Abstract
This chapter and the next shed light on how Cobden, Mitrany, and Ohmae describe the world around them. Here, we analyze our three authors’ accounts of the ways in which—and to what extent—the state has declined domestically. The intention is to disentangle what they claim has happened and is happening to the state from what they would like to happen and what they think will happen in the future. This is not as straight forward a process as one would expect, because all three merge their roles as observers of society with their attempts to advance a particular political agenda.l Their empirical claims often emanate not only from their rather sophisticated theories of how economics and politics work, but also how these should function. Often, they also ground their descriptions of the state on daily experiences and observations, as well as their personal versions of what amounts to common sense logic. The main complication when teasing out Cobden, Mitrany, and Ohmae’s empirical claims, though, is that they are virtually indistinguishable from their criticism of the state. Their portrayals are colored by their visceral dislike of what they see as the state’s restrictive practices, as well as by their perceived need to discredit the state in order to promote a better society. In short, the empirical element in the decline-of-the-state hypothesis is hardly an objective and disinterested description of events.
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Notes
For an incisive explanation of a similar tendency in Leonard Woolf’s writing, see Peter Wilson, The International Theory ofLeonard Woolf.• A Study in TwentiethCenturyIdealism (New York, NY: Palerave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 60–1.
See, e.g., Linda Weiss, The Myth ofthe Powerless State: Governing the Economy in a Global Era (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), and The Economist, “A Survey of the World Economy: Who’s in the Driving Seat?” 7 October 1995.
John, Viscount Morley, O. M., TheLife ofRichardCobden, fourteenth edition (London: T. Fisher Unwin Ltd., 1920 [first published 1879 in two volumes]), p. 705. See also John MacCunn, Six Radical Thinkers: Bentham, J.S. Mill, Cobden, Carlyle, Mazzini, TH. Green (London: Edward Arnold, 1910), p. 124.
Richard Cobden, “Russia” (1836), in Richard Cobden, The Political Writings of Richard Cobden, Vol. I, of two volumes, fourth edition (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903 [first published 1867]), p. 232.
E. L. Woodward, The Age of Reform, 1815–1870 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1938), pp. 121–33.
Cobden to W. Hargreaves, 31 October 1860, Cobden Papers in the British Library Add. MS 43655, quoted in Anthony Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England 1846–1946 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), p. 96.
Cobden, The Political Writings, Vol. I, especially, p. 122. See also William Harbutt Dawson, Richard Cobden and Foreign Policy: A Critical Exposition, with Special Reference to our Day and its Problems (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1926), p. 62.
See, e.g., Peter Nelson Farrar, “Richard Cobden, Educationist, Economist and Statesman” (University of Sheffield: Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis, 1987), pp. 7 and 16.
Lord Palmerston quoted in Salis Schwabe, Reminiscences of Richard Cobden (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1895), pp. 65–6. Extract taken from the Morning Chronicle, 14 May 1847.
Richard Cobden, “1793 and 1853, in Three Letters” (1853), in Richard Cobden, The Political Writings ofRichard Cobden, Vol. II, of two volumes, fourth edition (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903 [first published 1867]), p. 354. The letters, written between December 1852 and January 1853, are addressed to the Reverend Sir Henry Richards.
See, e.g., Howe, Free Trade and Liberal England, p. 75, and Nicholas C. Edsall, Richard Cobden, Independent Radical (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), p. 184.
See, e.g., Richard Cobden, “What Next—and Next?” (1856), in Cobden, The Political Writings, Vol. II, pp. 471–2.
Ibid., p. 525.
See, e.g., Richard Cobden, “The Three Panics: An Historical Episode” (1862), in Cobden, The Political Writings, Vol. II, p. 697.
Richard Cobden, House of Commons, 12 June 1849, Speeches on Questions of Public Policy, Vol. II, of two volumes, John Bright and James E. Thorold Rogers (eds.) (London: Macmillan and Co., 1870), pp. 168–9.
Inis L. Claude, Jr., Swords into Plowshares: The Problems and Progress of International Organization, Fourth Edition (New York, NY: Random House, 1971), p. 390.
For a recent analysis, see Lucian M. Ashworth and David Long (eds.), New Perspectives on International Functionalism (Houndsmill: Macmillan Press, 1999).
Paul Taylor and A. J. R. Groom, “Introduction: Functionalism and International Relations,” in A. J. R Groom and Paul Taylor (eds.), Functionalism: Theory and Practice in International Relations (New York, NY: Crane, Russak & Company, 1975), p. 4.
David Mitrany, The Functional Theory of Politics (London: Robertson, 1975), p. 4.
Justin D. Cooper, “Organizing for Peace: Science, Politics and Conflict in the Functional Approach,” in Ashworth and Long, NewPerspectives, pp. 28–9.
See, especially, David Mitrany, “International Consequences of National Planning,” The Yale Review (Vol. 37, No. 1, 1947), pp. 18–31.
David Mitrany as one of the main speakers in the plenary session “Problems of World Citizenship and Good Group Relations,” in International Congress on Mental Health London 1948, Proceedings of the International Conference on Mental Hygiene, 16th-21st August, t/ol. IV, J. C. Flugel (ed.), (London: H.K. Lewis, 1948), pp. 71–85, hereafter Mitrany, Mental Health Address, p. 78.
David Mitrany, “A Political Theory for the New Society,” in Groom and Taylor, Functionalism, p. 27.
David Long and Lucian M. Ashworth, “Working for Peace: The Functional Approach, Functionalism and Beyond,” in Ashworth and Long, New Perspectives, p. 4.
David Mitrany, “The Functional Approach to World Organization,” International Affairs (Vol. 24, No. 3, 1948), p. 358. International functional arrangements are supposed to be the extension internationally of governments’ administration of domestic affairs.
Ibid., p. 354.
David Mitrany, A Working Peace System: An Argument for the Functional Development of International Organization, fourth edition (London: National Peace Council, 1946 [first published 1943]), pp. 39, 50, and 52.
David Mitrany, “Parliamentary Democracy and Poll Democracy,” Parliamentary Affairs (Vol. 9, No. 1, 1955–56), p. 17.
Ian Clark, Globalization and Fragmentation: International Relations in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 183.
Weiss, The Myth ofthe Powerless State, pp. 225, 169, and 1.
Harry G. Gelber, Sovereignty through Interdependence (London: Kluwer Law International, 1997), p. 267.
Kenichi Ohmae, Beyond National Borders: Reflections on Japan and the World (Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin, 1987), p. vii.
Kenichi Ohmae, “The Rise of the Region State,” Foreign Affairs (Vol. 72, No. 2, 1993), p. 78.
Kenichi Ohmae, The End of the Nation State: The Rise of Regional Economies (London: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 7.
John H. Herz, “The Rise and Demise of the Territorial State,” WorldPolitics (Vol. 9, No. 4, 1957), pp. 473–93.
Kenichi Ohmae, The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Global Market Place (London: HarperCollins, 1990), p. 11.
Robert B. Reich, “Who Is Us?” and Robert B. Reich, “Who Is Them?” in Kenichi Ohmae (ed.), The Evolving Global Economy: Making Sense of the New World Order (Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1995), pp. 141–60, and 161–81.
Howard W. French, “Reformist Premier Finds Japan Difficult to Change,” The New York Times, 17 November, 2001.
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© 2005 Per A. Hammarlund
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Hammarlund, P.A. (2005). The Decline of the State: The Empirical Claim. In: Liberal Internationalism and the Decline of the State. The Palgrave Macmillan History of International Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980366_3
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