a similar stage of social development to fifth-century Greece. These two

volumes contained an early articulation of the theoretically refined attack on historical linearity that

would characterise Toynbee’s philosophy of history:

The remote past embodied in foreign civilisations may be subjectively nearer to the life of our

own day than is the recent past. In other words, chronological priority and posteriority have

little or no subjective significance except within the single span of a given civilisation.… In

the philosophical sense, all civilisations have been and are and will continue to be

contemporaneous with one another.116

In the Study, Toynbee critiqued the directional interpretation of history tied up in what he called the

idea of ‘Unity of Civilization’, the belief in the existence of one civilisation as opposed to multiple

civilisations, and the identification of that civilisation with a particular society, the contemporary

West.117 For Toynbee, this arrogant attitude was both the result of a mistaken conception of historical

time and an intellectual by-product of Western economic and imperial hegemony.118 Toynbee asserted

that discontinuity was the most significant phenomenon in world history: history was defined by the

rise and fall of different civilisations. Furthermore, Toynbee echoed his earlier sentiments in asserting

114 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 15. Toynbee argues that the Spartans practised eugenics. See, Toynbee, Study, III, pp. 60, 94–

95. 115 Toynbee, Greek Civilisation and Character, pp. vi–viii, xi. Karl Popper dismissed the historicist assumption that human

groupings have a history and structure independent of their members as ‘holistic jargon’. Karl Popper, The Poverty of

Historicism (London: Routledge, 2002), pp. 15–17, 101–5. 116 Toynbee, Greek Historical Thought, p. xiii. 117 Toynbee, Study, I, p. 151. 118 Toynbee, Study, I, p. 157. This argument has interesting similarities to Edward Said’s contentions that the monolithic

and static constructions of the ‘Orient’ found in Western scholarship were underlined by the realities of Western global

and imperial power. Said, pp. 11–12.

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that civilisations must be treated as if they were ‘philosophically contemporary’.119 Toynbee’s

experience witnessing the clash of civilisations in the war-torn Near East coincided with a period of

intense intellectual engagement with ancient Greek historiography. These developments were critical

in the formation of his thinking about civilisations in history.

The classical world was central to Toynbee’s international and historical thought, yet Toynbee also

sought to transcend aspects of the classical inheritance. He moved away from the determinism inherent

in cyclical notions of historical time, rejecting the idea of ‘sheer recurrence’ typical of classical

thinkers like Plato, Aristotle, Tacitus, Marcus Aurelius and Lucretius. Toynbee felt that such criticism

could not be directed at Polybius because his view of the mixed constitution offered a way to break

the cycle of history. Virgil also recognised circular time for what it was, ‘a nightmare vision of human

affairs’ that would make mankind, like Sisyphus, the victim of an ‘everlasting cosmic practical joke’.

Toynbee distanced himself from classical theories of history by asserting the critical role of human

agency in history through ordeal and creative response. This historical logic integrated aspects of

‘sheer recurrence’, which he defined as essentially pure and amoral historical repetition, and an

overarching providential telos into one distinctive historical pattern or ‘rhythm’. Small scale cyclical

movements of history, for example the process of ‘Challenge-and-Response’ in a growing civilisation,

weaved together a larger ‘tapestry in which there is manifestly “a progress towards an end” and not

just an “endless repetition”.’ History was defined by ‘harmony of two diverse movements—a major

irreversible movement which is borne on the wings of a minor repetitive movement’, a spiral-like

‘rhythm’ that was both cyclical and linear.120 This obviously jarred slightly with Toynbee’s emphasis

on historical discontinuity. As such, he argued that each civilisation differed in its internal content;

thus, the rise and fall of multiple civilisations was not a ‘vain repetition’ but rather a new act of

creativity.121 Toynbee’s historical logic left space for human agency and contained a transcendental

telos for humanity in a way that the purely cyclical visions of history could not. His anxious audience

in the contemporary West could take comfort from this conclusion that ‘the dead civilizations are not

“dead by fate”; and therefore a living civilization is not doomed inexorably.’122

119 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 43–44, 172–77. 120 Toynbee, Study, IV, pp. 28, 30–31, 34, 36. This interpretation of history was remarkably similar to that of Giambattista

Vico, although Toynbee did not discuss or cite Vico before 1945. On the links between Toynbee’s theory of history and

Vico’s The New Science (1725), see Paquette, pp. 71–72. 121 Toynbee, Study, VI, pp. 173–74. 122 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 39.

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Breaking the cycle of civilisation: the study of history, the international

crisis and the Polybian escape

McNeill argues that two ancient Greek historians, Thucydides and Herodotus, helped to shape

Toynbee’s intellectual outlook.123 Polybius was a far more pervasive influence on Toynbee’s historical

and international thought, yet Polybius is not mentioned by Castellin, Lang or McNeill. Further,

Toynbee’s engagement with Polybius is critical to understanding his distinctive place in the

development of academic historical writing in twentieth century Britain. The Achaean nobleman

Polybius of Megalopolis was taken as a hostage to Rome in 167 BC. After gaining his release in 150

BC, he joined the Roman campaign in Africa, witnessing the sack of Carthage in 146 BC. Polybius

subsequently compiled his Histories, which related Mediterranean politics between 264 and 146 BC,

focusing on Rome’s rise to global power. Book VII examined the role and methodology of the

historian, emphasising the importance of factual integrity and that the historian should be close to the

events they seek to understand. Polybius’ account of the benefits of Rome’s balanced constitution was

an important influence on republican political thinkers, for example Montesquieu and Thomas

Jefferson.124 The nineteenth-century German historian Theodor Mommsen (1817–1903) praised the

unusual transparency and objectivity of Polybius’ Histories.125 Polybian conceptions of cyclical time

were prominent in late-Victorian thinking on the future of the British empire.126 The Oxford historian

J.L. Strachan-Davidson, for instance, saw parallels between British and Roman imperialism, published

a standard textbook edition, Selections from Polybius in 1888.127 Toynbee echoed the opinion of a

young Oscar Wilde, for whom Polybius represented the culmination of the Greek historical method

and the virtues of the ideal, politically engaged historian.128

On a discursive level, there was a considerable overlap between E.S. Shuckburgh’s 1889 translation

of Polybius’ Histories, possibly used by Toynbee during his undergraduate years, and certain phrases

found in Toynbee’s later writings. Shuckburgh’s translation depicts Rome and Carthage as ‘states that

were rivals for universal empire.’129 The idea of ‘universal empire’ was important in Toynbee’s

historical thinking from at least 1920, when he compared the dynamics of the ‘universal empires’ of

123 McNeill, p. 287. 124 Pocock, pp. 484, 539. 125 Theodor Mommsen, The History of Rome, trans. by W.P. Dickson (London: W. Clowes and Sons, 1862), II, p. 464. 126 Duncan Bell, ‘From Ancient to Modern in Victorian Imperial Thought’, Historical Journal, 49.3 (2006), 735–59 (p.

754). 127 Oswyn Murray, ‘Ancient History, 1872–1914’, p. 341. 128 Luke Pitcher, ‘Polybius and Oscar Wilde: Pragmatike Historia in Nineteenth Century Oxford’, in Polybius and His

Legacy, ed. by Nikos Miltsios and Melina Tamiolaki (Boston: De Gruyter, 2019), pp. 417–444 (pp. 436–37). 129 Polybius, 1.3.

