ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author analyses the book by the Cambridge political scientist Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, The Choice before Us, dating from 1917, the most in-depth study among those favourable to the project of the League. In Germany, there was an enduring tradition of international legal studies strongly tied to the peace movement and represented by the magazine Zeitschrift fur Volkerrecht und Bundesstaatsrecht, founded by Joseph Kohler in 1906. The author discusses some aspects of the Italian debate considering the positions of the liberal economists Luigi Einaudi and Attilio Cabiati, to whom he shall add the industrialist Giovanni Agnelli. The German peace association Bund Neues Vaterland, of which Walther Schucking himself was a member, was committed to building a new European order founded on law. The faith in a new rules-based international order that circulated among European intellectuals committed to peace in the early years of the war found expression in the peace projects that were elaborated starting from 1917.
