“Debate, Democracy, and the Politics of Panic: Norman Angell in the Edwardian Crisis”

“Debate, Democracy, and the Politics of Panic: Norman Angell in the Edwardian Crisis” by Ryan Anthony Joseph Vieira B.A. A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts Department of History Carleton University Ottawa, Ontario 12 July 2006 © copyright 2006 Ryan Vieira Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 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Abstract “Debate, Democracy, and the Politics of Panic” seeks to recast the historical image of Norman Angell, author of the famous 1910 pacificist book The Great Illusion. Norman Angell has traditionally been depicted as a political failure. Recent work by Hugh Peter Gaitskell McNeal has shown that this is largely because historians have a retrospective bias and have not been able to see Angell as his contemporaries would have done. Even McNeal, however, fails to appreciate fully the political significance of Angell’s work. William Scheuerman’s new book Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time provides a theoretical framework through which Norman Angell’s work can be more justly assessed. The present thesis represents an extension and testing of Scheuerman’s logic and centers on the idea that the patterns of public speech which define any society’s public sphere greatly affect that society’s experience of time and by extension its politics. By altering speech patterns in the public sphere Norman Angell had a significant political impact. In a period of acceleration, when the Edwardian public sphere was becoming increasingly confrontational and anti-liberal, Norman Angell fostered a discursive space, Norman Angellism, which was characterized by the open- ended give and take of meaningful debate. In so doing Norman Angell affected his contemporaries’ experience of time, slowing things down and creating an environment more conducive to liberal practice. Contrary to George Dangerfield’s claim that England’s liberal state was on the verge of collapse in 1914, the story of Norman Angell shows that there were respected agents of liberal revival at work. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents Abstract i Table of Contents ii Introduction 1 Chapter One: Angell Remembered 10 Chapter Two: The Acceleration of the Edwardian Public Sphere 41 Chapter Three: Norman Angellism as a new Discursive Space 68 Conclusion 101 Appendix 109 Bibliography 110 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 1 Introduction In 1909, a relatively unknown author named Ralph Lane adopted the penname Norman Angell and self-published a political pamphlet entitled “Europe’s Optical Illusion.”1 Largely because of his own publicity efforts, Angell’s pamphlet became extraordinarily popular and in 1910 it was expanded into a much larger book entitled The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to their Economic and Social Advantage.2 In 2004,1 wrote a fourth year research paper that examined some of the work Norman Angell published between 1910 and 1914, and attempted to assess its political significance in terms of recent debates regarding the intellectual’s role in politics and society.3 The most noteworthy change between this work and its predecessor is the absence here of an attempt to formulate a comprehensive definition of the term “intellectual.” Instead I have turned my attention to a “character and circumstance” examination of Angell. This approach means that the thesis is based not only on an assessment of Angell, but also on a particular understanding of the Edwardian period (1900-1914) in which he wrote his famous book. Speed is the central concept in this understanding. This work seeks to shed light on the relationship between shifting experiences of time and the patterns of public speech by suggesting answers to the 1 Norman Angell, Europe’s Optical Illusion. London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1909 2 Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power in Nations to their Economic and Social Advantages. Toronto: McClelland and Goodchild, 1910 3 Ryan Vieira, “Norman Angell as an Intellectual,” Unpublished paper prepared for Professor Y.A. Bennett, 2004. The general theoretical foundation for that paper was based on, Arthur Melzer, et al., eds., The Public Intellectual: Between Philosophy and Politics. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. In terms of making the research possible for this thesis I must thank Professor Bruce Elliot for consistently encouraging me to apply for a variety of grants and bursaries. I must also thank the staff members at the Ball State, McMaster, and University of Toronto archives for their assistance. I would also like to thank Professor YA Bennett who supervised the writing of this thesis, read all of the drafts, and contributed fantastic ideas. Finally, I must thank Jocelynn Foster for all of her support during this process. Without all of these people it is certain that the present thesis would have remained nothing but a series of scattered ideas in my mind. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. questions: to what extent did speed influence politics and political discussion in the Edwardian period and how did Angell fit within that framework as a creator of public discourse? The central theory which drives this examination grew out of a recent book published by University of Indiana political theorist, William Scheuerman. Professor Scheuerman’s book, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time, explains recent anti-liberal trends within American politics by grounding them in a broad theoretical and historical framework.4 To this end, he employs the concept of social acceleration, a phenomenon which he sees as having three root causes: technology, capitalism, and the inherently competitive modem state system.5 Scheuerman argues that this phenomenon potentially disfigures liberal democracy by disabling key aspects of it, such as the separation of powers, which rests on a particular set of temporal assumptions.6 According to Scheuerman, increased demands for speed and efficiency tend to benefit the executive, “whose contemporaneous and high-speed temporal contours appear to leave it especially well suited to decision making in a corresponding high-speed social environment.”7 Scheuerman notes that this sense of acceleration becomes increasingly significant in periods of political crisis, when panic grabs hold of the demos, who then insist on change “before it is too late” and are often easily convinced that 4 William Scheuerman, Liberal Democracy and the Social Acceleration of Time. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004 5 Ibid, pp. 15-23 6 Scheuerman sets out the temporal underpinnings of the separation of powers as such: Legislature (forward looking and slow moving), Judiciary (retrospective and slow moving), Executive (contemporaneous and fast-moving). Ibid, pp. 26-70. Also see William Scheuerman, “Liberal Democracy’s Time,” Unpublished paper presented at University of Michigan Political Theory Colloquium, pp. 5-19. For Scheuerman’s earliest expression of this idea see, William Scheuerman, “Liberal Democracy and the Empire of Speed,” Polity. (34), 1, September 2001, pp. 41-69 7 William Scheuerman, “Liberal Democracy’s Time,” p. 30 Reproduced with permission

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