"Covenants without Swords" examines an enduring tension within
liberal theory: that between many liberals' professed commitment to
universal equality on the one hand, and their historic support for
the politics of hierarchy and empire on the other. It does so by
examining the work of two extremely influential British liberals
and internationalists, Gilbert Murray and Alfred Zimmern. Jeanne
Morefield mounts a forceful challenge to disciplinary boundaries by
arguing that this tension, on both the domestic and international
levels, is best understood as frequently arising from the same,
liberal reformist political aim--namely, the aim of fashioning a
socially conscious liberalism that ultimately reifies putatively
natural, preliberal notions of paternalistic order.
Morefield also questions conventional analyses of interwar
thought by resurrecting the work of Murray and Zimmern, and by
linking their approaches to liberal internationalism with the
ossified notion of sovereignty that continues to trouble
international politics to this day. Ultimately, Morefield argues,
these two thinkers' drift toward conservative and imperialist
understandings of international order was the result of a more
general difficulty still faced by liberals today: how to adequately
define community in liberal terms without sacrificing these terms
themselves. Moreover, Covenants without Swords suggests that Murray
and Zimmern's work offers a cautionary historical example for the
cadre of post-September 11th "new imperialists" who believe it
possible to combine a liberal commitment to equality with an
American Empire.
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