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the Abbasid caliphate and ancient Rome in a letter to Murray.130 A ‘universal state’ emerging as the

sole victor in a devastating international conflict was central to Toynbee’s later schemata of

civilisations.131 The blueprint for this appears to be the wars between Carthage and Rome in second

century BC, the central conflict in Polybius’ Histories. For Toynbee, whether the Hellenic ‘universal

state’ would be Carthaginian or Roman was ‘the real issue of the Hannibalic War.’132 Toynbee later

wrote a two-volume history of the Punic Wars entitled Hannibal’s Legacy, his most extensive piece

of original classical scholarship.133 There are also argumentative similarities between Polybius and

Toynbee. Polybius’ contention that second-century Mediterranean history was characterised by ‘the

tendency of all is to unity’ is echoed in Toynbee’s 1931 assertion that modernity was defined by ‘the

tendency of all human affairs to become international.’134 Likewise, in 1926, Toynbee insisted that

historians must use an international perspective to grasp the ‘unity of life’.135 The early pages of the

Study depict 1918 as the culmination of a fifty-year tendency towards international economic and

social integration.136

The Polybian influences on Toynbee run deeper than these discursive resemblances. Polybian holism

provided Toynbee with a conceptual framework for his writings on international politics and world

history. In Experiences (1969), one of two autobiographies, Toynbee noted that, ‘I have gained from

my classical education… a life-long conviction that human affairs do not become intelligible until

they are seen as a whole.’ Like Murray and Zimmern, Toynbee held that the philosophical holism of

antiquity was essential for attempting to understand the level of integration visible in the modern

international system. Further, holism offered an alternative to the preoccupation with the nation-state

in modern political theory and an epistemological antidote to academic specialisation. A consistent

intellectual engagement with, and admiration for, Polybius pushed Toynbee towards the

‘comprehensive view of human affairs’ that characterised his work.137 It was in this mind that Toynbee

approached his first large-scale historical project. In 1924, Toynbee was invited by the Royal Institute

of International Affairs to write an annual overview of international events as a follow up to the

institute’s multi-volume History of the Peace Conference of Paris (1920–24), edited by the historian

130 Toynbee to Murray, 9 March 1920, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. The Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad became the ‘universal

state’ of the ‘Islamic Civilization’ in Toynbee, Study, I, p. 67. 131 Toynbee, Study, I, p. 73; Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 2. 132 Toynbee, Study, II, p. 21. 133 Arnold Toynbee, Hannibal’s Legacy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1965). 134 Polybius, 1.3; Toynbee, ‘World Sovereignty and World Culture’, p. 753. 135 ‘Inaugural Lecture’ (1926), p. 4, Toynbee Papers, Box 3. 136 Polybius, 1.3; Toynbee, Study, I, p. 14. The phrase ‘a tendency towards unity’ also appears in the Study in a quotation

taken from Jan Smuts’s Holism and Evolution (1926). Smuts’s influence on Toynbee has been noted by Lang, but given

Toynbee’s grounding in the classics and his claims in Experiences his idea of holism was also inspired by Polybius. Lang,

pp. 772–73. 137 Toynbee, Experiences, p. 108.

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H.W.V. Temperley.138 The annual Survey of International Affairs was conceived by James Headlam-

Morley and G.M. Gathorne-Hardy as a means of ‘moulding public opinion on foreign affairs’ and an

informative tool for policy-makers, statesmen and publicists.139 Toynbee agreed with this purpose, but

envisaged the Surveys as more than a tool for public information and policy-making. They were an

exercise in a form of global contemporary history, one that adopted a cohesive perspective on world

affairs. Indeed, Toynbee’s Director of Studies role at Chatham House was combined with an LSE

chair in international history from 1926. Toynbee self-consciously applied a Polybian interpretation

of world politics to the Surveys. The first volume began with a quote from Polybius:

The coincidence by which all the transactions of the world have been orientated in a single

direction and guided towards a single goal is the extraordinary characteristic of the present age.

… The unity of events imposes upon the historian a similar unity of composition in depicting

for his readers the operation of the laws of Fortune upon the grand scale, and this has been my

own principal inducement and stimulus in the work which I have undertaken. The study of

general contacts and relations and of general resemblances and differences is the only avenue

to a general perspective, without which neither profit nor pleasure can be extracted from

historical research.140

The structure of the Surveys followed Polybius’ historical methodology and reflected Toynbee’s

conviction that all societies were united into one international system.141 The introductory section of

each volume identified a single overarching narrative or theme from the year’s political events; the

main body went on to detail political and diplomatic occurrences. This classically inspired generalism

was much to Headlam-Morley’s dismay: ‘Headlam-Morley thinks it [the Survey] is too much in the

Oxford manner, by which, I think, he means too much like “Greats”.’142 Nonetheless, Toynbee stuck

to his method, and a similar unity of composition and global vision structured his understanding of the

task of the historian.

Toynbee believed that, unlike the modern specialist and technical historian, Polybius had created a

‘panoramic history’ defined by an ecumenical unity of vision that could shed light on global historical

processes and events in different epochs.143 He alleged that all great historians were inspired to write

by ‘direct personal experience of some public event’ that they recognised as having both deep roots in

138 McNeill, p. 122. 139 G.M. Gathorne Hardy’s preface to Toynbee, Survey, 1920–1923, p. v. 140 Toynbee, Survey, 1920–1923, p. x. Polybius, 1.4. This translation is found in Toynbee, Greek Historical Thought, p.

26. 141 Hall, ‘“Time of Troubles”’, p. 28. 142 Toynbee to Murray, 2 June 1924, Toynbee Papers, Box 72. 143 Toynbee, Study, III, p. 313.

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the past and a profound effect of the future.144 Polybius’ work was an attempt to explain ‘an event for

which the past affords no precedent’, namely how ‘almost the whole inhabited world was conquered

and brought under the dominion of the single city of Rome’.145 Toynbee believed that historical

processes underlying the development of the international system and the rise of the West to global

dominance were a comparably universal—and, in some senses, unprecedented—historical subject. He

sought to understand this process in the Study of History, using a comparative historical method that

was itself partly inspired by Polybius’ assertion only ‘the comparative method of study and analysis’

could reveal the ‘fundamental points’ and ‘the essential elements in History’ that are occluded by ‘the

method of dissection in compartments’.146

Toynbee located Polybius’ contribution to historiography in a universal focus and a comparative

methodology of history, both of which also characterised A Study of History. During the interwar

years, the first six volumes of the Study appeared in two batches: volumes I–III in 1934 and volumes

IV–VI in 1939. The draft manuscripts of the earlier volumes were read by Murray and Zimmern, as

well as R.H. Tawney, Lawrence Hammond, G.P. Gooch, N.H. Baines, and H.K. Patton.147 In this

systematic philosophy of history, Toynbee argued the essential unit of historical study was civilisation

and that discontinuity between different civilisations was the phenomenon at the heart of world

history. A civilisation was a supra-state society that encompassed an array of national communities

into one single and indivisible whole with a distinct identity both spatially and across historical time.

Throughout history there were 19 civilisations (five of which existed in Toynbee’s day), four

‘abortive’ civilisations and five ‘arrested’ civilisations. Civilisations grow through the successful

responses of creative individuals to a series of ordeals, a regular and recurring process he terms

‘Challenge-and-Response’. They break down and disintegrate when society fails to overcome

successive challenges. This begins a period of internal conflict and anarchy, the ‘Time of Troubles’,

which ends when a minority forcefully imposes its dominance on a society in the creation of a

‘universal state’. Further, all historic and contemporary civilisations were ‘philosophically’ analogous

because they were ‘dynamic movements of an evolutionary kind’ that obeyed a similar ‘law of motion’

based upon the Bergsonian notion of the élan vital, the vital impetus that drives creative evolution.148

The comparative analysis of civilisations would reveal the true nature of history. Toynbee hoped that

it would also explain Western global hegemony and the international crisis.

