The contemporary age 'rationalisation', a finding of alleged 'reasons' to justify emotional needs.

Sociologists explained that groups, classes and entire nations construct elabrate, collective myths, belief systems or 'ideologies' which reflect some collective material interest (Mannheim 1936). Such arguments made human knovvledge relative; dependent upon a given constellation of socio-historical circumstances. Even physics, the hardest of all sciences, dissolved into relativism. Continental scientists like Mach, Einstein, Heisenberg, Schrodinger and othcrs clevcloped quantum mechanics, whose 'principie of uncertainty' removed causality from (he physical universe and replaced it with cool calculi of probability (Prigogine 1984, pp. 6,213-40). Around 1900, sch challenges were restricted to small groups of philosophcrs and scientsts, and had little political impact. After World War I, however, thesc new ideas were co-opted by popularisers and mass-organisers. The od Enlightenment notions of reason, freedom and natural law were attacked by demagogues who wooed the vast, marginalised groups of Western societies with simplified, often vulgar and absurd, renclitions of Marx, Danvin and Freud. During the traumatic uncertainties of the 1930s, such anti-rationalist, antiliberal arguments often had a great appeal. The adjrony_ofjjic liheraLcrkk.is_haLil_was to some degree-faelled-by-the spread of liberaHdeals, As suffrage was extended and mass-markets grew, whole poplations were integrated into national politics and global economics. They grew conscious of their economic interests and dieir political power; they defined themselves as members of distinct groups or classes; they filled ie tradicional institutions with new demands and burst them asunder. The new political groups consisted predominantly of farmers and workingclass males. In interwar Europe, a substantial number were veterans of World War I. They were disillusioned, hardened men who had risked their lives for statesmen's follies and received few rewards in return. They had little trust in politicians and little faith in od social vales. or did they share the idealism of the industrialists and the academic liberis (Drucker 1939). The veterans of the Great War constituted a pool from which evolved a generation of defiant pleasure-seekers, typically portrayed with glass in hand and cigarette dangling from the lips. The financial panic of 1929 was the final straw. The Great Depression upsct the world's commodity and labour markets. It tossed manufacturers and labourers helplessly about in unpredictable ups and downs. These fluctuations were beyond reason; they defied any larger order which the human mind could discover; they did not describe a unidirectional evolution of skills and wealth and power. In these chaotic circumstances, appeals to the natural laws of the free market sounded like renouncements of social responsibilities. The cornbined forc of mass mobilisation and of economic and socio->sychological depression poisoned the soils in which liberalism was striking its west roots. Mobilisation and disillusion interacted to crate a distinct political

Interrvar politics climate. When the disillusioned men of the lost generation were stirred to action in the 1930s, they tended to shun the liberal ideis; and instead embraced hard and fast solutions to complex problems. The disillusion of the intellectuals and the cynicism of the masses reinforced the ideological divisin of the world between dictatorial and democratc politics; between market economies and cornmand economies; between liberal politics on the one hand and communism and fascism on the other (Wohl 1979). 8.3 International Relations: the infancy of the discipline

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Inlernational Relations emerged as a discipline in its own right after World War I. However, the subject matters discussed in these first, formative years_wgre ciidausLv-o.ut-0-f tnurh withJJie-pditkaxealides of the age. Many of the courses harrpn^jnany of the books written were ideologically myopic. Early students of world affairs confined thFm'!plvf's fQ-the Wilsonian vi sionofjworld politics and rarely ventured to explore the many theories which swept_the_streets outside theirJvoryJDgeis. Why did the infant discipline of International Relations remain so curiously aloof from the diverse, intense and polarised debate of the interwar period? The answer, writes Edward Carr, is that every new scholarly discipline has come into beingjn re^RQns^q.sirn-Social-Q5chnical need. It first identifies a need, dien thinks of ways to address and alleyiate this_need. Only then will it focus its attention_on_iieality. The need to promote health created medical science; the desire to build bridges created the engineering sciences; 'the desire to cure the sickness of the body politic has given the impulse and its inspiration to political science. Purpose, whetherwe are conscious ofitornot, is a condition of thought' (Carr 1964, p. 3). Aftgr Wnrl,d War T, the^Qmm.Qn_nppfl andjnost sincerelv felt wish to avoid anorier wnrlrl war provided the major impulse for the new science of International Relations. 'The passionate desire to prevent war determined the who" initial course and direction of the study. Like other infant sciences, the science of International politics has been markedly and frankly utopian,' writes Carr (ibid., p. 8). In order to appreciate the nature of the utopianism which characterized International Relations in its infant years, it is importara to recall that the new discipline was primarily an Atlanticjphenomenon, infused with the political ideis o f the Atlantic tradrt!n7Shenjiew_courses in Internajjanal-Relfltions emerged after World War I like mushrooms after rain, the zone of scholarly growdi was limited to the North Atlantic cultureZTtslanguage was English; its theoretical tradlon was that of liberalism; its visions of war, wealth, peace and power were those of the Enlightenment project. Continental scholars, too, studied world affairs; however, diey did so within the traditional confines of law, sociology, history, geography and other established disciplines. The first modern anti-war societies were formed in response to the Thirty

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