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Abstract
Jan Smuts was one of the key figures in the creation of the League of Nations, the first international organisation with truly global pretensions. However, Holism and Evolution, the most philosophical of his works, and one that illuminates his views on international organisation, has remained in a state of relative academic neglect. This paper turns to that work for a richer understanding of the background assumptions of those who contributed to the creation of the League. To do so, this paper lays bare the main ideas of Holism and Evolution, emphasising those elements most relevant to Smuts's proposals for international organisation, and situates his thought within broader currents of liberal imperialism. Such an examination of Holism and Evolution aids greatly in our understanding of some of the most contested issues in the debate over the nascent League of Nations: sovereignty, imperialism, self-determination, and the conception of politics in organic terms.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Richard Tuck for suggesting that I turn my attention to this project. Further thanks are due to Eric Nelson, Patrick Riley, and Nancy Rosenblum. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Social Studies Colloquium at Harvard University in March 2011; this article has benefited greatly from their helpful comments. Finally, I would like to thank Richard Whatmore and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful suggestions.
Notes
1See Francis P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (London, 1960), 29–30; Inis L. Claude, Jr., Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization (New York, 1971), 42–43; Paul Kennedy, The Parliament of Man: Past, Present, and Future of the United Nations (New York, 2006), 8.
2Mark Mazower offers an understanding of Smuts's thought with direct reference to Smuts's political concerns, paying particular attention to the relationship between international affairs and the domestic politics of South Africa. There is by contrast little direct focus on Holism and Evolution; see Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2009). Peder Anker treats Smuts in the context of the history of ecology in the British Empire, though the book also offers insight into the influence of that realm on politics and social policy generally, and Smuts's role in politics in particular; see Peder Anker, Imperial Ecology (Cambridge MA, 2009). Jeanne Morefield analyses the emergence of liberal imperialism in Britain, and in so doing treats a constellation of issues similar to those treated in this paper. However, her inquiry is rooted in the Oxford liberalism of the late nineteenth century, and her analysis is focused on Alfred Zimmern and Gilbert Murray, rather than Jan Smuts; see Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2005). Antony Lentin and Kenneth Ingham each discuss briefly the ideas animating Holism and Evolution, but are primarily focused on Smuts's activities in politics and military affairs; see Antony Lentin, General Smuts (London, 2010); Kenneth Ingham, Jan Christian Smuts, the Conscience of a South African (New York, 1986).
3Jan Christiaan Smuts, The League of Nations: A Practical Suggestion (London, 1918), 49.
4Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 25.
5Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 25–26.
7Jan Christiaan Smuts, ‘Democracy and the War’, in War-time Speeches, 100–01.
6Jan Christiaan Smuts, ‘The British Commonwealth of Nations’, in War-time Speeches: A Compilation of Public Utterances in Great Britain (New York, 1917), 32.
8Smuts, ‘Democracy and the War’, in War-time Speeches, 108.
9Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 9.
12Jan Christiaan Smuts, ‘A League of Nations’, in War-time Speeches, 54.
10For an analysis of the early role of the Bryce Group in articulating a widely influential vision of reforming the methods of settling international disputes, see Martin D. Dubin, ‘Toward the Concept of Collective Security: The Bryce Group's “Proposals for the Avoidance of War,” 1914–1917’, International Organization, 24 (Spring, 1970), 288–318.
11Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 47
13Smuts, ‘League of Nations’, in War-time Speeches, 57.
15Smuts, Practical Suggestion, v.
14Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 11–12.
17Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 26–27.
16Smuts, Practical Suggestion, v–vi.
18Smuts, Practical Suggestion, vi.
19‘In a rudimentary way all [ethnically] composite Empires of the past were leagues of nations, keeping the peace among the constituent nations, but unfortunately doing so not on the basis of freedom but of repression’; see Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 9.
20Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 9.
21Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 29.
22Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 9.
23‘We are far greater than any Empire which has ever existed, and by using this ancient expression we really disguise the main fact that our whole position is different […]’; see Smuts, ‘British Commonwealth of Nations’, in War-time Speeches, 26.
24Jan Christiaan Smuts, ‘The Future Constitutional Relations of the Empire’, in War-time Speeches, 11.
25 ‘We see growing up before us a great number of strong free nations all over the Empire’; see Jan Christiaan Smuts, ‘The War and Empire Problems’, in War-time Speeches, 6.
26Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 10.
28Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 25–26.
27‘For not only are men's minds prepared for the new peaceful order, but the sweeping away of the Imperial systems of Europe leaves the space vacant which the new institution must occupy’; see Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 70.
29Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 11.
30Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 11.
