War

Brief Observation on War and the State

November 13, 2007 @ 10:56 am

I was just watching Crimson Tide on tv and there was a mention of the famous dictum by the Prussian general, military historian, and theorist Carl von Clausewitz: “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” There is a profound truth in that dictum. It identifies shared characteristics of statist politics and war: anti-social [...]

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More empirical evidence against the democratic peace thesis

June 15, 2005 @ 9:33 pm

Last semester I took a political science seminar on international conflict. I wanted to learn more about international conflict. I blogged about it here, here, and here. Unfortunately, the class was oriented primarily around mainstream (i.e., empirical and quantitative) political science, so I didn’t learn as much as I would have liked. Everything I learned [...]

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Hamilton vs. Kant on War and Peace

April 6, 2005 @ 3:03 pm

Here’s an interesting excerpt from Federalist #6, written by Alexander Hamilton, that directly contradicts Immanuel Kant’s famous argument for what is today called the democratic peace thesis. For Kant it was a republican peace, but he thought that a combination of republics, international trade, and international laws and organizations would be necessary for bringing about [...]

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Neoconservatism, Irving Kristol, and Hegel

December 11, 2004 @ 8:44 am

Tibor Machan has also been to a Philadelphia Society meeting. (See my reflections on the meeting I attended.) I think there were a lot more neocons there when I attended than when he did. In fact, he writes of one of the first neocons, Irving Kristol, presenting a novel idea to traditional conservatives: we need [...]

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