The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Vio - By Steven Pinker Page 0,149

At the same time a romantic, militarized communism inspired the expansionist programs of the Soviet Union and China, who wanted to give a helping hand to the dialectical process by which the proletariat or peasantry would vanquish the bourgeoisie and establish a dictatorship in country after country. The Cold War was the product of the determination of the United States to contain this movement at something close to its boundaries at the end of World War II.126

But this narrative leaves out a major plot that perhaps had the most lasting impact on the 20th century. Mueller, Howard, Payne, and other political historians remind us that the 19th century was host to yet another movement: a continuation of the Enlightenment critique of war.127 Unlike the strain of liberalism that developed a soft spot for nationalism, this one kept its eye on the individual human being as the entity whose interests are paramount. And it invoked the Kantian principles of democracy, commerce, universal citizenship, and international law as practical means of implementing peace.

The brain trust of the 19th- and early-20th-century antiwar movement included Quakers such as John Bright, abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, advocates of the theory of gentle commerce such as John Stuart Mill and Richard Cobden, pacifist writers such as Leo Tolstoy, Victor Hugo, Mark Twain, and George Bernard Shaw, the philosopher Bertrand Russell, industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie and Alfred Nobel (of Peace Prize fame), many feminists, and the occasional socialist (motto: “A bayonet is a weapon with a worker at each end”). Some of these moral entrepreneurs created new institutions that were designed to preempt or constrain war, such as a court of international arbitration in The Hague and a series of Geneva Conventions on the conduct of war.

Peace first became a popular sensation with the publication of two bestsellers. In 1889 the Austrian novelist Bertha von Suttner published a work of fiction called Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!), a first-person account of the gruesomeness of war. And in 1909 the British journalist Norman Angell published a pamphlet called Europe’s Optical Illusion, later expanded as The Great Illusion, which argued that war was economically futile. Plunder may have been profitable in primitive economies, when wealth lay in finite resources like gold or land or in the handiwork of self-sufficient craftsmen. But in a world in which wealth grows out of exchange, credit, and a division of labor, conquest cannot make a conqueror richer. Minerals don’t just jump out of the ground, nor does grain harvest itself, so the conqueror would still have to pay the miners to mine and the farmers to farm. In fact, he would make himself poorer, since the conquest would cost money and lives and would damage the networks of trust and cooperation that allow everyone to enjoy gains in trade. Germany would have nothing to gain by conquering Canada any more than Manitoba would have something to gain by conquering Saskatchewan.

For all its literary popularity, the antiwar movement seemed too idealistic at the time to be taken seriously by the political mainstream. Suttner was called “a gentle perfume of absurdity,” and her German Peace Society “a comical sewing bee composed of sentimental aunts of both sexes.” Angell’s friends told him to “avoid that stuff or you’ll be classed with cranks and faddists, with devotees of Higher Thought who go about in sandals and long beards, and live on nuts.”128 H. G. Wells wrote that Shaw was “an elderly adolescent still at play.... All through the war we shall have this Shavian accompaniment going on, like an idiot child screaming in a hospital.”129 And though Angell had never claimed that war was obsolete—he argued only that it served no economic purpose, and was terrified that glory-drunk leaders would blunder into it anyway—that was how he was interpreted.130 After World War I he became a laughingstock, and to this day he remains a symbol for naïve optimism about the impending end of war. While I was writing this book, more than one concerned colleague took me aside to educate me about Norman Angell.

But according to Mueller, Angell deserves the last laugh. World War I put an end not just to romantic militarism in the Western mainstream but to the idea that war was in any way desirable or inevitable. “The First World War,” notes Luard, “transformed traditional attitudes toward war. For the first time there was an almost universal sense that the deliberate launching of a war could now no longer be