ABSTRACT
Political action is necessarily directed towards achieving one condition which is the first objective of all politicians and their supporters — namely the attainment of political power. The ‘practical politician’ of today is thus a man who occupies himself first with the task of persuading his fellow-citizens to vote him into power and who, when he has succeeded in doing so, finds himself confronted with the necessity of conducting the affairs of his country in the vital field of international politics. The Liberal expectation was soon shown to have been wrong. The Cobdenite Liberals, who postulated the existence of the ‘economic man’ and brought him into their discussions of economic affairs equally, implicitly postulated a ‘political man’. The basic miscalculation of the classical nineteenth-century Liberal was his assumption that the international society resembled in all essentials the law-abiding domestic society which was the background of his individual experience.
