We trace the course of the war; the record of losses, particularly during the early months; the voices calling for peace and reasons for why the war continued; and last but not least, the peace treaties, and the initial debate about who the guilty men were who launched the war. 

"...statesmen involved in the July crisis  were too often muddle headed: they wanted one thing, and its reverse. Margaret MacMillan is surely correct when she puts the blame in her book, The War that Ended Peace: The Road to 1914, for the start of the First World War on the decision making of the small group of people leading the prime protagonists of Russia, Germany and Austria-Hungary".

This is the eighth essay in my series on cultural wars: its subject is nationalism, considered  from the 1920s on as the prime cause of war in Europe. It follows on from the previous articles on the ideas of race, of the state, and of economics. These three, with nationalism, constitute what I identify as the […]

This is the seventh essay in my series on cultural wars: its subject is utilitarianism as the source of the new discipline of economics. It follows on from the previous article, also on the utilitarians, whose central figures are Jeremy Bentham, and James Mill. Both were significant thinkers, particularly on the fields of government and law, the […]

This is the sixth essay in the series on my blog dealing with cultural wars.  The picture on the front is of Jeremy Bentham, who has a good claim to be acknowledged as the first British progressive. The first essay in the series sets the scene in the post-1990 decades: The year of Covid-19: political religion and the culture […]