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James J. Sheehan, Stella Ghervas. Conquering Peace: From the Enlightenment to the European Union., The American Historical Review, Volume 128, Issue 1, March 2023, Pages 438–439, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhad041
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Extract
Michael Howard began his book on “the invention of peace” with a quotation from the great nineteenth-century jurist Sir Henry Maine: “War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.” Sir Henry was certainly correct. From the beginning of recorded history, making war was the community’s most important task, carried on at great cost of blood and treasures, an enduring object of fear and fascination for historians and poets. Peace, on the other hand, may have been a pious hope for some, but for most people it was no more than an intermission in an apparently endless cycle of violence. As Stella Ghervas’s fascinating new book demonstrates, Europeans’ attitude toward peace began to change in the eighteenth century, when some theorists and a few statesmen first imagined there could be a world without war. Coexisting with the arc of expanding international violence that characterizes the modern era was this dream of what Immanuel Kant called “perpetual peace,” a time when humanity could be, once and for all, emancipated from the burden of war.
