THE SCIENCE OF POLITICS

Catlin earned his doctorate at Cornell in 1924, and worked there as a professor of political science until 1935, when he returned to London to live full-time with his wife, the pacifist Vera Brittain. His time at Cornell exposed him to emerging American practices of social science, which influenced the theory of the science of politics which he set out in two academic books, The Science and Method of Politics (1927) and A Study of the Principles of Politics (1930). This interwar theoretical work established the framework within which Catlin developed his ideas of Anglo-American union in the later 1930s, particularly his commitment to the empirical study of political behaviour, his conviction that power was the central variable in politics, and his belief in rational planning.

Catlin believed that politics was a science in that “it is a body of knowledge that admits of statement . . . in general laws [which are] capable of empirical verification.” Unlike the practice of politics, which he believed to be an art, the study of politics entailed the empirical analysis of “the ‘forms’ and ‘processes’ which so far repeat themselves as to be comparable.” Without denying humanity's diversity, Catlin argued that politics is the means by which individuals, and the groups they form out of solidarities, seek “to give effect to certain persistent desires [and] stated objects.”Footnote ⁶ Power and the expression of individual or group will were the foremost such desires and objects, in Catlin's view. Like the economist Lionel Robbins, whose work he admired, Catlin believed that the study of facts should be separated from values. Unlike Robbins, Catlin came to believe that values could themselves be studied empirically, an ontological position he investigated through his analysis of Anglo-Saxon union.Footnote ⁷

Catlin argued that political science's utility was in its application to real-world political problems. In 1926 he led a survey of prohibition for the American Social Science Research Council (SSRC), funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. His report was an “exercise in applied sociology,” in which Catlin studied the social, economic, moral, and political aspects of prohibition. It influenced the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment of the United States Constitution (1933) which abolished prohibition.Footnote ⁸ This experience encouraged Catlin's belief in social science's practical purpose. It also fired a desire to participate more actively in electoral politics at home in Britain, where he ran unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate in Brentford and Chiswick in 1931, and Sunderland in 1935.Footnote ⁹ In 1928 Charles Roden Buxton, Parliamentary adviser to the Labour Party, introduced Catlin to Oswald Mosley, who was looking for collaborators to resuscitate Labour's research efforts. Catlin provided economic advice on reform issues such as raising the school leaving age, lowering the old-age pension limit to reduce employment, and import substitution. His research helped shape the “Mosley Memorandum,” Mosley's prescription for solving Britain's economic problems. Catlin also suggested a National Economic Council to provide economic policy research, having seen the role such public policy research played in American politics.Footnote ¹⁰ Catlin split with Mosley when the latter formed his New Party in 1931, but continued to believe in the importance of economic planning and Labour's attempts to balance a commitment to international peace and the need to confront the dictators. He edited two collections of essays on these themes, New Trends in Socialism (1935) and War and Democracy (1938).Footnote ¹¹ While he also periodically collaborated with Labour pacifists, including Brittain, Philip Noel Baker and Storm Jameson, Catlin's scientific peace research and support for British engagement with international institutions was closer to the liberal internationalism of Labour figures such as Leonard Woolf and Gilbert Murray. He deplored what he saw as Labour's “detachment” in foreign affairs, and tried to establish an independent international humanitarian operation in Spain during its Civil War.Footnote ¹²

Catlin's conception of the scientific study of politics as a tool for reform was influenced in part by the positivist turn among some American social scientists. Though technically orientated studies did not yet displace political philosophy and political history in the American academy, the 1920s witnessed a revolution in how political scientists conceived of political reality and the nature of democracy. Interwar innovations concerning the rational study of politics laid the groundwork for the post-1945 behavioural “revolution.”Footnote ¹³ Catlin was a central figure in these developments, in which he was inspired by the work of American social scientists, especially those associated with the University of Chicago such as the political scientists Charles Merriam and Harold Lasswell.

Merriam advocated a shift from historical and comparative studies of politics to a scientific study of their causes and nature, by which he meant data-driven, disinterested scholarship.Footnote ¹⁴ He advanced this argument in a steady flow of major publications, notably New Aspects of Politics (1925), and also co-created the SSRC in 1923 as a means of applying social-scientific research to public issues. Another “Chicago school” influence was the sociologist Robert Park, whom Catlin knew through the SSRC and whose conception of sociology as an “interstitial” discipline accorded with Catlin's own interdisciplinary understanding of politics.Footnote ¹⁵ Catlin was drawn to Lasswell's use of power theory to study problems such as how revolutionaries select symbols to destroy loyalty to the status quo. For his part, Lasswell felt that Catlin's The Science and Method of Politics argued “the necessity of divorcing the valuational and the descriptive attitude with more verbal charm and dialectical cogency than did Merriam.”Footnote ¹⁶ Merriam himself believed that Catlin had successfully reconciled Austinian and pluralist theories of sovereignty in A Study of the Principles of Politics, but wished that Catlin had moved beyond an engagement with Harold Laski's Grammar of Politics to provide a more extensive “synthesis of modern realities.”Footnote ¹⁷ The work of Merriam, Park, Lasswell, Catlin and others occasioned a shift in political science from a field concerned with the “practical wisdom” of politicians to a social-scientific orientation concerned with solving practical problems. Preliminary steps had been taken in this direction with the creation of APSA, whose early conferences brought together political scientists and practitioners, but it was not until the 1920s that political scientists began to consider the practice of a scientific study of politics.Footnote ¹⁸

