ABSTRACT OF “MAN, STATE AND WAR”, BY KENNETH N. WALTZ

CHAPTER 1 – INTRODUCTION

ð War is recurrent in history as natural disasters, however, the human source of wars is the reason of belief and most diverse efforts to intervene and reduce or eliminate such outcome.

ð The efforts for peace do not correspond to the achievements.

ð Better than asking whether we can have peace in situations utterly driven to war, one should ask in which ways to possibly reduce the war possibilities and raise peace ones.

ð Our social conditions are invariable products of our nature

o Saint August; Lutero; Malthus; Jonathan Swift; Dean Inge; Niebuhr; Espinoza.

§ Waltz disagrees with this view.

è Criticizes by simply opposing that, if bad units (states) drive to wars, than good ones were supposed to drive to peace, which don’t really happen

o This way he goes against liberals and Marxists will of uniformizing states according to their own patterns of a good state.

o Also criticizes other efforts to settle a moral pattern for good and evil states, like Woodrow Wilson and other Irenists did

§ Woodrow Wilson moralist politics and Cobden persuasion that people interest is peace in 1849. Both them using the democracy in a utilitarist way.

ð Our social environment determines our behavior

o Rousseau and the noble savage and Locke selfish savage, both end up behaving the same way due to society rules.

o The same way persons live in states, one can believe states live in a “world of states” and for so they are constrained

è Criticizes efforts to put the responsibility of environmental failures on bad statemens, such as the cases of:

o Woodrow Wilson moralist politics;

o Cobden persuasion that people interest is peace in 1849;

o Dwight Einsenhower

ð All them using the democracy in a utilitarist way!!!

ð Where are the main reasons of war? In the man, in the separately structure of the states, or in the system of states.

o There is no strict prescription to each image. However, there are logical and non-logical prescription for each pair of goal and image.

o There is no empirical solution to validate or not the prescriptions because goals depend on the diagnosis predicted by each image from the reality.

o Understand the likely consequences of each diagnosed cause may depend on the comprehension of the other diagnoses. This turns even more difficult to evaluate which image to follow.

§ Purposes an evaluation of the merits through four steps:

1. Is it feasible to implement the final conclusion? How?

2. Is there a logical relation between the prescription and the image? The prescription really faces the attributed causes?

3. The image is adequate or a merely grab to facts with manipulative biased interest?

4. How the attempts to satisfy the prescription will affect the other goals?

a. IMPORTANT BECOUSE UNITS ARE NOT UNICALY INTERESTED IN ONE GOAL OR ONE WAY TO SETTLE SUCH GOAL!!!

CHAPTER 8 – CONCLUSION

ð International Politics is like a chess, in which the possible movements should be considered as well as the weight and role of each piece. However, one must add, in International Politics the pieces change their weights and roles from time to time.

ð Political practice is largely influenced by the political vision of politicians.

ð Differently from Metternich and Bismarck, politicians of the 20^th century transferred huge amounts of party policy to their international policy.

ð States that anarchy is better substituted by government, however, punctuates that in international reality it would be way costly, and prosecuting this could create even more war than the traditional anarchy does.

ð RELATION BETWEEN THE TWO FIRST IMAGES AND THE THIRD ONE:

o The two first are active cause of the war and the third is permissive.

o A war can happen because the state A has something that the state B wants. The active cause is the willingness of B and the permissive is the inexistence of something to avoid B to take the risks of a war

o DEFINITION OD THE THIRD VIEW: Each state pursues its own interests, whatever being them, by the way it judges to be the best. The strength is a way to obtain the external goals of the state because there is no solid and trustful process of conciliation of divergent interest inevitably to occur in a situation of anarchy

§ Politics based on this view is not moral or not, but only an answer to the world around.

o The third image describes the world political structure, but without the first and second images there is no knowledge over the forces pressuring politics.

o The first and second images describes the forces in the international politics, however, one can’t evaluate or predict the results of such forces without the third view.