British Idealism and International Thought

Pinar Kaymaz Nazli

Description

This book gives a comprehensive account of the British Idealist approach to international relations from the 1880s to 1930s. In an attempt to historically contextualise the shifts in several British Idealists' approaches to the nature of international relations and human rights, it focuses on their reflections on the Second Boer War, the Great War and the League of Nations. The ensuing discussion offers valuable insights into British Idealists' evolving approaches to the topics of imperialism, cosmopolitanism, internationalism, multiculturalism and human rights. While the pioneering Idealists like T.H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet are acknowledged as those who set the tone of discussion on these central issues, works by minor British Idealists such as J.S. Mackenzie, J.H. Muirhead, Henry Jones, R.B. Haldane and H.J.W. Hetherington reveal British Idealism's capacity for adaptation to novel ideational positions under adverse international conditions.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Western philosophy
• Geopolitics
• Human rights

Informations

• Publié par: Andrews UK
• Date de parution: 09 juillet 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781788360395
• Langue: English

Extrait

British Idealism and International Thought
The Development of Human Rights
Nazlı Pınar Kaymaz


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Copyright © 2020 Nazlı Pınar Kaymaz
The right of Nazlı Pınar Kaymaz to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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Preface
This book is a revised version of my PhD dissertation that evolved and expanded throughout the years. The only thing I knew when I started my PhD was that I wanted to tackle the theoretical questions that underlay the concept of human rights and continued to discredit it through its inconsistencies. As a clueless and overconfident student, I was looking for a definitive theoretical answer that would prove and sustain the fact that human rights do exist. I was totally unaware of the existence of British Idealism as a school of thought. Following my adviser James Alexander’s advice, I started reading T.H. Green’s works on rights and then Bosanquet’s works on the state and Ritchie’s reflections on natural rights. During my research visit to Cardiff University’s Collingwood and British Idealism Centre, I also became acquainted with the works of J.S. Mackenzie, J.H. Muirhead, Henry Jones, R.B. Haldane, and H.J.W. Hetherington. While I found abundant material to approach the topic of human rights in the works of all these writers, I also became aware that their thought and writing was a product of their time and it would be a mistake to directly translate their reflections on rights into a defence of human rights as we know it today. The biggest indicator of the futility of such a task was their approach to the matter of imperialism. There were passages in some of their writings that defended the imperial conduct of European powers and would totally discredit any argument that they were unconditionally supporting universal human rights. Thus, it became inevitable to deal at length with the historical specificities of the era they lived in and the political and international climate of which they were a part. When I started to pay attention not only to what they wrote, but also when and under which circumstances they wrote it, the picture became clearer.
The British Idealists’ work was not a flawless and complete defence of universal human rights from the 1880s to 1930s. It was, rather, a story of intellectual evolution and growth that incorporated, through time, the necessary theoretical and conceptual tools that were indispensable for the recognition and maintenance of international human rights. Their thought was by no means perfect, but it is valuable today as it offers a viable way of taking human rights seriously. When Ritchie reflected on the merits of the French Revolution in 1892, he wrote, ‘it is right to ask ourselves how our generation will be judged at the bar of history a hundred years hence… Will they be able to pardon our mistakes and our delusions, because of the spirit in which we tried to leave the world—not worse but a little better than we found it?’ [1] Throughout this book, I tried to be as fair as possible to their work without glossing over the points where I did not agree with them. Of course, the reader will be the judge of my success in this regard .
I have been very lucky to study British Idealism in the 2010s when there already existed a considerable amount of literature on its political, international, and philosophical legacy. I learned the intricacies of the British Idealist line of thought by reading the works of scholars such as Maria Dimova-Cookson, Colin Tyler, William Sweet, and James Connelly. As a PhD student I benefited greatly from James Alexander’s, Lars Vinx’s, Daniel Just’s, and Reşide Ömür Birler’s criticisms and suggestions while developing the arguments that constitute the core of this work. I also had the chance to work under the supervision of David Boucher and Andrew Vincent in 2015 as a visiting researcher and benefited greatly from their guidance. I am especially indebted to David Boucher for his continuing support from 2015 onwards, both during my years as a PhD student and afterwards. In the writing of this book, I am most grateful to Peter Nicholson who read innumerable drafts of this manuscript and invested his valuable time in editing the language and the content of it. Without his expertise in British Idealism and his gracious support I would not have been equal to this task. I am grateful to Graham Horswell and the staff at Imprint Academic for their diligent work in preparing this manuscript for publication. I would also like to thank the editors of the International History Review for letting me use excerpts from an article of mine that was published in their journal. [2]
Lastly, I would like to offer my thanks to my family. I feel especially grateful to my husband, Timur Kaymaz, for his years’ worth of love and encouragement. I dedicate this book to my late grandfather, Talat Gömbül, who probably never heard about British Idealism but it is his image that comes to my mind when I read and write about the pursuance of an ethical life.