31‘Reversion to the League of Nations should be substituted for any policy of national annexation’; see Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 13.
32Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 21.
33Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 28.
34Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 11.
35Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 15.
36Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 16, 19.
37‘[…] the German colonies in the Pacific and Africa are inhabited by barbarians, who not only cannot possibly govern themselves, but to whom it would be impracticable to apply any ideas of political self-determination in the European sense’; see Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 15.
38For more on Smuts's racial views, and the ways in which they shaped his politics, see Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 47–48, 50–53; Anker, Imperial Ecology, 46–47, 125–28.
39The fifth point called for the ‘observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined’; see Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 15.
40‘No mandatary State ought to be appointed by the League in respect of a people or territory without the consultation of the latter in such ways as the League may consider fair and reasonable. It will be for such people or territory not only to determine generally on the form of its internal self-government, but also on the State from which it will receive such external assistance as may be necessary in its government’; see Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 19. Even when such local consultation was not possible, because there was no clear local body with which to consult, Smuts believed that the League should, ‘as far as possible, follow the trend of popular wishes, and not attempt to foist on the population an unwelcome mandatary’; see Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 20–21.
41Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 8.
42Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 32.
43Smuts, Practical Suggestion, 8.
44Jan Christiaan Smuts, Selections from the Smuts Papers, edited by W. K. Hancock and Jean van der Poel, 7 vols (Cambridge, 1966–1973), III, 520. See also Anker, Imperial Ecology, 46.
45Anker, Imperial Ecology, 72–73.
46Jan Christiaan Smuts, Holism and Evolution (London, 1926), 3–4.
47Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 10–11.
48Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 103.
49Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 155.
50Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 23.
51Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 34.
52Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 51.
53Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 52.
54Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 54.
55Just to cite one example: ‘The plant or animal body is a social community, but a community which allows a substantial development to its individual members’; see Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 83.
58Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 57.
56Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 55.
57Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 56.
59Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 228–29.
60Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 229.
61Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 89–90.
62Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 90.
64Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 98.
63Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 97.
68Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 106–07.
65‘The creation of wholes, and ever more highly organised wholes, and of wholeness generally as characteristic of existence, is an inherent character of the universe’; see Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 99.
66‘Wholes are not mere artificial constructions of thought, they point to something real in the universe; and Holism as the creative principle behind them is a real vera causa. It is the motive force behind Evolution’; see Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 99.
67Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 106.
69Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 108.
70Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 109.
71Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 138.
72Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 234.
73Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 250–51.
74Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 258.
75Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 258.
80Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 307–08.
76Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 305.
77Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 305.
78Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 307.
79Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 307.
81Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 308.
84Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 309.
82‘The concept of necessity, which arises in connection with that of causation, is not grounded in the reality of things, but is (as Kant showed) a mere mental expedient for joining up or reconnecting parts of the whole which have become dissociated or severed in the course of thought or experience’; see Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 308.
83‘In the whole Freedom and Causation, or rather efficient action, are not utterly different; their antagonism arises only in the application of consciousness to the atomic aspects of our empirical experiences. Determinism is in the last resort based on free holistic self-determination’; see Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 308. ‘In the ideal Personality Libertas and Imperium are identical’; see Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 312.
85Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 309.
86Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 311.
87Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 311–12.
88See note 82 above.
89Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 344.
90Jennifer Pitts, A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial Liberalism in Britain and France (Princeton, NJ, 2005), 14.
91Uday Mehta, Liberalism and Empire: A Study in Nineteenth-Century British Liberal Thought (Chicago, IL, 1999), 213–14.
92Duncan Bell, The Idea of Greater Britain: Empire and the Future of World Order, 1860–1900 (Princeton, NJ, 2007), 27.
93‘It was his reading of Spinoza that helped him through the Versailles Conference; in a dejected mood he commented that “[t]he original Holism message is also my book-mark in Spinoza so that there is generally something to remind me of better times and great comrades”’; see Anker, Imperial Ecology, 50.
94‘By the nineteenth century virtually every liberal justification of the empire is anchored in the patience needed to serve and realize a future. And that future is invariably expressed through the notion of progress’; see Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 30.
95Pitts, Turn to Empire, 11.
96Pitts, Turn to Empire, 20.
97‘Mill regarded the ability to progress as the essential quality of human nature and thus the proper basis for social scientific study’; see Pitts, Turn to Empire, 138.
98‘By seeming to draw a strict boundary between civilized and barbarous societies, Mill appeared to insulate Europe from the paternalistic policies he deemed appropriate for those other societies’; see Pitts, Turn to Empire, 253. Smuts's use of ‘civilisation’ functioned as a counterpoint to the barbarism of war as much as to the character of non-Western societies.
