10 - Veblen, War and Peace

Summary

In 1957, on the 100th anniversary of Veblen's birth, the Department of Economics at Cornell University, where Veblen had studied in 1891–92, sponsored a series of lectures to commemorate this event. The main purpose of these commemorative lectures, which were published subsequently in a book, was to celebrate Veblen's seminal contribution and stimulate an interest in it. However, not a single lecture focused on Veblen's writings on war and peace, although this topic was mentioned in passing on a couple of occasions. This was in part possibly because the analysis of war is not a central issue in either mainstream economics or indeed heterodox economics, and partly perhaps because international conflicts were at a relatively low point in the late 1950s by the standards of the twentieth century. Yet the twentieth century was one of almost perpetual war with an estimated 180 million people killed, the vast majority civilians rather than combatants, a higher total than for any other century in the history of humankind.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the prospect of perpetual peace looks no nearer being achieved than it did at the beginning of the last century (notwithstanding the creation in 1919 of the first international organisation in modern history, the League of Nations, and its replacement in 1945 by the United Nations).