144 Toynbee, ‘The Greek Door’, p. 293. 145 Polybius, 1.1. 146 Polybius, quoted in Toynbee, Greek Historical Thought, p. 155. Polybius compared Roman dominion to the great

empires of the past: the Persians, the Spartans and the Macedonians. Polybius 1.2. 147 Hutton, p. 418. 148 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 16, 27–50, 53, 169, 176.

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Toynbee’s internationalism was integrated into his philosophy of history, which, as Ian Hall notes,

was ‘a very present-minded enterprise.’149 Reflecting a long-held distaste for militarism and war,

Toynbee contended that ‘an unceasing round of internecine warfare’ was ‘the principal cause of the

breakdown and disintegration of… the civilizations that have already gone the way of all flesh.’150

Furthermore, Toynbee projected his critique of modern theories of state sovereignty and realist notions

of international anarchy onto the history of civilisations. The ‘Time of Troubles’ was, essentially, a

period of international anarchy dominated by the institution of the sovereign ‘parochial state’. A

civilisation’s ‘Time of Troubles’ was marked by its articulation into a multiplicity of local and

antagonistic states which then engaged in internecine warfare of an increasing intensity and

destructiveness until one state emerged as the sole world-conquering survivor.151 This idea was heavily

influenced by Oswald Spengler’s argument that the struggle for hegemony in an ‘Era of Warring

States’ characterises a Kultur as it degenerates into a static Zivilisation.152 However, it also reflected

Toynbee’s personal disgust at the destructive scale of modern industrialised warfare and the atrocities

he witnessed in the Near East. For Toynbee, the chaotic ‘Time of Troubles’ signified the progressive

decline of a civilisation’s creative power.

In the first three volumes of the Study, published in 1934, Toynbee argued that the lack of creative

vitality became manifest when a civilisation’s dominant minority ‘having lost the power to influence

and attract, seeks instead to impose itself by force.’153 This line of argument echoed J.R. Seeley’s

contention that force was an inorganic principle of political cohesion.154 In classical history, this

process was signalled by the establishment of the Roman empire by Augustus in 31 BC, which ended

a ‘Time of Troubles’ that began with the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War in 431 BC—a neat four-

century period that Toynbee paradoxically applied to the history of all civilisations.155 For Toynbee,

the Roman global order was only a veneer, a temporary ‘rally’ which could delay but not permanently

arrest the ruin of Hellenic civilisation, for beneath the surface Roman society was in revolt.156 The

second batch of volumes of the Study was written in the more politically unstable world of the later

1930s and published in September 1939. The collapse of the League’s collective system after the

Italian invasion of Abyssinia, the Spanish Civil War, and a looming conflict with Nazi Germany

provided a stormy backdrop to Toynbee’s mediations on history. Criticism of the League, often from

149 Hall, ‘“Time of Troubles”’, p. 29. 150 Toynbee, Study, V, p. 189. 151 Toynbee, Study, I, p. 173; Toynbee, Study, III, p. 150; Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 3. 152 Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, trans. by C.F. Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1928), II, pp. 416–17. 153 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 188–89. 154 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, p. 229. 155 Toynbee, Study, I, p. 53. 156 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 61.

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prominent supporters like Zimmern, latched onto its failure to challenge aggressive action by

sovereign states, even League members like Italy.157 In this intellectual environment, Toynbee argued

that it was specifically the inability of a civilisation’s ‘creative minority’ to conceptualise politics

beyond the institution of the ‘parochial state’ that demonstrated the loss of its élan vital: ‘the Hellenic

Society brought itself to ruin by an inveterate idolization of City-State Sovereignty; and a similar

infatuation with the sovereignty of national states is the corresponding aberration that threatens now

to bring ruin upon us.’158 By the late 1930s, therefore, the history of antiquity was both consciously

and urgently didactic. Toynbee treated world history as heuristic, a source of knowledge and

experience that revealed the various alternatives for international relations.159

Modern globalisation was a key concern in Toynbee’s philosophy of history. Indeed, he told Lionel

Curtis that the Study was ‘really the historical background to the Survey’, and during the 1930s there

was a significant cross-over of ideas between the two projects.160 Toynbee asserted that the economic,

imperial and technoscientific developments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had

created along Western lines of development a global economy and an international comity of states.161

But global unification had not erased the distinctive character and spirituality of the world’s many

cultures.162 The contemporary crisis emerged from Western hegemony and the growing pains of the

expanding ‘Western-made “Great Society”’.163 A global community was, however, only possible

along Western lines, for the other living civilisations were not materially or spiritually strong enough

to create the political framework for the universal socio-economic forces of democracy and

industrialisation.164 As Michael Lang argues, ‘Toynbee read this global theme back into various large-

scale social orders of the past.’165 Indeed, Toynbee’s notion of civilisation was conceptually tied to

that of the international system. Firstly, each historic civilisation contained an international system

characterised by the balance of power.166 Secondly, like the modern system of states, civilisations

were economically and socially integrated entities united by commerce and culture. Conscious of

occupying a distinct geopolitical space, both aimed towards some form of ordered political unity and

internal peace. Civilisations and the international system centring on the League of Nations were also

linked by their shared aspirations to a moral ideal, the creation of an ordered ‘Great Society’.167 Indeed,

157 Hall, Dilemmas of Decline, pp. 32–33. 158 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 319. 159 Brewin, p. 285. 160 Toynbee to Curtis, 4 March 1932, MS Curtis 6, fol. 99. 161 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 14, 27. 162 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 35, 150. 163 Toynbee, Study, I, p. 187; Toynbee, Study, III, p. 204. 164 Toynbee, Study, IV, pp. 162, 170, 179. 165 Lang, pp. 770–71. 166 Toynbee, Study, III, p. 301. 167 Toynbee, Study, III, pp. 234, 373.

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a stable international order was essential to providing a secure and enduring political framework for

the established socio-economic and cultural order of a particular civilisation. However, internal peace

did not mean that a civilisation would avoid collapse, for equally crucial was the manner in which

international order was established.

Toynbee believed that the experiences of world history, especially classical antiquity, revealed that

anarchy was an almost permanent factor, and not an essential feature, of international affairs.168 The

modern League of Nations and the Roman empire both demonstrated the possibility of transcending

anarchy through the establishment of world order, but they offered two radically different paths. For

those searching for a solution to the problem of establishing a political world order, ‘Hellenic history

supplies us with a key to the riddle’. This was only if theorists and politicians first assumed that the

nation-state was not totally distinct from pre-modern forms of political association, and that ‘parochial

state sovereignty’ was recurrent historical principle. Although the nation-state and the polis ‘may

differ from one another in size and construction and structure… they are all akin in being polities of

the parochial species, mere fractions or articulations of the society within which, and for which, they

exist.’ Thus, classical attempts to build a world order from a multiplicity of small contending city-

states were instructive to modern statesmen and intellectuals reckoning with nation-state sovereignty:

‘the challenge of the conflict between Parochial Sovereignty and world order confronts our world to-

day as it confronted the Hellenic World from the fifth to the last century BC.’169

The history of ancient interstate relations proved to Toynbee that there were two routes of escape from

the modern ‘world crisis’. The more terrible alternative was the global dominance of a single

hegemonic world power akin to ancient Rome that had established its position through defeating all

rivals in a war of annihilation. This argument followed Murray’s interpretation of the parallels between

the Peloponnesian War and the First World War. Murray asserted that wartime Athenian politics was

divided between two factions, a group that favoured ‘Peace by Negotiation’ led by Nicias and a

‘Knock-out-Blow party’ that followed the demagogue Cleon. Nicias’ faction recognised that a war to

the bitter end would corrupt Athens, exhaust both sides and encourage ‘the ruin of Greece as a

whole.’170 Zimmern also saw Cleon as ‘the very embodiment of the mad war-spirit which was driving

Athens down the decline.’171 Toynbee viewed militaristic, world-conquering Rome as the destroyer

168 Arnold Toynbee, Survey of International Affairs, 1936 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), pp. 33–35; Castellin,

p. 621. 169 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 319. 170 Murray, ‘Aristophanes and the War Party’, p. 33. 171 Zimmern, Greek Commonwealth, p. 429.

