In Our Time - The Art of War

Episode Date: June 12, 2003

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the history and philosophy of warfare. The British historian Edward Gibbon wrote: “Every age, however destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of blood and military renown.” War, it seems, is one of mankind’s most constant companions, one that has blighted the lives and troubled the minds of men and women from antiquity onwards. Plato envisaged a society without war, but found it had no arts, no culture and no political system. In our own time the United Nations struggles but often fails to prevent the outbreak of conflict. But how has war been understood throughout the ages? Who has it served and how has it been justified? Is war inherent to human beings or could society be organised to the exclusion of all conflict?With Sir Michael Howard, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford; Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Warwick; Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter.

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Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com. UK forward slash radio 4. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. The historian Edward Gibbon wrote, Every age, however,

destitute of science or virtue, sufficiently abounds with acts of blood and military renown. War, it seems, is one of the world. of mankind's most constant companions, one that has blighted the lives and troubled the minds of men and women from antiquity onwards. Plato envisaged a society without war, but find it had no arts, no culture, and no political system. War was often thought as desirable. It's peace, which is now desirable. But how has war been understood through the ages, whose it served and how has it been justified? Is war inherent to human beings, or could society be organized to the exclusion of all conflict? With me to discuss the thought and

History of War. Sir Michael Howard, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford. Angie Hobbes, Lecture and Philosophy at the University of Warwick, and Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter. Angie Hobbs, war featured greatly in Greek life, in a sense, the foundation of our literature is the great war book, I'd. Can you just say what Homer said in around 800 BC about war in that book? Yes.

Right from the very beginning, we're presented with a very complex picture of war. On the one hand, war seems to be accepted not simply as an inevitable facet of human experience, but also is the ideal training ground, display case and test for heroic courage. The supreme Greek warrior Achilles makes it explicit that his brand of heroism requires a battlefield. And battlefields, of course, are also where the hero wins the glory that is to be his compensation. for risking his life or even sacrificing his life. The danger of this approach, of course, is that it could lead some people,

not Homer, I think, but some of his readers, to actually approve of war or even actively to promote it. And the test case here might be the warrior leader Alexander the Great, who absolutely hero-worshipped Achilles and devoted his brief life to see, out war and conquest in an explicit attempt to emulate and even to supersede his hero. On the other hand, Homer is absolutely unflinching in his depiction of the suffering, pity and waste of war, as exemplified in his extraordinarily moving scene between Achilles and the Trojan King Priam.

Priam comes to Achilles' tend as a supplicant to request the return of the body of Priam's son Hector whom Achilles has slain and whose corpse he has defiled. And Achilles is so moved by Priam's courage and grief that he is briefly moved to reflect on what he is doing in Troy and what he is doing causing sorrow to the Trojan people, as he puts it. So right from the beginning you get this kind of. complexity. And we have the dark side because we have Achilles' blood lust. What's the Greek word for

it? That's right, Carme, yes. And the slaughtering of these boys to sacrifice with his friend Petroclus, who's been killed. And Homer seems to disapprove of that, even though he's a Homer hero. Oh, yes, yes. I mean, some of the acts committed by Homeric heroes, particularly by Achilles, are clearly castigated by other characters and gods in the Iliad itself. It's not an uncomplicated picture by any means. Have you any means of judging how far this was a reflection of the actual experience of Greeks at the time? A, not so much in the battles, I need to go into the details of that, but the idea that these were the great virtues, the heroic virtues, the virtues of courage,

and these could be tested, these were the greatest things to do, and these could only be tested on battlefields? Yes, well, if you take Euripides, for instance, Euripides will tend to He tends to look at the innocent victims of war as depicted, for instance, in his play the Trojan women where he looks at the conquered and soon to be enslaved Trojan women

and he makes it clear that these victims or at least it's a suggestion that these victims don't just represent all innocent victims of war but are specifically representative of the inhabitants of the island of Milos, whom the Athenians had treated with the utmost savagery and cruelly very recently. So there you get a direct example of how the interaction between Greek literature and Greek experience. Very briefly, when Plato tried to think about a world without war through Socrates,

he found it was a world without anything else as well, didn't he? Yes, that's right. No science, no culture. That's right. I mean, yeah, Plato's particularly interesting and that he tries to examine the origins of warfare and whether it's an inevitable or inevitable aspect of human experience. And his character, Socrates in the Republic, when he's setting up his model of the ideally just state,

he initially postulates a pre-politicized and pre-monetary community of just one class of individuals who are both producers and consumers of very basic goods and who live a very simple, harmonious and ascetic life. And the crucial point here is that they live a life at peace, both amongst themselves and with their neighbouring states. But one of Socrates's interlocutors protests that a life of such simple pleasures is too basic. It's a society fit only for pigs, as he puts it.