For Catlin, the Aristotelian idea of politics as human beings’ practical interactions of will “distinguished the empiricism of political science from the speculations of political philosophy.”Footnote ¹⁹ Such work required technical and scientific knowledge. Catlin argued that it was important to avoid the English cult of the amateur and, citing Edmund Burke, “the cold malignancy of the metaphysicians.”Footnote ²⁰ Societies faced the choice of whether politics “is to be an exercise of domination by a masterly will or whether it is to be coordination shaped by the guidance of social physicians, studying the political physiology of our body politic by research and reason.”Footnote ²¹ He thus advocated a British equivalent of the SSRC, an idea for which he found little receptivity in Britain, and state planning, befitting his Labour politics. As “unequal wealth spells unequal power,” Catlin saw socialism as the preferable political system because it encourages equilibrium in the distribution of political power, through economic redistribution.Footnote ²²

Both Catlin's socialism and his commitment to the scientific study of politics encouraged his faith in rational planning, especially for international peace. His first major work was The Science and Method of Politics, one of the earliest sustained works to argue for the scientific method's utility for the study of political behaviour. Catlin rejected the humanistic study of politics in which he had been educated in Britain: “valuable although it be of itself, the approach to politics from the angle of political philosophy and of the humanities is less important for the needs of the present day than an approach from the angle of psychology and of statistics.” Political knowledge should instead be derived from “the wells of direct observation.”Footnote ²³ While he would later moderate this position, at this stage of his career he advocated empirical study of the “‘likeness of form’ of political behavior rather than the ‘evasive world of ideas, values, choices, and purposes’.”Footnote ²⁴ The latter is idealistic, and therefore subjective. Catlin's scientific study of politics assumed that political behaviour, like other human behaviour, was driven by like human impulses, and that similar patterns of behaviour recur over time.Footnote ²⁵ Empirical data was the best means of ascertaining patterns of political behaviour, and thus the preferable means of addressing political problems. As A. Gordon Dewey observed, Science and Method of Politics shifted attention from the state, then the dominant unit of analysis in political science, to the individual's group behaviour. Here Catlin was strongly influenced by period work in psychology.Footnote ²⁶ He was interested in studying how and why individuals formed group identities and political solidarities as a means of pursuing their political interests, which eventually led to his interest in Anglo-American union.

Catlin believed that politics was a social behaviour, and thus could be studied psychologically. A systematic understanding of politics could be derived from psychological, sociological and statistical studies of political behaviour, and then, following Henri Poincaré, tested through hypotheses to arrive at generalizable conclusions about peoples’ behaviour within political systems.Footnote ²⁷ He was influenced by the social psychologist Floyd Allport, whose book Social Psychology (1924) suggested to Catlin the active role of individuals in shaping the conventions which constitute social (and hence political) relations.Footnote ²⁸ Catlin sought to draw political axioms from psychologists’ studies of human impulses. Here his ideas followed the structural psychology of his Cornell colleague E. B. Titchener, to whom he dedicated A Study of the Principles of Politics along with the English social psychologist Graham Wallas.Footnote ²⁹

Catlin wanted to study the interconnections of individual political behaviours to establish the nature of political structures, as he argued had been done in economics. Politics was not an autonomous human activity, in Catlin's mind, but rather one linked to other forms of human behaviour. It was thus necessary to study politics empirically as a set of social interactions. Theory was useful in this task. Theory was derived from the social facts with which it was concerned; its utility was in giving form to sets of repeated interactions and behaviours. Like fellow period positivists in economics, psychology and sociology, Catlin assumed human beings to be self-interested rational actors, and thus believed that their goals could be discerned from their actions. Political scientists would thus study “political man,” just as economists such as Robbins used “economic man” as an expository device. This was an instrumental proposition, in that it provided an objective analytical tool which was superior to normative explanations of political behaviour, which Catlin argued were based upon speculative political theory. Political science was the study of means, not ends.Footnote ³⁰ It could tell us nothing definitive about political values, although Catlin believed that the scientific study of politics, by making clear what was more likely to occur than not, could help people make better political judgements. Catlin's political science was naturalistic, by which he meant the verifiable study of the systematic relationships of observable political behaviour.

Like many leading period advocates of scientism, such as William B. Munro, Catlin's theoretical works on the science of politics were rhetorical, methodological prescriptions as to how politics ought to be studied. Yet his international thought, beginning in the 1930s, while scientific in seeking to explain objectively the foundations of political solidarity within the Anglo-American world, was ultimately normative in advocating Anglo-American union as the linchpin of world order. This epistemological imprecision was not unusual for interwar political thinkers. Scholars such as Charles Beard and William Yandell Elliot argued that the natural and social sciences were incompatible, and that the subjective nature of political reality made a “rationalized” study of politics unfeasible. Merriam, the sociologist Stuart Rice, and other SSRC members were committed to the scientific study of politics, but believed that a unified-field theory of politics was not possible given the heterogeneous nature of human experience. What such methods did share was a desire to establish common units of analysis and the boundaries of study.Footnote ³¹ These debates later assumed a more explicit theoretical form, but in the 1920s the “scientific” study of politics remained a broad tent of fellow travellers attracted to positivism and the understanding of politics as a systemic activity. Catlin's extended meditation on the scientific study of politics set him in the vanguard of this movement.

As he wrote in The Science and Method of Politics, Catlin sought to continue in Bentham's spirit “by building up a science of social relations and formations on the basis of which alone can be founded a satisfactory art of social regulation.”Footnote ³² The political scientist should be concerned “with action . . . not with intention or appreciation, save so far as these show themselves in historical action.”Footnote ³³ An example of this position was Catlin's analysis of the relationship between freedom and authority. To obtain “some desired freedoms men had to obtain the securities offered by an authority; but, for this, reluctantly, they had to pay the price.” Thus power, understood by Catlin as the exercise of individual wills within social structures created by the historical interactions of millions of members of societies, should be the core focus of political science. Here the influence of Hobbes, the subject of Catlin's first book, is evident. Catlin shared the conviction of early behaviourists like Lasswell that power constituted the ability to secure one's goals, which could be studied empirically, in contrast to the more subjective and state-based view of classical realists like Morgenthau, who believed that international politics was determined by “the mutual relations of control among the holders of public authority and between the latter and the people at large.”Footnote ³⁴