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of Greek internationalism and, with it, classical civilisation.172 He integrated this into a liberal concern

with the advance of fascism during the 1930s, associating the Roman path to international order with

modern totalitarian states, both of which were ‘institutional enormities’.173 This also reflected the more

general ‘war anxiety’ that characterised British political discourse and intellectual culture during the

later 1930s.174 Toynbee channelled these influences and fears when outlining the Roman solution to

the crisis of the West: ‘a “knock-out bow” which will unify our world by force, and at the same time

ruin our civilization, in the Roman manner, is a catastrophe of which we now live in daily dread.’175

Overy contends that from 1929 Toynbee was inspired partly by a need to reject Edward Gibbon’s

claim that Western civilisation would avoid the fate of the Roman Empire.176 Toynbee compared the

modern ‘world crisis’ to the decline and fall of Rome, but, like Gibbon, he believed that the modern

West could avert such a fate. This was also how Toynbee was received by contemporary reviewers,

with the Times Literary Supplement noting in 1939 that ‘he has shown that the triumphs of barbarism

are illusory and that the Galilean has indeed conquered.’177 For Toynbee, Rome was the blueprint for

civilisational collapse. But ancient history also offered constructive solutions to the problem of world

order through the Boeotian League (c.550–335 BC), the ‘Chalcidian Federal Commonwealth’ (c. 432–

378 BC), the Aetolian Confederacy and the Achaean Confederacy during the third century, and the

Athenian-led Delian League (478–431 BC). What united these experiments in international order was

a recognition of the historical imperative of adjusting the institution of ‘parochial sovereignty’—which

Toynbee viewed anachronistically as a continuous and destructive presence in world history—to

accommodate rising global forces through some form of federation. Following his trusted guide

Polybius, Toynbee praised the Achaean Confederacy for successfully balancing ‘traditional city-state

autonomy’ with collective action through ‘the common Government of the federal union.’178

Toynbee’s language and concern with the global position of Europe suggests this was an intervention

in contemporary debates on regional or international federalism, rejuvenated by Aristide Briand’s plan

for a closer European union, approached through Toynbee’s characteristic lens of classical history.179

But Toynbee considered the Delian League the archetypal attempt at international order in the smaller

world of the ancient Aegean. This was unsurprising, given Toynbee’s admiration for Zimmern’s

interpretation of ancient Athens, although, unlike Zimmern, Toynbee acknowledged the coercive

172 Toynbee, ‘World Sovereignty and World Culture’, p. 762; Toynbee, Study, IV, pp. 265, 318–19. 173 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 211. 174 Hucker, pp. 15–16; Overy, pp. 314–62. 175 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 318. 176 Overy, pp. 36–37. 177 ‘Visciti, Galilæe’, Times Literary Supplement, 19 August 1939, p. 491. 178 Toynbee, Study, IV, pp. 308–10, 268. 179 Toynbee discussed the Briand plan in Toynbee, Survey, 1930, pp. 131–42. Murray advocated European federation in

Murray, Liberality and Civilization, p. 46.

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elements in the early Delian League. He recognised that the cities of Scyros and Carystus were forcibly

brought into the alliance and that Athens imposed tributes to the federal treasury at Delos on weaker

members, but he portrayed these actions as ‘Oriental’ imports ‘alien from the indigenous Hellenic

tradition of city-state sovereignty.’ Nonetheless, the Delian League represented an attempt at the

‘permanent limitation of City-State Sovereignty by voluntary agreement between the city-states

themselves for the sake of providing the necessary political security for a now indispensable economic

intercourse.’180 The Greek leagues and federations offered a far more palatable outline of global order

than the forceful, despotic and paralysing Roman solution to the perennial problem of sovereignty.

During the late 1930s, there was a rising interest in federalist approaches to international order among

Anglo-American political thinkers. Responding to the collapse of the League of Nations, a group of

British intellectuals argued that international law and institutions could not in themselves prevent war,

and that sovereign states must federate into a transnational polity. These figures drew upon the late-

eighteenth-century American Federalist Papers and attempts to create an imperial federation in the

early-twentieth-century Britain. The British Federal Union was founded in 1938 to advocate for

international federation, and its members included Lionel Curtis and Philip Kerr, central figures in the

Round Table movement. Ian Hall notes that Toynbee flirted with the federalist movement in the early

1940s.181 However, the discussions of Greek leagues and confederations in A Study of History suggest

that Toynbee’s federalist commitments stretched back into the 1930s and that Toynbee was a

potentially significant influence on the later federalists. In 1931, Toynbee argued that the nation-state

could perform a positive function if political sovereignty was transferred ‘to some institution

representing society as a whole’, by which he meant international society. Toynbee did not desire to

totally restrict each individual state’s freedom to act. Rather, a federal union would make foreign

policy a regional consideration and war an irrelevance, allowing states to focus on improving the

quality of their citizens’ lives through education, economic equality and public health. By transcending

local sovereignty, states could be transformed from ‘killing-machines’ motivated by the imperative to

control legitimate violence within and beyond their borders into something resembling Zimmern’s

rendering of the Athenian polis, ‘local associations for mutual benefit.’182

Toynbee’s thinking appears to have been strongly influenced by E.A. Freeman’s philhellenist

interpretation of federalism as a compromise between the vitality of political participation in the

classical polis and the necessity of large political units in the modern world. He told Curtis that it was

180 Toynbee, Study, IV, pp. 212, 209. 181 Hall, Dilemmas of Decline, pp. 75–76; Rosenboim, pp. 100–129. 182 Toynbee, ‘World Sovereignty and World Culture’, p. 771.

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important to have ‘a certain homogeneity of moral and political tradition and outlook’, a form of

political unity seen as characteristic of the polis, when creating a federation.183 From the early 1930s,

Toynbee was concerned by the decline of European global supremacy, which he interpreted as the

‘dwarfing’ of the small states of western Europe by larger peripheral (and mostly non-white) states

such as Brazil, Canada, China, India and the United States.184 He later praised ancient federalism as

‘the only terms on which the city-states in the heart of Greece could survive politically in a world in

which the average unit-size of a sovereign state had already increased.’185 He highlighted the Achaean

League, which had enabled the smaller Greek states to counterbalance the enormous size and strength

of Macedon. Throughout the 1930s, Toynbee’s internationalism, classicism and historical thought

were intertwined as he inched towards a programme of world order based on some modern iteration

of a classical federation of city-states. By 1939, Toynbee’s views on this upwards transfer of

sovereignty had crystallised, as he saw classical attempts at interstate federation and confederacy as

an instructive model for contemporary international affairs. Writing to Curtis, Toynbee stressed that

the failure of the League of Nations was due to its inability to override state sovereignty and suggested

that a federation of Western democracies could resolve the international crisis by peacefully

establishing a united world, thereby avoiding ‘the Roman solution’ to the problem of international

order.186

The Greek federal approach to world order was more in tune with dynamics of creative vitality central

to the growth of a civilisation as it was based on the peaceful ‘adjustment’ of political institutions to

a new environment.187 By Toynbee’s own admission, this was a profoundly Polybian interpretation of

constitutional and political change. Indeed, Polybius was central to the optimistic message that

underlined A Study of History: that the West could escape cycles of social decline. In Experiences,

