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The founding text of International Relations? Norman Angell's seminal yet flawed The Great Illusion (1909–1938)

Abstract Norman Angell's The Great Illusion, which ran through six versions in London between November 1909 and December 1938, has some claim to have launched International Relations as a self-consciously independent yet sub-consciously liberal discipline. Understood to argue primarily that the interlocking fragility of the international financial system stopped modern states profiting from aggression, its ideas were promoted by a specially created foundation as ‘the science of international politics’ or ‘international polity’. Since the 1970s, moreover, the book has been credited by scholars with pioneering the concepts of interdependence and globalisation. Now, therefore, it is less its seminal qualities than its fundamental flaws that require emphasis. Its celebrated claim about the irenic implications of financial interdependence was widely misunderstood as implying the impossibility, in addition to the disutility, of aggression. And a little-noticed second argument – that political control over territory brought no substantive benefits – was not only implausible but inconsistent with Angell's declared opposition to cuts in arms spending. The Great Illusion's policy recommendations were thus ambiguous, and altered from edition to edition as its author grappled first with the contradiction between pacifist and pro-defence strands in his thinking and then with the changing international situation.