Richard Ned Lebow

On his book Why Nations Fight: Past and Future Motives for War

Cover Interview of October 03, 2010

Lastly

The three shifts in thinking I identity have two common features. Each developed slowly and progressed in fits and starts.

Changes in beliefs took a long time to become sufficiently widespread to affect practice, and practice was at first halting and unsuccessful. Over time, however, patterns of behavior changed and the motives in question become increasingly disaggregated from war. The revolution in thinking about wealth began in late eighteenth century, did not fully become the conventional wisdom until the late nineteenth century and did not act as a check on war until at least one half century later. Collective security, a product of the early nineteenth century, took almost 150 years to show meaningful political consequences. The shift in thinking about standing is a twentieth century phenomenon and only began to affect political practice during the Cold War.

This author can only hope that a book that demonstrates how traditional conceptions of standing have been responsible for war can help accelerate this change, and, with it, the search and acceptance of alternate means of claiming and receiving standing.

history / philosophy / polemics / violence / globalization / power / wwii / war / united nations / aristotle /

[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.

Carolyn J. Dean,
Interview of February 01, 2011

The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.

Jerome Kagan,
Interview of September 17, 2009