On the Civil-ness of Civil War: A Comment on David Armitage's Civil War Time

In: Proceedings of the ASIL Annual Meeting, Band 111, S. 14-19

Abstract

It is a pleasure and an honor to comment on the work of David Armitage, a historian of unparalleled reach and impact. His topic could not be more important. "Civil war has gradually become the most widespread, the most destructive, and the most characteristic form of organized human violence," he writes in his elegant and masterful recent book Civil Wars: A History in Ideas. Examining the history of the idea of "civil war" is not simply an academic enterprise. Understanding its history, he explains, "reveals the contingency of the phenomenon, contradicting those who claim its permanence and durability." Armitage's purpose is "to show that what humans have invented, they may yet dismantle … what intellectual will has enshrined, an equal effort of imaginative determination can dethrone."