Catlin saw history as key to understanding how power was attained, maintained and contested. History may have “literary, educational and antiquarian value,” but its lack of methodological arrangement gave it little analytical or prescriptive value.Footnote ³⁵ It was rather a repository of empirical data with which to test hypotheses about human behaviour.Footnote ³⁶ As he argued in The Story of the Political Philosophers (1939), history provides “not merely antique analogies and far-away critics, but a norm and canon whereby to judge new theories.”Footnote ³⁷ Here Catlin differed from Lasswell, who argued in private correspondence with Catlin in 1927 that “our facts are to be secured by dint of many procedures of validation, of which psychometrics, interviewing, psychoanalyzing, as well as the technique of documentation will be important.”Footnote ³⁸ While Catlin remained dependent on historical evidence in his work, he did appreciate the promise of psephology, and more broadly argued that “intensive local studies, the statistical and descriptive information in special subjects for larger areas, and investigations into the characteristics of the more permanent framework of society relying upon anthropological, economic and social history, serve, if properly conducted, to fertilise each other. From this combination of methods a political science . . . may conceivably be constructed.”Footnote ³⁹ The purpose of the scientific study of politics was to develop theories which could be applied to progressive political reform.

EQUILIBRIUM AND INTERNATIONAL POLITICS

While Catlin remained a positivist throughout his career, by the late 1920s he came to acknowledge the contextual utility of political philosophy in shaping values.Footnote ⁴⁰ This evolution in his political thought shaped his emerging ideas on international order. Catlin believed that international peace could be attained through conditions of international organization which allowed for both mediation and the application of force. This view made him a Labour centrist, his internationalism focused on international organization rather than principles; and his attention to applying the scientific analysis of politics to the creation of better means for enacting peaceful change won the support of many peace activists.

Unlike the post-war behaviourists, who also studied politics objectively, Catlin believed that politics, and therefore political science, was necessarily normative because values guided the expression of individuals’ and groups’ political wills. Whereas behaviourism, which many interwar social scientists embraced after 1945, prioritized “interests” as the kinetic force in international relations, Catlin followed a different road from the late 1920s, seeking to understand how political values could be understood scientifically.Footnote ⁴¹ He believed that the normative genealogies of political value systems, as studied by political philosophers, could be combined with the scientific study of observable political actions, to better understand universal laws of political behaviour. This was the argument of A Study of the Principles of Politics (1930).

Therein Catlin argued that the goal of politics is social balance, by which he meant a balance between individual members of a society, and of societies with each other. Politics is composed of the perpetual tension between self-will, which leads to conflict, and interdependence, which favours cooperation. The ideal social balance is a state of equilibrium between individuals’ demands for freedom and the demands of authority. Unlike Rousseau's social contract, which Catlin felt sanctioned the coercion of minorities, his was a process of one political calibration after another, each seeking ever-better accord. Catlin thought that politics could be progressive in the sense of moving ever closer to an ideal state of equilibrium. This idea framed his concept of an Anglo-Saxon union as the first step towards a more integrated world government, as detailed below.

Catlin argued that the balance of individual wills depends at any given time on their intensity and members’ identities, shaped by the social structure within which such a balance occurs.Footnote ⁴² He incorporated the nineteenth-century balance-of-power principle, but was primarily concerned with the social, rather than the international, unit of analysis. So “the true social balance is one which conforms to no doctrine [thus his opposition to fascism and communism, and also his reluctance to define Anglo-Saxonism in doctrinal terms] . . . and is being re-struck from moment to moment by a reconciliation of men's actual powers and interests.”Footnote ⁴³ The latter point reflected his scientism. Unlike Locke's view of constitutional balance, which assumes a system of checks and balances to attain equilibrium, Catlin argued that it was human beings’ recognition of their power or impotence, and their actions in pursuing or rectifying their relative position, which determine political equilibrium. Regarding the organization of the international system, he notes ironically that “Conservative thought, following Rousseau the Socialist, has always tended to the organic solution; and Liberal thought, following Hobbes the individualist, has tended to the mechanical solution.”Footnote ⁴⁴ The ideal equilibrium is achieved by the common recognition of constituent members, where authority is dispersed throughout the system and becomes conventionalized. Equilibrium achieved through force to subdue the aggressive self-assertiveness of some members is less stable and liable to violent disintegration when that force can no longer be maintained.

The challenge for the international system is how stable adaptations can occur. Quoting Abraham Lincoln, Catlin believed such adaptations can only occur within a system of government which is “not too strong for the liberties of its people, but strong enough to maintain its existence in great emergencies.”Footnote ⁴⁵ The war had destabilized the state as the basic unit of international affairs. National societies, Catlin argued, were more stable political units upon which to build such a world order, as their foundation in collective identities was stronger than states’ appeal to sovereignty for their legitimacy. The crystallization of national identities was not inimical to world government, but in fact a necessary preliminary step towards this goal. Here he was influenced by Herbert Spencer's law of equilibration, wherein social evolution occurs through oscillations between periods of political restraint and those wherein rebellion produces disintegration, resulting in a moving or mobile equilibrium.Footnote ⁴⁶ For Spencer, “the ultimate abolition of all limits to the freedom of each save those imposed by the like freedom of all, must result from the complete equilibration between man's desires and the conduct necessitated by surrounding conditions.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Catlin did not believe that such a complete equilibrium was possible. However, as the business cycle could be managed by economic policy, so could politicians manage the political cycle to ensure that its oscillations remained as close to equilibrium as possible, as often as possible.

