Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War

• Department of History
• Department of Law

In this talk organised by the International Law Working Group and the Intellectual History Working Group, Professor Samuel Moyn will present his book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Macmillan, 2021).

Professor Moyn will present his latest book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War (Macmillan, 2021), a historical inquiry into the moral dilemmas and political implications of making war more humane.

In his book, Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical—to ban torture and limit civilian casualties—have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed—and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences. 

The presentation will be followed by remarks offered by Professors Or Rosenboim (City University/EUI Max Weber Fellow), Sara Kendall (University of Kent/EUI Fernand Braudel Fellow) and Daryl Robinson (Queen’s University), and a Q&A session with the public. A reception will follow.