War And The Illiberal Conscience

An evocative exposition of the long-standing struggle between liberalism and illiberalism, focusing on the revolt against liberalism from the end of the 19th century to the present day. "The range of (Christopher) Coker's erudition is stunning, and the rapid leaps across intellectual eras, disciplines, and national borders are breathtaking".--Seyom Brown, Brandeis University.

For centuries liberal minded men have been horrified by the pain and waste of war. From Erasmus, who saw war above all as a product of stupidity, to the Marxists who see it as a matter of class conflict, they have produced social theories to account for its occurrence and have tried to devise means to end it. Their prescriptions have been various. The central view of the Enlightenment was that wars would end when the ambitions of princes could be curbed by the sanity of ordinary men. At first the commercial classes seemed to be the new force that would produce this happy state, but by the end of the nineteenth century they themselves (the 'capitalists') were being stigmatized as the instigators of war. Similarly, the nineteenth-century liberals at first believed that the rise of the new independent nation-states of Europe would lead to a permanent peace as the wishes of the masses (naturally peace-loving) were able to express themselves. Again, the supposed agents of peace were soon seen as a prime cause of wars. Despite these contradictions there have been certain continuing themes in the search for a means to end wars, and one of the most enlightening things in this book is they way in which it is possible to see how these themes recur in subtly different forms in different periods of history. Professor Howard traces them from the renaissance to our own time, through the social, political and intellectual groups that gave birth to them. Throughout the whole story runs the continuing contrast between those who hoped to find a single cause for the disease, leading to a lasting cure, and those who understood that, in Professor Howard's words, 'this was a task which needs to be tackled afresh every day of our lives'.

The Good War tackles the issue of NATO in Afghanistan, exploring NATO's evolution in the 1990s and blending NATO's transformation from a reactive defense organization into a pro-active risk manager with the ethic of liberalism. It raises questions such as why an alliance built upon the territorial defence of Europe ended up in Afghanistan.

The Good War tackles the issue of NATO in Afghanistan, exploring NATO's evolution in the 1990s and blending NATO's transformation from a reactive defense organization into a pro-active risk manager with the ethic of liberalism. It raises questions such as why an alliance built upon the territorial defence of Europe ended up in Afghanistan.

An evocative exposition of the long-standing struggle between liberalism and illiberalism, focusing on the revolt against liberalism from the end of the 19th century to the present day. "The range of (Christopher) Coker's erudition is stunning, and the rapid leaps across intellectual eras, disciplines, and national borders are breathtaking".--Seyom Brown, Brandeis University.

Since the early 1990s, Michael Ignatieff has traveled the world's war zoes, from Bosnia to the West Bank, from Afghanistan to central Africa. In THE WARRIOR'S HONOUR Ignatieff charts the rise of the new moral interventionists - the aid workers, reporters, peacekeepers, Red Cross delegates, and diplomats - who believe that other people's misery is of concern to us all. He brings us face to face with the new ethnic warriors who have escalated post-modern war to an unprecedented level of savagery. He draws startling realisations about the ethics of engagement, the limited force of moral justice in a world of war, and the clash between those who defend tribal and national loyalties and those who speak the universalist language of human rights. Hard-hitting, passionate, urgent, THE WARRIORS'S HONOUR is a profound and searching exploration of the troubled connection between the zones of safety and the zones of danger that configure the modern world.