Adaptations to the political balance occur where authorities abuse their power, Catlin argued, but also when new structural conditions make alternate political balances possible and preferable. Catlin believed the latter had occurred after the First World War. The task of government is to maintain this balance. Every potential new policy has a margin of utility within the bounds of prevailing conventions; those which press too far upset the political equilibrium between individual freedom and authority, and create crisis.Footnote ⁴⁸ He argued that sovereignty emanates from the body politic, and is maintained only so long as the sovereign maintains balance. Because there is no external authority outside the political world, authorities cannot appeal to their own sovereignty as justification for their rule. This limited the utility of states as the basic unit of international affairs, in Catlin's view. He defined sovereignty as merely “the final authority to arbitrate,” and thus perceived all sovereigns as relational, rather than autonomous entities.Footnote ⁴⁹ Such a mutually constitutive relationship between international actors could either lead to anarchy, or, as Catlin hoped, to world government. He saw the latter as the most expansive state of political equilibrium, and believed it could be attained through the progressive incorporation of national and regional sovereignties.

Catlin's politicians are scientific administrators, manipulating or directing the balance of wills within the system. A common Anglo-Saxon heritage, Catlin believed, allowed for an “alignment of wills” amongst the world's English-speaking peoples. Drawing on economic thought, Catlin argued that there is a market which establishes a “price” for political support, which depends upon “the relation of the demand for freedom to the supply of substantial civil liberty.” The voters alone are the “price fixers” of the political market.Footnote ⁵⁰ Catlin also demonstrated awareness that human beings’ internal desire for recognition and the exertion of will is as much a variable in politics as external material factors. As he later wrote in his autobiography, politics was “a business to provide, for the political consumer who contributed his votes and support, the efficient goods of legislation and of government and rule, rather than . . . a football match . . . between champion political leaders.”Footnote ⁵¹ Political scientists, he believed, could discern political laws of supply and demand.

Politics, like economics, was a problem of coordination, a perspective which shaped his conviction as to the importance of international organization. Here Catlin's methodological ideas echoed the assertion of the market's self-correcting proclivity towards equilibrium in the economic theory of the Austrian political economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek, and in Robbins's An Essay on the Nature and Significance of Economic Science (1932). While their politics differed, Catlin, Hayek and Robbins were all attracted to federalism as the form of international order which best satisfied the empirical realities of global politics.Footnote ⁵² Robbins's definition of economics as a theory of equilibrium concerned with distribution, rather than means and ends, accorded with Catlin's definition of politics as “a body of verifiable and systematic knowledge, gathered by observation and experiment.” Catlin approved of Robbins's focus on “a subject matter of economic or political means, resting upon the constants of human nature or upon the logic of certain situations, which is theoretically distinguishable as a discipline from judgments of human values.”Footnote ⁵³ Where Catlin differed from Robbins was in his belief that while political values were distinct from empirical realities, the former could nonetheless be studied scientifically as independent variables.

In its conception of politics as the interactions of self-interested individual actors whose behaviour could be studied and ultimately predicted, Catlin's work was a precursor to post-1945 public-choice theory in political science. Political scientists could provide politicians with “quantitative study, concerned to supply principles for the art of associating predominant masses of men to achieve a given end.” In the 1930s, the ends which individuals demanded were economic and physical security, the provision of which democracies could not cede to those political actors who preached “absolute values” (thus Catlin's split from Mosley). Democracy's strength, Catlin asserted, was that it affirms positive freedoms, not negative ones; it provides a “liberty market” whose fluctuations could be studied through psephology.Footnote ⁵⁴

Politicians require a rational understanding of their political constituents to provide these freedoms, but they also need to understand the “moral factor” or “constructive enthusiasm” which mobilizes individuals and provides a “rational scheme” which offers harmony and prevents wasteful social conflict.Footnote ⁵⁵ This is what Catlin meant by political values, a variable which would form a central component of his international thought. Politicians thus need to heed public opinion, as “no one is so wise that they can know beforehand the subtlety of the stream of opinion without first swimming in them [sic].”Footnote ⁵⁶ They could then turn to law, which provides the “formula of the equilibration of wills.” It consecrates social conventions, a system of relations which are the “formulation of a balance of wills which has been struck and stabilized.” Catlin would later develop this idea in relation to what he identified as Anglo-Saxon social conventions. The political authority—whether the majority or the most powerful—makes law, but must also accommodate minority groups’ interests. If the latter are not accommodated, they disrupt the political balance by becoming centrifugal forces. This is important, because political balance is not just a balance of individuals, but of political groups.Footnote ⁵⁷

Catlin thus believed that the basic units of international affairs were “societies,” which he defined as extensive bodies of “actually related persons, whether by economic interchange, geographic association, common civilization or traditions, or like bonds which make them objectively in a condition of mutuality and interdependence more permanent than mere physical contiguity.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Social order emerges through social conventions created from the perpetual contest of wills amongst a society's members, rather than Rousseau's general will or social contract. These conventions are social facts which can be studied, about which general theories can be derived, and managed.Footnote ⁵⁹ While in theory the small polity, such as the city state, is best equipped to strike a political balance between security and individual will, for reasons of interest and sentiment humanity has organized itself into broader groups, thus necessitating social orders. While Catlin acknowledged the importance of generational, gender,Footnote ⁶⁰ and racial groups, it was an international system of national groups in a state of equilibrium through which Catlin believed international peace could be secured. This idea led him to formulate his concept of “Anglo-Saxony” and of Anglo-American union.

THE ANGLO-SAXON TRADITION

Catlin's focus on national groups led him to consider regional and supra-national governance structures as plausible political alternatives to the state as the core units of international affairs. The difficulties of pooling sovereignty in transnational and international structures seemed minor, or at least soluble, because he saw sovereignty as an epiphenomenal rather than essentialist feature of politics. It could therefore be transposed or re-created to fit new political structures as required, and was not tied intrinsically to the state. He envisioned a progressive equilibrium shift from a world of sovereign states (which he rejected in favour of a pluralist view of the international system) to an interconnected world of regions (with Anglo-Saxon union the first stage in this integrative process).

