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''The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and The Will of the People'' is a book on the power of nonviolence by Jonathan Schell published in 2003. Schell starts by discussing the cultural embeddedness of men, patriotism and death in battle (going back to the Athenian - Pericles). From this classic root political morality has held onto the need for 'standing up for principles with force', which in practice quickly descends to "plunder, exploitation and massacre". In the 5th century, St. Augustine conjoined this with Christian love... by theorising 'separate realms' for political and religious morality. Politics has thus long been wedded to violence... it is hard to conceptualise a political ideology that does not have a resort to violence clause. As Schell says there has been, "an age old reliance of politics on violent means". (p. 4) Schell then puts forward his main thesis that "violence has now become dysfunctional as a political instrument" (p. 7) and that "forms of non-violent action can serve effectively in the place of violence at every level of political affairs". (p. 8) The key political progress has been the idea of democracy - even the worst democracy - carries within it the principle of equality which is a deeply seated contradiction to an also deeply embedded practice of inequality - see Tocqueville. Ironically modern national democracy allowed for a new kind of army, in which it was possible to mobilise masses of men prepared to die - apparently in defence of their own national interest and the principle of democracy. The disaster of the modern war system was fed by an unholy confluence of democracy, science, industrial revolution, and imperialism which developed through the 19th century. ==Power== Power came to be widely defined by the ability to wage war. He describes imperialism as "a monotonous record of one sided slaughter" (p. 75) He argues that there was an end of limited war between 'great powers' after 1870 (p. 44). After that we had 1914 and the period of total or world war until 1946. Then the period of Cold War in which the public appearances of a strategic balance of power became more important than the reality of a balance of actual power. The A-bomb made a balance of actual power obsolete (p. 62). 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Unconquerable World」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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