War and Peace

Homer does not argue for or against war. He shows it. The Iliad is the first and in some ways still the most honest portrait of armed conflict in the Western tradition. War is "grievous"; "pale fear" and "black death" are its constant companions. Ares is the "blood-stained bane of mortals." And yet the poem's heroes, Achilles and Hector, find in battle the supreme test of human excellence. Glory (kleos) is won on the field or not at all.

What Homer establishes, and what echoes through every later thinker, is war's essential duality. It calls out both the noblest and the basest in human nature, acts of heroic strength alongside cringing weakness. Homer does not resolve this tension. He lets it stand. Every later writer on war is, in some sense, trying to resolve what Homer left open.

Homer is the starting point. He provides the raw material (war as lived experience) that the philosophers, theologians, and political theorists will spend the next 2,500 years trying to make sense of.

Where Homer shows war's face, Thucydides dissects its logic. His History of the Peloponnesian War is the first work of political realism. The famous Melian Dialogue strips away every moral justification: "The strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." War is not caused by the anger of gods or the ambitions of individual heroes. It arises from the structural dynamics between states: from the growth of Athenian power and the fear it inspired in Sparta.

Thucydides also makes an observation that reshapes the discussion: periods of armistice are not really peace. They are part of the war. "Only a mistaken judgment can object to including the interval of treaty in the war. Looked at by the light of facts it cannot be rationally considered a state of peace, where neither party either gave or got back all that they had agreed upon." This insight, that the absence of fighting is not the same as genuine peace, anticipates Hobbes by two thousand years.

Thucydides establishes the realist pole of the debate. Every later thinker who argues that peace is achievable must answer his challenge: that power, not justice, governs relations between states.

Plato sees both sides of the question but does not give them equal weight. In the Republic, Socrates identifies war's origin: it is "derived from causes which are also the causes of almost all the evils in states, private as well as public." Those causes are the appetites: the desire for wealth and luxury that forces cities to expand beyond their borders and encroach on their neighbors. War is not rooted in human nature as such, but in the disordered soul and the disordered state.

In the Laws, Plato allows that a city devoted to military readiness can be partially justified, insofar as its laws aim at courage. But he insists that courage is only part of virtue, not the whole. "No one can be a true statesman who looks only, or first of all, to external warfare; nor will he ever be a sound legislator who orders peace for the sake of war, and not war for the sake of peace."

Plato shifts the question from "What is war like?" to "What causes war?" His answer, disordered desire, opens the door to a moral and political solution, setting up the tradition of just war thinking and the eventual argument for perpetual peace.

Aristotle agrees with his teacher that war is subordinate to peace but frames the point more precisely. "The whole of life is divided into two parts, business and leisure, war and peace. There must be war for the sake of peace, business for the sake of leisure, things useful and necessary for the sake of things honorable." War is an instrument, and like all instruments, it is judged by the end it serves.

This seemingly simple formulation has enormous consequences. If war is a means to peace, then a war that does not serve peace is unjustified. If leisure (and the intellectual and moral life it makes possible) is the true purpose of political community, then a city permanently organized for war has misunderstood its own purpose. Aristotle does not develop a full just war theory, but he provides its essential premise: war requires justification by reference to something beyond itself.

Aristotle provides the philosophical framework (war as means, peace as end) that Augustine and Aquinas will later fill with theological content. He also implicitly rebukes Thucydides' realism: if war is only a means, then power cannot be its own justification.

The Aeneid begins in the fall of one city and ends in the foundation of the line that will raise another. Between lies a story of wars: the wars Aeneas has survived at Troy, the single combats and pitched battles of the Italian campaign, and, held in prospect throughout, the wars by which Rome will come to rule the world. Virgil does not treat this sequence as a mere setting for the hero's deeds. He treats it as the matter from which a lasting peace must be made, and the cost at which the making is carried out.

