The entanglement of liberal political thought and European imperial expansion has received increasing attention in recent years, in work by David Armitage, Barbara Arneil, Uday Mehta, Richard Tuck, and James Tully, among others. Yet the phenomenon remains puzzling, for while many European liberals, especially from the mid–nineteenth century through the interwar period, enthusiastically promoted imperial rule, the reasons for their support varied widely: There is no single or consistent liberal imperialism. Jeanne Morefield has enriched this story considerably with her closely argued and elegantly written account of a hitherto largely neglected episode, which she calls “one of the most philosophically interesting moments when liberal thinkers and activists engaged in the politics of hierarchy and paternalism” (p. 2). Although Morefield's protagonists, Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern, have not received much attention in previous scholarship, her narrative impressively complements the account in Martti Koskenniemi's recent book The Gentle Civiliser of Nations (2002). Both chronicle the activities and ideas of visionary internationalists who aspired to end the barbarities of war and erect a humane international system, but who also keenly supported European imperial expansion during its heyday.

Covenants Without Swords offers a compelling rereading of British interwar internationalism that in important respects improves upon E. H. Carr's influential account in The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939) by providing a more nuanced and differentiated portrait of some key thinkers of the period. The central figures of the book, Murray and Zimmern, were both Oxford classicists trained during the 1880s and 1890s when the liberal idealism of T. H. Green and Bernard Bosanquet was ascendant. Both men were outsiders to the British establishment, Murray as the Australian descendant of a line of Irish radicals, and Zimmern as the son of Jewish German parents who had emigrated to England after the Prussian annexation of Frankfurt. Zimmern went on to hold the world's first chair of international relations (at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth), while Murray remained a lifelong professor of classics at Oxford even as he lectured and wrote widely on international politics. Both had extravagant hopes for a moral global society but were at the same time unwilling to argue for the institutions and politics that might foster such a society. Their individualist suspicion of state power, Morefield shows, led them to resist any global organization with real power and to rest content with the hope that liberal nations would voluntarily come to renounce war. Their complacent paternalism toward “backward races,” as well as their anxiety for the European imperial order in the face of anticolonial resistance, resulted in a vision of “world spirit” that acquiesced in, indeed embraced, imperial rule.

Murray and Zimmern exercised considerable influence over the development of the League of Nations, in part because their vision of a toothless League was more palatable to key British delegates than the aspirations for a more potent international body entertained by contemporaries such as Harold Laski and John Hobson. The League's weaknesses, Morefield argues, can thus be traced in part to the distinctive political preoccupations and theoretical approaches of this fascinating and problematic moment of British idealist liberalism. Murray and Zimmern's thought is worth dwelling on, she suggests, not because they offered a particularly compelling vision of international politics but because the theoretical “muddle” that characterized their thought exemplifies deeper, persisting tensions in liberalism.

One of the great strengths of Morefield's argument is that it shows that Murray and Zimmern's seemingly paradoxical international commitments were firmly rooted in their political thought more broadly. Far from being an anomalous departure from an otherwise seamless egalitarianism, their combination of idealistic internationalism and deference to the imperial status quo reflects deeper tensions that run through their views on domestic politics as well. As Morefield puts it, Murray and Zimmern held that “selfishness caused conflict; in both cases [domestic and international], a return to a spiritualized form of liberal morality would lead to renewed order” (p. 97). The author situates Murray and Zimmern in a reformist tradition that saw classical liberalism as excessively individualist and as complicit in the economic injustices endemic in industrial society. In their effort to supply British liberalism with a stronger notion of moral responsibility, and to reconcile liberal freedom with a sense of the common good, these thinkers, following Green and Bosanquet, turned to Hegelian idealism. Their engagement with Hegelianism was always ambivalent, however, for they were too wary of government power to accept Hegel's seeming apotheosis of the state. Moreover, as British opinion turned against “Prussianism” in reaction to Bismarck's aggressive foreign policy, and then even more emphatically with the onset of the First World War, it became impolitic to acknowledge a debt to Hegel, who was seen as having inspired the Prussian state. Morefield argues persuasively that these thinkers' reluctance to adopt a thoroughgoing Hegelianism, in which the conflict embodied by the market and civil society is transcended in an ethical state, led them to adopt solutions to market failings that were in important and problematic ways both “preliberal” and “pre-Hegelian.”

Instead of turning to the political realm to resolve the pathologies of market individualism, British idealists, including Murray and Zimmern, relied on what they saw as organic structures, especially the family and the nation, as sources of moral authority. Their rather uncritical confidence in “nature” as an “engine of progress” (p. 43) led such thinkers to worry, for instance, that sexual equality would have catastrophic social consequences and to devote philanthropic efforts toward keeping working-class women at home. In the international sphere, Morefield shows, they blithely regarded nations as organic units and adopted a notion of the family of nations that presumed a hierarchy of mature and infantile peoples. For all the similarity in their concerns, Murray and Zimmern had distinctive approaches, which the author effectively details. Zimmern's thought appears, on the whole, more nuanced and his vision of international spirit less static and less hierarchical than the notion of “cosmos” that Murray modeled on his beloved Periclean Athens, with its values of community and self-sacrifice.

Morefield has provided a sure-handed and tightly argued account of a body of liberal thought whose failings had unfortunate effects on world politics and whose paradoxes continue to be instructive. In the book's final chapter, she explores analogous tensions in the work of such contemporary liberal hawks as Fareed Zakaria and Michael Ignatieff. Her discussion of many liberals' continuing temptation to overlook or embrace hierarchies of power both within and among states (as in Ignatieff's proposed “empire lite” [p. 227]) is tough-minded and acute. The book's references to the theoretical alternatives of the interwar period are tantalizing, for she suggests that some of Murray and Zimmern's liberal contemporaries, such as J. A. Hobson and Harold Laski, managed to avoid the paths and pitfalls that led so many others to support the imperial order and to shy away from imagining more effective global institutions. Those strands of interwar liberalism that escaped the most hierarchical and exclusionary tendencies of their day would be well worth further study, perhaps by Morefield herself, and indeed might aid current efforts to theorize more egalitarian global institutions than those offered by today's liberal imperialists.