War machine : the rationalisation of slaughter in the modern age
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Bibliographic Information
War machine : the rationalisation of slaughter in the modern age
Yale University Press, 1993
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Note
Includes bibliographical references (p. [271]-286) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
This book examines Western perceptions of war in and beyond the 19th-century, surveying the writings of novelists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, poets, natural scientists, journalists and soldiers to trace the origins of modern philosophies about the nature of war and conflict. Daniel Pick compares philosophical and historical modes of conflict with fictions of invasion and biological speculations about the nature and value of conquest. He discusses the work of such well-known commentators as Clausewitz, Engels and von Bernhardi, and examines little-known war writings by Proudhon, De Quincey, Ruskin, Valery, Reich and many others. Pick explores why so many major 19th-century writers justified war and even considered it rational and indespensible to social survival. And, conversely, he shows that during the course of the century, war was increasingly depicted as a machine running out of control, a locomoticve on the tracks toward total destruction. Pick looks at ways in which change and continuity, technology and destructve power, rationality and madness entered the debate on the nature and use of violence and conflict.
By analyzing the contexts and evolution of discussions of war in the previous century, he aims to shed light on current thought on this subject.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations Acknowledgements A Note on the Text 1 Introduction 2 Cobden's Critique of War 3 Clausewitz and Friction 4 Proudhon's War and Peace 5 Engels and The Devouring War of the Future 6 De Quincey's Most Romantic of All Romances' 7 Ruskin and the Desecration of True War 8 'Me Biology of War 9 The Wake of 1870 I "Me Prussian Race Ethnologically Considered' II Transfigurations III The Driverless Train IV War's Saturnalia 10 Tunnel Visions 11 1914: "The Deep Sources' 12 The Rationalisation of Slaughter I Time and Motion II "The Voice of the Machines' III The Perfect Abattoir 13 'the Unnatural and Terrible Wall of the War' 14 'the Revolt of the Machines' 15 'Why War?' I Reich's' Machine Murder' II Freud-Einstein III Anxiety and Mastery IV "All my libido.." V The Psychopathology of Everyday Death VI Seismic Shifts? Bibliography.
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