War

Historian Lewis Mumford, among others, has argued that warfare as an ongoing and necessary expression of the state originated with the rise of urbanism in the Tigris-Euphrates Valley thousands of years before the Common Era.  The twentieth century witnessed global, regional, and local war on a near-continuous basis.  For ten of the first fourteen years of the twenty-first century the United States has been at war in the Middle East.  The threat of terrorism, meanwhile, remains continuous and has altered the social psychology of these United States in ways that we have only barely begun to understand.  Under the guidance of Professor Steve Lamy, students will be encouraged to address such questions as: is war a permanent condition in contemporary and future society?  If so, then what are the social, psychological, and moral effects of living in such a continuous state of armed conflict and asymmetrical terror?