Michael Howard argues that democracies actually are more inclined to go to war
After years of hearing how democracies are inclined to be peaceable, I was surprised to read this in Sir Michael Howard’s War and the Liberal Conscience: Democracies, from France at the end of the eighteenth century to the United States in the middle of the twentieth, have failed to live up to the expectations of ...
After years of hearing how democracies are inclined to be peaceable, I was surprised to read this in Sir Michael Howard's War and the Liberal Conscience:
After years of hearing how democracies are inclined to be peaceable, I was surprised to read this in Sir Michael Howard’s War and the Liberal Conscience:
Democracies, from France at the end of the eighteenth century to the United States in the middle of the twentieth, have failed to live up to the expectations of eighteenth-century liberal thinkers. On the contrary they have repeatedly displayed a bellicose passion reminiscent of the worst years of the Wars of Religion….The doctrine that peoples if left to themselves are naturally peaceable, like its converse that they are naturally belligerent, begs far more questions than it answers.
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