Catlin's international thought existed at the intersection of two intellectual traditions: early twentieth-century ideas of international order, and discourse on the “English-speaking peoples.” Politicians and political theorists debated many, often over-lapping, visions of international order in the early twentieth century. Examples included Cecil Rhodes's racial vision of an Anglo-world; the imperial federation ideas of Curtis, Kerr and the Round Table; European federal-union concepts of Coudenhove-Kalergi, Aristide Briand, Edouard Herriot and others; H. G. Wells's Open Conspiracy (1928), which called for a world community built around scientific progress; various proposals for world government by internationalists such as Salvador de Madariaga, Rosika Schwimmer and Lola Maverick Lloyd; and the American journalist Clarence Streit's best-selling Union Now (1939), a proposed federal union of the United States, the British Commonwealth, and western European states.Footnote ⁶¹ Catlin was inspired by these plans, but instead of their common attention to integrative political frameworks he focused on Anglo-Saxony and values as the leavening ingredient of international organization. Unlike contemporaries such as the Conservative politician Leopold Amery, who looked to the Commonwealth as a template for world order, or the many federalists who were attracted to ideas of European union, Catlin argued that international peace could best be guaranteed through an international system with Anglo-American union at its core.Footnote ⁶²

Ideas of Anglo-American cooperation, meanwhile, dated from the late nineteenth century. The study of Anglo-Saxonism was prevalent in Britain in the 1870s and 1880s, with Charles Dilke, William Edward Forster, J. R. Seeley and E. A. Freeman key voices in a movement which identified Britain's traditions of liberty and freedom in its Saxon and Teutonic past. Figures such as the jurist James Bryce, later British ambassador to Washington (1907–13), exported Anglo-Saxonism to the United States, where legal and democratic connections suggested a broader Atlantic community. Bryce and the constitutional scholar A. V. Dicey, who stressed the shared culture of the “English-speaking people,” advocated for a union based on common citizenship, while figures such as Rudyard Kipling, W. T. Stead and Rhodes more baldly asserted the racial affinity of the global Anglo-Saxon world.Footnote ⁶³ Catlin adopted aspects of these antecedents, arguing for an Anglo-American union based upon both a shared and reciprocal citizenship, and what he believed was a common cultural heritage. While Catlin phrased his union views in the language of a “common tradition,” rather than the racial language of period conceptions of an “Anglo-sphere,” his Anglo-Americanism nonetheless bore the lineage of global-order ideas of “whiteness.” Here his ideas were similar in tone to Evelyn Wrench's Over-Seas Club and George Louis Beer's English Speaking Peoples (1917).Footnote ⁶⁴ Catlin's ideas of Anglo-American union helped internationalize the concept of Anglo-Saxonism, conceptualizing it within a broader international framework of regional blocs. At the same time, they reveal the lingering racial assumptions in the thinking of publicists of Atlantic union (a term Catlin helped popularize).

Catlin's support for Anglo-American cooperation flowed from his determination to identify the causes of war. He believed that international peace required a world authority. The first practical step in this direction was regional integration. The barriers to such integration were not ideological, which he regarded as salient but ultimately rhetorical, but power. Power can be either domineering or cooperative. Catlin saw in the latter the basis for Anglo-American union. If wars were caused by borders and frontiers, the promise of its abolition lay in their erasure. International union was also consistent with his basic humanism. “The heart of the matter,” he told a BBC audience in 1940, is to show “courtesy and respect to each man because you see in him some spark of the grandeur of the whole human race.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Catlin shared Brittain's abhorrence of war, but not her pacifism. Like Wells, with whom he co-founded the short-lived journal The Realist in 1929, Catlin saw international governance as the solution to war: “in choices of the imperfect, the moral answer of the moment is that which is best adjusted to the moral achievement of tomorrow.”Footnote ⁶⁶ Absolute pacifism was impractical and ineffective because it denied aggrieved parties the pursuit of justice; what was needed was “the will to accommodation.” Catlin's advocacy of the gradual construction of international authority thus placed him in the liberal internationalist wing of the Labour party alongside Fabians and proponents of international interdependence such as Norman Angell, part of the post-war shift from moral towards institutional concepts of international order.Footnote ⁶⁷

The nature of the state was a central focus of political-scientific debate in the 1920s. Older essentialist conceptions of the state as the expression of the public will were challenged by those who argued that the state was not archetypal in any real sense. For John Dewey the state was the “organized public,” while the political scientist Westel Woodbury Willoughby posited it as a human creation designed to perform particular functions, rather than a distinct entity. Pluralists such as Walter Lippmann and Laski argued that politics was not about the expression of “popular will” or national unity, but the constant calibration of competing interests.Footnote ⁶⁸

Catlin was a revisionist in this debate, embracing a pluralist conception of the state. Pluralism did not require a scientific analysis of politics (Charles Beard embraced the former but not the latter), but the two approaches seemed mutually compatible to an emerging generation of scholars, including Catlin. He saw individuals and the communities they formed as the prime political actors in international affairs. He recognized the political significance of large-scale associational communities—hence, like Arnold Toynbee, Catlin asserted the political salience of civilizations—but saw states as the administrative and legal vessels through which individuals and groups contested their interests, rather than autonomous actors or expressions of popular sovereignty in their own right.

As a political publicist, Catlin advocated Anglo-American union in The Anglo-Saxon Tradition (1939), One Anglo-American Nation (1941), and the Federal Union pamphlet Anglo-American Union as a Nucleus of World Federation (1942). In The Anglo-Saxon Tradition, he contended that “a World-State is inevitable, and the end of sixty old sovereignties—but not such a World-State as is a Caesarian despotism.” Anticipating Alexander Wendt's constructivist argument about the inevitability of a world state by more than sixty years, Catlin argued that values and identity are significant and measurable variables in international organization. The organization of international peace must be based on the will to arbitrate and the will to equity, just as in domestic law (here Catlin advanced liberal domestic analogical thinking), so in international affairs “he who will not submit to a court has no case in equity . . . to deny this is to maintain anarchy.”Footnote ⁶⁹ One difficulty with this formulation was how to reconcile international law with the exercise of power. Catlin's answer was to consolidate power in regional blocs, beginning with Anglo-Saxony (Great Britain, the United States, and the Dominions).

