The Verdict of Battle: The Law of Victory and the Making of Modern War, by
James Q. Whitman (Yale Law School), has just been released by Harvard University Press. Here's the Press's description:
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.
A few of the blurbs:
“This is one of the most remarkable books about law to have emerged in a long time. The depth and precision of the questions Whitman
asks, and the originality of the answers he proposes, take us from the
origins of the modern state to the ways in which law has determined many
of the fundamental features of the modern world. Sure to be a classic,
this stimulating and insightful book will appeal to any reader curious
about war, battles, or how the world we inhabit came to be the way it
is.”—William Ewald, University of Pennsylvania Law School
“The Verdict of Battle is an
exceptionally important book from a master historian that places our
current debates concerning the laws of war in a telling new light. Whitman
is a provocative critic of the ways in which humanitarianism has come
to modern law—and distorted our understanding of premodern warfare. The
book will completely recast future discussion among historians and leave
other readers pondering what can be done to legalize conflict to serve
humanity for the better.”—Samuel Moyn, author of The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History
Follow the
link for the TOC and an interview with Whitman.