And so Socrates is reforced to introduce more sophisticated activities and pleasures and what he terms the unnecessary desires. Now the problem here is that these unnecessary desires are limitless. So as soon as they're introduced, there is a move to expansion and to the appropriation of the goods and territory of neighbouring states and hence the instantiation of war and the need for a military class. So Michael Howard, in your reading, do you think that the Greeks took it for granted

that they would go to war, that they lived in a state in which war was simply part of the nature of life. And is this reflected in our organisation of the Athenian army, the citizen army? It was certainly, I speak as a total non-expert as that, but it was certainly taken for granted as part of the nature of human life. There's an element to be introduced which hasn't been discussed, which is the gods, that one was at the mercy of these totally capricious gods who were in a state of war with themselves as often as not.

And there was really nothing that you could do about it. It had to be accepted that the nature of life was tragic. Or it was comic. But certainly underlying there was this problem of tragedy which one had to come to terms with. And the hero was somebody who defied the gods, who accepted that his... fate was going to be tragic, and that one measured people's virtue by the capacity with which

they were able to stand up to this tragedy and overcome it, make a good end. One was going to die anyway. One might as well die fighting the gods, but certainly die fighting. And one of the gods was a god of war, wasn't he? One of the gods was the god of war, but they were all of them pretty bellicose. What can you tell us about the Greek, the Athenian citizen army and how significant do you think that was? Again, I speak subject to correction on this.

But it was a criterion of a free man that he fought. Those, the only people who, those who did not fight were women and slaves and children. That it was part of the duty and the honour and the virtue of the virtue of the virtue of, men that they did fight, they did fight for their state. And therefore, the citizen was automatically a soldier and soldiers were automatically citizens. So you had a potent combination of sort of the freedom to do this, the manhood, fighting for the state, all combined in one thing, in the war. So it wasn't, it, it became very complicated from the beginning, didn't it? I'd say it came very simple. It was really simple from the beginning.

that if you were a free man and not a slave, automatically you were a warrior. And it really was as simple as that. There was something very odd about somebody who was not a warrior. Can I just persist with some repudational, Mr. Michael. But if you're bringing in ideas of manhood, freedom, fighting for your own city into one act, isn't that rather putting a lot of complicated things into one box?

I'm just about to duck for you and we are straight left again this time. Well, we have complicated it. The situation has become a great deal more complex since then, but at that time I would have thought that had been seen as very, very simple indeed. Am I wrong on that one? Well, can I just persist with us? Ask you one more question. The Roman army became a professional army.

Was that even more professional than the Spartan army had been? Because they were still a citizen's army, weren't they, the Spartan army to a certain extent. So what was the big change with the Roman army? I'm not at my depth, yeah. What was the big change with the Roman army? Well, the big change of the Roman army was that they were not simply fighting for the defence of Rome and its environment. That as their power increased, it became impossible for a citizen to be a soldier fighting on the frontiers of Persia or on the Rhine. You had to have a professional army to do that kind of thing.

People who were totally dedicated to war. The Greek citizen army were most of the time they were farmers. And there was only a very limited time of the year when they actually did fight. Christianity brought in the idealistic idea of being Pacific very early on, but quite soon, well, after a few centuries, there was the theory of a just war proposed by Augustine of Hippo. Why do you think he felt obliged to do that? Well, because at that stage the Roman Empire was under very severe threat.