Toynbee expressed a personal empathetic identification with Polybius, in addition to the more overt

methodological similarities between the two: ‘the world in which I have the greatest intellectual and

emotional stake, is not this present-day Western-style one. It is the Aegean and Mediterranean World

of two thousand years and more ago—of, say, Polybius’s time.’188 Toynbee sensed deeply that he and

Polybius lived at similar stages in the histories of their respective civilisations. Two crucial ideas

within the Study emerged from this felt connection, and both were also central to the internationalist

183 Toynbee to Curtis, 16 February 1939, MS Curtis 13, fols. 190–91. On Freeman and federalism, see Duncan Bell, ‘Alter

Orbis: E.A. Freeman on Empire and Racial Destiny’, in Making History: Edward Augustus Freeman and Victorian

Cultural Politics, ed. by G.A. Bremner and Jonathan Conlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the British Academy,

2015), pp. 217–235; Collini, Winch, and Burrow, pp. 221–22. 184 Toynbee, ‘World Sovereignty and World Culture’, pp. 768–70. 185 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 268. 186 Toynbee to Curtis, 16 February 1939, MS Curtis 13, fols. 190–91. 187 The alternative to adjustment was an Augustan-style revolution. Toynbee, Study, IV, pp. 153–55, 209. 188 Toynbee, Experiences, pp. 107–8.

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convictions underpinning Toynbee’s philosophy of history. In Book VI of his Histories, Polybius

confronted the cyclical model of political change characteristic of earlier Greek philosophy, for

example Plato. The ‘regular cycle of constitutional revolutions’ provides the framework through

which Polybius evaluated the rise of Roman power.189 Polybius argued that the combination of

aristocratic, oligarchic and democratic forms of rule in Rome’s mixed constitution enabled Rome to

avert, or at least postpone, the seemingly inevitable cycle of political decline: ‘by being accurately

adjusted and in exact equilibrium, the whole might remain long steady like a ship sailing close to the

wind.’190

Toynbee’s interpretation of ‘arrested’ civilizations drew heavily on the Polybian logic of history.

According to Toynbee, there had been five ‘arrested’ civilizations throughout history: the

‘Polynesians’, the ‘Esquimaux’ (the indigenous populations of the Arctic), the ‘Nomads’ of the

Eurasian steppe, the ‘‘Osmanlis’ (Ottoman Turks), and the ‘Spartans’.191 These civilisations had

‘arrested’ primarily because they lacked institutional flexibility. As societies organised into rigid caste

systems, and without a holistic view of society, they were unable to respond creatively to the

challenges that they faced and remained perpetually locked in an early stage of social development.

This resembled the arguments of late-Victorian anthropological history, especially Henry Maine’s

belief that modern Western progress had an acute pathos in the immobilising forces of custom and

status, or ‘Oriental stagnation’. Indeed, Toynbee’s assertion that ‘creative minorities’ were central to

the progress of civilisation recalled Maine’s anti-democratic argument in Popular Government (1885)

that progress was always the work of elites.192 However, a more overt and pervasive influence was

Polybius’s assertion that the Roman constitution was adjusted to its environment and reactive to

situational change, which framed Toynbee’s contention that the growth of civilisations depended upon

‘a constant remodelling or readjustment of the most flagrantly anachronistic institutions.’193 Toynbee

disagreed with Polybius on specific historical points, especially the latter’s admiration of militaristic

Sparta.194 Nonetheless, the Polybian idea that the Roman genius lay in confronting problems and

189 Polybius, 6.9. 190 Polybius, 6.10. 191 Toynbee, Study, III, pp. 1–78. 192 Collini, Winch, and Burrow, p. 218. Despite these similarities, Toynbee did not cite Maine in the first six volumes of

A Study of History. Julia Stapleton notes the affinities between Maine’s Gilbert Murray’s assertions of the fragility and

rarity of progress. Julia Stapleton, ‘The Classicist as Liberal Intellectual: Gilbert Murray and Alfred Eckhard Zimmern’,

in Gilbert Murray Reassessed: Hellenism, Theatre, and International Politics, ed. by Christopher Stray (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2007), pp. 261–92, (p. 266). Gilbert Murray was an undergraduate during the mid-1880s, when Maine’s

ideas were highly influential in British intellectual circles. In a letter to The Times in 1945, Murray quoted Maine’s

contention that ‘Except the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origin.’ Gilbert

Murray, letter to The Times, 18 April 1945, p. 5; Henry Maine, Village Communities, 4th edn, (London: John Murray,

1885), p. 238. On the reception of Maine, see Raymond Cocks, Sir Henry Maine: A Study in Victorian

Jurisprudence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 141–195. 193 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 133. 194 Polybius, 6.45, 6.48, 6.50.

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finding adaptive solutions, of ‘continually adopting reforms from knowledge gained in disaster’, was

the critical intellectual inspiration for the central dynamic at the heart of Toynbee’s philosophy of

history, his argument that civilisations develop through a process of ‘Challenge-and-Response’

whereby creative minorities successfully responded to certain ordeals, and that civilisations collapse

when these responses fail.195

Toynbee and the historical profession

Toynbee’s expansive historical thought offers a number of insights into the nature of interwar English

historiography. Toynbee’s purpose was not to use history to comment on or craft an English national

identity in the manner of Macaulay, Stubbs, Freeman or Acton. He employed a transnational historical

lens to elaborate an international identity for a divided West, one that he felt was more in tune with

the global forces of industrial modernity than nationality. In this respect, Toynbee’s world history

must be situated in the wider intellectual context of internationalist education programmes in interwar

Britain, campaigns for citizenship education, and the various attempts to combat the promotion of

nationalist histories in British schools and universities. A Study of History was a lengthy contribution

to a larger debate on the intertwined future of British education and international relations, from the

perspective of the philosophy of history. It also reacted against specific methodological and

intellectual trends within the discipline of history, in particular the increasing specialisation and

professionalisation of British historiography from the late nineteenth century and the rise of a

‘scientific’ approach to history.196 The early pages defended H.G. Wells’s internationalist history

textbook, Outline of History (1920) against attacks from academic ‘historical specialists’, noting that

the broader public had grasped its value and purpose.197 Toynbee deployed Polybius against these

modern academic trends, contrasting the limitations of the specialist with the ecumenical vision of the

universal historian: ‘it is impossible to obtain from the monographs of historical specialists a

comprehensive view of the morphology of Universal History.’198 Toynbee attacked ‘the

industrialization of historical thought’ through academic specialisation, which he viewed as an

intellectual form of the division of labour through an increasing focus on individual nations and minute

periods of history at the expense of a universal perspective. The career of Theodor Mommsen

illustrated this trend. After writing a monumental work, The History of the Roman Republic (1854–

195 Polybius, 6.10; Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 271–99. 196 Ian Hesketh, The Science of History in Victorian Britain (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016), pp. 35–53. 197 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 4–5. 198 Polybius, Histories, 8.2; Toynbee, Greek Historical Thought, p. 158.

