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Theor Soc (2008) 37:8386
DOI 10.1007/s11186-007-9057-6
BOOK REVIEW
Published online: 5 January 2008# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2007
Why do wars occur? And why do wars occur despite the high costs they entail? These are the question that Freud and Einstein discussed in their prescient exchange of letters in 1932, written just before Hitler came to power and published just after. Since then, history has delivered much and varied material to study these questions, ranging from the large-scale operations of the Second World War, the proxy wars of the Cold War, to internal conflicts, civil strife, and the more recent humanitarian interventions to the War on Terror.
Unfortunately social scientists during this period have done more to explain away the puzzle of why war occurs than to solve it. Dominant approaches in political science, economics, and sociology have built war into their assumptions by positing aggressive men or self-interested states. Scholars from the realist and neo-realist tradition in political science, conflict sociology, and rational choice theory often converge on explaining war out of states interest in and struggle over power resources. In this vision, all we have left to do is to fill the box interest with specific content to explain a given war.
We need better ways of understanding why war happens, and, to move beyond the tautological, we need to understand in particular why war happens some times and not others. Rather than appeal to interests in an abstract way, we need better understandings of how interests are shaped and produced, how actors interpret interests and whose interpretations matter how. Phil Smiths Why War takes one important step in this direction. He explicitly takes on realist and other instrumentalist approaches to war and argues against interest-driven explanations; provocatively, he argues that culture is not merely epiphenomenal, indeed that war is not just about culture but is all about culture (p.4).
In making his case, Smith puts war on the sociological agenda and shows mastery of an impressive array of cases. In the tradition of the strong program in cultural sociology, developed by Jeffrey Alexander and Smith at the Yale Center for Cultural Sociology, he also intervenes in theoretical and methodological debates about the
M. Krause (*)
Department of Sociology, New York...