Today, war is considered a last resort for resolving
disagreements. But a day of staged slaughter on the battlefield was
once seen as a legitimate means of settling political disputes.
James Whitman argues that pitched battle was essentially a trial
with a lawful verdict. And when this contained form of battle
ceased to exist, the law of victory gave way to the rule of
unbridled force. "The Verdict of Battle" explains why the
ritualized violence of the past was more effective than modern
warfare in bringing carnage to an end, and why humanitarian laws
that cling to a notion of war as evil have led to longer, more
barbaric conflicts.
Belief that sovereigns could, by rights, wage war for profit
made the eighteenth century battle s golden age. A pitched battle
was understood as a kind of legal proceeding in which both sides
agreed to be bound by the result. To the victor went the spoils,
including the fate of kingdoms. But with the nineteenth-century
decline of monarchical legitimacy and the rise of republican
sentiment, the public no longer accepted the verdict of pitched
battles. Ideology rather than politics became war s just cause. And
because modern humanitarian law provided no means for declaring a
victor or dispensing spoils at the end of battle, the violence of
war dragged on.
The most dangerous wars, Whitman asserts in this iconoclastic
tour de force, are the lawless wars we wage today to remake the
world in the name of higher moral imperatives."
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