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56), Mommsen turned his attention to the more precise—and, in Toynbee’s opinion, less intellectually

vital—task of cataloguing Latin inscriptions and the corpus of Roman constitutional law. Toynbee

believed that academic specialisation produced ‘synthetic histories’ like the multi-volume Cambridge

Ancient History, which are testament to laboriousness, factual knowledge, mechanical skill, and the

organising power of society, not the scale and depth of an author’s historical vision.199

Toynbee is rarely discussed in Michael Bentley’s account of twentieth century British historiography,

an intriguing oversight given the scale of Toynbee’s readership after 1945. This omission is

significant, for Toynbee’s work disrupts the boundaries that Bentley establishes between historical

‘modernism’ and a lingering commitment to whig narrative history. Bentley defines historical

‘modernism’ as academic specialisation and the professionalisation of historical practice, which

entailed empirical methodological rigour and a hostility to generalist historical narratives.200 Whig

historiography must, as James Kirby argues, be defined fluidly. Nonetheless, there are a number of

overlapping characteristics: a self-confident and progressive narrative structure, a focus on the

historical uniqueness and development of English constitutional liberty, and an association with

Protestantism.201 By the interwar period, narrative historiography was experiencing a considerable

critique, encapsulated in Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History (1931). Butterfield

argued that the whig tendency to fashion a ‘line of causation’ in history leads to ‘an over-simplification

of the relations between events and a complete misapprehension of the relations between past and

present.’202 By c.1930, F.M. Stenton stated with pride that ‘no histories written on the great scale &

inspired by the spirit of former days are being written now.’203 Toynbee’s philosophical critique of

historical linearity was part of this broader intellectual revolt; however, his expansive narrative

challenged the tendency towards specialisation in British historiography. Toynbee believed that

micro-historical approach could never understand or connect global phenomena like the international

crisis or the rise of Western hegemony. Indeed, A Study of History responded to the absence that

Stenton praised, as well as a public need to understand 1930s international politics.

In his inaugural lecture as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge in 1902, J.B. Bury

insisted that ‘history is a science, no less and no more’.204 From the late-Victorian era, a growing

199 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 3–5. 200 Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, pp. 2–3. For a critique of Bentley’s interpretation of the development of British

historiography from ‘whig’ to ‘modernist’ and ‘postmodernist’, see Kirby, Historians and the Church of England, p. 7. 201 James Kirby, ‘Religion and History in Stubbs’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 65.i (2014), 84–110 (p. 89). 202 Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931), pp. 11–12. 203 F.M. Stenton (c.1930), quoted in Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, p. 196. 204 J.B. Bury, ‘The Science of History’, in Selected Essays of J.B. Bury, ed. by H.W.V. Temperley (Cambridge: The

University Press, 1930), pp. 3–22 (p. 4).

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number of historians advocated a ‘scientific’ approach to the study of history grounded in the

discussion of historical ‘facts’, the dissection of primary material and archives, the contextualisation

of documentary evidence, and a focus on a minute period of history. Emblematic of this trend was the

medievalist T.F. Tout, who suggested in a paper entitled ‘An Historical Laboratory’ that historians

should employ ‘the methods of the observational sciences.’205 Such detailed and microscopic

examinations of the past began to subvert and replace the spacious narratives and moralising that

characterised mid-Victorian and whig historiography.206 The approaches and aims of the practitioners

of this kind of ‘scientific’ history were opposed to any systematic and all-encompassing philosophy

of history. Acton and Stubbs were both critical of Henry Thomas Buckle’s generalist (and unfinished)

History of Civilization in England, the first volume of which appeared in 1857.207 Stubbs went so far

as to tell E.A. Freeman, ‘I do not believe in the philosophy of history, and so do not believe in

Buckle.’208 These figures, especially Stubbs, sought to break away from the notion of the philosopher

historian.

Toynbee, like Buckle, was self-consciously a philosopher historian and an extremely contemporarily

engaged one. Yet, he simultaneously sought to frame his philosophy of world history with something

resembling a scientific method. He regularly included charts, tables and formulae to elucidate his

theory of civilisational development and the relationship between civilisations, although these were

deployed in a somewhat superficial manner. ‘Classificatory observations’ were used to explain the

relationship between ‘affiliated’ civilisations, resulting in bizarre formulations such as

‘Sinic+Sumeric+Minoan+Mayan’. This was allied to the discourses of the biological and

anthropological sciences, with an early (by Toynbee’s standards) chapter titled ‘The Provisional

Classification of Societies of the Species [of civilisation]’.209 This was a common argumentative move

in what Popper terms the ‘historicist’ approach to the social sciences, which seeks to discover rhythms

and patterns in the past and use these as the basis of making predictions about events. Many historicist

theories were based on ‘scientism’, defined by Popper as the attempt to imitate the language and

methods of science in order to elaborate laws or patterns in social development.210 Toynbee grounded

his history in the comparative methodology of certain sciences like biology, physiology, anthropology,

botany and zoology, which recognised that all manifestations of life were ‘uniquely creative and

205 T.F. Tout quoted in Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, p. 196. 206 Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, pp. 194–201. 207 Hesketh, pp. 41–48. As Semmel argues, Buckle also aspired to write a form of scientific history. Buckle’s History of

Civilization in England was ‘a demonstration of how the principles of science might be applied to the writing of history.’

Bernard Semmel, ‘H.T. Buckle: The Liberal Faith and the Science of History’, British Journal of Sociology 27.3 (1976),

370–386. 208 Stubbs to Freeman, 8 November 1857, quoted in Kirby, ‘Religion and History in Stubbs’, p. 108. 209 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 132–34, 129–46. 210 Popper, p. 96.

170

original’ whilst also being ‘in some sense comparable’.211 An organicist interpretation of human

societies was the key intellectual apparatus that enabled Toynbee to bridge, at least superficially, the

science of history and philosophy of history. Drawing on Plato’s idea that societies experience life-

cycles of birth, growth, maturity and decay, Toynbee asserted that ‘societies like individuals are living

creatures, and may therefore be expected to exhibit the same phenomena.’.212 But Toynbee was also

motivated by his conviction that the racist assumptions of nineteenth-century historiography and

science—for example Stubbs’s Constitutional History of England or Freeman’s History of the Norman

Conquest—were deterministic and, therefore, demonstrably false. He attacked nineteenth-century

assumptions that the comparative methods of anthropology was only applicable to primitive societies,

‘the peoples that have no History’, and applied them instead to all human societies and the highest

achievement of human society, civilisation. In the end, however, this allegedly scientific methodology

resulted in the somewhat unscientific conclusion that civilisations were all ‘philosophically

contemporary’.213 Indeed, as Popper notes, Toynbee ignored the contingency of historical

circumstances and was extremely selective with his use of supporting evidence.214 Toynbee’s attempt

to fuse inductive reasoning with a systematic philosophy of world history was often stretched to

intellectual limits which he could only explain away as ‘one of those exceptions that prove the rule.’215

Toynbee’s use of ‘scientific’, empirical and comparative approaches to history was not merely a

recognition of the intellectual authority that an inductive science of history had gained by the early

1930s. He believed that empiricism and philosophy were compatible, and that only empiricism could

prove his general theories of history: ‘if we make an empirical investigation into the facts of human

life as manifested in Civilizations, we actually come across an element of regularity and recurrence…

an aspect to which the comparative method of study can be applied.’216 Yet, Toynbee was in many

ways an embodiment of whig approaches to history. A Study of History is nothing if not a grand

narrative, although Toynbee’s inspiration was more Polybius than Macaulay. Indeed, Toynbee later

reflected that it was his background as a classicist that enabled him to challenge the specialist mould

and approach the study of history in a different register: ‘thanks to the effect on me of my classical

education, the nineteenth-century cult of specialization meant nothing to me.’217 Despite his criticism

of Freeman’s notion of the ‘Unity of History’ and linear visions of history, his own philosophy of

civilisation was based on a form of progressive movement, on a constant tension between the

211 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 178–79. 212 Toynbee, ‘History’, p. 290. 213 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 61, 207–49, 180, 174. 214 Popper, pp. 101–2. 215 Toynbee, Study, I, pp. 59, 139. 216 Toynbee, Study, I, p. 180. 217 Toynbee, Experiences, p. 110.

