A Philosophy of War: Why We Fight - Frédéric Gros
Translated by Gregory Elliot
English language edition published in 2026 by Verso, London, UK and New York, NY
Originally published in French in 2023 as Pourquoi la guerre? by Albin Michel
112 pages
ISBN: 9781804296028
LCCN: 2025031922
LCC: U22 .G75813 2026
In February 2022, Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine, kicking off the largest and deadliest war in Europe since the Second World War. An escalation of the conflict that began in 2014, this ongoing war has displaced around 8 million people, while the total number of dead and wounded is still unknown as both countries inflate the other's losses and minimize their own to keep up morale.
More recently, joint US and Israeli forces bombed the city of Tehran, killing its Supreme Leader and sparking havoc in the Middle East. This operation (nicknamed “Operation Epic Fury”), which has vacillated in its scope and aims from outright regime change to the disarmament of the country’s potential nuclear capabilities, has (as of writing) resulted in the deaths of 7 (now 13) American service members and 140 Americans wounded, while at least 1,270 people in Iran have been killed along with 486 in Lebanon. As the war continues without a clear end in sight, many of us on the Left are feeling a dreadful sense of deja vu, as we remember the quagmire wars we fumbled through in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Libya, among others.
Especially in the light of the ongoing genocide that Israel is perpetuating in Gaza, it seems that the specter and reality of war have become the defining signifier of our era. Translated into English in 2026, French philosopher Frédéric Gros’s A Philosophy of War: Why We Fight offers a concise philosophical meditation on war as a persistent feature of human political life. Drawing on the Western canon of political philosophy, Gros seeks to interrogate the ethical, symbolic, and political meanings of war, primarily utilizing the war in Ukraine as a case study. Against liberal narratives of postwar peace and inevitable historical progress, Gros insists that war remains a constitutive, if troubling, organizing feature of political life as it continues to shape our collective identities.
Overview:
In this brief volume, Gros sets out to confront a question that liberal modernity has never successfully answered: Why does war persist despite centuries of supposed progress and the institution of international law? Rather than defending a single theory, Gros surveys major philosophical interpretations of war and uses recent events, especially the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, as a starting point to reconsider how war works today. Against the comforting fiction that war is an exception to an otherwise peaceful global order, Gros insists that war remains a defining feature of political life.
Essentially, Gros argues that war persists not because of a single universal cause but because multiple moral, political, and historical frameworks continue to make it intelligible and sometimes acceptable. Taking the shock in Europe after the Russian invasion of Ukraine as a central point of reflection, Gros challenges the idea that modern societies have moved beyond war. Instead, he shows that war has long been embedded in human political life and repeatedly reappears because societies continue to justify it in different ways.
As such, his analysis examines several traditions of thought in the Western canon of political philosophy (from Plato to Hobbes, Rousseau, and Machiavelli) to interrogate the relationship between war and the state. Gros asks whether war produces the state or whether the state produces war, treating sovereignty as both morally charged and politically formative. He also engages critically with just-war theory, examining how ethical frameworks are mobilized to legitimate violence while acknowledging their internal tensions and contradictions. The result is a compact demonstration of how war has been interpreted and legitimized across history, even in societies that formally reject violence.
A central theme of the book is the deep moral ambiguity of war. Gros emphasizes that war is simultaneously associated with heroic virtues such as courage, sacrifice, and loyalty, along with extreme brutality and destruction. Even societies that condemn violence may still honor soldiers, commemorate battlefield sacrifice, or accept the idea that fighting can be necessary in the name of justice or self-defense. Philosophical attempts to regulate war, such as just war theory, illustrate this tension by trying to reconcile moral principles with the reality of organized violence.
Ultimately, Gros argues that war cannot be understood purely as a natural human instinct or an irrational eruption of animalistic aggression. Instead, it is a historical and political phenomenon shaped by institutions, collective narratives, and state power. Across the centuries, the three primary motivations for war, according to Gros, are fear, greed, and vanity. Wars occur because political systems prepare for them, moral traditions sometimes justify them, and societies remain capable of mobilizing around them, often capitalizing upon an imagined external Other that is vilified and thus rendered morally acceptable to kill. Understanding these overlapping structures, Gros suggests, is essential if we want to grasp why war persists and why efforts to eliminate it have repeatedly fallen short.
