ABSTRACT
Specialists from a multitude of disciplines over the past two and a half centuries have shown interest in the causes of war, and in the question as to whether war is inevitably part of the human condition. From Kant’s political philosophy and Freud’s psychological insights to the studies of zoologists like Darwin and anthropologists like Dawkins, we have a wide variety of angles from which to approach the question of war. These specialists, however, have reached very different conclusions, from the highly pessimistic one that humans are inherently aggressive and that there is no way that organized aggression – war – can be contained or prevented, to the much more optimistic one that aggressive behaviour is learned, and that there are means of preventing both individual aggression and war.
