Origins of War. Buchan's War in Modern Society
shows that if “strategic studies, the analysis of the role
of force in international relations, have yet to find their
Keynes” (1966, p. xii), social psychologists are no better
managers of what their predecessors called the instinct
of aggression. McDougall's “instinct of pugnacity” was
a secondary one, activated by inhibiting another.
“Emulation” would replace it in advanced societies,
to “end what has been... probably the most import-
tant factor of progressive evolution... [in] individuals
and societies” (Social Psychology, London [1908], Ch.
XI). William James felt that “our ancestors have bred
pugnacity into our bone and marrow,” and that “mili-
tary instincts and ideals are as strong as ever.” His
argument for a “Moral Equivalent of War” (1910;
Bramson [1964], pp. 21-31) was similar to those of
Bloch or of Norman Angell's widely read The Great
Illusion: a Study of the Relation of Miltary Power in
Nations to their Economic and Social Advantage (Lon-
don, 1911). “Modern war,” James held, “is so expensive
that we feel trade to be a better avenue for plunder.
... Competitive preparation... is the real war,...
battles are only a sort of public verification of the
mastery gained during the 'peace' interval.... When
whole nations are the armies and the science of de-
struction vies in intellectual refinement with the sci-
ences of production,... war becomes absurd and
impossible.”
Freud took years to admit an “aggressive instinct
alongside of the familiar instincts of self-preservation
and sex, and on an equal footing with them.” But by
1930 he felt that “men are not gentle creatures who
want to be loved, and who at the most can defend
themselves if... attacked.” Checks on aggression are
one source of civilized man's discontents. It had “very
probably” taken “the bees, the ants, the termites...
thousands of years” to arrive “at the State institutions
... for which we admire them.” The “question for
the human species... [is whether] their cultural de-
velopment will... [master] the disturbance of their
communal life by the human instinct of aggression...
[now that] they have gained control over the forces
of nature to such an extent that... they would have
no difficulty in exterminating one another to the last
man” (Civilization and its Discontents [1930], New
York [1961], pp. 8, 58, 92).
Some Freudians' views of militarism have been noted
elsewhere. In “Personal Aggressiveness and War”
(1938; Bramson [1964], pp. 81-103), E. F. M. Durbin
and John Bowlby saw the projection of aggression to
internal or external scapegoats as relieving social ten-
sions. The work of John Dollard and others on Human
Frustration and Aggression (New Haven, 1939) was
followed by his practical Fear in Battle (New Haven,
1943) and official Studies of Social Psychology in World
War II (4 vols., Princeton, 1949), but L. L. Bernard
felt that War and Its Causes (New York [1944], p. 23)
still eluded “all-purpose” definitions. And in the con-
temporary social explosion—from overpopulation,
poverty, etc.—theory of war goes little beyond
Machiavelli's or Bodin's maxims.
Konrad Lorenz' and other ethologists' works On
Aggression (New York, 1966) enliven the 1960's. Lorenz
sees aggression as a general instinct which is highly
adaptive to ecological conditions. In territorial species
it divides the habitat for their survival. In social ones
it may create hierarchical structures in which authority
and experience are predominant. Baboons' controlled
group aggressiveness fits their feeding habits; related
species act as if dominance were less important. But
ethologists study species with highly stereotyped re-
sponses, and most of the argument is by analogy. Ag-
gressive human responses to many situations are far
from stereotyped even in individuals, and the social
anthropologist Ashley Montagu (
On Being Human,
New York, 1966) sees all this as a new myth of original
sin to project and displace the learned social evils of
war and aggression to nature.
Our ideas of progress and states make it hard to take
Polybius' view of history as “education... for political
action” with “the memory of other people's calamities”
as “the only source from which we can learn to bear
the vicissitudes of Fortune with courage” (Histories,
Book I, Ch. i). Wright (1964, p. 154) found so many
historical causes of war that studying “the engineering
of peace” was more profitable. After showing war as
“the proximate cause of the breakdown of every civili-
zation... known for certain to have broken down”
and the failure of all universal empires, Toynbee (1951,
pp. vii-xii) still hoped for “a voluntary association of
peace-loving peoples” strong and wise enough “to
avoid any serious wish to challenge its authority.” And
McNeill (Rise..., p. 806) hopes that power “which
has dominated the whole history of mankind” will
“coalesce under an overarching world sovereignty
[until] the impetus now impelling men to develop new
sources of power will largely cease.”
The voluminous works of contemporary military
intellectuals contain no new ideas on the origins of war.
They deal with the scientific management of war in
an atmosphere of popular fears of absolute weapons
and revolutionary passions. While great powers are
deterred from direct attacks on each other, this may
produce nonevents which seem like victories, and old
ideas of influence spark wars in which “irresponsible”
small powers may manage their sponsors. Some result-
ing problems are familiar. Guerrillas may counter su-
perior machines hiding among the people; Americans
saved their men by using machines so indiscriminately
that popular passions overturned their managers and
imperiled the “great interests” allegedly in question.
In this situation a “satisfactory” scientific view of
war is as remote as ever. The sociologist Raymond Aron
(1959, pp. 114, 119) finds the “twentieth century an
aggregate of past centuries,... [without] even the
rudiments of an advance over them,” or any hopes for
the further neutralization of areas threatened by nu-
clear war, and notes that these “cannot be indefinitely
extended.” The economist Boulding (Meaning..., pp.
90-91) uses Bloch's argument. “In the age of civili-
zation war was a stable social institution, and for man-
kind as a whole, a tolerable one. In the twentieth
century the system of international relations... based
on unilateral national defense has broken down because
of the change in the fundamental parameters of the
system, and war has therefore become intolerable.” His
hope in the social sciences is James's hope that “the
ordinary prides and shames of social man... are
capable of organizing such a moral equivalent... [of
war]. It is but a question of time, of skillful propa-
gandism, and of opinion-making men seizing historic
opportunities” (“Moral Equivalent of War,” p. 29).
