Norman Angell and the war

 Norman Angell won a Nobel Peace Prize. What he was recognized for? Mainly for the book The Great Illusion. Its argument was economic, not moral: in a world of credit, integrated finance, and interdependent trade, military conquest cannot pay. The interest rate of belligerent countries was higher than that of peaceful countries. Angell was not the man who said that war was impossible, but rather the one who showed just how costly it was. His claim was that war is futile - that victory brings no economic gain - which is fully compatible with states going to war anyway out of miscalculation or illusion. That is the point of the title: the illusion is the belief that conquest enriches.

The award landed at a grim moment: Hitler took power in 1933, Japan left the League, and the Geneva disarmament talks were collapsing. Giving the prize to the great popularizer of interdependence looked either brave or naive, depending on your view. Notably, Angell himself was not a pacifist by then. He argued for collective security with real teeth - sanctions and, if necessary, force against aggressors - on the grounds that the alternative was piecemeal surrender. Carr made Angell the emblem of interwar "utopianism", a caricature that stuck for a generation.

Was Angell the only person to win a Nobel Peace Prize for a book?

No, if the question is which laureates were recognized primarily because of something they wrote, Angell has clear company: Bertha von Suttner (1905) is the strongest precedent. Her novel Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms, 1889) was a European sensation and the reason she became the face of the peace movement — it also helped persuade Alfred Nobel to endow a peace prize in the first place. Alfred Fried (1911) was a journalist and publisher whose case rested almost entirely on written output — his journal Die Friedens-Warte and his Handbuch der Friedensbewegung, a systematic manual of the peace movement. Less a single famous title, more a body of writing.

When I think of Angell and the idealists (or liberals) in general, I believe that thought has a task. And the task of thought is to create a better world. Realism does not create a better world; it merely explains certain conflicts between certain great powers. When I think about who I want to be and what I want to build my intellectual career upon, I think about using my thinking to help create a better world. I do not know if liberalism is the answer to perpetual world peace. Kant certainly has excellent ideas, and the European Union was an incredible invention that succeeded in putting an end to wars between quarreling siblings. But I don't know if interdependence is a silver bullet that can put an end to all wars.