ABSTRACT
Norman Angell and David Mitrany form an intellectual lynch-pin, holding together the Enlightenment philosophical tradition that had produced the perpetual peace project and the twentieth century subject of International Relations. The works of Angell and Mitrany can be seen both as part of the general "crisis of liberalism", and as an attempt to tackle the problem of world peace as a central liberal concern, rather than as an offshoot of liberal domestic ideas. The development of a liberal internationalist peace theory during the nineteenth century highlights the process by which the progress towards peace that was defined in fundamentally moral terms comes, by the twentieth century study of international affairs, to be seen exclusively in material and non-ethical terms. There are dissimilarities in the nuances that Angell and Mitrany give to their works, which often resulted in crucial differences in policy prescription. The crucial relationship for liberal internationalism, in its nineteenth century form, was between war and economic activity.
