Living the Great Illusion

Sir Norman Angell, pioneer both of international relations as a distinct discipline and of the theory of globalization, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, and one of the twentieth century's leading internationalist campaigners on both sides of the Atlantic, lived the great illusion in three senses. First, his 'life job', as he came to call it, was founded upon and defined by The Great Illusion, a best-seller whose original version appeared in 1909: it perceptively showed how economic interdependence would prevent great powers profiting from war; yet it made other, less felicitous, claims from whose implications he spent decades trying to extricate himself. Second, his magnum opus and all his best work derived, to an extent unusual for a public intellectual, not from abstract thinking but from an eventful and varied life as a jobbing journalist in four countries, a cowboy, land-speculator, and gold-prospector in California, production manager of the continental edition of the Daily Mail, author, lecturer, pig farmer, Labour MP, entrepreneur, and campaigner for collective security. Third, he fostered many an enduring illusion about himself by at various times giving wrongly his age, name, nationality, marital status, key career dates, and core beliefs. By dint of careful detective work, this first biography of Angell reveals the truth about a remarkable life that has hitherto been much misrepresented and misinterpreted.

Martin Ceadel is Professor of Politics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of New College, where he has taught since 1979. His academic interests straddle British politics and international relations. He has been described (in the journal Quaker History) as 'the pre-eminent historian of British peace movements'. His most recent book, Semi-detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945 (OUP, 2000), was (according to the journal Political Studies) 'about as good as the academy gets'.