The historiography of silence

The absence of anarchism cannot be explained by reference to any debate or to anything intrinsically weak or factually inaccurate in the ideological morphology of anarchism as a tradition in the history of political thought.Footnote ¹³ To claim such would involve the use of evidence, arguments and counter-arguments, and these do not exist in IR. If we cannot look here for our account of the absence of anarchism, then where ought we to look? Perhaps one of the most informative places to look is the historiography of the discipline. Historiography is the study and practice of history-writing. Because it involves unpacking empirical narratives, it is also itself history-(re)writing. Traditional histories are engaged with by historiographers less to tell us about the substantive object of study and more to tell us about the way in which the object of study has traditionally been approached and narrated. This is a necessary first step of any history-writing and, when done well, usually has huge implications for common-sense knowledge about the world. We might thus argue that historiography is the contextualising and de-naturalising of common sense. Its effect has usually been to deflate grandiose claims to universal knowledge or perspectives; claims to have provided the best or final interpretations of events, or to deflate Whig history, and also to uncover the history writers' political, normative and analytical biases.Footnote ¹⁴

When it comes to anarchism and IR, the traditional statist historiography of IR has obscured rather than enlightened. In keeping with statist historiography in the discipline of history itself, the needs and ideological foundations of the state are what were usually defended.Footnote ¹⁵ And yet when IR went through the epistemological turn in the 90s, the empirical history upon which the original narratives were based were largely left unchallenged. Since then a huge literature has emerged that seeks to re-build these early debates and show how the statist core of the discipline then (as now) is far from ideologically neutral.

Let us begin with Martin Wight's early piece ‘Why is there no international theory’ which has been an important teaching tool for decades.Footnote ¹⁶ What is significant is less the bifurcation he makes between domestic and international, but the claims he makes to substantiate this division and the political project that underpins it. In many ways it is typical of much of the historiographical literature in this regard. As is widely known, Wight argued that the aim of political theory is to ascertain the best internal make-up of a state in order to build and protect the good life. International theory, by contrast, did not exist in the pre-1945 era for two main reasons. First, because no such comparable project of building and defending the good life is possible in the lawless realm of world politics. This stated fact provides Wight with the best explanation for why no one had until then produced any international theory. The second reason why normative international theory is impossible is because all recent attempts at overcoming the anarchy of the international system, by seeking to establish a world state or global imperium, have failed. Moreover, none seems either desirable or likely for good, now fairly intuitive reasons. International theory must therefore, he argues, be directed at devising the means of regulating the international system as it exists in perpetuity.

It goes without saying that both claims are hugely contentious if not just downright wrong. Proudhon's voluminous writings on world politics are a case in point. Not only did he reject the bifurcation of domestic and international, he would almost certainly have rejected the ethical centrality of the state to the intellectual project now known as IR.Footnote ¹⁷ Wight's eschatological conservatism, a conservatism that posited the recurrence of war and anarchy until ‘the death of death’ at the theological end of history,Footnote ¹⁸ when history's purpose would be revealed to humans and this ‘divine act of judgement […] will bring it [history] to an end’,Footnote ¹⁹ would also have been anathema to Proudhon's ‘anti-theism’. Clearly if this is how one conceives of the history and purpose of IR, anarchism can have no place in the discipline.

