Aaron Sheehan-Dean. The Calculus of Violence

In The Calculus of Violence: How Americans Fought the Civil War, a provocative exploration of how Americans fought the Civil War, Aaron Sheehan-Dean asks a different question of the enormous violence exacted in the war. Instead of the more common question of why the Civil War was so horrific, he asks why the war wasn’t any worse. All of the ingredients for genocide on a twentieth-century scale were there: the technology for mass killing in new weaponry, deep ethnic and racial hatreds, guerrilla tactics, and battles bordering civilian populations. So why did the participants choose restraint instead of total war? As he sifts through the life-and-death choices made by generals and politicians on both sides of the conflict, Sheehan-Dean insists that he is not writing a “moral history” of the Civil War. And he is correct. It is the question of violence and its limits that concentrates his attention, and not morality as classically set forth in just war theory. And in this context he makes a compelling case that the Civil War was not a “total war” on civilians as well as soldiers. As bad as it was, Sheehan-Dean argues, it could have been worse—much worse. Unlike twentieth-century total wars that descended into genocide with millions of casualties, the Civil War (with notable exceptions) was generally a restrained affair in which politicians and commanders followed rules of civilized warfare that imposed limitations on the violence perpetrated on both sides.

Context (archaeology) · Criminology · Genocide · Guerrilla warfare · Just war theory · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Total war · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies