War Machine

The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age

By: Daniel Pick

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Paperback | 1 April 1996 | Edition Number 1

At a Glance

Paperback
300 Pages

Edition Type
New edition

Dimensions(cm)
2.39 x 1.54 x 0.17

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This fascinating book examines Western perceptions of war in and beyond the nineteenth century, surveying the writings of novelists, anthropologists, psychiatrists, poets, natural scientists, and journalists to trace the origins of modern philosophies about the nature of war and conflict.

Daniel Pick compares philosophical and historical models of conflict with fictions of invasion and biological speculation about the nature and value of conquest. He discusses the work of such familiar commentators on war as Clausewitz, Engels, and von Bernhardi, and examines little-known writings by Proudhon, De Quincey, Ruskin, Valery, and many others. He explores nineteenth-century English fears of French contamination through the Channel Tunnel and the widespread continuing dread of German domination. And he analyzes the history of the widely-shared European belief that war is beneficial or at least functionally necessary.

A central theme of the book is the disturbing relationship between machinery and destruction. According to Pick, relentless technological progress and the irresistible rise of the military-industrial complex risks turning conflict into little more than a sophisticated game played out by high-precision automata. Shorn of human agency or responsibility, war could become technologically unstoppable, a flawless mechanism for human slaughter.

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List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Text
Introduction	p. 1
Cobden's Critique of War	p. 19
Clausewitz and Friction	p. 28
Proudhon's War and Peace	p. 42
Engels and the Devouring War of the Future	p. 48
De Quincey's 'Most Romantic of All Romances'	p. 59
Ruskin and the Degradation of True War	p. 65
The Biology of War	p. 75
The Wake of 1870	p. 88
'The Prussian Race Ethnologically Considered'	p. 88
Transfigurations	p. 97
The Driverless Train	p. 106
War's Saturnalia	p. 110
Tunnel Visions	p. 115
1914: The 'Deep Sources'	p. 136
The Rationalisation of Slaughter	p. 165
Time and Motion	p. 165
'The Voice of the Machines'	p. 175
The Perfect Abattoir	p. 178
'The Unnatural and Terrible Wall of the War'	p. 189
'The Revolt of the Machines'	p. 205
'Why War?'	p. 211
Reich's 'Machine Murder'	p. 211
Freud-Einstein	p. 214
Anxiety and Mastery	p. 227
'All my libido...'	p. 239
The Psychopathology of Everyday Death	p. 243
Seismic Shifts?	p. 257
Bibliography	p. 271
Index	p. 287
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.

War Machine

The Rationalisation of Slaughter in the Modern Age

At a Glance

Paperback

Shipping

How to return your order

Defective items

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