Deeper Dive:
In the Introduction, Gros takes the war in Ukraine as a jumping-off point to interrogate the meaning of war. With the invasion on the eastern front of Ukraine, Western observers now had to tarry with the fact that we were at real war. Gros details how, as opposed to trade wars, psychological wars, or any other of ways in which we modify the term, real wars involve 1) “the mutual killing and dying in confrontation with an enemy,” 2) the binary bifurcation between good and evil “that pits states, peoples, political figures, and collective entities against one another,” and 3) offering reasons, justifications, and rules/protocols for engagement (ix-x). Therefore, Gros reframes the book’s central question: if modern societies have developed moral norms, international law, and political institutions meant to limit violence, why does war persist?
In the First Chapter, Gros begins with the shock in Europe following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which many commentators described as the “return of war.” Gros argues that this perception is misleading. War had not disappeared but had simply receded from the everyday experience of Western Europeans, who had come to believe that economic integration, international institutions, and liberal democracy had made large-scale war unlikely. As he writes, “Armed conflicts did not disappear, but simply changed form” (3, emphasis original).
He then proceeds through three distinct phases of war since the end of WWII: “Cold War, global war, and chaos-creating war” (1). Gros observes that contemporary conflicts often take forms very different from the large interstate wars that dominated earlier centuries. While we are familiar with the psychological and proxy wars that ensued during the half-century struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, Gros argues that the events of 9/11 ushered in a new form of war, which he calls “global” or “diffuse wars.” These conflicts are defined in principle by “an indefinite extension of violence and the contagious spread of fear,” as the very fact that a terrorist act occurs is a mark of its very success (7).
Therefore, these acts blur boundaries between war and peace, between internal and international conflict, and between soldiers and civilians. This type of warfare leads to a two-fold response, in which surveillance is increased to monitor potential threats and military actions are transformed into “interventions,” which are often justified by appealing to universal principles such as democracy and security. As a result, war no longer always appears as a clearly declared confrontation between two armies, but rather as a diffuse and persistent form of violence embedded in global political tensions.
This feeds into what Gros calls “chaos-creating wars,” which are waged for their own sake instead of seeking any kind of peace. This is exemplified, in Gros’s estimation, by the chaos that followed the Arab Spring and the liberation of Bashar Al-Assad in 2011. These chaos-creating wars are a symptom of the difficulty in creating a viable future. He argues that the Ukrainian war exemplifies qualities of each of these forms of war, though it hearkens back to classical forms of war, thus leading many to theorize that it shows a “return to war.” Gros argues that understanding these transformations is essential if societies hope to grasp why war continues to occur in the contemporary world.
In the Second Chapter, Gros explores the profound moral ambiguity of war, which simultaneously “brings out in human beings both their accursed part (bloodthirsty bestiality, terribly cruelty) and their divine part (abnegation, self sacrifice)” (25). War can bring forth virtues such as courage, sacrifice, loyalty, solidarity, and devotion to comrades, and societies often celebrate these qualities through lifting soldiers up as moral exemplars in literature, conferring on them medals of heroism and valor, and deifying them in national memory.
At the same time, war also unleashes brutality, destruction, and the dehumanization of the enemy. Gros emphasizes that the same actions of killing, destroying, and risking one’s life can be interpreted either as noble heroism or as barbaric violence, depending on the perspective from which they are viewed. This duality reveals one of the central paradoxes of war. It is simultaneously a site of moral elevation and a space where the most fundamental moral prohibitions collapse.
The Third Chapter turns to the long philosophical tradition that seeks to regulate warfare through the concept of “just war.” Gros explains that thinkers and theologians developed criteria intended to determine when war might be morally legitimate, such as the presence of a just cause, the authority of a legitimate political power, and the proportional use of force. These principles were designed to limit violence and prevent arbitrary warfare while still allowing states to defend themselves against aggression. However, Gros highlights the tension at the heart of the idea: even when a cause is just, the means used in war often seem incompatible with moral ideals. The concept of a just war, therefore, represents an attempt to reconcile the reality of armed conflict with ethical norms, but it also exposes the difficulty of achieving justice through organized violence.
In the Fourth Chapter, Gros examines the close relationship between war and the development of political authority. Following Rousseau, war is not merely an eruption of violence outside the realm of politics, but it is deeply embedded in the functioning of states. Historically, the need to wage war has encouraged governments to build stronger institutions, including systems of taxation, centralized administration, and national armies. At the same time, states use war to defend their interests, expand their power, or reinforce their legitimacy.
