The emergence of new ideas on state and nation in the early years of the nineteenth century cannot be understood in isolation from the socio-economic changes which were also characteristic of that era. The term “industrial revolution” is no longer widely used by economic historians who, today, point to the slow and uneven nature of change in the period, but, nonetheless, it can hardly be denied that major changes were taking place in the productive capacities of societies and the lives of ordinary people. First the factory system and the application of steam power to production, then, later in the nineteenth century, industrialism and mass production proper, transformed, directly or indirectly, the lives of most of the inhabitants of the planet. Part of this “Great Transformation” involved increasing importance for trade and international financial transactions (Polanyi, 1975). Whereas before the nineteenth century foreign trade in bulk goods such as foodstuffs rarely accounted for more than a small percentage of domestic consumption, by 1900 a full-scale international division of labor had been established, with a number of countries specializing in manufacturing products and no longer capable of feeding themselves without imports. That this became a possibility reflected the revolution in transportation and communication during the period, in particular the development of the electric telegraph, the steam ship, and techniques of refrigeration.

PLATO was born around the year 428 bce, the scion of a distinguished and Aristocratic Athenian family with known and pronounced anti-democratic sympathies and was expected eventually to play a part in oligarchic politics himself. However, as he himself tells it (in his Seventh Letter, reprinted here), his meeting with Socrates changed his life. Socrates, an artisan by birth, was an enormously charismatic figure, and quite clearly a teacher of genius, gathering around him some of the most brilliant men of his day. Plato became one of his most ardent admirers. The circle around Socrates was characterized by a dedication to the development of true knowledge (as they understood it) and this often took a broadly anti-democratic form: Socrates himself was a man who often criticized the Athenian democracy for its espousal of “mere” opinion over knowledge. It is therefore unsurprising that when Socrates was charged with worshipping false gods and corrupting Athenian youth by the democracy and then sentenced to death by means of ingesting hemlock, Plato should have developed a distaste for Greek democracy that emerges in most of his writings from his early middle age until his death. However, it is worth bearing in mind also that Socrates equally disputed the oligarchs (for example, refusing a direct order of Plato's relative Critias when the latter was one of the so-called “thirty tyrants” who briefly seized power in Athens in 404).

GIUSEPPE MAZZINI (1805–72), Italian patriot, liberal, revolutionary, and nationalist. At one time considered one of the most important thinkers of nineteenth-century Europe, Mazzini is now little known outside of his homeland. His very successful set of homilies On the Duties of Man was originally published in 1840, going through many editions. In the extracts printed below the importance of love of country is stressed, but so also is the compatibility of this patriotism with a love of humanity. Mazzini's is a world in which nationalisms are in conflict with multi-national empires rather than with each other – which perhaps explains why his influence declined in the twentieth century.

From On the Duties of Man

Duties to humanity

Your first duties, first not in point of time but of importance – because without understanding these you can only imperfectly fulfil the rest – are to Humanity. You have duties as citizens, as sons, as husbands, as fathers – sacred, inviolable duties of which I shall presently speak at length; but what makes these duties sacred and inviolable is the mission, the duty, which your nature as men imposes on you. You are fathers in order that you may educate men to worship and to unfold God's law. You are citizens, you have a country, in order that in a limited sphere, with the concourse of people linked to you already by speech, by tendencies, and by habits, you may labour for the benefit of all men whatever they are and may be in the future – a task which each one could ill do by himself, weak and lost amid the immense multitude of his fellow-men.

RUDOLF HILFERDING (1877–1941), Austrian-born Marxist political economist, whose Finance Capital (1910) has some claim to be considered the most important work of Marxist economic theory after Marx's Capital itself. His explanation of imperialism as the foreign policy of finance capital, which is extracted below, clearly provides the intellectual backbone of Lenin's theory of imperialism – although the latter was unwilling to admit this, since Hilferding was a democrat and anti-Bolshevik. An opponent of one tyranny, Soviet communism – and a Social Democrat Minister in the Weimar Republic – he was murdered by another, going into exile in 1933 and being found dead in a Nazi prison cell in Paris in 1941.

