War and Peace: On the Principle and Constitution of the Rights of Peoples

We are treated to a new translation and the first one in decades of Pierre-Joseph Proundhon masterpiece War and Peace. This work printed in the mid-1800s in Europe after decades of upheaval, conservative blowback, and the failed revolutions of the 1840s is a product of its time and place. Readers today might view some of the ideas espoused by the author as a combination of sexist, racist or both at the same time. But the impact the work had on literature and socialist thought can not be overestimated. Proundhon tried to grasp together anarchism, power and war. He tried to explain why war happens, what makes a just war and why do people get caught up in the frenzy even though the war generally only benefits the rich and their companies. Alex Prichard does a wonderful job in the introduction explaining the world of Proundhon, how he came to his ideas, and the impact the thinking had on nineteenth-century anarchists, though, which is confusing enough in itself but was born in a Europe that had seen the horrors of constant warfare.