War

This is a wonderful book. Expanding on the themes first raised in her 2018 series of Reith Lectures for the BBC, renowned historian Margaret MacMillan offers a thoughtful and compelling account of why war matters and why it still demands to be studied. Combining fine prose with an impressive range of historical examples ranging as far back as the Chalcolithic era, MacMillan shows how the evolution of human society has proceeded hand-in-hand with warfare. Indeed, she explains that at the heart of the relationship between society and war lies a tragic paradox: war is rooted in our sociability, not our aggressiveness. War requires cooperation and organization. It is as Clausewitz explained both collective and purposive; it demands that soldiers privilege the common interests of the group over their immediate self-interest. In their quest for security, humans learned to cooperate in groups. Groups that cooperated best served their individual members well, but inevitably groups came into conflict with one another. They had different interests, identities, languages and values, and to protect these goods societies and states built capacities for war. Human society and its organization into states marshalled our propensity for cooperation to great ends––order, law, science, industry and art were all made possible. But an inevitable and inescapable consequence was the emergence of conflict and war between groups. The origins of war, of course, remain hotly contested and on this, like everything, MacMillan is thoughtful and balanced. While we cannot be sure exactly when war began, we can be confident that by the time human societies bore some of the hallmarks of political organization, they were fighting wars and preparing for war. Trends in war's incidence and lethality may ebb and flow, but its actuality and potential are constant. Thus, MacMillan presents a counterpoint to Steven Pinker's more optimistic thesis put forward in Better angels of our nature (London: Viking, 2011), that the civilizing effects of enlightenment are making the world more peaceful. The so-called ‘long peace’ of the post-Second World War era was not so peaceful. ‘Those of us who have enjoyed the Long Peace since 1945’, she writes, ‘need to reflect that much of the world, including Indochina, Afghanistan, the Great Lakes district in Africa and large parts of the Middle East, has seen and still sees conflict’ (p. 19)

Political economy · Political science · Privilege (computing · Sociology · Spanish Civil War · Law · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East

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