A democratic critique of the state: G. Lowes Dickinson's The European Anarchy

In a 1934 biography of friend and mentor Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, E. M. Forster noted that ‘with the possible exception of The Choice Before Us’, all that Dickinson wrote ‘between 1914 and 1918 is likely to be forgotten’. ¹ Forster could not have been more wrong. Dickinson's 1916 book The European Anarchy (hereafter EA), which Forster described as a ‘short, historical survey’, would have enduring impact on the discipline of International Relations (IR) by first popularizing the term ‘international anarchy’. ² Generations of IR scholars have embraced the fundamentally anarchic nature of the international realm as their stock-in-trade, and critics of the idea have been forced to respond to the central role it has played in the discursive terrain of the discipline. ³ Ironically, however, since World War II, the majority of IR scholars writing about the concept have tended to draw very different moral, political and conceptual lessons from the idea of international anarchy than those drawn by Dickinson. When read closely for its content rather than just its title, EA calls both the anarchic state system and the state form itself into question in ways that continue to challenge some of the discipline's fundamental assumptions.