Why War?

In 1932, two towering intellectuals, Einstein and Freud, published a correspondence on the question, "Why war?" Their exchange presented war as an instinctive drive, a conclusion seemingly confirmed in the carnage of the coming world war. But their narrow response left many other explanations open: What about war and the competition for resources? the need for security? the passions of belief, ideological or religious? What of leadership and the impulse to power?

Showing remarkable range, Richard Overy explores the title question throughout human history. He reconstructs long-ago conflicts among hunter-gatherers from Africa to the Americas using skeletal and climatological evidence of the Neolithic period. He draws on Roman history to weigh the empire's voracious appetite for resources. He demonstrates the drive for power through the examples of Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and Hitler. And he shows through the current war in Ukraine how the various impulses to war overlap and reinforce.