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1-Page Summary of Man, the State and War
Overview
In 1959, when Waltz compiled his study on war, the Cold War was a major influence in society. Scholars tried to understand why people would go to war and how they could prevent it with nuclear weapons. Although the Cold War is over and we haven’t seen a world war for some time now, there are still wars all over the world that have no end in sight. Therefore, these questions remain relevant: Why do humans kill each other on such a massive scale? Are there ways to prevent this from happening?
This book examines the ideas of prominent thinkers throughout history and categorizes them into three different types: images. The first image focuses on human nature, while the second image looks at how states are organized internally. The third image examines international relations in an anarchic system.
The authors came up with three key reasons why humans go to war. The first is that they are aggressive, the second is that they are territorial and the third one is that international relations lack structure. However, all of those points aren’t enough to explain war without taking into account other factors as well.
In the following points, you will discover why that is not true. It’s because we can’t blame our innate nature for all of our problems, liberals and socialists have no peaceful solution to offer, and there are no real solutions to war available at this time.
Big Idea #1: First-image thinkers assume that human nature is the root cause of war.
Everybody has their own ideas about what causes war. Some people think it’s because of economic crises, authoritarian regimes, or power-hungry leaders. However, for some people—first-image thinkers—war is a direct result of human nature. But not all first-image thinkers agree on what human nature is; they’re divided into optimists and pessimists.
The optimists believe that human nature is changeable and improvable, so they see education as the cure for war. If we can change human nature through education, then we will eliminate war. While the optimists of the past placed their faith in religion and moral appeals to stop wars, modern optimists—the behavioral scientists—place their faith in studying human behavior to discover educational methods and social organization that would eliminate aggressive behavior and violence.
In the past, people have tried to prevent war by studying various tribes and their behavior. They’ve looked at how they live and what they do in order to figure out ways that we can avoid having wars of our own.
In contrast to the optimists, pessimists believe that human nature is evil. They also feel that humans are incapable of change and therefore need external control to prevent them from starting wars.
Augustine of Hippo, a Christian theologian and philosopher, believed that humans would kill each other until the whole species went extinct if there weren’t any government. Seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza affirmed that humans are led by their passions and not by reason.
Both pessimists and optimists agree that we can overcome war. Optimistic thinkers believe in the power of human nature, while pessimistic thinkers believe in controlling human nature to end war.
Big Idea #2: The optimists’ attempts to explain war are insufficient.
It’s easy to assume that the source of conflict, violence and war is selfishness.
Human nature is the source of both war and peace. We can see this in that there are alternating periods of war and peace despite the steadiness of human nature. Plus, when we consider how many opportunities for evil exist, it’s even possible to state that human nature is fundamentally good.