Stanley Hoffmann's famous argument, set out in ‘An American Social Science: International Relations’, was empirically richer but perhaps equally misleading, it is also baffling in its omissions and cynically conservative.Footnote ²⁰ Hoffmann claims IR to be an American social science for a number of now well-known reasons. First, Hoffmann repeats the prevailing assumption that international theory did not exist in the pre-1945 era. However, Hoffmann argues that rather than international theory being impossible at any time, as Wight had more or less argued, the rise of a science of IR was actually impossible in the pre-1945 era because there was no tradition of thinking about the international system conducive to scientific modelling. What were needed to bring this about were the writings of key individuals and the post-War dominance of the US in world affairs. The two texts which Hoffmann claims to have underpinned the new intellectual world order were Carr's Twenty Years' Crisis, and Morgenthau's Politics Among Nations. Their writings and the political context in which they emerged fed into the US need for technical expertise to understand and manage a ‘bi-polar world’ overshadowed by the threat of Mutually Assured Destruction. This need was met predominantly in the US because of the proximity of ambitious IR theorists, including a number of key émigrés, Hoffmann included, to the one state both able and willing to pay for this technical expertise. Morgenthau's work in particular made it possible to develop a scientific approach to world politics, focusing analysis on the ‘real’ as opposed to the ‘ideal’ and the promotion of ‘general propositions […] grounded in history’.Footnote ²¹ Hoffmann is clear that their approaches were discipline-defining in an America that needed to ‘justify a permanent and global involvement in world affairs’.Footnote ²² Again, anarchism can have no place here and what I will discuss in the following section is whether Morgenthau's empirical and theoretical claims were accurate.

While the technical maintenance of a bipolar world was a priority to which the vast majority of analysis in IR devoted itself, it was nevertheless deeply upsetting for Hoffmann. Moreover, it is not widely appreciated that Hoffmann was first and foremost a historian of France and a political historian of European international affairs. As his essay ‘The Areal Division of Power in the Writings of French Political Thinkers’, and the acknowledgements of Alan Ritter's The Political Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon make clear, he was also fully acquainted with Proudhon's thought and its context.Footnote ²³ Proudhon's thinking is however conspicuous by its absence in Hoffmann's essay despite championing the political sociology of Raymond Aron and his ‘monumental Peace and War’,Footnote ²⁴ which is complementary of Proudhon's work,Footnote ²⁵ and in many ways mirrored Proudhon's sociological, ethical and ‘scientific’ approach that claimed to be able to accord ‘the international’ analytical autonomy.Footnote ²⁶ Moreover, Proudhon was anti-positivist, and his anarchist thought, or those who drew on it faithfully, would in no way get caught up in those ‘precious relays’ between the academy and Washington that so depressed Hoffmann.Footnote ²⁷ So why not, at the very least, reference the existence of Proudhon's works? Bemoaning an omission is one thing, but what are the implications of this move for our understanding of what IR is for? Like Wight, Hoffmann believed bipolar great power politics needed managing and there is little in anarchism that would be of use in this task.

Things continued in this vein for the following twenty years or so, and then in the mid-1990s, IR had something of an epistemological turn. The emergence of Frankfurt School critical theory, feminist and poststructuralist approaches to IR, posed serious challenges to the traditional realist and neo-realist foundations of the discipline. While the epistemological challenge to the mainstream presented by the critics cannot be underestimated, the empirical reconstruction of the discipline took longer to emerge. This was most problematic, for in leaving the historical narrative intact and focusing mainly on method, history was ceded to the realists. In many respects, Booth and Smith's International Relations Theory Today marked this watershed in IR theory and turning to Steve Smith's introductory chapter ‘The Self-Images of the discipline: A Genealogy of International Relations Theory’ presents us with the evidence of how anarchism was once again inadvertently marginalised.Footnote ²⁸

Smith's purpose in his essay was to uncover the way in which IR's traditional ‘self-images’, or how the genealogy of debates about who and what IR is for, has served to discipline how IR is done, what counts as normal and permissible and what the implications of this disciplining might be for the praxis of world politics. Smith's focus was less on the silences and omissions or the substantive political implications of this disciplining, and more on the epistemological presuppositions that fuelled them. By taking this approach Smith posed a series of challenges to the disciplinary mainstream and pushed forward a critical agenda that questioned, for example, the bifurcation of domestic and international, the presupposition that a non-normative IR theory was possible, that IR had in fact been constructed around a series of so-called ‘Great Debates’ and so forth. But it was left to others to fill in the empirical detail.

