Introduction

It is common among intellectual historians to conceive of distinct historical periods in terms of the values or world views to which these periods seem to give expression. Thus the eighteenth century is sometimes called the Age of Reason or Enlightenment, and the nineteenth the Age of Ideology or the Age of History. Raymond Aron, in a book of the same name, dubbed the twentieth century the Century of Total War (Aron 1955). Like all historical generalisations, this one seeks to capture what is fundamental – in this case, the organisation of prodigious violence and destructiveness – at the expense of developments deemed less than fundamental, however important they may be. Of course this involves certain judgements of significance. Aron was far from being alone in his assessment of what distinguishes the twentieth century.

The twentieth century has seen the perfection of revolutionary new technologies – petrochemicals, electronics, nuclear power, a ‘world wide web’ of computer networks. It has seen the emancipation of women in many parts of the world; the rise and fall of empires, the organisation of national independence movements and wars of ‘national liberation’; the rise and fall of communism in Russia and Eastern Europe; the establishment of the United Nations; the creation of the modern welfare state; and the emergence of a ‘third wave’ of liberal democratic transformation in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In the face of all of these developments, many of them undoubtedly beneficial, all of them consequential, why think of the century as a century of total war?