Humane Warfare

ISBN-13: 9780415255752 / Angielski / Twarda / 2001 / 176 str.

Christopher Coker

Opis

In its attempt to humanise modernity the West is also trying to humanize war. It is trying to purge it of those features such as waste and cruelty which writers such as Clausewitz believed to be intrinsic to true nature. The decision, as in Kosovo, to fight humanitarian wars is one illustration of this trend but so too is our wish to use technology to make it more humane, and the extent to which humanism ahs displaced metaphysics in defining the ethical relationship between war and warrior. The book asks whether the attempt can succeed or whether the West is deluding itself (not its enemies) in thinking that war can ever be made humane.

Spis treści

1. HUMANISING WAR: Surfing the Zeitgeist - Irony and War - Humanising Modernity - Humanising War 2. WAR AND THE DENUNCIATION OF CRUELTY: The American Century and the will to power - Into the Slaughterhouse - Judith Shklar and cruelty 3. THE REDUNDANCY OF COURAGE: Machiavelli and the virtuous state - Hegel and war as a vocation - Nietzsche and the masses as a military caste - The end of the virtuous state - The Risk Society - Risk Aversive War - Stress-Free War 4. WAR WITHOUT HATRED: Why no enemies? - Post Materialist War - Uncivil Society - The Feminisation of Society - Non-lethal warfare 5. THE HUMANE WARRIOR: Counter Culture - Post Military Society - Post Tradition Military - The Feminisation of the Military 6. ZONING THE PLANET: Keeping the peace - An Insecure World - The Humanitarian military ethos - Humanitarian imperialism? - Humanitarian War and the loss of metaphysics 7. HUMANE WAR AND THE MORAL IMAGINATION: Lin Yutang and humanised thinking - Richard Rorty and the end of metaphysics - History as a metaphysical principle - War and sacrifice in an ironic world 8. CONCLUSION: Humanism and War - Humanity and War - Humanitarian Wars

O autorze

Christopher Coker