What gives the poem its distinctive treatment of the subject is the refusal to separate the praise of the imperial peace from an acknowledgment of the grief attending the wars. The episode of Pallas, killed in his first battle, and the killing of Turnus at the end of the poem, are told in a tone that does not conceal what has been lost in each case. Anchises in the sixth book declares the Roman vocation to be the imposition of the ways of peace, the sparing of the subject, and the breaking of the proud; and that declaration is not inconsistent with the lament that fills the poem for the young men, Trojan and Italian alike, who are killed before their time. Virgil does not present the imperial peace as cheap, and it is the tension between its necessity and its cost that the later readers will find most instructive.

The treatment of war and peace in the Aeneid raises questions continued under several other ideas. The justice of the imperial vocation itself is a matter belonging to Justice and to State; the grief of the slain and the moral weight of killing belong also to the treatments of Emotion and of Life and Death; the relation of human warfare to the purposes of the gods is considered under God and Fate. Virgil's contribution to the idea of War and Peace is the linking of these under a single head: no peace that is not also a conquest, and no conquest that is not paid for in the suffering of those who made and those who were subdued.

Augustine in the City of God will take up this inheritance and press it further. The peace of Rome, he will argue, is a real but limited good, secured by wars that cannot be wholly justified from within the framework the pagan city supplied. Aquinas will formulate the conditions of the just war partly by reflection on the cases the Aeneid had set before him. Later writers, from the medievals through the treatments of perpetual peace in Kant, will continue the conversation the Roman poet had framed: whether a lasting peace is possible, what its price is, and whether empire is the only instrument by which a great peace can be secured.

Augustine transforms the discussion by introducing the category of sin. Animals "devoid of rational will" live "more securely and peaceably with their own kind than men." It is not human nature but human fallenness that makes war endemic. This is a sharper diagnosis than Plato's: the problem is not merely disordered appetite but a fundamental corruption of the will.

And yet Augustine insists, paradoxically, that even warmakers desire peace. "Every man seeks peace by waging war, but no man seeks war by making peace. For even they who intentionally interrupt the peace in which they are living have no hatred of peace, but only wish it changed into a peace that suits them better." Peace is "the tranquillity of order," and all wars are waged "that men may find a more perfect peace than that which they had heretofore."

This does not make Augustine an optimist. He reflects soberly on Rome's imperial peace: "The imperial city has endeavored to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language, as a bond of peace. How many great wars, how much slaughter and bloodshed, have provided this unity!" The earthly city will always be plagued by war. Only the heavenly city enjoys true peace. But Augustine also originates the idea that war can be justified (the "just war") when waged reluctantly, for the restoration of peace, and with the right intention.

Augustine is the hinge. He synthesizes the classical insight (war for the sake of peace) with a Christian anthropology (war as the fruit of sin) and produces the just war tradition that will dominate Western thinking for a millennium.

Aquinas takes Augustine's scattered reflections on just war and gives them systematic form. A war is just only if three conditions are met: it must be waged by a legitimate sovereign authority (not a private individual), it must have a just cause (righting a wrong), and it must be undertaken with the right intention (the advancement of good or the avoidance of evil, not revenge or cruelty).

On peace itself, Aquinas refines Augustine. Peace involves more than concord. "Wherever peace is, there is concord, but there is not peace wherever there is concord." Genuine peace requires that men agree "not through being forced" but through a well-ordered harmony of wills. A peace imposed by coercion is not really peace. Furthermore, peace is "the work of justice" indirectly, "insofar as justice removes the obstacles to peace." Without justice, there can be truces and armistices but not true peace.

Aquinas gives the just war tradition its definitive medieval formulation. His three conditions remain the framework for just war thinking into the present. His insistence that coerced concord is not real peace anticipates the modern distinction between negative peace and positive peace.