171

Bergsonian élan vital and collapse into Thucydidean stasis. Toynbee even retained a whig appreciation

of the English constitution, although he did not see it as a unique historical development but rather a

phenomenon that was paralleled by the moderate constitution in the ‘Golden Age of Athenian

democracy’ between 507 and 318 BC.218 Toynbee was a whig-inclined historian writing in a period in

which grand narratives of history were undergoing a considerable intellectual critique. He rejected

linear history, seeing discontinuity as the central phenomenon in history. But he also retained a

vaguely Victorian liberal progressivism, arguing ‘the growths of civilizations are in their nature

progressive movements’ but that ‘this kind of progress cannot properly be described in the spatial

metaphor of “direction”.’219 Bentley argues that, despite the intellectual dominance of modernist

approaches to the study of history after 1914, ‘whig history survived alongside modernism and as a

critique of modernism.’220 However, Toynbee constantly modified and moved between the categories

of modernist and whig history that are central to Bentley’s interpretation of twentieth-century English

historiography. The intellectual inheritance of two overlapping traditions in English historical writing

underpinned the methodology and subject of A Study of History. Toynbee challenged the methods and

ideas of late-Victorian historians, especially Stubbs, by attempting to fuse a philosophy of universal

history with a whig (but not nationalist) grand narrative and an inductive scientific methodology.

Conclusion

When working as a classics tutor at Balliol in 1914, Toynbee compared the Spanish conquest of the

New World to the Roman defeat of Carthage and noted how Roman economic history led him towards

mediations on Norman Angell’s internationalism.221 Throughout his career, Toynbee searched for

connections between distinct and diverse historical phenomena and attempted to write present-minded

history with a liberal internationalist message. The pressures of the First World War and his personal

experiences of the clash of civilisations in the Near East shifted Toynbee’s historical thinking

decisively. This crucial formative period between 1918 and 1924 coincided with a particularly high

level of academic engagement with Greek historical writing, which is central to understanding both

his philosophy of history and his position in twentieth-century British historiography. Ancient Greek

historiography influenced Toynbee on a personal, empathetic level, providing comfort and stability in

the midst of a modernity in crisis, and intellectually, offering a holistic perspective on human affairs

that Toynbee felt was lacking in specialist historical scholarship. By 1924, Toynbee believed that the

218 Toynbee, Study, IV, p. 206. 219 Toynbee, Study, I, p. 128. 220 Bentley, Modernizing England’s Past, p. 4. 221 Toynbee to Murray, 10 April 1914, Toynbee Papers, Box 72.

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essence of the historical method was akin to the process of translation, of finding ‘an equation between

two independent civilisations’.222 Only by taking a generalist, global approach to history could people

understand contemporary international politics, globalisation and the rise of the West, or connect these

phenomena. Under the inspiration of Greek historical thinkers, above all Polybius, Toynbee’s earlier

predilection for parallels between certain historical processes, events and figures developed into the

global approach that characterised the Surveys and the more concrete comparative methodology of A

Study of History. These were, in many ways, one project, their combination of classically inflected

internationalism and world-historical thinking typical of Toynbee’s constant movement between

contemporary politics and the ideas of antiquity. They also contained a broadly optimistic message

that undermines historiographical interpretations of Toynbee’s writings as expressions of interwar

cultural fatalism. Toynbee deployed the historical precedent of classical antiquity to articulate the

divergent routes out of the international crisis of the 1930s, convinced that his civilisation was not

lost.

222 Toynbee, Greek Historical Thought, p. xiv.

173

Conclusion

When Toynbee wrote to congratulate Zimmern on his appointment as Professor of International

Relations in 1930, he recalled fondly his experience as an undergraduate attending Zimmern’s lectures

on ancient history. Toynbee praised Zimmern for ‘thinking about Greek history as something not less

alive than the present’, and hoped that he would continue this approach in his new academic position:

Now you will be lecturing on the modern world, with all that you have seen and done in the

last twenty years to go into the lectures, and the Greek background into the bargain. … With

one foot in Oxford and another in Geneva and another (if you have a third to spare) in London,

you will make a link between Oxford and the world and between Ancient and Modern History.1

For Toynbee, Zimmern’s academic interest in modern international relations did not signify,

necessitate or even benefit from an intellectual shift away from the classics. The practical political

work of the British government and policy-making establishment in London, the diplomatic and

humanitarian efforts of international institutions and organisations in Geneva, and the intellectual

speculations of an Oxford don were interwoven endeavours, all of which benefited from the lessons

of classical antiquity. This was the epitome of classicising internationalism.

The central aim of this thesis has been to uncover the deep relationship between classical learning and

modern international thought in the work of the three intellectuals I label the classicising

internationalists. In doing this, I have helped to develop a more rounded understanding of the

intellectual and disciplinary history of international relations by emphasising the interconnections

between early international relations theory and other academic fields, most notably the classics.

Further, the thesis has amplified recent interpretations of Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern by stressing

the interconnections between their understandings of modern international relations and their

interpretations of the political ideas and historical experience of antiquity. Their internationalism was

grounded in, and inseparable from, their classicism, above all their admiration for the civic ideals and

institutions of fifth-century Athens. The Athenian republican heritage was central to Murray’s and

Zimmern’s theorising of international order, which rested upon an internationalised notion of civic

1 Toynbee to Zimmern, 9 August 1930, MS Zimmern 24, fols. 51–52.

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virtue. A civic internationalism would strengthen the bonds of the global community by encouraging

individuals and states to work cooperatively for common interests. Thus, the thesis has made a

contribution to debates among intellectual historians on the relationship between liberalism and

republicanism, extending the scope of that discussion to the international. Moreover, I have stressed

the importance of educational theories and programmes to understanding early-twentieth-century

liberal internationalism. All three figures imagined the international as a rational and discursive public

space centring on the open political practices and institutions of the League of Nations. International

public opinion, not the nation-state, was sovereign in the post-war order, and fostering internationalist

opinion through educational schemes was critical to the maintenance of international peace. The

international public invoked by the classicising internationalists was conceived through an Athenian

lens, as body of informed, politically engaged, virtuous and responsible citizens who deferred to the

enlightened guardianship of League technocrats and internationalist intellectuals, in the way that the

Athenian demos followed leaders such as Pericles. For the classicising internationalists, Athenian civic

republican values were crucial for constructing modern civic identities on the international scale they

felt was appropriate to an integrated world, and for relocating civic devotion from nation-states to

international institutions. Like Murray and Zimmern, Toynbee saw ancient Greek confederacies as a

model for twentieth-century global order, one that transposed the ideas and institutions of the polis

onto an international stage. But, uniquely, Toynbee approached the problem of international order in

the 1930s through the lens of universal history. Toynbee’s internationalism, classicism and philosophy

of history were intertwined. Ancient history shadowed his thinking about globalisation and

Westernisation, inspired his theory of world history, and underpinned the hopeful internationalist

message that pervaded his interwar writings. By foregrounding the importance of the classical

imaginary in the internationalist writings of this group of prominent public intellectuals, this thesis has

argued that histories of international relations must consider the wider intellectual influences on the

discipline’s foundational theorists. Classical antiquity was a crucial tool as Murray, Toynbee and

Zimmern sought to make sense of world politics during the turbulent interwar years.

