Essential readings on international politics 5

On this occasion, I would like to share with you a wonderful book, an essential reading indeed. I am talking, of course, of Francis H. Hinsley's Power and the Pursuit of Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963).


Sir Francis Harry Hinsley, a British historian and authority on wartime intelligence and naval warfare, died on Feb. 16, 1998 in Cambridge, England. He was 79 and had been associated with St. John's College, Cambridge University, since his student days. He was an undergraduate at St. John's in 1939 when the British Foreign Office recruited him for its code-breaking headquarters at Bletchley Park. It was there that Germany's Enigma codes were broken, and Professor Hinsley in later decades became the official historian of British intelligence, authorized to tell how it was done and what role he played in it. He was the author of the five-part ''British Intelligence in the Second World War,'' published between 1979 and 1990. He produced the huge volumes with a special security clearance and a team of historians who helped him research the relevant documents from the Bletchley headquarters. An abridged edition appeared in 1993. Professor Hinsley, who was knighted in 1985, was born in Walsall, Staffordshire, and earned his M.A. at Cambridge in 1946 after his Bletchley experience.

He was a professor of the history of international relations and served for 35 years as a research fellow, tutor and lecturer in history and for 10 more years as the Master of St. John's College. He was elected a fellow of the British Academy in 1985. He retired in 1989 but remained active at the university almost to the last. His other books included ''Command of the Sea'' (1950), ''Hitler's Strategy'' (1951), ''The Naval Side of British History'' (1952), ''Power and the Pursuit of Peace'' (1963), and ''Sovereignty'' (1966).




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In the last years of the nineteenth century peace proposals were first stimulated by fear of the danger of war rather than in consequence of its outbreak. In this study of the nature and history of international relations, Hinsley presents his conclusions about the causes of war and the development of men's efforts to avoid it. In the first part he examines international theories from the end of the middle ages to the establishment of the League of Nations in their historical setting. This enables him to show how far modern peace proposals are merely copies or elaborations of earlier schemes. Hinsley believes there has been a marked reluctance to test these theories not only against the formidable criticisms of men like Rousseau, Kant and Bentham, but also against what we have learned about the nature of international relations and the history of the practice of states. This leads him to the second part of his study—an analysis of the origins of the modern states' system and of its evolution between the eighteenth century and the First World War.