The Origins of War

2024.03.29

We are today very much aware of war. We are daily told of its horrors, confronted with a seemingly endless stream of images and videos that present those horrors in near real time. As I write, wars in Ukraine and Israel appear so intractable that many in the West complain of “war fatigue.” What is worse, the perceived impossibility of ending these wars has led to a kind of geopolitical quietism among average people around the world. That quietism is more frightening than the wars themselves, as it will surely permit more political leaders to start more wars. When citizens cease to concern themselves with the reality of war, war propagates.

To reverse this tragic situation, I propose to examine the origins of war – not of individual wars, but of war itself. Individual wars are but cases of the disease. To diagnose and treat the case, one must understand the disease. To carry this metaphor to its logical conclusion, if we wish to prevent or stop war, we must understand what causes it in the first place, just as a doctor seeks to understand the causes of a disease in order to prescribe effective interventions against it.

In the essay that follows, I am going to argue that war originates in the natural equality of all human beings. I suspect that such a notion will be perplexing to many readers, if not downright offensive. Such a claim seems to contradict the common understanding of equality that has persisted in the West since the time of the American and French Revolutions. I believe that contradiction is instructive and will thus linger upon it for a moment before I proceed with my argument.

The United States’ Declaration of Independence begins with the famous line, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and goes on to spell out how that natural equality not only translates into the political rights of citizens, but also how it underwrites the authority of a government instituted to secure those rights.

Inspired by America’s founding fathers, the Revolutionary government of France, in 1789, published their principles for a new republic in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The first article states: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The French Declaration, like that of the Americans, then details how natural equality is the foundation for a system of legal and political rights: “[The law] must be the same for all, whether it protects or punishes. All citizens, being equal in its eyes, shall be equally eligible to all high offices, public positions and employments, according to their ability, and without other distinction than that of their virtues and talents.”

This idea of a natural equality of all citizens as the basis for political freedom, legal rights, and legitimate governance has, in the last two and a half centuries, become so deeply ingrained in Western political philosophy that any other interpretation of equality is immediately suspect to those of us who live in liberal democratic nation-states. However, there is an older and darker interpretation that is both conceptually and chronologically prior to these “revolutionary” articulations of natural equality.

Thomas Hobbes, writing more than a century before the American Revolution, would have agreed with the American and French revolutionaries that the natural state of man conferred upon all people an equality that is universal – but for Hobbes that equality was an inescapable burden of paranoia and violence, not a universalizing source of political fraternity. He articulates this view in the dense and difficult paragraph that opens chapter thirteen of his classic treatise, Leviathan (published in 1651):

“Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.”

And here is my own modernized version of Hobbes’ language:

“Nature has made people quite equal in their mental and physical capacities. Though we may often find one who is stronger or smarter than another, the differences are never so great that anyone can claim to have absolute advantage over all others. This is especially true of physical strength, for the weakest man is usually still strong enough to kill the strongest, whether through a secret plot or alliance with others.”

In what follows, I shall unpack this basic articulation of Hobbes’ theory of natural equality to show how it delineates the fundamental causes of war.