War in International Thought

This is a book about the meaning of war in international thought from the early seventeenth to the late nineteenth century. Such a topic lends itself to many approaches, with many possible results. One rather conventional way to approach this topic would be to investigate how the concept of war has been used by different authors in different historical contexts, and for what kind of ideological and political purposes. From such an inquiry we would hopefully be able to make inferences about the changing functions of the concept of war across time and space, and from these perhaps distill more general insights about the meaning of war in international thought.