From Finance Capital

The purpose of the old protective tariff, aside from compensating for various natural disadvantages, was to accelerate the emergence of industry within the protected borders. It was intended to guard the developing domestic industry against the danger of being stifled or destroyed by overwhelming competition from a well developed foreign industry. It needed only to be high enough to offset the advantages of foreign industry, and in no circumstances could it be prohibitive because domestic industry could not yet satisfy the entire demand. Above all it was not regarded as permanent.

MARTIN LUTHER (1483–1546), German priest and theologian whose defiance of the church in the matter of the sale of indulgences is taken as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Defending the idea of the church as a community of believers, rather than a hierarchy of priests, Luther relegated the existing church to what he saw as the corrupt realm of temporal affairs, radically undercutting its claims to provide spiritual guidance to the faithful. In On Secular Authority (1523), he argues that secular rule is necessary to control the behavior of the majority of human beings who are not true Christians. Luther's defense of secular authority suggests that a multiplicity of secular realms is the necessary and legitimate order of the temporal world.

From On Secular Authority

1. Our first task is [to find] a firm grounding for secular law and the Sword, in order to remove any possible doubt about their being in the world as a result of God's will and ordinance. The passages [of Scripture] which provide that foundation are these: Romans, 12 [in fact 13.1–2]: ‘Let every soul be subject to power and superiority. For there is no power but from God and the power that exists everywhere is ordained by God. And whoever resists the power, resists God's ordinance. But whosoever resists Gods ordinance shall receive condemnation on himself.’

JOSEPH SCHUMPETER (1883–1950), Moravian-born American economist and social theorist. Schumpeter contributed to a number of areas of economic theory, and his Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (3rd edn, 1950) is a sustained analysis of the relationship between political and economic forms. In the essay “The Sociology of Imperialisms” (1919) extracted below, he attempts to refute the notion that imperialism is connected in some way to capitalism.

From “The Sociology of Imperialisms”

It is in the nature of a capitalist economy – and of an exchange economy generally – that many people stand to gain economically in any war. Here the situation is fundamentally much as it is with the familiar subject of luxury. War means increased demand at panic prices, hence high profits and also high wages in many parts of the national economy. This is primarily a matter of money incomes, but as a rule (though to a lesser extent) real incomes are also affected. There are, for example, the special war interests, such as the arms industry. If the war lasts long enough, the circle of money profiteers naturally expands more and more – quite apart from a possible paper-money economy.

NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI (1469–1527), a minor Florentine official and diplomat, posthumously infamous for the advice to tyrants on how to seize or maintain power contained in his little book The Prince (1532). Machiavelli's political career came to an end in 1512 when he was imprisoned and tortured by the recently restored Medici regime, after which he retired to his farm near San Casciano outside Florence to study the works of the ancient Romans, whose wisdom he revered. Neither The Prince nor his longer and, arguably, more substantial Discourses on the First Ten Books of Livy (1531) was published during his lifetime. Rightly or wrongly, both books have been read as articulating a doctrine of reason of state, and for that reason are considered classics of political realism.

From The Prince

The different kinds of principality and how they are acquired

All the states, all the dominions that have held sway over men, have been either republics or principalities. Principalities are either hereditary (their rulers having been for a long time from the same family) or they are new. The new ones are either completely new (as was Milan to Francesco Sforza) or they are like limbs joined to the hereditary state of the ruler who annexes them (as is the Kingdom of Naples to the King of Spain).

EDMUND BURKE (1729–97), British statesman and political thinker. After a brief career as an author of philosophical works on ethics and aesthetics, Burke gained prominence as a Whig pamphleteer and then as a Member of Parliament. He wrote brilliantly on the need to conciliate the American colonies, the evils of British rule in India, and – most famously – the dangers to Britain posed by the revolutionary regime in France. Burke presented his case against the French revolution in his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), then in Thoughts on French Affairs (1791), and again in four Letters on a Regicide Peace (1796–7). In the Letters, his last work, he argues that the revolution had placed France in the hands of a barbaric regime whose principles were a threat not only to Britain but to European civilization.

