On Michael Mann's "On Wars"
Reviewing a book whose strengths—all of its arresting & insightful individual stories—do not really allow for fruitful summarization & lesson-drawing…
From my economist’s point of view, every single war is first and foremost a mistake.
Wars are negative-sum. Someone—possibly two someones—must have miscalculated the likely outcome in order for a war to even begin, and not halted at or before the last minute by some agreement that is, relative to the costs and hazards of war, unambiguously a win-win bargain better in expectation for both sides than the wager of the battlefield could possibly be. The aggressor should not have attacked. It should, rather, have stayed at home, cultivated its own vine and fig tree, and rested beneath them. Or, given that the aggressor was on the move, the aggressee should have struck the best bargain it could and submitted. Or perhaps both are true. But it cannot be the case, given the negative-sum nature of the activity, that neither is true.
So why do wars happen? And what, considered as a human social practice that probably excels all other human social practices in its sheer stupidity, is war?
Michael Mann’s 2023 On Wars <https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300266818/on-wars/> is profoundly thought-provoking—but not comprehensive. With such a subject, how could it be comprehensive? It is an attempt to explore the history and nature of war as an ideological, economic, political, emotional, and strictly military—whatever that could possibly be—human social practice. It tries to come to general conclusions about the underlying causes of conflicts, and thus about the potential for better achieving peace.
It fails. Much better at accomplishing the stated aims of the book, in my opinion, is Chris Blattman’s 2022 Why We Fight <https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/636263/why-we-fight-by-christopher-blattman/>. Blattman’s five-item list of the types of mistakes that lead to wars—Unchecked Interest, Intangible Incentives, Uncertainty, Commitment Problems, and Misperceptions—is the foundation for a useful sociology of war in order to guide human action toward the preservation of peace. But Mann’s book is tremendously worth reading even so. For Blattman tells us very little about what war actually is. Mann, by contrast, gives us rich story after rich story, example after example.
And even though his attempts to sort them into a set of conceptual boxes—boxes from which sociological generalizations can be drawn—????largely fail, what stories!