For many British intellectuals, the twentieth century was an uniquely and unprecedentedly

international age. The international nature and scale of life was interpreted as having emerged out of

a constellation of modern social, political and economic processes, including the transnational spread

of ideas that followed mass literacy, the rise of democratic institutions and the increasing power of

public opinion, the threat of industrialised warfare, the ease and speed of modern communications,

and a growing global network of interconnected commercial and economic interests. For its advocates,

this new internationalism represented and combined a range of aspirations: the end goal of humanity’s

social evolution, a secure path to permanent peace, the fulfilment of democratic ambitions, or the

175

prospect of liberation from European empire.2 Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern were in many ways

typical of these rising currents of international thought. They viewed internationality as a

characteristically modern condition. In Zimmern’s words, ‘International Relations, as an element of

supreme importance, are a particular feature of our own age.’3 They were convinced that there was a

profound tension between modern global economic integration and the politically fragmented world

of independent nation-states, what Toynbee described as ‘a secular struggle between oecumenicalism

and parochialism’.4 They also stressed the centrality of free trade, international law and institutions,

public opinion, conferences and arbitration, transcultural dialogue, collective security, and

international cooperation to the maintenance of peace. Yet, the writings of the classicising

internationalists encourage us to question the extent to which the new internationalism was conceived

as new. Their thinking about international relations was underpinned by a shared belief in the enduring

importance of the classical world and its particular relevance to the dilemmas and opportunities of

twentieth-century internationality.

Historians recognise that many of the ideas and assumptions of the new internationalism had a longer

history, one that stretched back to Hobbes, the seventeenth-century theorists of the law of nations,

Kantian cosmopolitanism, and Richard Cobden’s arguments about civilising effects of free trade.5

This thesis has challenged the continuing, often implicit assumption that the new internationalism

rested on uniquely modernist premises. For a number of its leading proponents, the new

internationalism had to be grounded in the authoritative precedents of antiquity. Murray, Toynbee and

Zimmern believed that the established fact of modern international interdependence provided an

opportune moment to look back to the classical world for inspiration and guidance in theorising

international institutions. They connected modern international institutions to the ancient past by

situating the international in world-historical time. According to Murray, history was marked by ‘a

constantly repeated effort towards a rational and humane system of international relations… towards

a world order’, one that began in ancient Greece and culminated with ‘the League… both a sign of

this underlying effort towards social unity throughout the world, and an instrument for bringing the

effort to achievement.’6 Because the ancients had grappled with comparable international questions,

the classicising internationalists felt that the literature, philosophy and historical experience of

antiquity offered lessons for theorists of contemporary international order. Moreover, the scale, depth

and complexity of transnational social, economic and political interconnectivity ensured that the

2 Sluga, pp. 2–3. 3 Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, pp. 13–14. 4 Toynbee, Survey, 1931, pp. 16–17. 5 Mazower, Governing the World, pp. 13–42. 6 Gilbert Murray, ‘Epilogue’, in The Evolution of World Peace, ed. by F.S. Marvin (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1933), pp. 192–209 (p. 192).

176

Athenian city-state could act as a structural model for international relations. By transposing the moral

cohesion and civic spirit of the classical polis onto the global stage, ancient Athens offered modernity

an alternative to the nation-state and a framework for theorising a civic international order that held

the unique potential to unite politics and morality.

The writings of Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern reveal that interpretations of the ancient civic

republican heritage shaped the discourses of interwar liberal-idealist internationalism alongside the

liberal notion of the harmony of interests.7 Moreover, the fusion of modern internationalism and the

ancient polis that permeated their work contributed to the development of the languages of

international ethics that emerged during the first half of the twentieth century and are reflected in the

discourses of twenty-first-century global politics, especially those concerning the rights and

obligations of members of the international community. By stressing the importance of civic duties in

international politics, the classicising internationalists sought to align British national interests with

those of international society. Indeed, classicising internationalism was, like many liberal

internationalist accounts of the world, embedded within assumptions about Western cultural and

political superiority and the civilising benefits of European imperial hegemony. Invocations of

classical culture or political thought contained both a qualitative assumption and an implicit link,

through the notion of cultural inheritance, to the contemporary West. Within the context of discussions

of modern international relations, this connection served to cement the West as the intellectual and

political centre of gravity within the international system and the vanguard of a progressive and

peaceful future. Like Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern, the intellectual and political leaders of the

current global order are content with the assumption that international order emerges from universal

liberal and capitalist ideals, a collective design effort, and rational deliberation and cooperative action

between equal partners.8 Sensitivity to political power dynamics suggests that a different story lies

behind projects of international order in the twenty-first century, the aftermath of the First World War,

or the ancient Aegean.

Reconstructing the complex intellectual worlds and political concerns of early-twentieth-century

liberal international theorists and public champions of the League of Nations reveals some of the

tensions at the centre of international liberalism, and exposes how intellectuals attempted to overcome

those tensions. Like many internationalists, Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern sought a means to

7 The notion of harmony of interests underpinned what E.H. Carr referred to as ‘the utopian synthesis’. Carr, Twenty Years’

Crisis, pp. 65–77. 8 Adam Tooze, ‘Everything You Know About Global Order Is Wrong’, Foreign Policy, 30 January 2019

<https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/01/30/everything-you-know-about-global-order-is-wrong/>.

177

transcend the paradox between the universal and the particular at the heart of their visions of global

order. Their international thought juggled liberal political universalism alongside overwhelmingly

Eurocentric moral assumptions and a range of British political, economic and imperial interests. The

classicising of the international was a way to assert a particularist political and cultural heritage as

universal and, therefore, as a natural and inevitable structural basis for international relations. The

idealistic interpretation of fifth-century Athens as the anointed leader, guardian and educator of a free

association of city-states or a Greek commonwealth seeped into the classicising internationalists’

broader view of modern international order. Downplaying the coercive aspects of the ancient Greek

leagues and confederacies worked in tandem with disregarding the hierarchical design of the League

of Nations. Athens was an international not a global city.

Zimmern’s appointment as Professor of International Relations in 1930 symbolised, in many ways,

the high point of classicising internationalism and of the classicising internationalists’ political and

intellectual influence. Through a series of diplomatic successes during the 1920s, the League of

Nations had become a central component of modern political life. As its major champions and

theorists, Murray, Toynbee and Zimmern were important voices in British public and academic debate.

By the end of 1931, the stability that had characterised post-war international relations had been

shattered by the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. The League would not recover its authority, and

struggled to control the escalating international crises of the 1930s. Nor would the classicising

internationalists maintain their influence, as their desire to enforce the Covenant clashed with the

British public’s lack of appetite for war. Their way of thinking about international relations was also

gradually eclipsed by the rise of political realism, a process that accelerated from the early 1940s and

has defined subsequent international relations scholarship. In contemporary discussions of world

politics, there are few proponents of such a rigorous application of classical learning or exemplar to

international relations. American imperialism is interpreted through the lens of Roman history by both

its cheerleaders and critics.9 Thucydides still holds a seat at the table as the herald of a seemingly

recurrent pattern in international relations, the inevitability of war between rival superpowers.10 But

the deep entanglement of classicism and internationalism that defined the writings of Murray, Toynbee

and Zimmern remains a relic of a lost generation of British intellectuals who saw in the modern world

an image of Greek and Roman antiquity.

9 Recent comparisons have been made by the historian Edward J. Watts and the Canadian environmental scientist Vaclav

Smil. Edward J. Watts, Mortal Republic: How Rome Fell into Tyranny (New York: Basic Books, 2018; Vaclav Smil, Why

America Is Not a New Rome (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010). For a historical account of the reception of ancient Rome

in American politics and culture, see Margaret Malamud, Ancient Rome and Modern America (Malden, MA: Wiley-

Blackwell, 2009), pp. 150–185. 10 Allison, Graham T., Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides’ Trap? (Brunswick: Scribe

Publications, 2017).

178

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