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A highly readable and incredibly astute look at why attaining a global peace isn’t as easy as simply not fighting wars.
This is a history of European warfare with a coating of peace on it. I did not mind, as Howard was a learned, smart, thoughtful historian. But ultimately he found himself incapable of standing outside of mainstream thinking, and his notion of what might provide peace in the centuries to come failed to consider anything but the familiar institutions.
Una sintesi dell’evoluzione della guerra in Europa, e dell’idea della pace.Peccato per la mancanza di note, e bibliografia (nella mia edizione è presente solo un indice dei nomi).Magnifico Kant!pag.10 _______________________________Talune società sono state certamente più bellicose di altre, probabilmente per necessità. In alcune, la guerra è nata probabilmente come rituale religioso, come un rito di passaggio per adolescenti, o come forma di gioco, sull'esempio delle partite di football, riserv...
I'm the book is an awkward history of war and it's pauses. I love that it hits the punchline quickly: peace is a new innovation. But it then talks exclusively about war, and not in a way that seems to have relevance to peace. The books argument is essentially: War. It started out ugly. Then we added human ingenuity and it got uglier. Peace. It's nice. It's new. Sometimes it happens between wars. I may just be reacting to personal expectations on the title though. Still 3 stars as I am thinking a...
Buon saggio anche se forse un po' troppo "teorico"
4.5A great summary of war from 800 to modern day.
Sources? Notes?
Scarcely more than a pamphlet, this book reiterates in broad strokes several of the major themes of "War and the Liberal Conscience." It's a mere 113 well-set and uncrowded pages, and those who read more quickly than a six-year old (or than me) can probably finish in two hours. You'd be fine to read only the last chapter, really, so long as you're familiar with the basic motifs of Western political and military thought over the last two centuries. Really, the book's whole point can be made in th...
A short and well-written history of war and peace in the western world. Howard emphasizes the fact that throughout much of history war was taken for granted and that the way we understand and value peace today is a relatively recent development -- a result of Enlightenment ideas. Whereas, starting in the late 18th century, peace gradually came to be seen as a grand objective, war, after the destruction and the slaughter of the wars of the last hundred years, began to be considered fundamentally
A succinct history of war from the 800s to present in the context of western civilization. It posits that war is the natural state of asocial social humans. Our sociability is necessary for our survival but it will, on the other hand, always create tension and hostility and power struggles. Peace is a rickety invention all too easily destroyed by human kind's tribalism and warlike nature.
with the exception of the spread of christianity, soft power never achieved anything. peace, order, civilization are hard won; such things don't happen by chance, treaty, treatise, dialogue, or nature.