1 D.G. Ritchie (1892) ‘1792—Year 1’, International Journal of Ethics , 3 (1), p. 88.

2 Nazli Pinar Kaymaz (2018) ‘From Imperialism to Internationalism: British Idealism and Human Rights’, The International History Review , published online.



Chapter 1
Introduction
A revival of interest in British Idealism is self-evident from the ever-expanding literature on their moral, political, and international theory as well as their metaphysics in the last thirty years. Although this literature is mostly dominated by a few names that can be perceived to be modern advocates of British Idealist philosophy, it is also possible to find references to well-known British Idealists in intellectual historiographies of the long nineteenth century. Especially T.H. Green’s and Bernard Bosanquet’s names are frequently mentioned in the historical accounts of British political thought in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Yet, with a few exceptions, the ‘modern advocates of British Idealism’ confine their attention to the works of the best-known British Idealists. While such an approach has been useful to explain the philosophical basis of a political theory that has long been perceived as an historical eccentricity, today it unnecessarily limits the scope and character of the discussion. Furthermore, possibly due to the contemporary dominance of analytical philosophy, as well as the very limited time period Green produced his work in, there is a lack of interest in the historical specificity of the era during which British Idealism continued to develop and evolve. To have a broader understanding of British Idealism as an evolving school of thought, one firstly needs to broaden the focal point of research to include minor figures in the British Idealist school of thought in the discussion in a substantive way. Doing so automatically expands the timespan one deals with and enables one to observe several British Idealists’ changing and varying reactions to major international phenomena. This study is an attempt to tackle the understudied field of post-Greenian British Idealist international theory.
This work offers an historical reading of the British Idealists’ approach to international relations from 1900 to the 1930s. It starts with British Idealists’ reflections on the British Empire and the general question of the legitimacy of imperialism. In the pre-Great War period the Boer War and its ramifications in the British intellectual arena constituted the larger picture in relation to which it is necessary to understand various British Idealists’ respective positions on imperialism. While F.H. Bradley and D.G. Ritchie are separated from the rest of the school by their almost militaristic imperialism, the remaining names represent a more or less coherent ‘sane’, or moderate, imperialist vein. The sense one gets from a close reading of the British Idealists’ writings during the period from 1900 to 1914 constitutes a striking contrast to the tone they adopted after the outbreak of the Great War. From 1914 onwards, the remaining British Idealists sound a unified chord in condemning imperialism and adopting an internationalist approach to international relations. With a focus on this shift, the main argument of this study emerges from the works of minor British Idealists who wrote extensively during and after the Great War on international relations. It pertains to a conviction that a closer look to this era would contribute greatly to a more nuanced understanding of British Idealist theory of human rights. While the Greenian theory of rights unarguably supplies the basis for such a theory, minor British Idealists’ writings in the post-1914 period reveal how it is translated into a practical pla