We're now in the fourth century also, and it is beginning to crumble, and the barbarians are beginning to intrude on, not simply the frontiers, but beginning to threaten the stability and the peace and the order of the empire, which had previously acted as the guardian of the Christians, who at that stage is sort of admittedly a Pacific sect. but once it became realized that they were able to be pacific because they were guarded by the authority of the Roman Empire, then it became fairly clear that if the Roman Empire was to survive and continue to provide the peaceful order in which Christianity could flourish, the Christians have got to play their part in the defense. And then the whole question of what is a just and what is an unjust war becomes discussed. and Augustine laid down the guidelines which have been followed by the Christian church ever since. Yeah. Can I move forward, Jeremy Mc Black, to after Augustine, to feudalism?

What did that bring to the... I'm trying to put a platform here before we discuss, take the ideas near our own time. What did that bring to the idea of how wars could be fought? Well, feudalism is essentially a form of social organisation linked to the idea that it is necessary to fight, and it reflects reciprocal relationships between people in different orders of society. And it's focused on the idea that the job of the laity is to act as the arm of the church.

There is a close relationship between that. As Michael was saying about St. Augustine, I mean, St. Augustine had argued in the City of God Book 19 that in the absence of morality, there is no difference between Alexander the Great and a band of robbers, a very famous text. And if one read that forward, what it meant is that the proper exercise of lay authority and the use of force required a kind of morality and justice. Now, obviously, there are two types of war in the medieval period from that point of view. There is conflict against non-Christians, and there is conflict against other Christians,

and each of those require very different understandings. Now, in essence, conflict against non-Christians had, as it were, a lower threshold. Conflict against other Christians has a much higher threshold for it to become acceptable. Although, just one last point, I think we obviously separate war from other aspects of force. I think what's worth bearing in mind that in the medieval period, war is an aspect of the use of force. So in other words, the question of the justice of killing somebody is not just a question of the justice of killing them in war. but also the question of the justice of killing them if they're engaging in feuds or illegal acts. I mean, is it legitimate for a Christian monarch or a Christian lord to kill another Christian, and if so, how?

And that is in a way not unique to war. It's also a question if they're a robber or if they're, quite frankly, another rival baron. Would you think someone cynical if they said, look, what happened was the great warrior states of this part of the world? simply took Christianity on and cut the cloth to their own suiting. I wouldn't think of being cynical at all. What I would say is that in many senses, as with today, as with the use of notions of international law over the last century, in many senses people respected ideas of the proper conduct

and then, as it were, ignored them. They ignored them because of the pressure of expediency, because of the need to defend themselves, because of the pursuit of advantage. All of those meant that you could at the same time go and listen to a sermon which gave you injunctions upon being a Christian king and what was required of a Christian king and then go and fight another Christian king in no way paying attention to that.

Because you could say there wasn't a great deal of difference. You could say, you're correct, there wasn't maybe a great deal of difference on the actual battlefield between the actions of the Mongol hordes, as we call them in one hand, and the crusading hordes on the other. I think you could say that very truthfully. the only difference of me the Mongols were more successful. Can I know, before we go into the moment, ask you, Machiavelli wrote very coherently about war.

He wrote a book about war. He's quoted. Now, he was, first of all, very briefly, Andrew, what did he say? But was he reflecting his times and putting in order, was he an original thinker about it? To some extent, I think he was an original thinker. He's also putting into practice what's going on in the Italy that he knew,

or rather the Florence and so on that he knew. For him, of course, the profession of the wise prince is war, and the best way of protecting against sedition at home is to unite your people with you and to keep them very, very busy, occupied in wars against an external enemy. And if necessary, you have to create the external enemy. Now, to some extent you could say that he's clarifying and making explicit what is going on in the Italian cities of his day.

But he's certainly making it more explicit. His originality perhaps is in his honesty and in his lucidity of thought. And he put aside, he favoured the Roman rather than the Christian method of warfare, didn't he? I mean, the aim was to win. Oh, yes. Oh, by any means, by any means, yes. Maccabellius were interested the notion of a citizen militia. So in many senses he goes back to the classics and argues that everybody in order to be, member of the Florentine Republic, has to be willing to take military service.

And to that extent, that's one of the reasons why he's a text that's quite important subsequently in military thought, the notion that there is a common obligation. And as Michael said, there is this tension in military service at all stages. Do you either have a system in which there is a requirement of all males, or at least all adult males, who are fit, to serve? and that that's one form of a society with everything that goes with it, or do you have a professionalised military? And the tension between those two has gone right, goes right the way through military history.