From Letters on a Regicide Peace

On the overtures of peace

My dear Sir,

Our last conversation, though not in the tone of absolute despondency, was far from cheerful. We could not easily account for some unpleasant appearances. They were represented to us as indicating the state of the popular mind; and they were not at all what we should have expected from our old ideas even of the faults and vices of the English character. The disastrous events, which have followed one upon another in a long, unbroken, funereal train, moving in a procession that seemed to have no end, – these were not the principal causes of our dejection.

It is a commonplace to allege that ancient thought, especially Greek thought, has little to offer the student of international relations. With the exception of Thucydides, the great political philosophers of the ancient world, it is usually argued, said little about relations between polities since they assumed that the feature that defined such relations – war – was a permanent and ever-present fixture in human affairs and that thus little could be done to change the characteristics of such relations. This view is common to many who otherwise differ profoundly: international relations scholars, historians of political thought, political theorists, philosophers, classicists, and, of course, many others (see, for example, Donelan, 1990; Knutsen, 1992, 2nd edn., 1996; Williams, 1992).

However, this is a misreading. On three issues in particular ancient thought offers a lot for the student of international relations: (1) the way in which the classical period established – and questioned – distinctions between insiders and outsiders; (2) the way in which this distinction is taken to generate, and limit, moral obligations between individuals; and (3) the ways in which this distinction is taken to generate, and limit, obligations between collectivities. In this section classical thought will be taken to consist of the thought of ancient Greece and Rome roughly between the political reforms of the Athenian statesman Cleisthenes in the fifth century bce (which introduced democracy into Athens) and the coronation of Constantine as Roman emperor (after the battle of Milian Bridge in 312 ce).

CORNELIUS VAN BYNKERSHOEK (1673–1743), Dutch jurist and author of many works on public and international law, including comprehensive treatises on Roman law, the law of the sea, and the rights and duties of ambassadors. Because he sometimes draws upon the practice of states to establish his conclusions, Bynkershoek is often, if misleadingly, considered a pioneer of international legal positivism, the theory that international law must be inferred from state practice rather than deduced from natural law; in fact, he draws upon both. The following extract from his On Questions of Public Law (1737), dealing with the law of treaties, illustrates how international lawyers handled the tensions between principle and expediency during the classical age of European diplomacy.

From On Questions of Public Law

On the observance of public agreements and whether there are any tacit exceptions

Civil law guards the contracts of individuals, considerations of honour, those of princes. If you destroy good faith, you destroy all intercourse between princes, for intercourse depends expressly upon treaties; you even destroy international law, which has its origin in tacitly accepted and presupposed agreements founded upon reason and usage. That treaties must be kept in good faith lest you destroy all this is readily granted, even by those who have learned nothing but treachery and all but frustrate the rules of good faith by numberless exceptions. Whether, however, a public agreement is always and everywhere to be kept inviolate is a very difficult question.

RICHARD COBDEN (1804–65), English publicist and politician. Although born in rural Sussex, Cobden became the leading figure in the “Manchester School” of liberalism, representing the interests of Lancashire manufacturers and industrialists, especially in the cotton industry. He was the leading publicist for the Anti-Corn Law League, which promoted free trade in agricultural products. A strong opponent of traditional diplomacy, Cobden regarded general free trade as the only route to international peace. The following extracts from a comparatively early pamphlet on Russia (1836) set out his opposition to the idea of balance of power and to any British intervention in overseas quarrels, and in the process lay out many of the themes which would be developed in twentieth-century liberal internationalism.

From The Political Writings of Richard Cobden

British intervention in the state policy of the Continent has been usually excused under the two stock pretences of maintaining the balance of power in Europe, and of protecting our commerce; upon which two subjects, as they bear indirectly on the question in hand, we shall next offer a few observations.

The first instance in which we find the “balance of power” alluded to in a king's speech is on the occasion of the last address of William III. to his Parliament, December 31, 1701, where he concludes by saying – “I will only add this – if you do in good earnest desire to see England hold the balance of Europe, it will appear by your right improving the present opportunity.

ADAM SMITH (1723–90), political economist, moral philosopher, and central figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. His The Wealth of Nations (1776) is a central document in liberal and political theory. The following brief extract sets out the case for an international division of labor.

