Ours to Reason Why
Why War? by Richard Overy (W.W. Norton & Co., 2024)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
Richard Overy’s new book Why War? opens with a review of the published exchange on the topic between Freud and Einstein. Einstein hoped there might be some way to avoid war in the future. Freud believed that the “death drive” led humans to war from the beginning and would continue to do so. The correspondence occurred in 1932, during what we now call the “interwar period.” The question is as relevant now as it was then.
Richard Overy is an award-winning historian of the Second World War and a foremost military historian. Readers may be familiar with his books Why the Allies Won (1995), The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (2004), Blood and Ruins: The Great Imperial War, 1931-1945 (2021), or one of his 26 other books. Why War? draws on his extensive research and knowledge of modern wars and reflects an appreciation for and familiarity with disciplines outside of history. It is also clearly and engagingly written.
There are not as many explanations for war as there are academic disciplines, but Richard Overy’s Why War? is a good overview of the significant arguments from different disciplines about the reasons for war. Part I looks at biology, psychology, anthropology, and ecology. The explanations offered in Part I suggest that war is the product of forces acting upon humans, who are driven to it for reasons beyond themselves but perhaps programmed into themselves. Part II leans more toward history and politics and other anthropologists, emphasizing human agency as the cause for war. Part II considers recurring triggers for conflict.
In Part I, Overy offers a thorough exploration of a variety of major arguments about the source of war. Some evolutionary biologist suggest it may be part of “inclusive fitness.” Many psychologists believe that warfare is a psychological response to circumstances, one which can be found everywhere in the world. Though some earlier anthropologists wanted to believe in a pacific past, the evidence is that “cultures of war are universal” (84). Ecological context “has contributed in a variety of ways to circumstances that might trigger violence,” but cannot be shown to be a regular, primary cause of war (108). Related to ecology, “resource stress” is widely predicted to be the cause of many future wars, even if it has not been a prime mover for many in the past.
In Part II, Overy examines the conscious motives most connected to war, with wide variety in time and geography among conflicts. They are resources, belief, power, and security. These may seem obvious and uncomplicated, but Overy works to fully consider and contextualize them. For example, Overy states that “material motives appear both rational and demonstrable,” but argues that resources are often not the cause of modern conflicts (112). While many historians tend to dismiss belief as an actual cause of war—seeing it more often as an excuse—Overy draws on anthropology and his knowledge of the Second World War to argue that while it is not often the cause of war, it certainly can be. He gives clear examples of power as a cause of war, though it is also a relatively uncommon cause. His chapter on security emphasizes that it is a concern in almost every war, but that the role of frontiers in conflict is shifting and the insights of security studies are very limited.
In Part II, Overy especially involves historical examples. His chapter on power draws heavily on Roman history and the “destructive leadership” of Hitler, Napoleon, and Alexander the Great. His chapter on belief includes examples from the English Civil War, Aztec wars, Vietnam, and the Crusades. His evidentiary support is wide-ranging, from Chinggis Khan to Boko Haram. He also continues to engage theory in Part II, asking us to reconsider Hobbes and the “Thucydides trap,” among other things.
As might be expected from a historian, Overy continuously draws attention to primary source evidence. The biological arguments seem logical, but lack sufficient evidentiary support. The psychological arguments add to our understanding of war but do not explain why particular wars happen and fail to explain the ways in which war was considered “psychologically rewarding” in the past (56). About the approaches in Part I, Overy concludes that they help illuminate but fail to fully explain the human tendency to war. In his conclusion, he asserts that “warfare is not in our genes, but for our genes,” that it is “reinforced by an evolved psychology” (us and them), and that our environment and natural resources give us reasons to fight (227-228). However, human beings are not mindlessly driven by hidden forces, they “acted and act… from conscious motives” (228).
Many books have been written about why particular wars happen. World War I, especially, has debated origins. How significant was the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand? Who ought to be considered the aggressors? Before the war was even over, everyone sought to blame others for its start. Later historians wondered if it even had to happen. Christopher Clark’s book Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 (2012) portrays the war as one that was essentially stumbled into. There were miscommunications, bad assumptions, and diplomatic errors that led to a largely unintended global conflict. Sometimes the answer to the “why” question is not particularly satisfying.
Sometimes the causes of war are debated because of their cultural weight. Who was to blame for the start of the Great War was of great significance in Germany in the interwar and Third Reich periods. In the United States, we continue to debate the reasons for the U.S. Civil War, in part because we cannot agree on the role of the slavery in the history of our Republic. Many Americans want slavery to be more peripheral than it was. We continue to give our children different accounts for the causes of the Civil War. Shelby Foote liked to tell a story about a Confederate soldier telling a Yankee that he was fighting “because you’re here.” Never mind that the South fired the first shots or that Gettysburg was north of the Mason-Dixon.
Relatively few books are like Why War?, asking why war at all. By doing so, Overy takes his book beyond typical military history, even most history. By examining the claims of evolutionary biology and psychology and integrating anthropology, Overy brings us to the one of the biggest questions that humans have ever asked: how free are we? The question of agency in human history has been asked since the beginning. We can find it in The Iliad and The Aeneid. We can find it in Epic of Gilgamesh.
The contemporary questions around human agency draw on genetics and evolutionary biology and psychology, but they revive Enlightenment questions and the dream of positivism. Would it one day be possible to have a perfectly predictable future—if all the factors were somehow known and could be calculated? As we understand more about genetics and evolution, we are better able to identify some of the forces acting upon us, seemingly limiting our freedom. Will governments soon be able to direct our actions, even in ways which are not to us obvious? Will AI be able to predict our every move? The question is everywhere—from a silly movie like Superintelligence (2020) with Melissa McCarthy to ongoing policy debates about nudges. Do advertisers already have an unfair advantage over our lizard brains? Does human psychology make social media a special kind of poison for teenagers, as Jonathan Haidt argues in The Anxious Generation?
As far back as 50 B.C. Lucretius wrote in On the Nature of Things that there is always an unpredictable element in the world, the atom that unpredictably swerves. Overy’s work integrates the insights of the last hundred years without disputing Lucretius or disavowing human agency. Why War? suggests that for humans, war is a feature, not a bug. However, the reasons for war are not reducible to forces acting upon us. Overy argues that war “viewed through the two levels of explanation, the general context framing the specific motives, can be understood as a mixture of imperatives that have remained remarkably constant over human history, though the mix can vary from case to case” (228). As much as we are framed by a general context, we do not have wars without specific motives. The same approach could be used to understand things other than war.
We are all too human, but, thankfully, we are less Hobbesian than Hobbes believed. We are more than wolves to each other most of the time. We are not doomed by evolutionary forces to exterminate each other, but neither are we in any way not responsible for the conflicts we cause. Human conflict is deeply connected to human culture and the organization of our communities. Wars result from choices we make with the circumstances we have. The same is true for other interactions between people and states.
One of the best aspects of Why War? is how it showcases the strengths and limitations of different disciplines, in a way which reinforces the value of each. Big questions are not answered simply by sitting in a room and pondering. Different disciplines offer specific, useful ways to answer questions. Not only are the powers of the disciplines reinforced in this book, so is the significance of inquiry. What is the point of these disciplines and academic inquiry if we don’t ask the big questions? Helping us ask and answer the big questions is the best that books can do.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War.