And he is writing at a time when the old feudal system, if we can call it, that is collapsing, is not working at all. In Italy in particular, where wealth has grown far more rapidly than elsewhere in Europe, the military class are now putting out their swords for hire to the wealthy cities. And they have, as it were, taken over the conduct of war themselves without very much respect to their employers. And Machiavelli sees this is something which is the major problem of the day

and the prince, the person who is in charge of these emerging states, as opposed to the old feudal estates, has somehow got to create what we now call states, which are going to have the allegiance of their citizens and be able to defend themselves. I want to ask you about states in one second, Michael, but just the word you use there about the military class, for about 2,500 years there has been the idea of a military class,

and it often coincided with an aristocracy, that these men, it's almost always been men, these men are there to do the great thing, which is to attack and defend the city, the state, the creed, whatever it is. Do you see that, sorry, you're going to say. Yes, well, in the high feudal period, the military were the lords.

The military were the people who had been rewarded for their service to originally people like Charlemagne by being given great estates, on which they could maintain themselves, in which they defended by castles. And the history of the Middle Ages did consist very largely of the feuds between these people, which sometimes were accepted, as Jeremy indicated,

as serious wars, and were sometimes simply battles over real estate. And by the 14th and 15th century, these lords had simply broken loose from all serious connection with justice and with order and the whole of Europe was degenerating and deteriorating into a lawless, bellicose, anarchic society. Nate, you, I'm going to, the terrible thing to do to give someone something that they themselves have written. but you wrote the entire apparatus of the state, talking about the 16th century, primarily came into being to enable princes to wage war.

That's pretty good, I think. I think it's really good. Could you develop it? Yes. I wouldn't have picked it if it hadn't been. Well, waging war became increasingly expensive with the development of the growth of siege warfare in particular. and with weapons development, it was no longer possible to wage war simply with cavalry,

this one would now call it, and a few infantry hanging on. You had actually to buy professionals, and the only way in which you could get the money to buy professionals was to get it from your tenants or your subjects or whatever it might be called. That meant you have to have taxes. That meant that you had to negotiate the taxation with somebody. And there grew up what ultimately became called parliaments or estates or whatever you might care to term them, where the prince met his subjects in some kind of representative order and negotiated taxation to enable him to pay his troops. and sometimes he was able to borrow from the growing numbers of bankers,

but ultimately he would go bankrupt. And therefore, increasingly, the representative bodies of his citizens were able to impose, as with negotiating with unions, able to impose their own terms. and in the 17th century, one saw have civil wars developing or civil conflicts all over Europe. And there are two conflicting models. One was in Britain where King Charles I attempt to get money from his parliament to fight the Scots,

ends up in a civil war in England which Parliament wins. And ever since then, the monarch has been subordinated. In Germany in particular in Prussia, there were the same kind of confrontations and the estates lost. And the princes, the dynasties were then able to impose their own order on their own estates, using their army to do so. And you then get developing in Europe an absolutist model, which continues in the ancient regime. Whereas in Britain and later in the United States, States, you have a representative

model of government. Angie Hobbes, where does Thomas Hobbes, Andrew Hobbes, where does Thomas Hobbes fit into this in the Leviathan, in the middle of the 17th century, when he seems to be saying that nature, perhaps out of what, Sir Michael, I'd have said, we've just

had the civil war in this country. A state of nature is a state of war, and therefore there has to be intervention or people have to come together. How does that fit in? How do Hobbs' ideas fit in here? Yes. By a state of nature, Hobbes particularly means a state without political organization. And the basis of his argument is his belief that human ethical values are fundamentally both subjective and relative.

So it's not just going to be the case that humans will, as a matter of fact, happen to disagree quite often about what they take to be good and bad, right and wrong. More than that, there is simply no external, independent, natural criterion they can appeal to to settle those differences. And hence, discord and wars will arise, particularly over people's disagreement about when it's an appropriate moment to assert their right to self-protection. Now, for Hobbes, the only way out of this on-pass is for men to supply what nature has failed to supply. And that is a set of objective standards for assessing right and wrong in the shape of civil laws set up by a sovereign ruler or rulers. So for Hobbes, there is a very clear choice to be made between war or law, which he perceives to be conceptual alternatives.