From The Wealth of Nations

A country that has no mines of its own must undoubtedly draw its gold and silver from foreign countries in the same manner as one that has no vineyards of its own must draw its wines. It does not seem necessary, however, that the attention of government should be more turned towards the one than towards the other object. A country that has wherewithal to buy wine will always get the wine which it has occasion for; and a country that has wherewithal to buy gold and silver will never be in want of those metals. They are to be bought for a certain price like all other commodities, and as they are the price of all other commodities, so all other commodities are the price of those metals. We trust with perfect security that the freedom of trade, without any attention of government, will always supply us with the wine which we have occasion for: and we may trust with equal security that it will always supply us with all the gold and silver which we can afford to purchase or to employ, either in circulating our commodities, or in other uses.

By the middle of the seventeenth century monarchs had consolidated their powers at the expense of other princes and the church. The modern territorial state was on its way to displacing the complicated feudal, urban, and ecclesiastical arrangements of medieval Europe. Advances in military technology and administrative machinery provided territorial sovereigns with instruments of power to reinforce their claims to authority, and the resulting concentration of power and authority generated an identifiable system of states ordered by its own imperatives and practices. These changes invited efforts to define the rights of sovereigns in their dealings with one another and to articulate principles of statecraft, prudential as well as moral, appropriate to the new international system.

In this chapter, we focus on the theories of sovereignty and reason of state that accompanied the emergence of the modern European state from its medieval antecedents, and on the new conceptions of diplomacy and statecraft to which these theories gave rise. The former are best illustrated in the sixteenth-century writings of Machiavelli and Bodin; the latter in writings of the statesmen and scholars who theorized the new, decentralized, system of states during its “classical” period, the eighteenth century. We leave to chapters 6 and 7 the writings of more philosophical writers, like Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant, who, in criticizing the presuppositions of this system, pointed the way toward its transformation.

EUSEBIUS PAMPHILI, as he is sometimes known because of his association with the theologian and scholar Pamphilus, was born in 263 ce. At the age of about thirty, while still a lay disciple of Pamphilus, he met the future emperor of Rome, Constantine, while the latter was travelling through Caesarea. Eusebius, later to write a life of Constantine, was deeply impressed. Some years later, after he had become bishop of Caesarea and Constantine had become emperor, Eusebius became the chief apologist and expounder of Constantinian theories of kingship and a force in many of the key theological controversies of his day, being present for example at the Council of Nicaea held between 20 May and 19 June 325 ce, the central Christian conference of the time. His key political work was the so-called Tricennial Orations, orations delivered to celebrate the thirteenth year of Constantine's reign and which were to shape the political thought of the Byzantine empire (as the eastern Roman empire is usually called) for nearly a thousand years. His chief importance was the adaptation of the Greek theory of kingship and government to the very changed circumstances of Constantine's Rome and of early Christianity. Eusebius died in 339, two years after his beloved emperor.

From Tricennial Orations

“In Praise of Constantine”

(8) Where the column of God-defying giants and the hissing of serpents, who with sharpened tongues loosed godless voices against the Ruler of All?

KARL MARX (1818–83) and Friedrich Engels (1820–95), revolutionaries. “The Communist Manifesto” had little influence at its time of publication during the 1848 revolutions in Europe but has since become the most influential pamphlet of the nineteenth century. The short extracts printed below point to the international nature of capitalism and the way in which capitalism has, allegedly, undermined the notion of nationality – although it might be argued that the actual history of the last century and a half suggests that capitalism is more likely to promote than to undermine nationalist sentiment.

From “The Communist Manifesto”

The discovery of America and the voyages round Africa provided fresh territory for the rising bourgeoisie. The East Indian and Chinese market, the colonisation of America, the colonial trade, the general increase in the means of exchange and of commodities, all gave to commerce, to sea transport, to industry a boost such as never before, hence quick development to the revolutionary element in a crumbling feudal society.

But markets were ever growing and demand ever rising. Even small-scale manufacture no longer sufficed to supply them. So steampower and machinery revolutionised industrial production.

Both the “state” and, perhaps less obviously, the “nation” are terms which recur in international political theory; nonetheless, both terms came to have rather different meanings from past usage in the course of the period from the end of the eighteenth century to the outbreak of the First World War. Moreover, the two meanings became interwoven one with another, such that in the course of our own century it has become common to regard them as almost synonymous, or at least both incorporated in the composite term “nation-state” – even though it is very difficult to arrive at a substantive definition of a nation which would allow more than a minority of the actual states of today to qualify, for all their membership of the United Nations. The purpose of the texts which follow this introduction is to set out the international implications of these changes in meaning.

