Disciplinary Views Of War: Causes‐Of‐War Studies

This entry is a subentry of Disciplinary Views Of War.

The causes of war have puzzled Western thinkers since Thucydides attributed the Peloponnesian War to fear of the growing power of Athens. Machiavelli thought that war was the natural order of things and fighting the first business of the prince. Immanuel Kant noted that states with republican regimes were more peaceful than other states, an insight that anticipated a flurry of scholarship at the end of the Cold War.

The systematic study of the causes of war, however, emerged only in the twentieth century. The greatest achievement in the field was stimulated by World War I. Following that unexpectedly costly and protracted war, scholars sought its causes in biology, psychiatry, politics, statistics, anthropology, history, and other disciplines. A group of scholars at the University of Chicago sought to synthesize these disciplinary analyses. Working from 1926 to 1942, they produced the monumental A Study of War under the authorship of political scientist Quincy Wright.

Wright developed a four‐tier model of the causes and nature of war. Animal warfare, he believed, was driven by biological instincts. Primitive war was driven by the nature of society. What he called civilized war, that is, war among states after the appearance of civilizations, was driven by the nature of the international system. And modern war, war after 1500, was driven by technology. The primary drive in each era, he believed, dominated the shaping of war but did not entirely eliminate the drives still extant from previous eras.

Historians and political scientists have taken the lead since Wright in exploring the causes of war. Kenneth Waltz influenced many successors with Man, the State, and War (1954), a three‐tier model similar to Wright's but without animal warfare. Subsequent literature in the field may be divided among those that look for the causes of war in individual behavior or decision making, the political imperatives of individual states, or the anarchy of the international system. As yet, no general theory has captured a consensus. Historians such as Michael Howard—The Causes of War (1983)—and John Stoessinger—Why Nations Go to War (1974)—have attempted to generalize from specific cases without reducing their conclusions to theory. Neither political science nor historical discipline has succeeded in integrating theories and explanations of nuclear war with those of conventional war.

Scholars in other disciplines have also continued to study the causes of war. Anthropologists, sociologists, biologists, psychologists, and economists have all advanced theories. Whole new disciplines, such as conflict resolution and peace studies, have grown up around the topic. One tendency within this scholarship has been to define war more broadly than heretofore and to seek to understand the nature of all large‐scale, organized intergroup violence. Yet little interdisciplinary work has followed in the tradition of Quincy Wright. With the end of the Cold War, two scholarly communities, one at Rutgers University and another at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, have turned their attention to interdisciplinary study of this topic.

[See also Clausewitz, Carl von; Disciplinary Views of War: Political Science and International Relations; Peace and Antiwar Movements; War.]