Typical of this literature, this methodologically-driven critique of the discipline as it stood in the mid-nineties, served little to uncover the actual problems and paradoxes of pre-1945 IR theory or replace the mythological narrative of IR's origins with a more empirically rich one. History itself was somehow tainted, or so it seemed. Rejecting the self-images of the discipline on epistemological grounds did nothing to redress the empirical gap that emerged: if there were no Great or Inter-paradigm Debates, if what we then knew of IR's history was a discursive sleight of hand, what were all of these things actually concealing?

In his critique of Steve Smith's chapter, (the now Lord) William Wallace argued that IR ought to eschew the ‘scholastic’, theory-based discipline Smith was held to be championing, and return to the empirical world and the ‘messy business of democratic politics’. Indeed, Wallace dismissed Smith's work as ‘self indulgent’ theory.Footnote ²⁹ However, what we as IR theorists were supposed to be doing instead was fairly conventional – the analysis of democratic politics. For Wallace, while the early founders of the discipline had sought to confront the ‘irrationalism and historicism of Fascism, Nazism and Leninism’, contemporary theorists had simply backed away from ‘critical engagement with the difficult compromises of democratic politics’.Footnote ³⁰ Which is to say the status quo ante. As Smith and Booth both argued in their responses, the tendency to return to statist solutions to statist problems will perpetuate rather than ameliorate these state-formed problems.Footnote ³¹ That said, it was another ten years before Booth drew his readers attention to Richard Falk's essay ‘Anarchism and World Order’Footnote ³² as a viable alternative to conventional mind-sets and remarked (in a footnote) that it was ‘among the most thought provoking (and short) articles in the field, yet never appears in standard collections’.Footnote ³³ This observation begs the central question of this article.

Despite Wallace's pleas against the epistemological turn, it thoroughly shaped subsequent critical investigation in IR in the late nineties. Unfortunately, the tendency towards discourse-based methods also shaped historical investigation. As a direct response to Smith's call for research, Brian Schmidt and Tim Dunne, amongst others, sought to recover the history of the formation of the discipline from the myths that had characterised it to date.Footnote ³⁴ Both took a discursive approach to the history of ideas which to a large degree removed the background international and social context from their purview. That said both texts seemed to characterise a new sensitivity to the challenges faced by IR theorists wanting to know what lay behind the myths Smith had so eloquently described.

For Schmidt, what defined IR over the ages was an intellectual and political concern with anarchy – anarchy between sovereign states, anarchy within states which are not sovereign and anarchy in areas of the world that had not yet been ‘civilised’. In each case the mainstream answer to the question of anarchy was the state and the unfortunate side-effect of the creation of yet another anarchy beyond or above it. The early protagonists in this academic debate were key architects of US foreign policy. These included individuals such as Francis Lieber, who developed a military science for President Lincoln during the Civil War;Footnote ³⁵ Herbert Baxter Adams and his Hegelian theory of the state, which was influenced by Heinrich von Treitschke and was hugely influential in early US political science; Adams' subsequent tutoring of Woodrow Wilson also being instructive in this regard.Footnote ³⁶ Further examples abound,Footnote ³⁷ the point being that, as Hoffmann argued, IR and political science developed in the English-speaking world with the requirements of the US state and the tried and tested ideas and techniques of the Prussian state, as well as the British Imperial state, at its heart. Of the critical voices, the English socialist pluralists Harold Laski and G. D. H Cole stand out, in Schmidt's analysis at least, as perhaps the lone radical and socialist voices in IR's 50-year pre-disciplinary period. Unfortunately, Schmidt's discursive rather than contextualist methodology precludes him from seeking out the anarchistic origins of their ideas and thus reinforces the impression that there was no wider tradition of anarchist thought that might contribute to IR, or that there was at the very least no established alternative to statism.