Machiavelli shatters the Augustinian-Thomistic framework. He does not argue against just war theory so much as ignore it. The relevant question is not moral but strategic. "A prince ought to have no other aim or thought, nor select anything else for his study, than war and its rules and discipline. When princes have thought more of ease than of arms, they have lost their states."

War, for Machiavelli, "is not to be avoided, but is only deferred to your disadvantage." The prince who delays in hopes of preserving peace makes a fatal error. In peacetime, the wise prince studies war more intensively than in war itself. Machiavelli quotes Cicero's distinction between contesting by law and contesting by force, then adds his characteristic twist: "Because the first is frequently not sufficient, it is necessary to have recourse to the second."

Machiavelli represents the sharpest break in the tradition. Where Augustine and Aquinas asked "When is war justified?", Machiavelli asks "How is war won?" Every later thinker who tries to revive the moral framework must reckon with his challenge: that moral categories may be irrelevant to political survival.

Hobbes gives the most rigorous formulation of war's inevitability and, paradoxically, the clearest argument for its cure. In the state of nature, without a common power to keep men in awe, there is "war of every man against every man." This war "consisteth not in battle only, or in the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known." War is not an event but a condition: "as the nature of foul weather lyeth not in a shower or two of rain, but in an inclination thereto of many days together."

The cure is the social contract: men surrender their individual sovereignty to a common authority, the Leviathan, which alone has the power to enforce peace. Within the commonwealth, peace reigns because the sovereign can arbitrate disputes. But between commonwealths, no such authority exists: "Kings and persons of sovereign authority, because of their independency, are in continual jealousies, and in the state and posture of gladiators."

Hobbes translates the problem of war from a moral question into a structural one. War is not caused by sin or by appetite but by anarchy: the absence of a common judge. This structural insight is the essential premise for every later argument about international peace.

Locke draws a threefold distinction that Hobbes had left blurred: the state of nature, the state of war, and the state of civil society. The state of nature is not itself war; it is simply the condition of men "living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth." But because there is no common judge to resolve disputes, the state of nature "inevitably lapses into the state of war," which is "the realm of force" wherever "there is no common superior on earth to appeal to for relief."

Civil society is the remedy: "a state of peace amongst those who are of it, from whom the state of war is excluded by the umpirage which they have provided in their legislative for the ending all differences that may rise amongst any of them." But this peace extends only to fellow citizens. Between nations, the state of nature, and therefore the tendency toward war, persists.

Locke's refinement of Hobbes matters. By distinguishing the state of nature from the state of war, he preserves the possibility that international relations need not be pure anarchy, even without world government. But his framework also generates the next question: if civil society is the cure for war among individuals, is a global civil society the cure for war among nations?

Montesquieu agrees with the Hobbesian framework but locates the origin of war differently. It is not individuals in the state of nature who are at war; it is societies. Once men form political communities, the communities themselves enter a state of nature with respect to each other, and war follows. The laws of nations ("the right of nations") should govern the conduct of war, just as civil laws govern the conduct of citizens.

Montesquieu contributes the idea that law can operate between nations, not just within them. This is a step toward international law as a partial remedy for war, short of world government.

Rousseau sharpens Montesquieu's insight into a principle: "War is a relation, not between man and man, but between State and State." In Rousseau's account, men in the pure state of nature are solitary and peaceful. It is the formation of societies, with their property, inequality, and competing interests, that produces war. Because states exist "in a state of nature among themselves," they experience "the inconveniences which had obliged individuals to forsake it. Hence arose national wars, battles, murders and reprisals, which shock nature and outrage reason."

This reframes the question. If war is not a product of human nature but of political arrangements, then different political arrangements might eliminate it. Rousseau does not develop this implication into a plan for perpetual peace, but he lays the groundwork.

Rousseau's claim that war is structural rather than natural directly enables Kant's argument for perpetual peace. If war is caused by the anarchic relations between states, then transforming those relations can end war.