Following the thought of Machiavelli, Gros emphasizes the reciprocal dynamic between war and political structures: states organize war, but war also contributes to the formation and consolidation of states. As he writes, “For the state, the art of war is its survival technique; it is the sign that, for all the founding narratives and other myths of origin, political power never has roots. A host of economic reasons can be found for war…but the most secret and decisive reason, concealed by rhetoric about the justice of the cause, is this: the radical contingency of power” (61, emphasis original). Understanding war, therefore, requires examining the contingent scramble for power of the political systems that prepare for and conduct it.
In Chapter Five, Gros analyzes the transformation of warfare in the modern era, particularly with the emergence of the phenomenon known as “total war.” In earlier periods, conflicts were often limited in scope and primarily involved professional armies fighting on defined battlefields. In contrast, modern industrial conflicts mobilize entire societies. Civilian populations, economic production, technological research, and propaganda all become integral parts of the war effort. The wars of the twentieth century demonstrated how conflict could expand beyond military engagements to encompass the entire social and economic life of nations.
Furthermore, total war seeks the total annihilation of the enemy, neutralizing all threats to the political body, whether real or imagined. To justify and sustain this, “one has to persuade oneself that the enemy is the embodiment of moral abomination which legitimizes the ferocity of the fighting” (68). For Gros, total war represents a dramatic escalation in the scale and intensity of violence, as the distinction between combatants and civilians becomes increasingly blurred. Paradoxically, the more absolute the moral claim is to justify war, the more acceptable it becomes to abandon moral constraints in achieving the goal of absolute victory.
In the Sixth Chapter, Gros makes his final argument as to why war has continued to persist across the centuries. While the contexts change from conflict to conflict, three semantic focal points have remained the same in the thought of the “great thinkers of war” (ie, Thucydides, Hobbes, and Raymond Aron): “greed, fear, and the pursuit of glory” (74-75). After dismissing the ideas that war is primarily driven by biological aggression or an innate psychological death drive, Gros turns to Hobbes’s Leviathan to argue in favor of this triad of motivations, bringing in thinkers such as Sartre, Girard, Hegel, and Aristotle, as well as applying it to the war in Ukraine, to buttress his argument.
Finally, in his Conclusion, Gros briefly considers what the goal of peace means, especially in the aftermath of war. First, there is the “peace of the graveyard," in which war is a constant fact of life and acts as an accelerant to the only true peace: death. A less radical form of this would be the concept of “armed peace,” which Gros breaks down into three forms. The first is a scenario in which peace is maintained through the constant production of war, whether through industry or the institution of increased surveillance and social organization. The second is that peace is what is kept through intimidation and the persistent possibility of war. Third, armed peace is a thin veneer that covers over the fact that politics is war continued by other means, as a tiny minority wages war internally against the majority through policing, taxes, and the suppression of labor. External war then becomes a way to conceal the fundamental class war that is occurring internally.
Aside from these forms of peace, Gros employs Kant and Spinoza to argue that peace is natural, and that “democracy is the most natural political regime, and that wars are anti-democratic: they impede and prevent a harmonious configuration of powers attesting to natural perfection” (90). The issue arises in establishing this configuration between states, as “it is our whole culture of malicious hatred and revenge, virulent fear and arrogance, that keeps us on the verge of peace, which is the triumphs of joy over sad passions” (91).
Commendations:
There are several notable strengths to Gros’s brief volume. First of all, Gros offers a brisk and accessible overview of how war has been theorized in Western philosophy. Drawing on the Western canon of philosophy, he largely succeeds in presenting war as a problem that cannot be reduced to a single explanatory framework. By moving through a wide array of themes such as heroism, barbarism, just war, state power, and total war, he demonstrates how moral traditions, political institutions, and collective narratives shape the way societies understand and legitimize organized violence. Despite some density in places, this work is also incredibly concise and can easily be read within an hour or two. This is helped by the fact that Gros writes in a style that bridges academic philosophy and public intellectual debate, making complex traditions of political thought accessible without sacrificing conceptual rigor.
I also found his treatment of the moral ambiguity of war to be particularly compelling. Gros highlights the coexistence of courage and atrocity in the act of war, which captures an essential dialectical tension that historians of warfare have long observed. I appreciated that Gros insists that war is not simply a natural human impulse but a historically structured phenomenon, which serves as an important corrective to all-too-common crude biological or civilizational explanations of conflict. Gros largely refutes how the liberal West often employs the technocratic language of “national security” and “defense,” insisting instead that war cannot be reduced to bad policy choices, strategic miscalculations, or inept leadership. Instead, he takes seriously the unsettling fact that war continues to command loyalty across the political spectrum, even in societies that claim to abhor it.
