ABSTRACT
The populist flaw in the psychologists' explanation of the causes of war derives of course from their methodology. They are most confident and convincing when dealing with human nature per se, with all human beings, past present and future. As the anthropologists draw their inductions from material which is both concrete and human, they manage to avoid the snares set by the psychologists' abstract individualism or by the ethologists' speculative animalism. Significantly, however, their services have been mainly of a negative, destructive variety. To write of anthropologists, ethologists and psychologists as if they were united armies of course is to distort. That unavoidable penalty, imposed by the need to be concise, afflicts doubly any discussion of sociological approaches to the origins of war. The implications of the principle for the origins of wars hardly need explaining. If foreign policy is determined by domestic forces, the place to look for those origins is at home.
