ABSTRACT
The economic explanation assumes that men stand in each other's way in satisfying the essential needs of life. This applies to individuals, but more particularly also to nations. The wealth of the rich means the comparative welfare of the poor; economic necessity unites even the most embittered enemies. Where national expansion, determined by economic principles, leads to conflicts, the cause of the conflict is not the economic necessity, but the menace formed by the expansion and penetration of a nation as a militant unit. The idea of guilt is the centre round which all conceptions of enmity revolve; again and again its singular position has set the philosophers, and particularly the legal philosophers, unanswerable problems. Enmity is nothing but transformed suffering, which out of psychological necessity must be projected upon human beings in order to be liquidated. In part this suffering is caused by human action, but its larger part is of non-human origin.