Accordingly, I found one of Gros’s most valuable contributions to be his insistence that war should not be treated as an anomaly or failure of politics, but as a recurring and constitutive phenomenon of political order. Gros challenges the idea that contemporary conflicts such as Ukraine represent a “return” of war, arguing instead that war never disappeared, but merely shifted geographically and discursively in the postwar era. His insistence that there has been no genuine global peace since 1945 deconstructs the mythology of Western pacification and exposes the selective memory through which war is imagined as absent rather than displaced to somewhere on the periphery. This move usefully destabilizes many of the liberal triumphalist narratives that equate modernity with the pacification of aggression and the institution of rational governance. By contrast, Gros acknowledges that war produces deep affective meaning for those involved, even when that meaning is morally troubling. By highlighting the vast cost of war, which is primarily driven by greed, fear, and the endless pursuit of glory, Gros correctly argues that war is, at its core, a tragedy that we constantly repeat.
Critique:
On the other hand, Gros’s account falls short in several key regards. First and foremost, at just under one hundred pages, the book is incredibly concise and philosophical rather than encyclopedic. While this is meant to provoke thought and deepen understanding rather than offer any kind of deep historical analysis, I ultimately felt disappointed by the shallow level of analysis that Gros offers. The book reads like a dissertation or extended essay, as it never dives too deeply into any one concept and relies heavily on the regurgitated thoughts of other philosophers and thinkers. It seems like this work was simply an exploratory thought exercise, as Gros struggles to reconcile and make sense in the immediate aftermath of the war in Ukraine.
Additionally, the book’s focus on the philosophical dimensions of war is also its main limitation. Gros’s analysis often remains at the level of moral discourse and political ideas rather than engaging deeply with the material and structural forces that produce wars. In particular, I found Gros’s treatment of the role of political economy to be particularly thin. While he does acknowledge the role of states and institutions in perpetuating war, he gives comparatively little sustained attention to capitalism, imperialism, or the military-industrial complex as systemic drivers of modern conflict.
In this respect, while thinkers such as Aristotle, Hegel, Rousseau, Hobbes, and Sartre are regularly referenced, other thinkers such as Karl Marx or Vladimir Lenin appear more as background references than as fully developed frameworks for interpreting the forces of empire and war making. By exclusively drawing on the Western canon of philosophy, Gros’s scope is similarly limited and constrained to a Eurocentric perspective. As such, readers seeking a detailed engagement with the social history of warfare or the transformation of military institutions beyond a Western framework may find Gros’s treatment somewhat abstract or scattershot.
Relatedly, Gros’s geopolitical concerns are also largely Eurocentric, further limiting his analysis. Although Gros begins the book with the shock of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and consistently uses it as a case example for his ideas, his broader narrative still reflects a largely Euro-Atlantic perspective in which war appears to “return” after a supposed post-Cold War interlude of peace. This framing risks obscuring the fact that violent conflicts have remained continuous across large parts of the Global South. The wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and numerous African conflicts suggest that what disappeared was less war itself than its proximity to Western European societies. For much of the Global South, war has not been an episodic crisis but a permanent condition, often appearing in the form of occupation, counterinsurgency, and blockades. Consequently, the book’s diagnosis of contemporary warfare would benefit from a more sustained engagement with imperial legacies and the persistence of global inequality in shaping patterns of violence.
As such, my biggest complaint with the book lies in its abstraction from empire, colonial history, and other racialized violence. Gros treats war as a broadly shared human phenomenon, but this universalism collapses under decolonial critique. A central question in the book concerns the relationship between war and the state: does war serve as the foundation of the state, or does the state generate war? Gros treats the state as the primary locus of political authority and ethical decision-making, situating his analysis within a broadly Hobbesian tradition. War, for Gros, is thus framed as a phenomenon that both expresses and tests the moral foundations of the political community.
I found this framing to be unconvincing. The modern state is not a neutral or universally shared political form but a historically contingent structure most often shaped by colonial conquest and imperial extraction. For colonized and postcolonial societies, the state has often functioned less as a guarantor of collective ethical life than as an apparatus of coercion imposed through explicit violence. Gros’s analysis largely brackets these histories, treating the state as an abstract political subject rather than as a differentiated and hierarchical formation. As a result, the book risks universalizing a specifically European experience of war and sovereignty, while marginalizing forms of violence that do not conform to classical models of interstate conflict.
