The Rise and Decline of Christian Militarism in Prussia-Germany from Hegel to Bonhoeffer: The End Effect of the Fallacy of Sacred Violence

摘要

The most recent investigations about the causes of the First World War, and indeed of international conflict generally, have repudiated emphatically the so-called 'liberal-peace school'. The latter had owed much to the thinking of such rational pacifists as the late Norman Angell (1874-1964), famous initially for his work of 1908, The Great Illusion. Angell had argued cogently and persuasively that the powers would exercise self-restraint, not wishing to risk war because of the cost in human life and treasure it would inevitably cause. However, nations did, and still do, go to war for what has been termed non-materialistic-that is, ideological, religious or nationalistic-motives, none of which are amenable to cost-benefit analysis. The argument is, then, that while generals and statesmen do in fact try to take into account the cost-benefit dimension of waging war, in the end it is non-materialistic or cultural factors that are decisive.