This was a tautological proposal; an Anglo-Saxon union would utilize such power responsibly because it comprised responsible societies. Despite Catlin's appreciation of international public opinion, he was also silent on whether and why non-English societies would acknowledge the primacy of Anglo-Saxonry, and why they would not resist or contest it through rival regional blocs. He suggested that non-English-speaking democratic states could associate with the Anglo-American bloc, but was vague on practical details. He was also largely silent on the question of race and colonialism, an issue he sublimated within the Anglo-Saxon union through appeals to the principle of trusteeship. Catlin saw British colonial Africa as an undeveloped opportunity—“this imperial cloak of cloth-of-gold about us”—and endorsed Lord Hailey's proposal for greater colonial development, but these points were tangential to his focus on Anglo-American union.Footnote ⁷⁰

As he had first argued in A Study of the Principles of Politics, the state was not the locus of international politics in Catlin's view, but an administrative tool whose functions could be subordinated to the machinery of international politics. International governance became feasible by de-emphasizing the place of sovereignty in the international system in favour of political values. He argued that Anglo-American union, a regionally delimited form of internationalism, was possible because English-speaking societies shared a set of common historical values.Footnote ⁷¹

Catlin's organic union was predicated on what he called the “Anglo-Saxon Tradition” or “Anglo-Saxony,”Footnote ⁷² a set of shared historical values that he argued were common throughout the English-speaking world. The Anglo-Saxon world was not a state or even an empire, but “a civilization, a culture which carries, latent in it, a philosophy and an outlook in living.”Footnote ⁷³ Echoing Gladstone, Catlin identified Anglo-Saxonism with liberty, the practical over the abstract, toleration, self-reliance, publicity as the “vital air of politics,” and a mistrust of centralized power. Anglo-Saxonism should guide, but not regiment, other societies. Catlin shared Curtis's admiration for Anglo-Saxon political culture, yet unlike Curtis he felt that “imperialism is the bad, mechanical system, without soul or imagination.”Footnote ⁷⁴ While Curtis believed that the Commonwealth provided a “guiding principle in public affairs” and a template for international governance, Catlin saw Anglo-American union as the first component of what he envisioned would ultimately be an interlocking international system of regional blocs.Footnote ⁷⁵

Catlin first proposed Anglo-American union in the Boston American in 1925.Footnote ⁷⁶ Writing in The Realist in 1929, he argued that “the standards of a national civilisation are worth fighting for, but Western Civilisation is so far bound up to-day in an organic unity that they are better safeguarded by peace, if intelligent organisation can secure peace.”Footnote ⁷⁷ He and Brittain witnessed Hitler address a Nazi rally in Cologne in 1933, where most of the Nazi election placards he saw contained the word “peace.” When even fascists appealed to peace to justify their politics, Catlin believed it imperative that the Anglo-Saxon world articulate its vision of international relations in a clear and collective manner.Footnote ⁷⁸

He discussed Anglo-Saxon union with Herbert Hoover in 1934, outlining his preference for evolutionary change rather than a schematic framework. It was after this meeting that he initially sketched the idea of Anglo-American union which would later appear in One Anglo-American Nation.Footnote ⁷⁹ While Catlin believed that England was the spiritual home of the Anglo-Saxon tradition, Anglo-Saxony was a “matter of culture [rather] than of civilization” that also encompassed Americans and “greater Britons” in the Dominions.Footnote ⁸⁰ Indeed, in the post-war world Britons should “be Westward looking” and admit that “America was the centre of our [Anglo-Saxon] culture, whether we liked it or not.” Catlin admired American innovation and energy, noting that “the power of technocracy is that it does not die, but embodies the doctrine of . . . success.”Footnote ⁸¹ He worried, however, that political disputes carried the potential for war unless both Britons and Americans came to better appreciate their shared values. After all, common ancestry and speech had not prevented the American Civil War.

In 1937 Catlin lectured on the Anglo-Saxon tradition at the Graduate School of the American University and the United States Ministry of Agriculture. The lectures were published in 1939 as The Anglo-Saxon Tradition in Britain, and Anglo-Saxony and Its Tradition in the United States.Footnote ⁸² The main tenets of the “Anglo-Saxon” tradition, Catlin argued, were humanism, freedom, an experimental attitude to life and politics, tolerance, the spirit of democracy, accommodation and federalism, moralism and a public spirit. In combination they formed Anglo-Saxony's “common character.” Anglo-American union would be achieved by cultivating “the small civitas,” with multiple local and regional identities stitched together into the cloth of Anglo-Saxon commonwealth—“we have got to think . . . of Canadians as we now think of Vermonters or Yorkshiremen, and of Americans and British as we now think of Scotsmen and Californians.”Footnote ⁸³

Catlin's Anglo-Saxon world was not a revised form of empire, as in the work of contemporary imperial writers such as Ramsay Muir.Footnote ⁸⁴ Its organizing principle was “not race-theory but a tradition of values,” a reflection of his theoretical writing on the role of values in shaping political structures. Some of these values are humanist, common to all people, and some are characteristics derived from a common Anglo-Saxon history. Catlin was not always consistent in identifying precisely who was a member of “Anglo-Saxony.” Often he referred to the English-speaking peoples, but he sometimes argued that the Anglo-Saxon tradition is broader, encompassing “an Anglo-Celtic tradition with Dutch and French and Danish admixtures. The common principle is culture, common civilization and this common tradition.”Footnote ⁸⁵ What was ultimately important was mobilizing a world community of common value-holders, as opposed to state-based sovereign communities.