While I completely understand the recency bias that Gros shows in this study, as the Ukraine war was relatively new and the assault on Gaza after October 7th had not yet occurred, it still struck me as odd that the tactics and rhetoric used to justify the apartheid regime in Gaza and the West Bank are nowhere to be found in this analysis. Certainly, the idea of “total war,” in which the enemy is portrayed as a moral force of evil that must be eradicated, fits the Israeli occupation and genocide against the Palestinian people more than it does the war in Ukraine. This form of asymmetrical warfare has long defined the eighty-year conflict in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank, even long before the events and subsequent aftermath of October 7th.
Discussion:
Overall, while Gros’s brief philosophical exploration of the causes of war is undoubtedly interesting, I fear that its brevity and Eurocentrism make it woefully inadequate to fully account for how war is actually experienced in the real world, especially in the Global South. As such, I find it useful to illustrate these shortcomings through three specific case studies, one of which Gros utilizes as a prime example, one which remains entirely out of Gros’s purview, and one in which he engages tangentially: the war in Ukraine, the genocide in Gaza, and the War on Terror.
Ukraine:
Even though he uses it as his primary example throughout the book, the war in Ukraine exposes the uneven moral economy that Gros leaves largely unexamined. The war in Ukraine has been framed by NATO and its defenders as a moral watershed. In this framing, the war is a clear struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, demanding unity, escalation, and sacrifice to defend the West. Admittedly, Gros’s reflections on heroism and collective identity resonate strongly in this case, as Ukrainian resistance is narrated as noble and existential. This is not without good reason.
Yet, the unanimity of this moral framing raises uncomfortable questions that Gros does not fully pursue. Unlike conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, or Palestine, Ukraine has been framed in Western media as a civilizational struggle, a moral emergency demanding total solidarity. Ukrainian lives are deemed grievable, their resistance is unquestionably heroic, and their suffering is fully covered as front-page news.
This is not to deny the brutality of Russia’s invasion or the legitimacy of Ukrainian self-defense. It is worth noting how starkly this war has revealed the racialized and geopolitical hierarchy of empathy. Gros analyzes heroism and sacrifice as universal features of war, but he does not interrogate why some fighters are celebrated as freedom fighters while others are labeled terrorists, insurgents, or simply collateral damage in the larger scope of armed conflict.
In short, why is this war rendered as an ethical absolute while others were framed as regrettable necessities or unfortunate complexities? Why does NATO expansion appear as a defense against inevitable aggression rather than as a geopolitical project with its own history of provocation and violence? Gros analyzes heroism and sacrifice as universal features of war, but he does not confront how such recognition, empathy, and legitimacy are unevenly distributed along these often racialized and geopolitical lines. Moral recognition is not evenly distributed, as some deaths generate outrage and mobilization while others barely register. Gros’s ethical framework presumes a shared moral community that, in practice, simply does not exist.
Gaza:
Nowhere is this asymmetry clearer than in Gaza. The ongoing destruction of the enclave is widely described in Western discourse as a “conflict,” a “war,” or a tragic but necessary act of self-defense. Israel’s assault is routinely justified through the language of self-defense, proportionality, and civilian protection, which is the very rhetoric that Gros analyzes with philosophical care.
Yet in practice, these concepts function less as moral constraints on aggressive behavior than as rhetorical shields that are used to justify it. Civilian death is too often hesitantly acknowledged and then reabsorbed into the logic of strategic necessity. Siege, starvation, and collective punishment are rendered legible within legalistic frameworks that never seriously threaten the violence they describe. As Palestinian activist Mohammed El-Kurd argues, “The brutal reality of colonial violence, as it manifests now only in constant exposure to checkpoints, raids, and settler and military violence but also in relentless attacks on their personhood, confirms that no amount of support, outside of abolishing colonial rule in Palestine, can shield children from the deep and lasting scars left by the erosion of their daily lives” (Perfect Victims; 146-147)
Gros’s conception of war as something that is simply declared, narrated, and morally debated clearly struggles to capture this reality. Gaza is not at war in the classical sense that is so often framed in Western media. Rather, it is subjected to a permanent condition of exposure to death as civilian infrastructure is destroyed and entire populations are starved or displaced. Yet, this violence is endlessly justified through legalistic and ethical language, as the Palestinians become suspect by their very existence as a potential threat to the Israeli regime.
