Fighting Mad (Review of Daniel Pick, War Machine: The Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age)
Times Literary Supplement, 1993
Posted: 2 Feb 2007
Date Written: 1993
Abstract
This 1993 Times Literary Supplement (London) review considers the intellectual, literary and high cultural understanding of war in the modern age, taking into account such writers as Clausewitz, Ruskin, Proudhon, and the Freud-Einstein correspondence on war. Pick gives sensitive, nuanced readings of these literary and political figures on war, and an outstanding discussion of Clausewitz and his concept of friction in war, the tension within an army of the machinery and its animal passions. The Freud-Einstein correspondence on war, Pick notes, is not very illuminating, and is better understood as a cultural artefact of a certain perception of the role of intellectuals in politics.
Keywords: El Salvador, Depredation, Terror, Subversives, Ends, Conduct of War, Military Discipline, War Machine, Daniel Pick, On War, Proudhon, De Quincey, Clausewitz, Civilization and its Discontents, Anti Personnel Land Mines, International Committee of Red Cross, Mine Injuries, Einstein-Freud
JEL Classification: B25, K33, N46
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation