Abstract

In this ambitious, erudite and at the same time impassioned book on conceptualisations of war since the seventeenth century, Nick Mansfield starts from the premise that war can only be thought in relation to its other. This other can assume different guises, such as peace, the social, sovereignty and so on. Mansfield persuasively argues that only a ‘humanist sentimentality’ would see war’s other as unquestionably good. Such naivete forgets that wars have always been fought and crimes have always been perpetrated in the name of a purported defence of humanity, even of life itself. ‘Peace might be the most aggressive thing of all.’