The New Peace Movement – Part I

Mass warfare developed in the modern world even before mass production or mass literacy. One of the rights won by the French revolution, as it turned out, was the right of everyone to take part in war. The Napoleonic wars inaugurated the period of conscripted armies in which the whole citizenry is drawn into fighting. This universalization of war was a break with the tradition of limited wars which had prevailed, for the most part, from the middle ages through the eighteenth century. The average citizen would now learn to identify himself with the state, first of all by being expected to fight and die for it.’

The modern American peace movement had its origins in a reaction to this new development, and particularly to the Na...