ABSTRACT
For most of human existence, war has been seen as an unalterable feature of the human condition: unwelcome, ghastly, tragic, perhaps – though there have been many who professed to find in it also excitement, intoxication and the noblest of human virtues – but in any case inevitable. War, the Greek philosopher and aphorist Heraclitus told us, was the ‘Father of all things’, and, as such, it was treated as an Olympian – as untameable and as mysterious as that other great Olympian, Aphrodite. But from the late eighteenth century onwards at least the possibility of eliminating war as a feature of politics and establishing a law-governed international order in its place was an increasingly recurrent feature of theoretical reflection on politics and international relations – a development reaching a crescendo in our own times, as many of the papers at this conference – and others like it – testify.
