ABSTRACT
Recognition of the inadequacy of state and state-to-state politics in assuring the security of the world’s people came early in the era of total war. The folly and horror of the First World War prompted a number of polemical works advocating world government in place of the sovereign system of states. British socialists John Hobson and Leonard Woolf (husband of novelist Virginia Woolf) wrote books advocating federalism on a global scale as a means of retreating from endemic war and imperialism (Hobson 1915, Woolf 1916). Woolf was a firm advocate of the League of Nations, which emerged after the First World War, whereas Hobson was highly dismissive of the organization as little more than a victors’ club for a war of which he did not approve. Woolf was more positive, considering the League to be furthering the trend established in nineteenth-century international affairs, before the build-up to world war, of international organizations assuming the political stewardship of certain functions from governments.