It's the complete antithesis to the case that we saw Plato putting earlier on. We saw Plato saying basically that the development of civilization and the development of warfare were part of the same process, and you couldn't have one without the other. In Hobbs, we get the opposite of that. For him, we get war as part of the natural state. The civil society or the Commonwealth is part of the attempt at a cure. So is the beginning, would you say this, I mean this is obviously talking, would you say this could mark perhaps a change in the, the, the place of war in the thinking about war, that it needn't necessarily be the central activity of mankind, that there's a way to think about life going on without war?

Yes, I'm not sure if Hobbes was ever quite that optimistic about human nature, but he certainly thinks that it should be a major part of our rational duty to try to use our reason to moderate war, to mitigate the circumstances in which war can arise and so on. has quite a lot of progress we can make. The Enlightenment took this up, didn't I, Jeremy, and Voltaire's ideas, for example, were relevant to this. Yes, there's a tension, which you see very clearly in Voltaire. He's critical of the way in which so many of the higher aristocracy are committed to war.

He himself believes that it's much more important to be prudent and cautious, and it has a limited view of the desirability of war. Other Enlightenment thinkers who are really important here are people like Robertson and Adam Smith, who take the view that, in fact, the way for a society to develop is to have only a minority of the population engaged in war, and that in as few wars as possible, whilst the majority of the population do not and are therefore able to take part in profitable economic activity. And both Robertson and Adam Smith argue that the crucial

distinction between what they see as European societies or developing European societies and what they see as primitive societies is that in the former military services is that of only of a minority of the population, whereas the latter military service is that of the whole of the population. Now, ironically, of course, that is to be subverted within 20 years of them writing when with the French Revolution you get the leve en masse and the idea that you should have conscription. And the whole country is available for call-up. And the whole country is available for call-up, which in a way subverts this notion of Enlightenment intellectuals. Although in one respect, the French Revolution takes forward to the

Enlightenment. I don't mean by that to that it's better or worse, but takes forward. in that enlightenment thinkers going right, and in a sense, recreating the ideas we've been talking about earlier, Enlightenment thinkers have the notion of virtue and morality as being crucial in war, and that in a sense a state can properly engage in war if it is a virtuous struggle. Now, in the French Revolution, that is taken forward very much, that in a sense the purpose of this new state is to be a virtuous state, and that in a sense it is engaged in a struggle with, as it presents it,

with the forces of lack of virtue. Is there any sense in which virtues like courage, heroism, are peeling away from war and applying to other areas and activities in life? Yes, I think that's very much the case. Although when you get the revolutionaries, they try and rejoin it up again. I mean, in a sense, the kind of the cultivation of the private sphere

and of private virtues or of public peaceful virtues, which you saw with Enlightenment thinkers and Enlightenment culture, is that it was subordinated with the French, revolutionists. The French revolutionaries really take us towards the notion of a total war, because what they're arguing is that if the struggle is virtuous, then everybody should take part in it. And if everybody should take part in it and the struggle is virtuous, then how can it be the case that one should accept limitations on the way war is waged? Briefly, then I want to go to Sir Michael. Yes. Though in addition to that, there is a tradition in Western thought going right back to Plato.

there is an attempt to try to extend the field of virtues such as courage and heroism beyond purely the battlefield and into areas of life, such as in Plato's case, philosophy. He was very keen to present Socrates as a courageous hero on a par with Achilles or any other military hero. So what you say is absolutely true, but it's not an entirely new question or problem. Can I ask you, Maglard, is there a sense in which our understanding of the word peace owes a great deal to Emmanuel Kant? Yes, to many other people as well. Kant, complicated figure, was arguing against the view, which was held by many other lesser figures of the Enlightenment, that war only came about because the aristocracy and monarchs enjoyed it,

that they had nothing else to do with their time, that for them period between war was spent just preparing for the next war and that if you could eliminate this now obsolete, Berico's ruling class, and you had introduced what he didn't call democracy, but that is basically what was meant, then you would have rational people in charge of societies and war would not be necessary

because all their morals could be sold by, by reason. Kant entitled his pamphlet on a perpetual peace, and he started by saying a picture of a perpetual peace is a graveyard. It's a nice idea, but one has got to really think this thing through. The first necessity is, well, he laid down various conditions for a peaceful world. And one of them was an evolution to war. democratic states, which will take some time.

