The Internationalists: How a Radical Plan to Outlaw War Remade the World

"To my list I would add The Internationalists , in which Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that the oft-ridiculed 1928 Kellogg-Briand pact outlawing war deserves much of the credit for the decline of war after 1945, when the United Nations put it into practice. The outlawry of war has functioned as a norm—“War is something that civilized countries just don’t do”—backed by economic sanctions and symbolic punishments. Those penalties are effective to the extent that nations value their standing in the international community—a reminder of why we should cherish and strengthen that community in the face of threats from populist nationalism today. To be sure, the norm is sometimes honored in the breach, most recently in 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea. But laws within a country are broken, too, from parking violations to homicides, yet an imperfectly enforced rule of law is better than no law at all. I’ve replied to various criticisms of Enlightenment Now here . [end of addendum] ___________________________ It was an obsession with human nature and its implications. In previous books such as How the Mind Works , The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought , I argued that evolution endowed us with a rich human nature – an intricate anatomy of emotions and ways of knowing. But the very idea of human nature raises, in many people’s minds, fears of fatalism, pessimism and nihilism. Does human nature doom us to perpetual violence, racism and oppression? I have always argued that it does not. Human nature is a complex system of many parts. And though it may have components that push us towards violence, it also has components that pull us away from violence. What can change over time is which of these components prevails. In How the Mind Works I briefly pointed out that rates of violence have changed significantly over history. Hunter-gatherer societies were far more dangerous than settled states. Rates of homicide have plummeted since the Middle Ages. Democracies have become more numerous. Forms of institutionalised violence such as slavery , harems and torture-executions – like burning at the stake or breaking on the wheel – have been abolished in most of the world. All these happy changes, I noted, represented the influence of components of human nature such as empathy, reason and the moral sense. Through a set of accidents, I came to expand those two or three paragraphs into a book of its own, The Better Angels of Our Nature . Violence has always been a source of inspiration for great dramatists and novelists, such as Homer , Shakespeare , and Tolstoy . But it also is a meaty subject for nonfiction writers. Some of the most intellectually substantive books on the history and psychology of violence are also written with great flair and wit."