Why War?

Richard Overy

Jun 2024 · Highbridge Audio · Narrated by Dennis Kleinman

About this audiobook

Why has war been such a consistent presence throughout the human past? A leading historian explains, drawing on rich examples and keen insight. Richard Overy is not the first scholar to take up the title question. In 1931, at the request of the League of Nations, Albert Einstein asked Sigmund Freud to collaborate on a short work examining whether there was "a way of delivering mankind from the menace of war." Published the next year as a pamphlet entitled Why War?, it conveyed Freud's conclusion that the "death drive" made any deliverance impossible-the psychological impulse to destruction was universal in the animal kingdom. The global wars of the later 1930s and 1940s seemed ample evidence of the dismal conclusion. A preeminent historian of those wars, Overy brings vast knowledge to the title question and years of experience unraveling the knotted motivations of war. His approach is to separate the major drivers and motivations, and consider the ways each has contributed to organized conflict. They range from the impulses embedded in human biology and psychology, to the incentives to conflict developed through cultural evolution, to competition for resources. The discussions show remarkable range, delving deep into the Neolithic past, through the twentieth-century world wars, and up to the current conflict in Ukraine.

About the author

Richard Overy is the author of many outstanding histories of World War II, including Why the Allies Won and the bestselling Blood and Ruins, winner of the Society of Military History Distinguished Book Award. His study of Hitler and Stalin, The Dictators, was awarded the Wolfson History Prize. He lives in Brescia, Italy.

Dennis Kleinman has been narrating audiobooks since 2013 and has at least forty titles to his credit. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, he currently lives in Los Angeles.