There would be lots more wars, he said. But he made a very interesting paradoxical statement that wars brought people closer together. That actually if people were fighting one another, they did establish certain kinds of links. And in an odd kind of way, that is true. Wars do create bounds. At the end of a war, you have to have a peace concluded.

And that at least does bring people together to discuss how the world is. is going to be organized after that. But his main contribution, I think, was to say, first of all, there has got to be political development, internal political developments, before we were going to have a peaceful world. Secondly, it's going to take a very long time. And thirdly, the wars may get increasingly terrible,

but they will also ultimately lead to a greater fairbindle, a greater connection between peoples, and ultimately you can then look forward to something like a perpetual peace. Jeremy, we have the paradox of enlightenment, as you've talked about Voltaire, ideas of a more peaceful way to. And then the French Revolution claimed all in many places. But then the enlightened idea of taking the French Revolution to other countries through the Levi-Amats, through this massive, massive army of Napoleon,

led to, one could argue, the sort of war that rumbol, through for the next two centuries in Europe and was the most savage and mass wars that there have been. And it provoked a counter-reformation from the Germans, sorry, counter-enlightment from the Germans. And so can you just discuss that a bit? Yes. The revolution, whereas the Americans did not try to export their revolution,

the French did. And the effect of the French trying to export the revolution, as you exactly say, is to produce a counter-revolution and to produce a lengthy war which goes on with one or two gaps to 1815, and that then creates a pattern of conflict, and that in a sense there are wars then subsequently to either try and sustain or to overthrow the Congress of Vienna settlement right the way through, and leading up, of course, with the impact of nationalism to the wars of Italian and German unification. Now, the net effect of this is that by the end of the 19th century,

the kind of French revolutionary idea of the nation under arms is replicated across almost all of Europe, but not Britain, but replicated across almost all of Europe with systems of conscription, which ensure that men have to give part of their life to the state, and only to the state for that purpose, and thereafter until they go towards their dotage,

they are reservists. And this kind of altered relationship between the individual and society, focused on the state's obligations and rights to demand military service, is one that really takes us into a pattern that has only changed in the

last 30 years. I mean, in a sense, within our lifetime, we've seen the end of conscription across Europe, and it's finally taking place now. There are still one or two countries where it still exists, but it's going. I mean, in Italy, it's going. For example, in France, it's gone. Russia, it's going. Britain, it's already gone. America, it's gone. And the effect of that has been that, in a sense, we now find it very difficult to understand what it was like for these earlier generations, for whom the state could not only demand military service, it could also then send them to war without in any way consent being part of the relationship.

So that in a sense, military service was not to that. You were assumed by the very act of being German or Italian or French to have, as it were, committed yourself in this way, which goes right back to what Angie was talking about earlier in the sense of the notion of a Greek city state, a Greek police, that that was your obligation as being as part of it, but in a sense now taking into an age of total war. It is interesting how they shoot through these

ideas, don't they? But Angie Hobbes, coming back to you, taking this on a bit, Nietzsche obviously was very, went back to the classics lot, but he seems to represent both sides of this dynamic. In some way he's enlightened and some way he's French Enlightenment, in other ways, he's German counter-enlightened, and out of him comes monsters, don't it? But can you say where Nietzsche stood in that? Because it depends on which picture you read, doesn't it really? Yes, I don't think he'd want you to be able to say clearly where he stood because it's part of his metaphysical approach that he doesn't believe one could or should try for a consistent theory.

