I'd like to distinguish two kinds of anti-war writing. I'll be talking only about American
anti-war authors. The first of these is a criticism of war on the grounds it has bad
effects on American society and government. And the one author I'd like to begin with
This one given in the title of my talk is William Graham Sumner.
Sumner was the founder, really the founder of American sociology, taught at Yale for
many years.
His best known work is a multi-volume work called Folkways.
In an essay that he wrote, or speech he actually gave it, which became, it was published in
January 1899 called the conquest of the United States by Spain. He opposed the Spanish-American
war which had begun in 1898 and in the title he suggested that America had abandoned its
traditional policy mission of individual responsibility. He said the Spanish system, which was also
was found among other European nations and Spain had been the earliest and one of the greatest empires had been based on conquest of other peoples and he said that America was now following that path, it was abandoning its own path and following this path of imperialism which was based not on productivity but on plundering other people.
and he said that this would eventually as it happened with Spain would lead to
decline that the people who tried to maintain imperialism over a long period
of time would eventually be unable to sustain the system they would just rely
in Europe and that he thought we should continue in that way so in what Sumner
was doing here was he wasn't going into the particular diplomatic circumstances
of the war between the United States and Spain but he was giving a more general
account of why the US shouldn't embark on a war system now we find in one work
I'll note in passing an article written by the great philosopher at Harvard, William
James in 1910 called the moral equivalent of war.
We find another kind of criticism of war that I don't think will be too useful to those
of us who are interested in a libertarian criticism of war.
What James said was war is very undesirable because of all the destruction and death suffering
that it causes, but at the same time it promotes certain virtues, it promotes manliness and
sacrifice of self for others.
He obviously had not studied the works of Ayn Rand very thoroughly.
So what James proposed instead was he needed what he called a moral equivalent of war.
He thought that people should get together in various cooperative projects under military
discipline.
He predicted the onset of what he called a socialist utopia that he looked forward to.
This essay was actually very influential in the Roosevelt's New Deal, in the Civilian
Conservation Corps.
They were very influenced by James' essay, but I say this is a particular kind of criticism
of war, but it's not a libertarian one.
So that is the first type of anti-war literature I want to mention, this one that says there's
There's something wrong with war because it has bad effects on American society.
Now the other type is the most numerous type, which is criticisms of particular wars that
the U.S. has gotten involved in that says the official account of the war is wrong or
shouldn't be accepted.
I should say this type of literature is relatively recent.
At one time it wasn't considered really necessary to show that your own country was justified
in engaging in war.
People wouldn't particularly try to show that other countries were the aggressors and they
were the Innocent Party. They would very willingly say that they were involved in war for particular political reasons.
For example, Prince Bismarck in his memoirs exaggerates his own role in the three German Wars,
War with Denmark 1864, Austria in 1866 and France 1870-71. He makes it seem as if he
had deliberately planned all those wars in order to unify Germany when it actually was
much less planned than he made out. But you see, he wasn't claiming that Germany was attacked
Pressure was attacked by all these countries, he was willingly saying that he had started
the war and exaggerating his own role.
But in the 20th century, especially considering the great destruction of World War I, it was
much more characteristic for nations to say that they were really defensive or were fighting
for civilization against the enemy who would attack them.
And we find, I want to mention a few, a couple works that perhaps aren't as well known as
some of the later works I'll be mentioning, quite early on, taking this line, one or two
books by the great American authority on constitutional law, John William Burgess, Tom de Lorenzo
I'm sure you'll be familiar with him because he was a very pro-Lincoln writer.
He had been born in East Tennessee, he was a Tennessee Unionist who was very strongly
pro-Lincoln.
But he had been educated in Germany, gotten his higher degrees in Germany, he was one
of the pioneers in bringing German higher education to the United States and he was
is very concerned with what he considered a campaign to demonize Germany during World
War I. In a book that came out, a short book that came out in 1914 called The European
War, Burgess said that the war that had begun in Europe wasn't as British propaganda was
trying to portray it, an attempt by the evil Germans under the Kaiser Wilhelm, the second
to conquer Europe, if not the world, but in fact he said the war had come about because
of Russian Expansionism, the attempt by various nationalities in Eastern Europe to revolt against
the Austrian Empire, and the attempt by France to recover Alsace and Lorraine, which had
had been taken from them in the treaty ending the war between France and Germany in 1870,
France and Prussia in 1870 and 1871.
So he also emphasized the British role in trying to suppress the rising power of Germany.
So what Burgess claimed was not so much how bad war would be on the American political
System, although he certainly wrote about that as well, but he had specific complaints
about the way the war was being portrayed.