One might therefore argue, with some justification, that where Wight and Hoffmann suggested that we ought to manage the system in perpetuity, and Wallace would have the discipline to retain an engaged but healthy distance from the state, Schmidt shows us the imperialistic and murderous history of the system we are supposed to maintain, manage or remain relatively detached from. While Steve Smith and others have argued for a more critical approach, none have seen the sense in turning to anarchism. It is also deeply ironic that despite being quintessentially concerned with anarchy and a world without sovereigns, the anarchists are never canvassed for their opinions by those working on the ‘political discourse of anarchy’.

Anarchism, pluralism and totalitarianism in inter-war IR

Developing Brian Schmidt's research, I will now turn to the anarchist legacy in pluralist approaches in early IR to try and show two things: how anarchist thought was marginalised and why. Returning to the early debates in IR, re-narrating this formative part of IR's disciplinary past, also has the twin benefit of reuniting anarchism with IR (on terms other than those that might be set by today's gatekeepers)Footnote ³⁸ and of re-narrating the discipline's past to do so. What follows – therefore, is a more detailed case study of the intellectual foundations of IR.

Broadly speaking, the inter-war pluralists sought to defend a political ethic that respected and affirmed the relative autonomy of a whole host of social, political and economic cleavages, with the state but one of a multitude of units within a sort of new medieval order.Footnote ³⁹ They believed that this pluralism, enmeshed with a firm commitment to economic democracy and strong international institutions, would pacify inter-state relations by restraining the state's scope for unilateral action. Most prominent amongst them, Harold Laski's thought has nevertheless traditionally been characterised as Marxist. There is undoubtedly truth in this, not least to say that it would have been Laski's Marxism that prompted him to see the promise of salvation for the working class in both the British Labour Party and Stalin's Russia. However, Laski's early political lineage is usually ignored while his anti-capitalism (rather than his Proudhonist anti-statism) becomes the key feature of his critique of world politics.Footnote ⁴⁰ Laski's detractors, such as the McCarthy era anti-communist Herbert A. Dean, are less nervous to highlight his anarchistic sentiments and use Proudhon as a stick with which to beat him.Footnote ⁴¹

Casper Sylvest also claimed that Laski ‘converted to Marxism’ in the 1920s, but this is, I think, a slight exaggeration.Footnote ⁴² Laski's Fabian background, his defence of the individual and of free speech and his anarchistic and socialist anti-Communism,Footnote ⁴³ are anarchist in origin and as I will show the source here is Proudhon. Moreover, Laski was publically chastised for the seeming paradox of being a ‘libertarian Marxist’, while Alfred Zimmern saw his work as ‘insidious syndicalism’ in the late thirties and the Times Literary Supplement believed his work to be dangerous and worried about it anarchic implications. As Kramnick and Sheehan note, these examples are all ‘consistent expressions of his overarching anti-statism’, and anti-statism was not consistent with Marxism until after 1968. In short, there is more to Laski's thought than meets the standard historical eye.Footnote ⁴⁴

Laski left Oxford with a double first in 1914. From here he took a short tenure at McGill University and then ended up at Harvard University. Within two years of arriving Laski had become a close friend and confidante of the Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, considered both then and now to be a ‘liberal constructionist’ and one of the fathers of the sociological tradition in jurisprudence.Footnote ⁴⁵ Laski left the US with his name on Hoover's political subversives list (though qualification for a place on this list was not particularly demanding). Over the intervening years Holmes and Laski struck up a long and unusual friendship and their letters are a wonderful source of historical illumination. For example, on 29 April 1917, Laski writes the following to Holmes:

It is likely that the book to which Laski was referring was Authority in the Modern State (1919). Interestingly, Justice Holmes does eventually read Proudhon and comments that ‘Proudhon, who hates him [Marx] and who also seems to me not above criticism, I think had more insight – though Marx had the force that any man gets who rides even a limping theory of Evolution.’Footnote ⁴⁷ Later he added that it was ‘my impression […] that Proudhon had profounder insights than his rival.’Footnote ⁴⁸ This is striking not so much because it's a conversation between one of the most famous and established Supreme Court Judges and a junior lecturer in political science at Harvard, but because of how Laski delivered on his promise to use Proudhon's ideas as a ‘peg’.

