Publishers Weekly
06/28/2021
The effort to make warfare more “civilized” has sapped energy from the peace movement and led to America’s “forever wars” in Iraq and Afghanistan, according to this provocative history from Yale law professor Moyn (Not Enough). Highlighting Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy’s belief that “making war more humane only allowed it to break out more often or drag on endlessly,” Moyn points out that many of the international laws established in the 19th century failed because they “didn’t apply or were ignored when it came to counterinsurgent and colonial war.” After WWII, the threat of U.S. air power helped to maintain peace in Europe, even as America went to war in Asia. The revelation of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam “added fuel to the fire of America’s last major peace movement,” while public outrage over the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal in Iraq only “diverted from deliberating on the deeper choice they were making to ignore constraints on starting war in the first place.” Moyn also sheds light on the rise of drone warfare and “targeted killings” during the Obama administration. Unfortunately, he doesn’t fully wrestle with the differences between wars of aggression and those of self-defense, which somewhat undermines his case. The result is a stimulating yet inconclusive rethink of what it means to regulate war. (Sept.)
From the Publisher
"[A] brilliant new book . . . Moyn casts new light on much of the surrounding historical landscape . . . Humane provides a powerful intellectual history of the American way of war. It is a bold departure from decades of historiography dominated by interventionist bromides . . . [Moyn's] most original and incisive contribution to historical understanding is taking seriously the possibility of peace." —Jackson Lears, The New York Review of Books
"[Moyn] takes the reader on an excruciating journey, in incisive, meticulous and elegant prose, about the modern history of making war more legal, and in effect sanitizing it so that it can continue forever . . . [He] puts the whole issue in a tough, pragmatic perspective . . . The yearning to avoid war and yet make it more humane will . . . continue, rendering Moyn’s book timeless." —Robert D. Kaplan, The New York Times Book Review
"Smart and provocative . . . Arriving 20 years after 9/11, as the United States has withdrawn its troops from Afghanistan, Humane encourages readers to ask central questions too often lost amid the chatter of the foreign policy establishment." —Jennifer Szalai, The New York Times
"Compelling and authoritative . . . Sweeping . . . The narrative is gripping and panoramic." —Rayan Fakhoury, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Moyn offers a sorely needed history of how war has become palatable . . . The brilliance of Moyn’s [book] is in how [it] wrest[s] control of the dominant narratives that have gripped the public imagination in the post-9/11 years, and in particular, the country after Trump." —Rozina Ali, American Prospect
"Moyn makes a deceptively simple and yet startlingly original argument . . . The contribution is ground-breaking and will likely become a seminal text-because of its content but also because it captures a generational moment." —Aurélie Basha i Novosejt, International Affairs
"An important book . . . [Humane] points out that Americans have made a moral choice to prioritize humane war, not a peaceful globe." —Dennis C. Jett, The Washington Post
"[Humane] is an important extension of themes [Moyn] has been developing since his critical account of 'human rights' in 2010’s The Last Utopia . . . One of Moyn’s greatest gifts as a scholar and a writer is his capacity to combine a carefully crafted historical narrative with both an analysis of political and legal discourse and a righteous anger at the abuses this discourse enables." —Jeanne Morefield, Jacobin
"Beyond being a meditation on the meaning of war, it is a history of the tension between pacifism and humanitarianism. In a culture that has come to valorize the latter, Moyn gives the former its due and pushes readers to think about how law can aid the cause of peace . . . Humane succeeds as a bracing reminder not to grow comfortable with war as a status quo." —Stephen Pomper, Foreign Affairs
"[A] learned and provocative book . . . The biggest value of Moyn’s book is the ethical questions he raises. Since war today has become so much less bloody, and involves so many fewer Americans, what is to stop it from becoming perpetual?" —Edward Luce, Financial Times
“In this profound and deeply disturbing book, Samuel Moyn shows how efforts to curb war's brutality—to make it more humane—find the United States today caught in a bind where war has become perpetual. As technology further dehumanizes war's conduct, this bind will become increasingly difficult to escape.” —Andrew Bacevich, president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft
“Humane is a deeply original, powerfully argued, mind-changing book. I predict it will become an activist Bible for Gen Z, in the same way that Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars guided an earlier generation of anti-war thinkers and protesters.” —Anne-Marie Slaughter, CEO of New America