99‘Mill, for all his radicalism with regard to domestic politics, placed considerable faith in colonial government as a well-intentioned and legitimate despotism designed for the improvement of its subjects’; see Pitts, Turn to Empire, 160.
100‘Mill drew an analogy between barbarians and children not merely for rhetorical or illustrative purposes, however, but as part of a larger political argument’; see Pitts, Turn to Empire, 143. ‘The family, or rather the naturalized version of a particular view of the family […] is that essential penumbra on which the pure political thought of liberalism relies’; see Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 33.
101‘All the thinkers considered here, then, can be described as universalists who negotiated in different ways the tensions between universalistic moral commitments and a recognition of particularity’; see Pitts, Turn to Empire, 21. ‘The tension between the demands of universality and the claims of the particular helped structure Victorian imperial discourse’; see Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 11–12.
102‘In the universalist vision informing the imperial liberalism that arose in the first half of the nineteenth century, Europe stood at the pinnacle of a universal history, a vantage point that was thought to grant Europeans the knowledge and moral authority necessary to impose progress on less advanced societies, using violence and coercion when these were deemed necessary by appropriately informed and well-intentioned colonial authorities’; see Pitts, Turn to Empire, 21.
103Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 14.
104Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 209.
105‘The antonym of national, in the dominant strands of Victorian political thought, was not the foreign or the cosmopolitan, but instead the provincial, the parochial, the narrow. It was a step on the road to the universal, not a retreat from it, and nationalism of this sort, which is to say support for the self-governing autonomy of groups identified as nations, was frequently understood as constitutive of a broadly internationalist vision’; see Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 116–17.
106Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 247.
107‘Whereas it was thought that the ancient empires had demonstrated the incompatibility of empire and liberty, and that empires were incapable of sustaining themselves over time, the United States proved that it was possible to achieve both goals. This was a normative argument suggesting that federalism established the conditions necessary for the sustenance of freedom’; see Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 238.
108Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 191.
109Mehta, Liberalism and Empire, 191.
110Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2003), 122.
111Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire, 122–23.
112Duncan Bell, ‘Victorian Visions of Global Order: An Introduction’, in Victorian Visions of Global Order, edited by Duncan Bell (Cambridge, 2008), 3.
113‘The pervasiveness of civic imperial themes in the debate over Great Britain also helps explain the later infusion of imperial thought by philosophical idealism’; see Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 143. See also Duncan Bell, ‘The Victorian Idea of a Global State’, in Victorian Visions, edited by Bell, 161.
114‘The second shift in the semantics of empire saw the extensive employment of organic metaphors to describe the totality of the colonial empire. Organic ideas were of course far from novel, comprising one of the staple languages of late Victorian political thought, and imperial discourse was once again drawing from a more widely employed lexicon’; see Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 86.
115Bell, ‘Victorian Idea’, in Victorian Visions, edited by Bell, 177.
116Bell, Idea of Greater Britain, 20.
117For the case in favour of a league paying regard to the organic character of politics, see Henry N. Brailsford, League of Nations (New York, 1917), 80–81. Brailsford identifies a threat to durable peace as ‘the system or want of system which forbade organic change without war’.
118In The Balance of Power, the ‘fundamental vice’ of balance-of-power politics is described as viewing ‘nations, not as living organisms, but as inert pieces of mechanism, without taking account of the movement which is perpetually modifying them […]’; see Union of Democratic Control, The Balance of Power (London, 1915), 5.
119For a statement of this point, see G. Lowes Dickinson, who asserts that in times of peace, ‘the political relations of States may reasonably and naturally seem to an observer to be a mere atavistic survival from an age of isolation into an age of communication’; see G. Lowes Dickinson, The Choice Before Us (New York, 1917), 164.
120For a representative assertion of this kind, see John A. Hobson, who says: ‘The real solution of the problem lies, however, in substituting, as far as possible, the word and the idea of autonomy, effective self-government, for the more confused and intransigent idea of nationality which often craves for itself an absolutism of independence and of sovereignty that is inherently antagonistic to the needs of an international society’; see John A. Hobson, Towards International Government (New York, 1915), 124–25.
121‘In the British Empire and other loosely federated States, we see the beginnings of another system of government, and one to which International Government would necessarily approximate’; see Leonard Woolf, International Government (New York, 1916), 367. ‘To abolish militarism we must internationalise Imperialism. To prevent war we must legislate in peace’; see Henry N. Brailsford, ‘On Preventing Wars’, War and Peace, 2 (1915), 72.
123Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 344–45.
122Smuts, Holism and Evolution, 344.
124Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 30–31.