I just finished Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars. This is an incredibly famous book about war that goes through various doctrines, conflicts, and strategies and tries to see where the limits of just conduct fall in war.
I have to confess, I didn’t like this book that much. It’s very influential, but I found the style very rhetorical and in the end very hard to see what the overall argument was supposed to be. For example, there are four sections labeled “the nature of necessity” and they are supposed to be different but somehow unified. I don’t see the overarching theme.
In some sense, the book is comforting because it goes through various historical examples and always comes down on the side of common sense. Strategic bombing against Germany = wrong after 1942, demanding the unconditional surrender of Germany = right. Combatants are allowed to kill, but only…
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