The historical record would suggest that warfare – armed conflict between two or more opposing groups – has been a fairly consistent feature of humanity’s time on Earth. Its impact on our species is virtually incalculable, though conservative estimates put the combined death toll from war (and disease and famine resulting from it) at over 1.5 billion. Yet there has been a remarkable lack of consensus in regard to fundamental aspects of war – for instance, is it a natural and inevitable component of life, and is it ever morally justifiable? ‘If you wish for peace,’ the great military historian B. H. Liddell Hart once wrote, ‘understand war.’
Lawrence H. Keeley, a professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, has claimed that some 90–95 per cent of known societies throughout history have engaged in at least occasional warfare. The reasons for war are numerous but chief among them is the desire for territorial expansion (whereby one group or nation invades the territory of another), competition for control of resources, historical disputes over rights to land and resources, and ideological conflicts (as epitomized by the Crusades).
So, is war a natural state for a species that subdivides into competing social groups? This was the opinion of Thomas Hobbes, who famously depicted mankind in the ‘state of nature’ as ‘in that condition which is called Warre; and such a warre, as is of every man, against every man.’ It was a view echoed by Voltaire, who concluded: ‘All animals are perpetually at war with each other . . . Air, earth and water are arenas of destruction.’
Plato regarded war as resulting from the abandonment of reason in favour of one’s passions, fomenting political and moral discord. In Phaedo, he wrote: ‘Wars and revolutions and battles are due simply and solely to the body and its desires. All wars are undertaken for the acquisition of wealth; and the reason why we have to acquire wealth is the body, because we are slaves in its service.’
Sigmund Freud, meanwhile, claimed Man is subject to a death instinct (sometimes called Thanatos), which leads ‘organic life back into the inanimate state.’ War, then, takes on the nature of a psychological compulsion.
The father of all things
Heraclitus described war as ‘the father of all things’. Georg Hegel held a similar view, regarding it as a vital step on the path towards the ‘Absolute Spirit’ (the endpoint of civilization, knowledge and being). Each stage of world history is a necessary moment in the Idea of the World Spirit,’ he argued, so that figures like Napoleon Bonaparte – the greatest military leader of the age – become the epitome of the Zeitgeist (the ‘spirit of the age’) and drivers of progress. Spying the Frenchman in 1806 on the eve of the Battle of Jena, Hegel noted: ‘I saw the Emperor – this world-soul – riding out of the city on reconnaissance. It is indeed a wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrated here at a single point, astride a horse, reaches out over the world and masters it . . . this extraordinary man, whom it is impossible not to admire.’
In the 19th century, Karl von Clausewitz established himself as perhaps the single greatest philosopher of war, and it was his contention that: ‘War is not merely a political act but a real political instrument, a continuation of political intercourse, a carrying out of the same by other means.’