No CrossRef data available.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2025
The challenges of nuclear proliferation, conflict and terrorism, poverty and inequality, climate change and the deteriorating environment, are inextricably linked in our current world, and can only be tackled by a broad and unified effort to achieve peace in its fullest sense. Yet the perception of peace is much less vivid in popular imagination than that of war, and the growing body of serious peace studies is less accessible than it should be. Peace is often written off - especially by war historians - as a difficult concept to define, as a dull subject compared to war, or simply as ‘the absence of war’, a mere interval between wars which are claimed to be the driving motor of history. In my new book, The Glorious Art of Peace: From the Iliad to Iraq, I argue to the contrary that from ancient times onwards there has been a rich discourse about the meaning of peace and how to secure it, that there is a wealth of ideas and debate which continues to be relevant, and that The Art of Peace is as complex as the Art of War. Human civilisation could not have developed without long periods of productive peace, which have allowed for the emergence of stable agriculture, the growth of urban society, and the expansion of peaceful trade and intercourse between societies. Peace, as the great humanist thinker Erasmus (1466-1536) put it, is ‘the mother and nurse of all that is good for man’.
1 This is an edited extract from chapter 2 of John Gittings, The Glorious Art of Peace: From the Iliad to Iraq (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 62-72.
2 Mengzi, 4A.14 (Harvard-Yenching concordance number). [All translations are by John Gittings unless attributed to another source].
3 Shang Yang, ‘The Book of Lord Shang’, trans. in Robert Wilkinson, ed., The Art of War (Ware: Wordsworth, 1998), 214.
4 Tao Hanzhang, ‘Commentary on The Art of War’, in Wilkinson, ibid., 130.
5 Laozi, Daodejing, ch. 30.
6 Mengzi, 4a.14.
7 Mozi, Book 5, 2. 2.
8 Yuri Pines, Envisioning Eternal Empire: Chinese Political Thought of the Warring States Era (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2009), 201.
9 Zuo Qiuming, Chronicle of Zuo (henceforth cited as Chronicle), ‘Duke Ai’, 11th Year.
10 Confucius, The Analects, trans. D. C. Lau (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 26.
11 Kongzi [Confucius], Lunyu (Analects), 12. 7
12 Ibid., 16.1.
13 Mengzi, 6B. 9.
14 Ibid., 1B.11, 7B. 4.
15 W. A. C. H. Dobson, Mencius: A New Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), 124.
16 Mengzi, 7B. 2. Inconsistencies in Mengzi's position would probably be clarified if we had his own writings rather than a collection of episodes, anecdotes, and sayings recorded by his disciples and compiled later.
17 Burton Watson, Hsun Tzu: Basic Writings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 4-5.
18 Xunzi, 15. 5, 7. I have amended Xunzi's comment on military matters to follow the same wording as when he refers back to it in 15. 21, i.e. fanzai yu jun(everything to do with the army), instead of fan zai da wang (everything to do with the ruler).
19 Xunzi, 15. 5.
20 Ibid., 15.16. I have translated this more than
usually terse passage quite loosely.
21 The word ru may originally have had the derogatory meaning of a ‘weakling’ who did not take up arms: Needham, Joseph, Science and Civilisation in China, vol. ii (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), 31. The Confucians belonged mainly to the class of functionaries and specialists whose positions became less secure during the break-up of the feudal courts. Mozi may have begun life as a wheelwright, and the original meaning of mo was a captive engaged in hard labour.
22 Mozi, 4, 1.4.
23 Ibid., 5, 3. 6.
24 The Confucian Gongsun Hong in the Han dynasty would define ren as ‘extending benefit and eliminating harm, inclusively caring without partiality’: Chris Fraser, ‘Mohism’, section 9 (revised March 2010) in the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
25 Laozi, op. cit. n. 5 above, ch. 46.
26 Roger Ames, The Art of Rulership: A Study in Ancient Chinese Political Thought (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1983), 39.
27 Laozi, op. cit. n. 5 above, ch. 31, ch. 68.
28 Ibid., ch. 80.
29 Zhuangzi, 33. Fragments of both scholars have been collected by John Knoblock at Fragments of Song Xing. The Logician Gongsun Long (best known for his sophistry in defending the proposition that ‘a white horse is not a horse’) also advocated the peaceful settlement of disputes. The Annals of Lu Buwei contains an anecdote in which his clever use of logic undermines the Qin ruler's attempt to persuade the state of Zhao to join him in an aggressive war. See the entry on Gongsun Long at New World Encyclopedia.
30 See further Paul Gregor, ‘War and Peace in Classical Chinese Thought, with Particular Regard to Chinese Religions’, in Perry Schmidt- Leukel, ed., War and Peace in World Religions (London: SCM Press, 2004), 72-5.
31 James Stroble, ‘Justification of War in Ancient China’, Asian Philosophy, 8: 3 (1998), 165-90.
32 Thomas Kane, ‘Inauspicious Tools: Chinese Thought on the Morality of Warfare’, in Paul Robinson, ed., Just War in Comparative Perspective (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), ch. 9, 151-2.
33 John King Fairbank, ‘Introduction: Varieties of the Chinese Military Experience’, in Fairbank and Frank A. Kierman, eds., Chinese Ways in Warfare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 4, 25. Fairbank's approach is shared by Joseph Needham in his introduction to Science and Civilisation in China, vol. v, pt 6 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
34 Christopher Rand, ‘The Role of Military Thought in Early Chinese Intellectual History’ (Harvard University, unpublished PhD, 1977), 23.
35 Pines, op. cit. n. 8 above, 65-6, 78.
36 Emily Kearns, ‘The Gods in the Homeric Epics’, in Robert Fowler, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 59-73 at 70.
37 Jonathan Shay, Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character (New York: Scribner, 1994). See also Lawrence Tritle, From Melos to My Lai: War and Survival (London: Routledge, 2000), and Robert Meagher, Herakles Gone Mad: Rethinking Heroism in an Age of Endless Wa r (Northampton, Mass.: Olive Branch Press, 2006.)
38 For some contrary views, see Ralph Sawyer, ‘Chinese Warfare: The Paradox of the Unlearned Lesson’, American Diplomacy, 4: 4 (1999); Andrew Scobell, China and Strategic Culture (Carlisle, Pa.: US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, May 2002).
39 Li Shijia, ‘Harmonious World: Chinaos Ancient Philosophy for New International Order、 People's Daily Online, 2 October 2007. Also ‘China Supports Buddhism in Building a Harmonious Worlď, Peoples Daily Online, 13 April 2006.
You have
Access
Open access