However, in certain moods, he does very clearly say, in texts like the genealogy of morals and the gay science, that he is longing for the return of a more manly warlike age in which there will be the return of the supreme martial virtue of courage and a display case for courage. And it will also be given opportunity for the rise of the overman and for the return of the return of. of the master morality as opposed to the current slave morality as he sees it. On the other hand, he also, in later texts, seems to move away from this notion

of courage and endurance in a purely belligerent sphere, and he seems to move more towards a notion of the overman as exercising, self-restrained and self-disciplined, perhaps in a more artistic context. So he's not always militaristic, but he can be. Together with all of that, he can be extremely critical of current Prussia militarism as he sees it. So a complicated thinker. As Nietzsche is both reacting against and expressing this militarism, which Andy has just referred to, which was a feature primarily of Prussia and Germany,

but was becoming increasingly current in Europe at the end of the 19th and the early 20th century as a reaction not simply against the ideas of the French Revolution, but against the way in which society as a whole was going, with industrialization, with democratization, with urbanization, with modernization, with all the things which have made life a great deal more comfortable and more just and more agreeable for everybody, but has been seen by those who dislike it as, as degenerate and weakening us.

And in the First World War, and of course even more in the Second World War, the Germans were consciously fighting for a militarist society, for which they were proud, or at least many of them, against this what they call the shopkeeper mentality of the English and then later on of the Americans. And they said it would be terrible if these degenerate views did become general throughout the world, and that is the way things are going. And we are fighting for societies

which are honourable and virtuous in which people are prepared to die and be heroic. And this becomes, of course, ultimately the basis of fascism and particularly of national socialism. What strikes you more and more is over the last two and a half thousand years the solidity of the central ideas about war, I mean, the way it's kept its grip,

quickly, Angi, because I want to go to Jeremy. Yes, I mean, and fitting in there, arriving at the same place, but from a different starting point, you've got the social Darwinists in the late 19th century. People in the early 20th century, people like Carl Pearson, arguing that, who was a professor of eugenics, arguing that war is a form of natural selection, and it's a means of putting his and others eugenic theories into practice,

because as he sees it, national progress depends on what he terms racial fitness, and he sees that war is the supreme test of racial fitness, fitness and he even goes on to say that without war, mankind will cease to progress because there will not be any means of inhibiting the means of reproducing of what he calls inferior stock. And the weak will inherit the earth. That's right. Do you think there's anything in there?

I think that certainly it's become very much a feature of modern culture, the way in which these ideas of war which have replicated down through the centuries are, you know, I think One thing that we haven't really talked about at all, we'll go for another program almost, is the way in which these Western traditions have to be set in a wider context, because there are other societies with very different ideas. I mean, you asked me earlier about the Mongols. You're right to do so. I mean, it's the Mongols, for example, that capture Baghdad in 1258.

It's not the Crusaders. It's the Mongols that capture Damascus, not the Crusaders. The Crusaders get defeated outside its walls. And I think one of the problems is that so much of our analytical ideas about war are developed within the Western context, understandably so. And what we haven't really brought into the equation is understanding other societies, which range enormously. One has imperial societies, such as the ancient Persia, the Greeks' fort, or China in the 18th century, which conquered more square miles of world territory than any European power in the 18th century, and tribal warfare societies. So this variety needs to be encompassed within our understanding.

Right. I think you're right about that being another programme. Yes, I'm afraid so. I think, I think that is a door that you've opened, shut. But what you have focused on is something that is very, very important in this programme, which is that so often thought, the pattern of thought that we study is essentially thought about peace, about issues of morality

and justice and ethics in peaceful context. Wonderful. But of course, much of human society has been about conflict and war and the preparation for conflict of war and war. And many of the great thinkers, many societies, their ideas have been as much about the proper use of force as they have been about ethical questions in a

peaceful context. And we need, I mean, too often over the last 50 years since the Second World War, we've shut out that side. We've treated, as it were, political thought as an issue of social responsibility, rather than thinking about these wider militaristic and political contexts. Finally, then, and very briefly, I'm afraid, so Michael, do you think that the League of Nations,

the United Nations, do they signify a sea change in larger thinking about war? Well, they are the culmination of the trend of thought, began in the 18th century, that man is reasonable and a reasoning being. War itself is a very unreasonable and irrational way of settling differences. And we must therefore aim for a society in which, in the same way as we have tamed violence and tamed crime within our own state societies, that we must extend this to the interstate society. And the idea of the League of Nations originated with Jeremy Bentham in the earlier

part of the 19th century. It is then put into practice by the Americans after the first and after the Second World Wars. And is the culmination of a certain trend of thought, which one hoped was going ultimately to be successful and universal, but we're having problems. Thank you very much with problems. I can't think of a better word to end it. Thank you very much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio 4.