AtDDtA1: Pugnax

[Ya Sam]

See also 'homo pugnax'

>From the review of Paul Crook's: Darwinism, War and History: The Debate over 
the Biology of War from the ‘Origin of Species’ to the First World War 
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 306, ISBN 0-521-46645-8).


"Is it true, as the textbooks tell us, that Darwinism basically encouraged 
war and racist imperialism, that it generated violent images of ‘man the 
fighting animal’ – perceptions that paved the way for the holocaust of 
1914-18?” the blurb text of the book asks rhetorically. Crook skillfully 
reconstructs the theories of war and human pugnacity of thinkers such as 
Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Walter Bagehot, Alfred Wallace, Thomas 
Huxley, Karl Pearson, Benjamin Kidd, Peter Kropotkin, Jacques Novicow, 
William McDougall, WilliamJames, Peter Chalmers Mitchell, William Graham 
Sumner and a host of now-forgotten naturalists, lesser deities and minor 
savants of the time. The book can be summarized in one sentence: The 
vicissitudes of Homo Pugnax and the cult of violence"

http://rechten.eldoc.ub.rug.nl/FILES/departments/Algemeen/overigepublicaties/2005enouder/CROOK/CROOK.pdf

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