Treitschke, Heinrich von,

The features of history are virile, unsuited to sentimental or feminine natures. Brave people alone have an existence, an evolution or a future; the weak and cowardly perish, and perish justly. The grandeur of history lies in the perpetual conflict of nations, and it is simply foolish to desire the suppression of rivalry

Without war no State could be. All those we know of arose through war, and the protection of their members by armed force remains their primary and essential task. War, therefore, will endure to the end of history, as long as there is a multiplicity of States.

Moltke, Field Marshal Helmuth von,

War is an integral part of God's ordering of the Universe. In war, man's noblest virtues come into play. Courage and renunciation, fidelity to duty and a readiness for sacrifice that does not stop short of offering up life itself. Without war the world would become swamped in materialism.

Hegel, The Philosophy of Right , §324Z

War is that condition in which the vanity of temporal things (Dinge) and temporal goods-- which tends at other times to be merely a pious phrase -- takes on a serious significance, and it is accordingly the moment in which the ideality of the particular attains it right and becomes actuality. The higher significance of war is that, through its agency (as I have put it on another occasion), `the ethical health of nations (Völker) is preserved in their indifference towards the permanence of finite determinicies, just as the movement of the winds preserves the sea from that stagnation which a lasting calm would produce-- a stagnation which a lasting, not to say perpetual, peace would also produce among nations'. [NR(Natural Law), 481/93; trans. Knox, Univ. Penn. Press, 1975]

§455 The community, the superior law whose validity is openly apparent, has its real vitality in the government as that in which it has an individual form. Government is the reality of Spirit that is reflected into itself, the simple self of the entire ethical substance. This simple power does indeed allow the Family to expand into its constituent members, and to give each part an enduring being and a being-for-self of its own. Spirit has in this its reality or its objective existence, and the Family is the element of this reality. But Spirit is at the same time the power of the whole, which brings these parts together again into a negative unity, giving them the feeling of their lack of independence, and keeping them aware that they have their life only in the whole. The community may, on the one hand, organize itself into systems of personal independence and property, of laws relating to persons and things; and, on the other hand, the various ways of working for Ends which are in the first instance particular Ends-- those of gain and employment-- it may articulate into their own special and independent associations. The Spirit of universal assembly and association is the simple negative essence of those systems which tend to isolate themselves. In order not to let them become rooted and set in this isolation, thereby breaking up the whole and letting the {communal} spirit evaporate, government has from time to time to shake them to their core by war. By this means the government upsets their established order, and violates their right to independence, while the individuals who, absorbed in their own way of life, break loose from the whole and strive after the inviolable independence and security of the person, are made to feel in the task laid upon them their lord and master, death. Spirit, by thus throwing into the melting-pot the stable existence of these systems, checks their tendency to fall away from the ethical order, and to be submerged in a {merely} natural existence; and it preserved and raises conscious self into freedom and its own power. The negative essence shows itself to be the real power of the community and the force of its self-preservation. The community therefore possesses the truth and the confirmation of its power in the essence of the Divine Law and in the realm of the nether world.

Lewis, John The Case Against Pacifism , p. 235

The constructive function of moral idealism can only operate in a society made safe for it. It is always dependent upon its antithesis, the force of the Law. If peace were the supreme good, moral idealism would stand no chance at all in the face of evil. The law exists to enable good men to live among bad; in the hands of evil governments it [p. 236] enables bad men to live upon the good. The believe that idealism unarmed can subdue evil is to tread the path that leads to sentimental dreaming or complete despair.

Erasmus The Complaint of Peace

p. 14 But whether [whither] after this shall I unfortunate turn me, seeing that hope hath so oftentimes deceived me? But princes are rather mightier than learned and are led more by cupidity and lust than by the right judgment of the mind. I will convey myself to the company of erudite and learned men. Good letters make men; but philosophy, more than men. Divinity maketh the gods. It shall be lawful for [granted to] me, thus driven about with so may circuits, to rest among these men.

But alas, for sorrow! Behold here in a like manner a new kind of war, not so bloody but no less foolish and mad. One school varieth from another; and although the truth of things were changed by the place, so certain decrees [tenets] travel not over the sea, certain pass not over the Alps, nor certain swim not over the Rhine; yea, in the selfsame university the logician maketh war with the rhetorician, and the divine doth discord with the lawyer. And in the selfsame kind of profession and learning, the Scotist doth fight with the Thomist, the Nominalist with the Realist, the Platonist with the Peripatetic; insomuch that in most small matters they agree not, and oftentimes they strive most cruelly for a matter of nothing, until the heat of the disputation doth wax more and more from arguments to slanders and from slanders to buffets. And albeit the thing not be done nother [neither] with daggers nor spears, yet with their poisoned and venomous styles [pens] they wound each other; and with biting teeth and taunts they tear one another and, one against the other's fame, do violently move and shake the deadly darts of their tongues.

Mary Midgley, Wickedness p. 86-7 from Chapter 4: UNDERSTANDING AGGRESSION

Argument does involve attack, and unless the disputants make an effort to control themselves, there will sometimes be anger. All this, however, is perfectly compatible with good humour, and can go on between people who are excellent friends, and mean to continue so. Disputants do not in general hate their opponents or wish them dead. They simply want them out of the way-that is, in the context of argument, they want them silenced. That silencing will satisfy them.

McMurphy, John, "Rethinking the Military Paradigm" Inquiry, 34:415

p. 418 II. The Hidden Premises of the Military Paradigm What one finds in surveying the vast philosophical and social-scientific literature on war and defence is that a particular narrow form of both is unspokenly presupposed. This presupposed form is so reductively prescriptive in its sense that one might regard it as inconcievable to human intelligence, were its objective not so conventionally assumed: namely, national defence or war means the threat or action of systematically killing, maiming, and destroying the life-supports of other human beings by maximally efficient means.

A family of prescriptions normally accompanies this unstated principle of military intention. Though these prescriptions may in principle contradict every value of democratic or progressive social order we espouse, they too are presupposed at the pre-reflective level. We need to unpack from the institutionally given what they are. Like the ruling purpose they serve, they can only be derived from a kind of transcendental deduction. The following general properties of the military programme are here abstracted from its operations over two millenia, and together they constitute its underlying regulative form: (i) social segregation of a specialist arms-monopolizing group to execute the programme's general objective; (ii) a rank-ordered command structure relying on motivation by fear to coerce its membership into preforming and risking its mass-homicidal prescription; (iii) immersion programmes of obedience conditioning, indoctrination, and life-uniformity to liquidate individuality and choice; (iv) an autonomous technological development whose telos is ever more efficiently homicidal and destructive weapons; (v) an enshrinement of heroic life-sacrifice as a supreme ethical good.

From this culturally univeral programme of military war and defence, two main kinds of reflective or theoretical argument have arisen pver two millenia of consideration: (1) arguments which specify those types of occasion when other humans are to be systematically killed and maimed with good moral reason (i.e. 'just war' theory, `moral means' arguments, and the like); (2) arguments which specify, by game-theoretical or other rational calculation, those strategies for military killing and destruction which will by threat or enactment maximize payoffs for one side in the conflict.

Further narrowing this premiss-base of the established theory of war and defence is an invariant a priori principle regulating judgment: namely, justification from the standpoint of one side only, the side to which one is assigned by one's prescribed membership in a predefined group (what we may call the tribal a priori).