There are two main points to make about Proudhon's ideas in this context: the first analytical, the second sociological and historical.Footnote ⁴⁹ The first key aspect of Proudhon's thought for our purposes is his political theory as he developed it in the Principle of Federation; the second is the way in which this theory informs his analysis of the ontology, emergence and transformation of political order. Turning to the first, Proudhon begins the work by developing an original theory of the political antinomy. He argues that all of political life can be thought of as a struggle between authority and liberty that has, over political time, evolved within and alongside evolving political institutions. These institutions, the state included, embody or attempt to resolve this antinomy in different ways. ‘Regimes of authority’, as Proudhon called them, include Monarchy and Patriarchy, while those of liberty include democracy and anarchy. All are ideal types ‘fated to remain perpetual desiderata’Footnote ⁵⁰ and yet attempts to realise pure form based on idealised thinking is all-too frequent. For Proudhon paternalism is closest to an actually existing ideal political order,Footnote ⁵¹ and while Monarchy was the first attempt to make it into a wider social and political order, all Monarchies must delegate authority. This process of delegation is intrinsic to the corruption of political principles and the encroachment of the real on the ideal – all political orders are therefore entropic. Thus, ‘every real government is necessarily mixed’,Footnote ⁵² and, contrary to Kant's ideas on the subject, there is no transcendental or ideal foundation to politics. More salient in this regard is force and our idealisation/rationalisation of it. As he stipulates quite clearly in La Guerre et la Paix, while the ideals of war may drive it, the reality undermines these ideals and reveals that force and the ideals we use to justify it, are the foundations of a stable society.Footnote ⁵³ Thus, the question of the efficacy of sovereignty, or of any other political order we build to institutionalise force, is always an open one and the principles and structures of political order are not only intellectually or conceptually entropic, but turning to war and politics we can see that they are materially so also.

Like many before and since, Proudhon saw the global order as a system of institutionalised anarchy, a political order without sovereign, tenuously formalised in treaties. Here, states, characterised as ‘natural groups’ that are relatively autonomous from all the other plural ‘natural groups’ of society, conduct their inter-relations without a sovereign authority.Footnote ⁵⁴ But for Proudhon there was no radical difference between the international and domestic when we consider states to be a ‘natural group’ in the context of Empire and imperialism. Revolutions, civil wars and the rise of new groups such as the industrial working class and bourgeoisie, suggested to Proudhon that society was in constant flux with systems of morality and wider intellectual frameworks such as religion or science, socialism or nationalism, bringing intellectual coherence to this anarchic order. In short, Proudhon suggests that anarchy is the ontological condition of all social life, of politics as such. There is no actual sovereign.

Secondly, as I hope is becoming clear, Proudhon had a non-reductionist sociological and historical method, one that united a pluralist and class-based view of society with an historical view of politics. We see this most clearly in his discussion of ‘natural groups’ and in Principle of Federation and in his extended discussion of the political travesties facing the Polish and Slavic revolutionaries in the nineteenth century. For Proudhon a two-class analysis was only appropriate for primitive society. In modern society the antagonism between the working class and the Imperial throne of Napoleon III was mediated by the bourgeoisie.Footnote ⁵⁵ Political orders changed according to class alignments: royalty aligned with aristocracy results in constitutional monarchy; where the people align with royalty or aristocracy (and here Proudhon is imprecise in his terminology), ‘the government will be an empire or autocratic democracy’.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the case of Poland, the situation was relatively different. Here, Proudhon argued that there were but two classes: the nobility and the serfs.Footnote ⁵⁷ The argument he makes here is that until an intermediary class appeared in Poland to act as a balancing force between the nobility and the serf population, Poland would always be the plaything of great powers. This feudal class structure in Poland was dire in its domestic and international consequences. As Proudhon argued, ‘[s]'il est un coin sur le globe ou jamais il ait été vrai de dire […] que la propriété est le vol, c'est en Pologne.’Footnote ⁵⁸ Territory was annexed by neighbouring Great Powers while the Polish nobility were simply parasitical upon the serf population. While Proudhon recognised that this situation was extreme he nevertheless argued that partition was in the Polish people's best interests since partition would at least dissuade outright control of the country by a single foreign power and might encourage the emergence of a middle class to mediate between nobility and serf and tie the upper classes to a conception of ‘Poland’ and, perhaps, emancipate the serfs. For Proudhon then, the economic system is central to understanding social conflict and social order.

