ABSTRACT
There are two commonly accepted ideas about war which have little foundation in history. One is that war is an abnormality. The other is that with the passage of time warfare has become costlier and dead-lier. The frequency of war is in itself the best argument against accepting the idea of its abnormality. War itself was an important stimulus to technological development in many industries in the late nineteenth century such as shipbuilding, the manufacture of steel plate and the development of machine tools. The possibility of making a deliberate choice of war as economic policy has existed since the late eighteenth century and exists still. The origins of the Second World War lay in the deliberate choice of warfare as an instrument of policy by two of the most economically developed states. The basis of Fascist and National Socialist political and economic thought was the rejection of the ideas of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.
