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NOTE The Critics of the War Party: From William Graham Sumner to Murray Rothbard

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I'd like to distinguish two kinds of anti-war writing. I'll be talking only about American

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anti-war authors. The first of these is a criticism of war on the grounds it has bad

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effects on American society and government. And the one author I'd like to begin with

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This one given in the title of my talk is William Graham Sumner.

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Sumner was the founder, really the founder of American sociology, taught at Yale for

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many years.

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His best known work is a multi-volume work called Folkways.

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In an essay that he wrote, or speech he actually gave it, which became, it was published in

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January 1899 called the conquest of the United States by Spain. He opposed the Spanish-American

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war which had begun in 1898 and in the title he suggested that America had abandoned its

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traditional policy mission of individual responsibility. He said the Spanish system, which was also

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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.

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and he said that this would eventually as it happened with Spain would lead to

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decline that the people who tried to maintain imperialism over a long period

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of time would eventually be unable to sustain the system they would just rely

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in Europe and that he thought we should continue in that way so in what Sumner

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was doing here was he wasn't going into the particular diplomatic circumstances

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of the war between the United States and Spain but he was giving a more general

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account of why the US shouldn't embark on a war system now we find in one work

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I'll note in passing an article written by the great philosopher at Harvard, William

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James in 1910 called the moral equivalent of war.

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We find another kind of criticism of war that I don't think will be too useful to those

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of us who are interested in a libertarian criticism of war.

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What James said was war is very undesirable because of all the destruction and death suffering

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that it causes, but at the same time it promotes certain virtues, it promotes manliness and

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sacrifice of self for others.

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He obviously had not studied the works of Ayn Rand very thoroughly.

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So what James proposed instead was he needed what he called a moral equivalent of war.

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He thought that people should get together in various cooperative projects under military

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discipline.

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He predicted the onset of what he called a socialist utopia that he looked forward to.

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This essay was actually very influential in the Roosevelt's New Deal, in the Civilian

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Conservation Corps.

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They were very influenced by James' essay, but I say this is a particular kind of criticism

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of war, but it's not a libertarian one.

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So that is the first type of anti-war literature I want to mention, this one that says there's

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There's something wrong with war because it has bad effects on American society.

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Now the other type is the most numerous type, which is criticisms of particular wars that

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the U.S. has gotten involved in that says the official account of the war is wrong or

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shouldn't be accepted.

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I should say this type of literature is relatively recent.

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At one time it wasn't considered really necessary to show that your own country was justified

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in engaging in war.

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People wouldn't particularly try to show that other countries were the aggressors and they

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were the Innocent Party. They would very willingly say that they were involved in war for particular political reasons.

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For example, Prince Bismarck in his memoirs exaggerates his own role in the three German Wars,

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War with Denmark 1864, Austria in 1866 and France 1870-71. He makes it seem as if he

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had deliberately planned all those wars in order to unify Germany when it actually was

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much less planned than he made out. But you see, he wasn't claiming that Germany was attacked

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Pressure was attacked by all these countries, he was willingly saying that he had started

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the war and exaggerating his own role.

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But in the 20th century, especially considering the great destruction of World War I, it was

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much more characteristic for nations to say that they were really defensive or were fighting

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for civilization against the enemy who would attack them.

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And we find, I want to mention a few, a couple works that perhaps aren't as well known as

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some of the later works I'll be mentioning, quite early on, taking this line, one or two

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books by the great American authority on constitutional law, John William Burgess, Tom de Lorenzo

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I'm sure you'll be familiar with him because he was a very pro-Lincoln writer.

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He had been born in East Tennessee, he was a Tennessee Unionist who was very strongly

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pro-Lincoln.

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But he had been educated in Germany, gotten his higher degrees in Germany, he was one

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of the pioneers in bringing German higher education to the United States and he was

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is very concerned with what he considered a campaign to demonize Germany during World

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War I. In a book that came out, a short book that came out in 1914 called The European

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War, Burgess said that the war that had begun in Europe wasn't as British propaganda was

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trying to portray it, an attempt by the evil Germans under the Kaiser Wilhelm, the second

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to conquer Europe, if not the world, but in fact he said the war had come about because

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of Russian Expansionism, the attempt by various nationalities in Eastern Europe to revolt against

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the Austrian Empire, and the attempt by France to recover Alsace and Lorraine, which had

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had been taken from them in the treaty ending the war between France and Germany in 1870,

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France and Prussia in 1870 and 1871.

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So he also emphasized the British role in trying to suppress the rising power of Germany.

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So what Burgess claimed was not so much how bad war would be on the American political

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System, although he certainly wrote about that as well, but he had specific complaints

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about the way the war was being portrayed.