If one were to attempt to encapsulate as simply as possible the nature of these changes, it would be by noting the emergence of the idea of an “ethical” state and the principle of national sovereignty. In past thinking – at least in the Christian era – the state had been understood as an institution which was either a necessary evil, as a partial antidote to human sinfulness, or a clever, contracted, solution to the problem of the egoism generated by the human condition in a state of nature.

JEAN BODIN (1530–96), French humanist, lawyer, administrator, and scholar. Bodin was one of the first to attribute rising prices in sixteenth-century Europe to the influx of gold from America and he also wrote a book on the detection and punishment of witches. He is one of several thinkers of the period who were concerned to explore the question of how competing claims to rule within the emerging territorial states of Europe might be resolved. For Bodin, it is the possession of “sovereignty” that distinguishes the ruler of a state from other authorities. Despite his erroneous conclusion that sovereign authority cannot be divided between different branches of government, his discussion of the concept constitutes an innovative and enduring contribution to the legal theory, one with momentous consequences for international relations.

From Six Books of the Commonwealth

On sovereignty

Sovereignty is the absolute and perpetual power of a commonwealth, which the Latins call maiestas; the Greeks akra exousia, kurion arche, and kurion politeuma; and the Italians segnioria, a word they use for private persons as well as for those who have full control of the state, while the Hebrews call it tomech shévet – that is, the highest power of command. We must now formulate a definition of sovereignty because no jurist or political philosopher has defined it, even though it is the chief point, and the one that needs most to be explained, in a treatise on the commonwealth.

CHARLES-IRENÉE CASTEL, ABBÉ DE SAINT-PIERRE, was born in 1658 into the minor aristocracy. He frequented the Parisian salons fashionable in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and gained his entrance to court through the patronage of the Duchess of Orleans. He was a member of the French delegation which negotiated the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and thus had diplomatic and political experience. He wrote on many aspects of French politics, but it was his A Project for Settling an Everlasting Peace in Europe (1713) for which he is chiefly remembered and which spurred thinkers much greater than he (Leibniz, Rousseau, and Kant to name but three) to consider his proposals and develop their own. He died in 1743.

A project for settling an everlasting peace in Europe

“First proposed by Henry IV of France, and approved of by Queen Elizabeth, and most of the then Princes of Europe, and now discussed at large and made practicable

Fundamental articles

The Present Sovereigns, by their under-written Deputies, have agreed to the following articles: There shall be from this Day following a Society, a permanent and perpetual Union, between the Sovereigns subscribed, and if possible among all the Christian Sovereigns, in the Design to make the Peace unalterable in Europe; and in that view the Union shall make, if possible, with its neighbours the Mahometan Sovereigns, Treaties of Alliance, offensive and defensive, to keep each of them in Peace within the Bounds of his Territory, by taking of them and giving to them, all possible reciprocal Securities.

DAVID RICARDO (1772–1823), banker and political economist. Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) is a foundation stone for contemporary economic theory. The following extract sets out his demonstration that there are gains to be made from trade even when one of the countries involved can make all the goods traded cheaper than can another; all that is required for there to be gains from trade is that comparative costs be different. This is one of the few theories of the nineteenth century which, suitably amended, is still part of twenty-first century economics; it remains the basis for liberal internationalism and the belief that trade promotes peace.

From “On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation”

Under a system of perfectly free commerce, each country naturally devotes its capital and labour to such employments as are most beneficial to each. This pursuit of individual advantage is admirably connected with the universal good of the whole. By stimulating industry, by rewarding ingenuity, and by using most efficaciously the peculiar powers bestowed by nature, it distributes labour most effectively and most economically: while, by increasing the general mass of productions, it diffuses general benefit, and binds together by one common tie of interest and intercourse, the universal society of nations throughout the civilized world. It is this principle which determines that wine shall be made in France and Portugal, that corn shall be grown in America and Poland, and that hardware and other goods shall be manufactured in England.