An analytical distinction, first made more than two thousand years ago by Thucydides, continues to shape most intellectual consideration of war. The Peloponnesian conflict destroyed the Athens of Pericles even more completely than the First World War did Europe, and Thucydides found its cause not in the immediate train of events that led up to it—the crisis in Epidamnus, the Corinthian and Corycrean interventions, the Megarian Decree, and so forth—but in something much deeper, namely “the growth of Athenian power, which presented an object of fear to the Spartans and forced them to go to war.”

Most modern historians have followed Thucydides’ lead and accepted that wars have “underlying” as well as “immediate” causes, and that, of the two, the underlying causes are the more important. Greatly strengthened by the rise of sociology, this approach has contributed to the eclipse, in...

 

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