War : an enquiry
(Book)

In this latest addition to Yale's "Vices and Virtues" series, Grayling (St. Anne's, Oxford) argues that humankind's propensity for social organization has been war's primary cause but that it also offers a way out; the more pessimistic allegations of humans' innate tendency toward conflict (see Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Spencer) have ignored the human will and capacity for change that animals lack. Save for his insightful chapter on the ethics and law of war--the book's strongest--Grayling relies primarily on secondary sources, concluding that even though emotion pushes individuals to violence, war and peace remain conscious government decisions. So, too, do recent multinational efforts appear in a positive light; e.g., UN peacekeeping efforts have generally failed so far. Rejection of such an already discredited doctrine as biological determinism will trouble few, yet the author's recommended alternative--"lessening the evil of war, and eventually bringing it to an end" by deinstitutionalizing, deromanticizing, and uncensoring it while redirecting society's energies elsewhere remains a "what" in search of a "how." Further explication of the latter merits, at the very least, an entire series of its own. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above. --John L.S. Daley, Pittsburg State University