Proudhon did not assume that society ought to have just two or three classes, but that the progressive pluralisation of the class structure and the disaggregation, rather than aggregation and centralisation, of political and economic power, would be more conducive to achieving social order and justice, and make the prize of total control by a domestic or foreign power so much harder to achieve.Footnote ⁵⁹ His political ontology was such that the most obvious institutional form to bring unity to this natural social diversity was a loose ‘principle of federation’. As with many of his neo-Kantian contemporaries, Proudhon called for a united states of Europe, but not states as they became within thirty years of his death, but states more like the cantons Switzerland. Proudhon called for a form of political order in which all the political and social cleavages of society, whether they are coterminous with some formal border or not, ought to be federated and inter-related, thereby bringing unity in diversity and ushering forth a quintessentially neo-medieval order.

The politics of Proudhon's position ought to be quite clear. Since the state and economy are manifestations of political power rather than natural right, they deserve allegiance only insofar as they can be shown to achieve the ends they profess to idealise. Should they fail to do so, and Proudhon argues that all concentrations of power will inevitably fail to justify themselves absolutely, then anarchy follows as both the ontological condition of all political community and as the framework for the future. Statism, being entropic, is utopian, while anarchism is a realistic political philosophy for a social order without sovereign foundations. While the ideal of anarchy, or absolute ‘self-government’ as he calls it, will remain ‘desiderata’, it has very real properties as an ideological framework for conceptualising human liberty and this ought, he argues, to drive politics. It is impossible to do justice to this fully here, but as I will show in the following section, the statist alternative to his ideas became a very real nightmare. The aim now is to show Laski's debt to Proudhon and the responses it provoked.

Laski's anti-capitalism has been well described by Lamb,Footnote ⁶⁰ I want to focus on his politics and what we find is that it is Proudhon and not Marx which colours his ideas. By way of context, as Schmidt has more than adequately shown, central to Laski's thought was his critique of the German idealist theory of the state. First set out in ‘The Pluralistic State’ (1919), Laski attacks what he calls the ‘monistic’ and legalistic theory of the state. He argued that this theory substituted a short hand theory of sovereignty for actual empirical analysis. As far as Laski was concerned the state is only the expression of universal interest when it can be said to be just such an expression – at all other times it is not and is usually the expression of, as he put it, the interests of those who ‘wield economic power’.Footnote ⁶¹ This argument only crudely reflects Proudhon's position, but the article under question also reflects more deeply on the lessons of federalism, particularly the US model of federalism, for our conception of statehood and sovereignty and it is here that Proudhon's ideas emerge most clearly.

America, Laski argues, forces us to think of federalism not only ‘in the old spatial terms’ but also in terms of ‘function’, of ‘the government of the cotton industry’ and of ‘the civil service’.Footnote ⁶² Natural political cleavages suggest a pluralist theory of politics and society, which all ‘require a sovereignty of their own’.Footnote ⁶³ The emergence of the working class suggested ‘a new movement for the conquest of self-government’.Footnote ⁶⁴ He argued that ‘where administrative organisation is responsive to the actual associations of men, there is greater chance not merely of efficiency but of freedom also.’Footnote ⁶⁵ The political corollary of this theory is that states are thus placed ‘on a moral parity with the acts of any other institution’ and must be judged by the values they claim to uphold and by their actions, not a priori, and while Laski claims this does not lead to anarchy, it is certainly not that far from anarchism,Footnote ⁶⁶ for if it can be shown that the state possesses less moral authority than any other institution, there lies an argument for its abandonment if it fails (and it has done many times).Footnote ⁶⁷

