Inclinations Toward War Why do human beings go to war? Th

St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Middle Ages, framed the question of just as against unjust wars, but he rejected, early in his discussion, and on Scriptural authority, the proposition that all war is inherently immoral (Aquinas, 1990, p. 8). More fundamentally, he did not think to ask why war occurred in the first place. If asked, he might well have said that unjust wars were the inevitable consequence of the sinful nature of human beings, while just wars were the necessary response to this sinfulness. In more recent times, pacifists have denounced war, and Gandhi, at least, offered passive resistance as an alternative to populations that might feel tempted to defend themselves by war (Gandhi, 1990, pp. 49-50). But no more than Aquinas did Gandhi address himself to the question of why wars occur in the first place.

The moral critique of war, such as that offered by Gandhi and other pacifists, has thus always been subject to the counter-argument that it gives no practical advice for avoiding war short of a profound moral transformation of human beings. In one way or another, the p

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broad schools of thought regarding war are both essentially historicist; they proceed not from general propositions, as Morganthau and other realists do, but from the examination of historical experience. They might, indeed, be regarded as two variations within a single school of thought; we have separated them for this essay not on any logical grounds, but because of the rather different levels on which they examine historical materials. The historicist school of the analysis of war is as old as the Western tradition of historical writing. "Analytical studies of war can be traced back at least to the great work of the historian Thucydides" (Holsti, n.d., p. 1) --and it would be difficult to trace Western historical writing back much further. The central characteristic of the historicist school is that it looks first and foremost not at "war," but at wars, at individual, particular wars that broke out between specific nations, at specific times and places, and from specific causes. The historicist school contains with it an implicit and oblique criticism of the realist school. I do not have a quarrel with my neighbor because he or she is older, is more wealthy, or has a larger house. All of these attributes are
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Approximate Word count = 4839
Approximate Pages = 19 (250 words per page)