Anglo-Saxon union was necessary, Catlin believed, in an age where “biology ultimately governs politics” and power accrues to large population blocs, echoing the geopolitical arguments of figures such as Mackinder.Footnote ⁸⁶ Unlike Mackinder, however, Catlin believed that a disaggregated union was possible, and indeed preferable, in an integrated world where “stock and culture matter more, in a world of changing communications, than geography.”Footnote ⁸⁷ He wanted the British Empire to emulate Rome in its cosmopolitanism, rather than Carthage, with a narrow focus on wealth which led to ruin, or the Habsburg Empire, which was unable to keep united “peoples among whom there could be no possible cultural sympathy.”Footnote ⁸⁸ Britain must look first to Anglo-Saxon union, rather than to uniting non-English peoples. Humanity should organize politically according to the value-communities it had already constructed. A world order where such regional value-communities sat in equilibrium was his envisioned ideal.

How could such a world order be achieved? Of immediate importance was the “moral rearmament” of English-speakers. In a world driven by politics of faith, they must reassert their faith in liberty, equality and democracy. Humanism connected Anglo-Saxony to other societies by stressing the centrality of reason (a reflection of his scientific conception of politics), and provided a bridge between the English world and other regions in a future world government. A spirit of tolerance and embrace of experimentation would create the space for liberty to develop. Applied to international affairs, this would enable federation between political units, as opposed to Caesarism or centralization. A common sense of world community would be underpinned by a moral covenant, and given life by the public-spiritedness by which citizenship is enacted in Britain.Footnote ⁸⁹

Such a process of global integration guided by the spirit of Anglo-Saxony was imperative given the challenge of communism and fascism in the 1930s. As Hegelian theories which demand that individuals subordinate their interests to the state, communism and fascism cannot countenance alternative world views. The Anglo-Saxon world must confront them together rather than submit to them separately. Catlin was aware of the danger of hypocrisy in conflating Anglo-Saxony with the highest moral standard: “no one people is so much better that, in a wide aloofness from the rest, it is entitled to arrogate to itself that moral allegiance which belongs to humanity.” He argued that seeking power over men is evil, but power over things was good. The Anglo-Saxon civilization is “technological and practical. Who collaborates with it collaborates with a beneficent, not an evil, power.”Footnote ⁹⁰ As the world's largest power bloc, Catlin believed the United States–British Commonwealth had a duty to exert itself in the dangerous politics of the late 1930s. Democrats must face the logic of power politics: “if two men ride upon a horse, one must ride in front.”Footnote ⁹¹ The solution was a World Authority with a tribunal which could provide an autonomous international forum for the provision of justice.

For Catlin this meant an international government—he favoured maintaining the League of Nations infrastructure—which rested atop an international federation of regional blocs based on value-communities. Anglo-Saxony was the most advanced such bloc, in his mind. The first stage of world integration was thus Anglo-American organic union. Here Catlin's ideas conflicted with the international functionalist arguments of thinkers such as Mitrany, Arthur Salter (who conceived of “functional bodies as a meeting place for national and international officials”), and (by the 1940s) E. H. Carr. Catlin and Mitrany corresponded while working on their respective international-order ideas, and a comparison of their thought is instructive. Their respective experience in American academia gave them an instinctual appreciation of the realist view of the importance of power in international politics, as advanced in the 1940s by Nicholas Spykman, Lippmann, Reinhold Niebuhr and Morgenthau. This set them apart from many contemporary British political thinkers, for whom realism was both amoral and tainted by associations with appeasement.Footnote ⁹² Catlin and Mitrany differed, however, in their positions as to how power should be regulated. For Mitrany, security was one among many international functions; for Catlin, it was the primary function of international order. The prevention of war was the focus of Catlin's international thought, for which he prescribed an international system of interconnected regional unions based on common values, beginning with Anglo-American union. Mitrany's international functionalism was also motivated by a desire to prevent conflict, but it was practical, and had no place for values. Mitrany argued in Progress of International Government (1933) that the real problem of international affairs was “how to create acceptance for international authority.” He concluded that “the system of law and order inaugurated in the State must be widened, until it covers and embraces the whole range of the social interests and activities that represent our modern civilization.”Footnote ⁹³ What he found wanting in Catlin's regional federalism was its aspirational nature; while it may be desirable, he argued in 1945 that Catlin had “produced no evidence to show that it is desired.” For his part, Catlin did not believe that federalism and functionalism were mutually incompatible, and that it was “misleading and false” to abstract politics and economics from each other. He criticized Mitrany for “side-stepping” the issue of sovereignty—“the problem of who gives orders to whom”—and suggested that federal structures could flexibly accommodate different functional tasks.Footnote ⁹⁴

THE SECOND WORLD WAR AND ANGLO-AMERICAN UNION

The outbreak of the Second World War galvanized Catlin's thought on Anglo-American union. He spent the winter of 1939–40 in North America advocating union, garnering support from Kerr (now Lord Lothian and British ambassador to Washington), Eleanor Roosevelt, the Canadian socialist J. S. Woodsworth, and Republican presidential candidate and “One World” proponent Wendell Willkie.Footnote ⁹⁵ In a speech at the University of Kansas City in September 1940, Catlin declared that Anglo-Saxony was “something territorial and something spiritual. I mean a region, and I mean a philosophy.” It is not “a spirit of a revolting serf proletariat, as in Russia, nor a spirit of race.” It is a spirit which “embraces all those—habitant of Quebec, Dutch of South Africa, immigrants to America of a hundred kinds, Scots, Welsh, Irish, who chose [sic] to identify themselves with it.” His goal was to embed the Anglo-Saxon spirit in an Anglo-Saxon political space, of which North America, with its close Anglo-Canadian ties, would be the core. Applying ideas from his systemic theory of political science, Catlin argued that an Anglo-Saxon world was composed of a hierarchy of values—democracy, underpinned by liberty, which itself is made possible by a spirit of experimentation. It is a world of the technocrat and the scientist given the freedom to innovate.Footnote ⁹⁶