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And in a later work, he emphasized the violations of neutrality by the British, especially the

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British blockade of Germany designed to starve the German population, and he emphasized violations

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of American neutral rights.

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These were themes that were taken up much later in later anti-war writings in the 1920s

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and 1930s. A writer who took a similar point of view to Burgess was a professor of psychology

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at Harvard, Hugo Munsterberg, a very famous philosopher and psychologist. He became very

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He was very unpopular at Harvard because of his strong defense of Germany.

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He was a German immigrant, and he strongly defended Germany.

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And as a psychologist in a book called The Peace and America, which came out in 1916,

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he pointed to the effects of propaganda in molding people's beliefs.

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He was very interested as a psychologist in how beliefs affected, how people's beliefs were affected by emotion and various materials.

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They read he was particularly concerned with attempts to stir up an anti-German campaign through atrocity propaganda.

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The pressure on him, because of his views, he had split with his great friend Josiah

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Royce, who was the leading proponent of German idealism in the United States. It was very

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overwhelming and in fact, one thing I as a lecturer have to be conscious of is in 1916,

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was giving a lecture at Harvard and he dropped dead. Of course, 1916 wasn't a very good

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year for his one-time friend Royce either. Royce was struck by a glancing blow by a

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streetcar in that year, but he survived that. After the war, then there was a very strong

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The revisionist historians who opposed Article 231 of the Treaty of Versailles, which placed

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all the responsibility for World War I on Germany. Among the leading people in this

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was Harry Elmer Barnes. He was the leading public figure of historians favoring this

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This is a book published in 1926 called Genesis of the World War. He said the war was not

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caused by Germany, but rather by France and Russia. He had a rather conspiracy view of

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the war. Murray Rothbard accepted his results, and although probably the most important scholarly

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Revisionist Sidney Faye at Harvard. In his book, The Origins of the World War, it came

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out in 1928, had a view where there was a divided responsibility. If you get that book,

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you should get the 1930 edition, that's really better than the 28 edition. Faye is definitely

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So, as I say, there were these various writers who went into particular details, I'm just

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talking about World War I, that they were critical of the official story.

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Fay said it was not true that as Ambassador Morgenthau of Turkey said that the war had

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had been plotted in July 1914 by the German Crown Council.

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He demolished that view and there was a divided responsibility.

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But I now, I don't have much time left, but I now want to finish up with a writer who

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synthesized both of these types of view.

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The one that says America, the war has a bad effect on American political life and government

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and also was interested in the particular details of American participation wars and that's Murray Rothbard.

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Now, Rothbard was, of course, emphasized, for example, he had an essay, very critical of the Cold War,

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where he said you can't have a limited state as the conservatives of National Review claim

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to favor and have a very aggressive war policy as well.

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It was inconsistent to say that you wanted a limited government at the same time to say

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as the editors of National Review such as James Burnham and Frank Maier did, they favored

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a Preventive Nuclear War Against Russia, Maybe Could Have a Libertarian Society After the

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Nuclear Catastrophe, I don't know, but he was very much insistent to say that this just

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wouldn't work.

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But at the same time, he wasn't someone who was confining himself just to a general

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He had particular views on the origins of wars, as well, where he went into detail.

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He was not someone who said, well, here is my structural analysis of the system, so therefore

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the United States is at fault.

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The philosopher Ed Faser once criticized Rothbard.

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He said, well, Rothbard blames the United States for everything because he says America

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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

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For example, in his view on World War II origins, a very controversial subject, he certainly

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would recognize the totalitarian nature of Hitler's Germany, but he thought following

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A. J. P. Taylor's book, 1961 book, Origins of the Second World War, that Germany didn't

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I should say, since I'm running out of time, I'll just finish with one story about Murray Rothbard.

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He wrote one of his essays, which was giving his views on the origins of the Cold War,

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in a festschrift for Harry Elmer Barnes, which was published under the title,

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Harry Elmer Barnes, which was published under the title, Harry Elmer Barnes,

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War in a Feschrift for Harry Elmer Barnes, which was published under the title Harry

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Elmer Barnes Learned Crusader edited by Arthur Goddard.

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Now the story is Rothbard was originally going to be the editor of the Feschrift but he gave

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up the idea and he told me that Barnes, who knew about the Feschrift, would insert things

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into various, if anyone criticized him in the Festschrift, Barnes would put in passages

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replying to them. For example, if someone had a criticism, Barnes would put in, Professor

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Barnes would respond, probably respond to this criticism in this way. So Murray said

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I think we can see in Rothbard, as I say, a synthesis of both these types of views, both

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a view that criticizes wars as having a bad effect on American society and also a detailed

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investigation of particular wars showing that the official story given for the war is false.