The remainder of the article is a treasure trove for those with post-statist inclinations, but to flesh out this anarchistic temperament in more detail it is worth turning to Authority in the Modern State and Liberty in the Modern State, the titles of which perhaps coincidently correspond to the central political antinomy of Proudhon's classic text in federalist theory. In the former work, Laski turns to the question of anarchy early on. He argues that the state is not a priori an actor, nor can its actions be deemed morally good without the express (rather than the assumed) support of all people it is designed to represent. Since this is impossible in reality, and since all people at all times can, at least in principle, deny the moral authority of the state and act in any which way they like, the question of political order and authority is a sociological and historical, rather than a philosophical, one. But of course, what this also presupposes is that ‘[t]he possibility of anarchy is theoretically at every moment present’.Footnote ⁶⁸ ‘Every government is a de facto government except insofar as the rightness of its efforts makes it de jure’.Footnote ⁶⁹ The principle of sovereignty might be a useful legal shorthand in some contexts, but it reflects the ambitions of states rather than the reality, since nothing is actually ever sovereign in the Bodinian or Hobbesian sense. We might therefore legitimately wonder whether it is sensible to structure the formal architecture of world politics around a useful short-hand.

This conception clearly radically alters the way in which we conceptualise political power. Moreover, it changes what a state must be. For Laski, as for Proudhon, the emergence of the working class and of other functional units, as well as the rejection of state sovereignty, meant the German idealist theory of the state was a fantasy. Pluralist state theory on the other hand

Contrary to Lamb's assertion that ‘Laski was not attracted to federal solutions’,Footnote ⁷¹ what we find is that Laski's works are littered with federalist lines of argument and advocacy. Indeed, one might go further to argue that functional and administrative federalism is at the heart of Laksi's politics.Footnote ⁷² Whereas Proudhon had argued ‘The twentieth century will open the age of federations, or else humanity will undergo another purgatory of a thousand years’,Footnote ⁷³ Laski believed that ‘the federalist society towards which we are moving’ was inevitable.Footnote ⁷⁴ Moreover, Laski argued that the ‘democratic society must reject the sovereign state as by definition inconsistent with democracy’Footnote ⁷⁵ and ‘that private ownership of the means of production are no longer compatible with democratic institutions.’Footnote ⁷⁶ The federalist alternative was all he could see to the aggrandising state across Europe. In The State in Theory and Practice (1935) Laski goes so far as to argue that ‘the sovereign state is incompatible with the establishment of an effective world order; yet every serious move which looks to the erosion of its sovereignty is checkmated at some pivotal point’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Given the pressing problems of his time, which cannot have been any greater than our own impending ecological collapse, Laski was moved to argue that ‘the sovereign state and civilisation have irreconcilable interests’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Moreover, not only the state, but the international system itself was also the expression of minority interests. Continuing a standard theme by now, Laski argued in his Introduction to Politics that states are not in any real sense sovereign, least of all new states emerging on to the international scene and finding their actions curtailed by a pre-existing body of international law,Footnote ⁷⁹ but that also, because societies and states interact and cooperate, ‘there is not, in the historic and technical sense, the possibility of a sovereign state.’Footnote ⁸⁰ Laski also cautiously observed that ‘we are at the beginning of a new epoch’ where citizens can appeal to courts beyond their state, where international criminal courts could become common and despite the fact that progress in this regard is not inevitable, the progressive decentring of the state is an historical fact and one that ought, he thought, to be pushed forward.Footnote ⁸¹ Alongside this, Laski's uncompromising anti-capitalism illustrated clearly to his authors which direction he would like this anti-statism to have been pushed.