1st Edition

The Peace Discourse in Europe, 1900-1945

By Alberto Castelli Copyright 2019
    250 Pages
    by Routledge

    250 Pages
    by Routledge

    This book charts ideas European intellectuals (mostly from Great Britain, France, Germany and Italy) put forward to solve the problem of war during the first half of the twentieth century: a period that began with the Anglo-Boer war and that ended with the explosion of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Such ideas do not belong to a homogeneous tradition of thought, but can be understood as a unique discourse that takes different characteristics according to the point of view of each author and of the specific historical situation.

    Introduction;  Part I 19001914: ideas and history, the nineteenth-century legacy of optimism;  Chapter 1: Peace and patriotism: Ernesto Teodoro Moneta;  Chapter 2: Peace, the free market and the strength of financial advantage: Norman Angell;  Chapter 3: "Do not avenge yourselves against those who do evil": Leo Tolstoy;  Chapter 4: Against militarism;  Part II Inside the war (19141915);  Chapter 5: Apologies for violence;  Chapter 6: Rhetoric of peace;  Chapter 7: Planning the future peace;  Part III Seeking a new European order: projects for unifying the continent in the interwar period;  Chapter 8: From war to projects for European unity;  Chapter 9: For a new Europe;  Part IV Critique of violence: politics, revolution and religion;  Chapter 10: Peace and war in Max Scheler;  Chapter 11: The problem of force: Simone Weil;  Chapter 12: Thinking outside pochlitics: Andrea Caffi;  Chapter 13: Bart de Ligt and the true revolution;  Chapter 14: Aldo Capitini: elements of a non-violent experience

    Biography

    Alberto Castelli is Associate Professor of the History of Political Ideas at the University of Ferrara, Italy.