And in a later work, he emphasized the violations of neutrality by the British, especially the
British blockade of Germany designed to starve the German population, and he emphasized violations
of American neutral rights.
These were themes that were taken up much later in later anti-war writings in the 1920s
and 1930s. A writer who took a similar point of view to Burgess was a professor of psychology
at Harvard, Hugo Munsterberg, a very famous philosopher and psychologist. He became very
He was very unpopular at Harvard because of his strong defense of Germany.
He was a German immigrant, and he strongly defended Germany.
And as a psychologist in a book called The Peace and America, which came out in 1916,
he pointed to the effects of propaganda in molding people's beliefs.
He was very interested as a psychologist in how beliefs affected, how people's beliefs were affected by emotion and various materials.
They read he was particularly concerned with attempts to stir up an anti-German campaign through atrocity propaganda.
The pressure on him, because of his views, he had split with his great friend Josiah
Royce, who was the leading proponent of German idealism in the United States. It was very
overwhelming and in fact, one thing I as a lecturer have to be conscious of is in 1916,
was giving a lecture at Harvard and he dropped dead. Of course, 1916 wasn't a very good
year for his one-time friend Royce either. Royce was struck by a glancing blow by a
streetcar in that year, but he survived that. After the war, then there was a very strong
The revisionist historians who opposed Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which placed
all the responsibility for World War I on Germany. Among the leading people in this
was Harry Elmer Barnes. He was the leading public figure of historians favoring this
This is a book published in 1926 called Genesis of the World War. He said the war was not
caused by Germany, but rather by France and Russia. He had a rather conspiracy view of
the war. Murray Rothbard accepted his results, and although probably the most important scholarly
Revisionist Sidney Faye at Harvard. In his book, The Origins of the World War, it came
out in 1928, had a view where there was a divided responsibility. If you get that book,
you should get the 1930 edition, that's really better than the 28 edition. Faye is definitely
So, as I say, there were these various writers who went into particular details, I'm just
talking about World War I, that they were critical of the official story.
Fay said it was not true that as Ambassador Morgenthau of Turkey said that the war had
had been plotted in July 1914 by the German Crown Council.
He demolished that view and there was a divided responsibility.
But I now, I don't have much time left, but I now want to finish up with a writer who
synthesized both of these types of view.
The one that says America, the war has a bad effect on American political life and government
and also was interested in the particular details of American participation wars and that's Murray Rothbard.
Now, Rothbard was, of course, emphasized, for example, he had an essay, very critical of the Cold War,
where he said you can't have a limited state as the conservatives of National Review claim
to favor and have a very aggressive war policy as well.
It was inconsistent to say that you wanted a limited government at the same time to say
as the editors of National Review such as James Burnham and Frank Maier did, they favored
a Preventive Nuclear War Against Russia, Maybe Could Have a Libertarian Society After the
Nuclear Catastrophe, I don't know, but he was very much insistent to say that this just
wouldn't work.
But at the same time, he wasn't someone who was confining himself just to a general
He had particular views on the origins of wars, as well, where he went into detail.
He was not someone who said, well, here is my structural analysis of the system, so therefore
the United States is at fault.
The philosopher Ed Faser once criticized Rothbard.
He said, well, Rothbard blames the United States for everything because he says America
is the most powerful state and so therefore America has to be responsible for all the most for all the wars that it's in but that was definitely not his view he thought that you needed for each war to analyze specifically what had happened in that war and it wasn't his view at all that whether how aggressive a state was would be determined by the political system it was in
For example, in his view on World War II origins, a very controversial subject, he certainly
would recognize the totalitarian nature of Hitler's Germany, but he thought following
A. J. P. Taylor's book, 1961 book, Origins of the Second World War, that Germany didn't
I should say, since I'm running out of time, I'll just finish with one story about Murray Rothbard.
He wrote one of his essays, which was giving his views on the origins of the Cold War,
in a festschrift for Harry Elmer Barnes, which was published under the title,
Harry Elmer Barnes, which was published under the title, Harry Elmer Barnes,
War in a Feschrift for Harry Elmer Barnes, which was published under the title Harry
Elmer Barnes Learned Crusader edited by Arthur Goddard.
Now the story is Rothbard was originally going to be the editor of the Feschrift but he gave
up the idea and he told me that Barnes, who knew about the Feschrift, would insert things
into various, if anyone criticized him in the Festschrift, Barnes would put in passages
replying to them. For example, if someone had a criticism, Barnes would put in, Professor
Barnes would respond, probably respond to this criticism in this way. So Murray said
I think we can see in Rothbard, as I say, a synthesis of both these types of views, both
a view that criticizes wars as having a bad effect on American society and also a detailed
investigation of particular wars showing that the official story given for the war is false.