Kant is where the thread turns. He agrees with Hobbes that sovereign states are "naturally in a non-juridical condition" and that "this is a state of war, in which the right of the stronger prevails." But where Hobbes stops (war between states is permanent) Kant insists that morality demands we go further. "The morally practical reason utters within us its irrevocable Veto: 'There shall be no War.'"

Kant envisions a "Universal Union of States analogous to that by which a Nation becomes a State," but he is careful to distinguish this from a world empire. He means "only a voluntary combination of different States that would be dissoluble at any time." He admits this is imperfect, and that "with the too great extension of such a Union of States over vast regions, any government of it must at last become impossible."

Yet Kant refuses to yield to despair. "The question no longer is as to whether Perpetual Peace is a real thing or not a real thing. We must act on the supposition of its being real. We must work for what may perhaps not be realized, and thus we may put an end to the evil of wars."

Kant is the culmination of the Hobbes-Locke-Rousseau line. He takes their structural insight (war results from anarchy between states) and draws the moral conclusion (therefore we must work to overcome that anarchy). But his solution (a voluntary federation, not a world state) remains in tension with the logic of his own argument.

The Federalist papers apply the Hobbesian insight to a concrete political problem. Hamilton argues that "a man must be far gone in Utopian speculations who can seriously doubt that, if these States should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other."

The solution is not a league or alliance (which depends on "the obligations of good faith" and therefore on each state's sovereign will) but a federal union with real governing authority. "To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent, unconnected sovereignties in the same neighborhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages."

Madison glimpses the universal implication: "Happy would it be if such a remedy for its infirmities could be enjoyed by all free governments; if a project equally effectual could be established for the universal peace of mankind!"

The Federalists provide the empirical test case. If thirteen formerly independent sovereignties can form a union and thereby end war among themselves, the logic extends, in principle, to all sovereignties.

Hegel is the great dissenter. Against the entire tradition from Plato through Kant, he argues that war is not merely inevitable but positively necessary. "War is a state of affairs which deals in earnest with the vanity of temporal goods and concerns." It preserves "the ethical health of peoples in their indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also the corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone 'perpetual,' peace."

Hegel dismisses Kant's proposal for a league of nations. Any such arrangement "presupposes an accord between states; this would rest on moral and religious or other grounds and considerations, but in any case would always depend ultimately on a particular sovereign will and for that reason would remain infected with contingency." States are "completely autonomous totalities in themselves," and self-interest is "the highest law governing the relation of one state to another."

Therefore, "if states disagree and their particular wills cannot be harmonized, the matter can only be settled by war."

Hegel closes the loop back to Thucydides. After two millennia of moral and political philosophy, he reasserts the realist position: war is structural, permanent, and in a sense beneficial.

Tolstoy brings the thread full circle, back to Homer's unflinching gaze at war's face. War and Peace is both a novel and a philosophical argument. Tolstoy scoffs at the historians and generals who claim to understand war's logic. Kutuzov's greatness lies precisely in his "lack of plans"; Napoleon's air of strategic mastery is a delusion. War is the domain of force and chance, and no human mind can master it.

To Prince Andrew, "the aim of war is murder; the methods of war are spying, treachery, and their encouragement." But Tolstoy does not leave it there. He magnifies the campaign of 1812 as the greatest mass movement of humanity, from west to east and then from east to west. In the chaos and suffering, he finds moments of extraordinary human connection: the brotherhood of soldiers, the compassion of enemies, the resilience of ordinary people caught in forces beyond their control.

Tolstoy's old prince puts it simply: "Drain the blood from men's veins and put in water instead, then there will be no more war!" War is rooted not in political arrangements but in human blood itself: in the passions, fears, and loyalties that make us what we are.

Tolstoy is the counterweight to every systematic thinker on the list. Against Hegel's glorification, against Kant's moral program, against Hobbes' structural analysis, he insists that war as lived experience resists all theorizing. He returns the conversation to where Homer began: the human reality of battle, irreducible to any formula.