Some lend themselves particularly well to Moyn’s talent. The Yale professor has a special ability to bring the characters populating Humane into life. The second half, on the contrary, mainly discusses developments in US warfare and society. The first half, covering the period up to the end of the Second World War, presents a global perspective. Its structure is broadly divided chronologically into two halves. Moyn’s book is to an important extent a historical account of the evolution of war and international law from the late nineteenth century up to the present day. And in doing so, it provides valuable lessons. It does not present an entirely novel point of view, but carefully examines how Tolstoy’s prophecy came to be a dangerous reality. Humane can certainly be considered a ground-breaking work. As the author himself explains early in the book, the great Russian novelist and pacifist Leo Tolstoy already “understood that humanity in warfare, for all its virtues, opened up the possibility of a new vice- facilitating and legitimating war rather than controlling its outbreak or ending its continuation” (p. Moyn, a professor of law and history at Yale University, makes a claim that sounds revolutionary but is actually not completely new.

This is the counter-intuitive and somehow paradoxical argument at the core of Samuel Moyn’s latest book, Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. The emphasis on the better treatment of prisoners, the ending of torture, and the reduction of civilian deaths has shifted attention from the why to the how wars are fought. Working to restrict the horrors of war contributes to making conflict longer and more frequent. Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn.

Humane by Samuel Moyn