In this way, Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics is far more illuminating in this case. For Mbembe, modern power is defined by the ability to decide who may live and who must die, as well as whose deaths are rendered invisible, acceptable, or necessary. Gaza is a paradigmatic necropolitical space, as it is a population that is enclosed, managed, and periodically annihilated in the name of security. While Gros’s commitment to ethical inquiry remains admirable, in Gaza these rhetorical flourishes have become part of the machinery of death. A philosophy of war that does not reckon with this reality risks becoming complicit through abstraction.
War on Terror:
If Ukraine represents war as a moral spectacle and Gaza reveals the flimsy rhetorical logics that are used to justify death and destruction, then the War on Terror represents war’s disappearance into bureaucracy and routine administration. Drone strikes, special operations, indefinite detention, extrajudicial killing, and surveillance regimes have defined U.S. military power for more than twenty years, most often occurring without formal declarations of war or public debate (as we’ve most recently seen in the war on Iran). These tactics and forms of violence do not fit neatly into his model of war as a bounded event, as they blur the line between war and peace, once again producing a necropolitical regime in which power is exercised through the management of death rather than through sovereign decision alone.
The War on Terror is not a war in the classical sense, nor is it peace. It is a permanent state of exception in which entire regions are subjected to continuous, low-intensity violence. The victims rarely appear as political subjects, but rather as targets, suspects, or risks. This is precisely the type of continuous violence that Mbembe theorizes, which is that violence that no longer needs to announce itself as war in order to kill. In necropolitical regimes, the distinction between war and peace collapses into continuous exposure to death through occupation, policing, borders, environmental destruction, and economic abandonment.
From this perspective, Gros’s emphasis on war as an episodic event obscures the lived realities of populations for whom violence is normalized and permanent. Colonial and postcolonial subjects do not experience war as an interruption of peace but as the enduring structure of political existence. Gros’s focus on moral justification and collective meaning feels almost anachronistic in a world where violence is automated, outsourced, and legally obscured. By centering a detached, philosophical-historical approach while under-theorizing the imperial structure that gives rise to violence on the periphery, Gros risks offering a philosophy of war that speaks primarily from, and to, the metropole, where war remains exceptional enough to provoke such ethical reflection. For whom is war an ethical, if temporary crisis, and for whom is it simply the unending background condition of life? Gros offers a philosophy about war, but not one grounded in the lived realities of imperial violence.
Conclusion:
Overall, A Philosophy of War is a quick, thoughtful, and accessible introduction to the philosophical discourse and history of war and its meaning through the lens of Western political philosophy. While limited by its Eurocentric conceptual and geopolitical framework, insufficient attention to the economic dimensions of warfare, and inability to confront the imperial and colonial structures that organize contemporary violence, Gros’s work still offers a brisk and incisive meditation on the roots of war. Gros offers a philosophy of war from within the imperial core, where war still appears as a moral problem to be debated. What is missing is a philosophy of war from the standpoint of those for whom war is an everyday experience rather than an exception. As such, while it may be useful for those interested in the philosophical ethics of war, the book serves more as a cursory reflection rather than a precise interrogation of the root causes of war.
In short, A Philosophy of War is best read as a lucid philosophical essay on the moral and political meanings of war rather than as a comprehensive theory of its causes. While it is useful as a quick and useful primer for thinking about how war has been theorized in the Western canon and provides plenty of interesting thoughts, Gros’s work often falls woefully short in providing any kind of depth in its analysis. Gros provides a valuable map of the ideas through which societies interpret war, but the book stops short of fully integrating those ideas with the economic, imperial, and structural dynamics that are essential to explaining why wars actually occur.
To be sure, Gros is right about one thing. In our present moment, as Western leaders speak solemnly of a “rules-based international order” while funding Israel’s devastation of Gaza, escalating a proxy war in Ukraine, and maintaining the architecture of the War on Terror two decades after its launch, the idea that war has somehow returned rings hollow. Gros is right to reject the idea that war has somehow returned after a long peace. For much of the world, peace was never the baseline. Yet while Gros captures this persistence and transformation over the past century, his analysis ultimately struggles to directly confront the imperial and colonial structures that unevenly distribute contemporary violence. Ultimately, his philosophy of war is a fascinating, if meandering, exploration of the ethics of war, but it remains politically restrained in ways that feel increasingly untenable in the age of Gaza, Ukraine, and the War on Terror.