Tuesday, October 15, 2013

2013 read #131: A History of Warfare by John Keegan.

A History of Warfare by John Keegan
398 pages
Published 1993
Read from October 12 to October 15
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

The main gist of this book, repeated again and again in every chapter, is the insufficiency or outright incorrectness of the Clauswitzian analysis of war, "continuation of politics by other means." Keegan's essential idea seems to be that war is an element and extension of culture, its practice and purpose culturally bound, which as far as ideas go is pretty darn safe and unprovocative. Keegan's explorations of martial history have a slight tendency toward mechanistic, reductive explanations; he traces the ultimate cause of nomadic steppe people's willingness to fight and kill without compunction, their "dynamism and ruthlessness" in contrast to "primitive" and "oriental" warmaking, to their practice of slaughtering stock, for example. I do agree with Keegan's assertion that anthropologists (and conventional historians as well, though he doesn't single them out) have a tendency to ignore the actual prosecution of warfare in human society and history. Overall a stimulating, interesting read, rather tragicomically dated by its 1990s optimism regarding peacekeeping, the United Nations, and "neighbourliness" in the coming decades.

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