Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson

Not to be confused with his father Lowes Cato Dickinson, the portrait painter

Dickinson in 1893, by Roger Fry

Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson (6 August 1862 – 3 August 1932), known as Goldie,[1] was a British political scientist[2] and philosopher. He lived most of his life at Cambridge, where he wrote a dissertation on Neoplatonism before becoming a fellow. He was closely associated with the Bloomsbury Group.

Dickinson was deeply distressed by Britain's involvement in the First World War. Within a fortnight of the war's breaking out, he drew up the idea of a League of Nations, and his subsequent writings helped to shape public opinion towards the creation of the League.[3]

Within the field of international relations, Dickinson is prominent for popularizing conceptions of the international system as being an international "anarchy."[4][5][6] In contrast to many of his contemporaries who attributed the causes of war to national and imperial expansion or to population growth, Dickinson argued that war was rooted in fear and suspicion caused by anarchy and arms races.[7][5]

  1. ^ T. S. Eliot (2011). The Letters of T. S. Eliot: Volume 1: 1898–1922, Revised Edition. Yale University Press. p. 523. ISBN 9780300176452. affectionately known as 'Goldie'
  2. ^ Forster, E. M., Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, p. 80
  3. ^ Kaiga, Sakiko (2021). Britain and the Intellectual Origins of the League of Nations, 1914–1919. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-108-48917-1.
  4. ^ Donnelly, Jack (2015). "The discourse of anarchy in IR". International Theory. 7 (3): 393–425. doi:10.1017/S1752971915000111. ISSN 1752-9719. S2CID 143360196.
  5. ^ a b Garner, James W. (1926). "International Anarchy, 1904–1914. By G. Lowes Dickinson. (New York: The Century Company. 1926. Pp. xii, 505.)". American Political Science Review. 20 (4): 885–887. doi:10.2307/1945438. ISSN 0003-0554. JSTOR 1945438. S2CID 147076161.
  6. ^ Morefield, Jeanne (2009), Hall, Ian; Hill, Lisa (eds.), "The Never-Satisfied Idealism of Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson", British International Thinkers from Hobbes to Namier, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 207–225, doi:10.1057/9780230101739_11, ISBN 978-0-230-10173-9
  7. ^ Schieber, Clara E. (1919). "Review of The Choice before Us". The Journal of Race Development. 9 (4): 429. doi:10.2307/29738320. ISSN 1068-3380. JSTOR 29738320.