“This is what books are for: to change our minds. Samuel Moyn has written a surprising, sharp, and deeply compelling reflection on the price of making war humane.” —Daniel Immerwahr, author of How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States
“History at its finest, Samuel Moyn’s Humane recasts the iconic narratives of warfare, unearthing the ideas that led to today’s forever wars. Sweeping and rich in detail, Humane taps loudly at the conscience of the complacent, sounding a clarion call for peace.” —Karen Greenberg, author of Subtle Tools: The Dismantling of American Democracy from the War on Terror to Donald Trump
“We tend to think of the rise of humanitarian laws constraining the exercise of force as an unalloyed good. But Samuel Moyn’s stunning new book, Humane, fundamentally upends this conventional wisdom. In the process, Moyn also recovers the now long-forgotten abolitionist tradition, which sought to end war rather than to reform it. This profound historical retelling is an essential and groundbreaking contribution.” —Aziz Rana, author of The Two Faces of American Freedom
“In gripping prose, one of our boldest intellectuals and most trenchant critics upends the conventional stories that are told about law, progress, and war. Humane exposes the deceptive promise of humanization and its role in supporting the clinically legalized wars of our future. This book is a call for moral and political engagement that should be very widely read.” —Naz Khatoon Modirzadeh, founding director of the Harvard Law School Program on International Law and Armed Conflict
“This is a singularly important book by a singularly incisive thinker. How, Samuel Moyn asks, might we imagine a more moral, generous, efficacious, and just plain sensible approach to the end of violence and the alleviation of human suffering?” —Walter Johnson, professor of history at Harvard University and author of The Broken Heart of America: Saint Louis and the Violent History of the United States
Library Journal
07/02/2021
This book makes the case that justifications for war have become increasingly complex in response to arguments for peace from the treaties of The Hague and Geneva Conventions and assorted organizations and international law theorists. Historian Moyn (jurisprudence and history, Yale Univ. and Yale Law Sch.; Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World) maintains that the United States has superficially humanized war (especially since 9/11) and become more accurate in attacking designated targets. The concept of more humane warfare challenges those who seek to abolish it as an intrinsic evil rather than opposing particular illegal aggressive conflicts or ameliorating the atrocities within war. The author warns that those who seek control over others as in war may choose to do so more easily through various surveillance methods rather than by physical means. Readers will learn much about the views of post—World War II legal influencers, such as Telford Taylor, Richard Falk, and John Yoo, and may be surprised by the continuity of evolving policies and arguments on hostilities during the administrations of George H. W. Bush through Donald Trump. VERDICT This complex, idea-filled tome may contradict some general readers' assumptions; its subtle argumentation will appeal to contemporary political historians, students of international law, post—Cold War military analysts, and social justice advocates. These are all good reasons to study it.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr., Lib. of Congress, Washington, DC
Kirkus Reviews
2021-06-29
A searching look at the rise of the “endless war” the U.S. is now waging.
“There is no single arc to the moral universe that guarantees that progress comes without regress on other fronts,” writes Yale Law School professor Moyn. The way in which contemporary war is fought, at least by American standards, has become increasingly “humane,” discounting the devastation it wreaks on identified enemies. Today, civilian populations suffer fewer casualties as targets are isolated and then hit with drones or Special Forces operations. The author contrasts this new approach to war with the conflicts in the last century, in which untold millions of civilians died, with cases in point being Vietnam and especially Korea, which, with good reason, Moyn considers “the most brutal war of the twentieth century, measured by the intensity of violence and per capita civilian death.” The author locates some of origins of the comparatively sanitized wars of the present in abolitionist and pacifist movements of the 19th century, although more interesting are the seeming contradictions he identifies in writers such as Carl von Clausewitz, who held that “the point of engagement is annihilation”—which would, oddly enough, then usher in peace. The contradictions remain: Making war a business of killer machines and a handful of highly trained soldiers does not necessarily make it any more just. However, Moyn notes, some of the present insistence on a more humane approach to fighting comes from our revulsion in the face of such horrors as Abu Ghraib and My Lai. Never mind that, as Moyn adds, humane war is also the product of what he calls “lawyerliness” on the part of the Obama administration, which sold the public on the idea that “his policies of endless and humane war, though not exactly what they had signed up for, were morally wholesome.”
“Humane war” may seem an oxymoron, but Moyn’s book will be of interest to war fighters and peacemakers alike.
