Civil wars

David Armitage's new book Civil wars invites us on a structured romp through a historian's playground of ideas. In three parts, he takes us from the Roman genesis of civil war as a phenomenon and phrase, through a dizzying span of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century wars and revolutions in Europe, and into a surprising, legally grounded approach to understanding contemporary civil wars. For scholars of political violence and civil war, Armitage forces our attention back to foundational assumptions of a key concept. For casual readers, he challenges received wisdom about domestic power politics and the very premise of ‘us’ and ‘them’. Throughout, one of the book's greatest charms is that it reads like the book Armitage—a scholar of big, history-defining ideas—wanted to write. Noting that there is no On civil war to complement Carl von Clausewitz's seminal work On war or Hannah Arendt's On revolution, he states as his aim ‘to uncover the origins of our present discontents, to explain just why we remain so confused about civil war and why we refuse to look it in the face’ (p. 7). He seizes the opportunity to introduce us to historians' historians. The resulting tour des idées spends more time with Lucan than Lenin, while eighteenth-century Swiss legal thinker Emer de Vattel and nineteenth-century US lawyer Francis Lieber reign supreme over household names like Karl Marx, Mao Zedong and Robert E. Lee

Art · Casual · Face (sociological concept · Literature · Political science · Politics · Power (physics · Social science · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Classics · History · Law · Political and Social Dynamics in Chile and Latin America · Political Theology and Sovereignty