- Person
- Alfred Hermann Fried
- Lived
- 1864–1921
- Field
- Peace movement
- From
- Austrian
The story
Alfred Hermann Fried was born in Vienna in 1864 to a Jewish family and left school at fifteen to work in a bookshop. In Berlin he became a bookseller and publisher, and in 1891, inspired by Bertha von Suttner’s anti-war novel Lay Down Your Arms!, he proposed that she edit a peace journal he would publish. In 1892 they launched it, and that same year Fried co-founded the German Peace Society.
Fried’s distinctive contribution was intellectual. Earlier pacifists relied mostly on moral appeals; Fried called that too romantic. In his view war was not a condition in itself but the symptom of a condition, the anarchy of a world without common institutions. “If we wish to substitute for war the settlement of disputes by justice,” he wrote, “we must first substitute for the condition of international anarchy a condition of international order.” Disarmament, he believed, would follow once nations were bound together by treaties, arbitration courts, international unions and regular conferences.
He spent his life documenting and promoting that order. After the Hague Peace Conference of 1899 he focused on economic cooperation and political organisation among nations. His journal Die Friedens-Warte, founded in 1899, was called by Norman Angell the most efficient periodical of the pacifist movement in the world. His Annuaire de la vie internationale, prepared from 1909 with Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, catalogued the growing web of international bodies, and he held up the Pan-American Union as a model for how nations could cooperate while keeping their identities. He was one of the fathers of the idea of a permanent organisation to keep world peace.
Fried shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 1911. During the First World War he worked from Switzerland for peace and for prisoners of war, and was accused of treason by Austria. He died in poverty in Vienna in 1921, a year after the League of Nations was founded on principles he had championed, which after 1945 were carried into the United Nations.
Why it matters
Fried’s argument that peace requires permanent institutions helped prepare the ground for the League of Nations and the United Nations, through which countries today settle disputes by negotiation and law.
About Alfred Hermann Fried
Self-taught Viennese Jewish journalist who co-founded the German Peace Society and argued that only organised cooperation could end war, ideas realised in the League and UN. Nobel 1911.
Sources
- Alfred Fried, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Alfred Hermann Fried Wikipedia
- Alfred Hermann Fried New World Encyclopedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.