In 1986, attendees of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) conference in Seville concluded that war is not a biological necessity but a social invention. The observation has a long and much-debated history in the field of politics. Given the intricacies of human nature, the early social contract theorists from Thomas Hobbes to Jean Jacques Rousseau oscillated between man’s propensity towards evil and his inherently good nature. Hobbes argued that without government man’s life is “nasty, brutish and short” as covetousness and vainglory motivate men to acquire that which belongs to another. Contrary to Hobbes, John Locke contended that free citizens join to form a government to protect themselves from anarchy and thus resolve to live peacefully without resorting to authoritarianism. Rousseau’s naturally good and naturally free “noble savage,” on the other hand, became contaminated by the corrupting nature of civilization, its enslaving institutions promoting inequality and selfishness and systems of thought which stifle compassion, giving rise to his trademark phrase “Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains.”

Yet, humanity cannot live in anarchy. Shakespearian plot lines in Macbeth, King Lear, and Richard II demonstrate the degree to which ruthless individual ambition and struggle for political power contribute to the collapse of authority and subsequent breakdown of social order. Where there is society, there must be rules, says the Latin dictum ubi societas, ibi jus. That is what the social compact and civilizational progress requires. Yet, as Colonel Louis de Grandmaison, a leading French military theorist observed, it is “the human heart [that] is the starting point in all questions of war” (Macmillan 2020, 49). Undiluted passions of the wicked, weak-willed, or morally indolent can and often do upset the carefully constructed socio-political artifice and reveal its greatest contradictions. Humanity is as much capable of Shakespearian sonnets, Verdi’s operas, and Beethoven’s symphonies as it is of genocides, extermination camps, and nuclear obliteration.

“What a Chimera is man!” lamented Blaise Pascal in his Pensés, “What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe” (Pinker 2011, X). In The Man Who Laughs, Victor Hugo (1888, 2), on the other hand, warned his character Homo the wolf of the precariousness of the human condition, counseling him to “Above all things, do not degenerate into a man.”

Elise Boulding’s Cultures of Peace: The Hidden Side of History (2000), while a work of sociology and social history that ably recasts the efforts of building lasting paradigms for the sustainable development of peace is also a continuation of the reflections on hopes and vicissitudes of the social contract initiated in the 16th century and the manner of life that human beings must come to agree upon to elide that which is destructive to humanity. A commendable feature of Boulding’s magnum opus is its breadth and multidimensional scope. The book’s central themes easily interweave and engage in a rich interdisciplinary conversation with peace studies and international relations scholarship. The book’s twelve chapters divided into three parts offer profound reflections on such diverse subjects as the war-natured identity of Western civilization, peace movements and feminist peacemaking, the media and communication revolutions, and demilitarization challenges. Hers is an erudite, patient, and thorough analysis of the subject executed with exacting objectivity to which many scholars aspire, yet few seldom accomplish. What follows is an examination of the book’s major themes and reflections and their continuing relevance to present-day socio-political, institutional, and cultural architecture.

KEYWORDS: Elise Boulding, Cultures of Peace, Global Governance, Social Contract