Catlin believed that the world's democracies, “habituated to a way of life and a scheme of values significantly similar,” needed to abrogate their parochial sovereignties in a broader democratic Anschluss to combat the totalitarian unions. Anglo-American union, comprising the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States, was the “vital nucleus” of the global democratic bloc. Such a union, Catlin enumerated, would

1. 1 publicize the already existing sense of common community amongst English-speaking peoples;

2. 2 continue the practice of wartime mutual aid in military and foreign-policy affairs through a common postwar defense policy;

3. 3 continue the practice of wartime economic collaboration through postwar economic control institutions, joint commissions and tariff arrangements; and

4. 4 ultimately pursue political union, defined as the “the abrogation, pooling or erosion of national political sovereignties and the actual abolition of frontiers.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Catlin expanded on these ideas in One Anglo-American Nation (1941).Footnote ⁹⁸ Anglo-American union should be premised upon the following principles: common citizenship (including the right to vote anywhere in the union), a common defense policy, free migration, currency based on fixed relations, the right to regulate trade by federal legislation, a common law and common supreme court of appeal, a common allegiance (making war against member states would be categorized as treason), a common foreign policy and joint taxation.Footnote ⁹⁹

Such a union was not immediately feasible, in Catlin's view. Possible in the short term was what he called a “Mirror of Federation”: an Anglo-American conference, with the king as president and the American president as chairman ex officio. The vice chairmanship could rotate amongst other member states, and the position of secretary be chosen by election. To this apparatus could be added committees of Joint Defense, Foreign Affairs, Food Supply, and Priorities and Production. Adapting Joseph Chamberlain's idea of an imperial Zollverein, Catlin proposed that an Anglo-Saxon union would create a free-trade bloc large enough to confront the autarkic blocs of the fascist and communist world economies.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Catlin suggested that the British parliament could take the first step by passing a bill granting American passport holders citizenship in the British Empire, with reciprocal legislation to follow in Washington. He was reluctant, however, “to play at any game of ‘blue prints’ unrelated to the public opinion of the voting electorate.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ He criticized the “thin internationalism” of late nineteenth-century liberals who viewed the world in an “atomized” fashion, seeing international anarchy where a community of nations was instead possible. He thus did not feel that the failure of later nineteenth-century imperial federation plans precluded an Anglo-American union, as the former were based on a “hub and spokes” view of empire, whereas his union concept rested on a unity of nationalisms bound by common values.Footnote ¹⁰²

Anglo-American union was a necessity, Catlin asserted, because international integration was inevitable; if the democracies did not shape it, the totalitarians would.Footnote ¹⁰³ Small powers in the international system are security consumers, and thus unable to take a leadership role. Only a large power such as an Anglo-American union could provide the concentrated power necessary to attract other states within its weal, much as thinkers such as Spykman and Owen Lattimore argued that a stable regional world order was only possible if comprising large-scale polities.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This argument reflected Catlin's conviction on the centrality of power in politics, as well as interwar federalist thought that federal unions create incentives which attract new members.Footnote ¹⁰⁵

Inspired by Graham Wallas's The Great Society (1914), Catlin argued that Anglo-American union was a step towards “the sociality of nations.” While the ultimate aim was world federation, allowance must be made for “legitimate” nationalities, which “are due cultural autonomy, but not sovereignty.” Here he was influenced by the Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini's expression of internationalism as an “orchestra” of like-minded nationalities. The prerequisite of peace was the acknowledgement of a wider community with its wider moral loyalties.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Catlin ultimately envisioned “a time when there will be nowhere in the world such things as full sovereign states, but when all sovereignty of states—unless it were a world state—will be mitigated by mutual federal obligations.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In an application to international relations of his ideas on equilibrium, he posited that regional unification would provide liberty for the nation, just as democracy did for the individual.

Catlin believed the postwar world would be dominated by regions, specifically the Soviet Union, China, a German-dominated central Europe, and the Atlantic world (the Anglo-Saxon world plus France, the western European and Scandinavian states, and the whole of the New World). World government would emerge in stages through the federation of these regional blocs. Politicians must “look for the easiest frontiers to eliminate . . . and to engender a sentiment of common and expanding loyalty.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ An international system of regions would be augmented by the League of Nations, whose function “is to provide a loose, confederate substructure on which a more solid, closer superstructure can be built of nations welded together in certain regions.” Thus would national and regional antagonisms be overcome, and the technical work of internationalism be carried out: “in a Geneva based on federal organizations, we have the best organizational means available to confirm and maintain peace.” The Anglo-Saxon community would give the League “the requisite degree of emotional energy, of concentrated military and economic power, and of unity of purpose and ideal to make the machinery of the World League work.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ In this way Catlin's international thought can be seen as a fusion of period ideas of collective security and peaceful change.

Catlin's plan for Anglo-American union was similar to Streit's widely disseminated Union Now proposal, which Catlin avoided reading until he had finished One Anglo-American Nation. Catlin and Streit agreed on the need to accommodate the United States within a confederation, rather than a federation that would dilute its power.Footnote ¹¹⁰ International governance would then take place within confederal bodies such as the International Labour Organization. They also advocated similar ideas of Anglo-American common citizenship, defence, currency, trade and taxation features. Where Streit's plan appealed to the political logic of integration, however, Catlin's appealed to common values and historical identity. Similar to his disagreement with the functionalists, Catlin differed with Streit in arguing that the mechanistic and constitutional connections would emerge from a common identity, not the other way round.Footnote ¹¹¹