Hans Joas and Wolfgang Knöbl have given us an intellectual treasure trove. The authors skillfully lead us on an edifying journey through historical eras and encounters with towering theoretical minds. At the heart of this scholarly journey lies a purpose: to reveal what they call the “suppression of war,” namely, that “throughout the period examined here—from Hobbes to Habermas as it were—wars are often constitutive of theory construction, as the informative background to ideas, yet they do not appear in theories themselves at all or only to a small extent” (p. viii). This suppression is a result of liberal assumptions that cause theorists to view war as a kind of relic that is doomed to disappear. Theorists, the authors maintain, almost wish war away, but do so without grounds, blinded by liberal ideology that they interpret broadly, as “a family of “liberalisms” (p. 3). This family includes all those progressive worldviews that believe in enlightenment and progress, including, for example, Marxism.

Joas and Knöbl argue that liberal blind spots and the suppression of war in actual theories have influenced and failed social theorizing throughout its history. To support their argument, they do not make do with the obvious towering candidates, such as Auguste Comte, Max Weber, Emile Durkheim, Georg Simmel, Raymond Aron, Charles Tilly, and Anthony Giddens; they delve into the less remembered sociological alleyways and corners to examine secondary figures. They thus meticulously construct, in almost Skinnerian fashion, the intellectual context in which social thought is conceived and formed and the argumentative, scholarly back-and-forth among and between interlocutors: the intellectual discussions that sharpened and refined social theory, yet left it almost blind to war. It is this contextualization of the great minds within their intellectual cohorts that gives the book its depth and contributes to the strength and solidity of Joas and Knöbl’s argument.

The authors also expand the horizon of analysis in another way. They look at it not only “vertically,” spanning the great minds and the secondary echelon of thinkers, but also “horizontally,” ranging from sociology to its related disciplines, such as philosophy, political science, economics, history, law, and international relations. The book thus offers an in-depth examination of the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, James Mill, John Stuart Mill, Emanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vladimir Lenin, Friedrich Meinecke, Carl Schmitt, and many more thinkers who are not necessarily sociologists. This horizontal expansion in range carries the same advantages as the vertical expansion. However, it also has some disadvantages, such as reducing the book’s structural tightness and weakening the forcefulness of the authors’ argument as they venture into disciplines in which they are less versed. Later, I will expand on this weakness.

The book progressively establishes the context of the theoretical discussions and the arguments on the suppression of war in the course of six chapters, each devoted to another period. The journey begins with the seventeenth century and Hobbes, who in many respects gave rise to modernity and paved the way for the systematic study of society, in other words, sociology and its related disciplines. Next examined is the development of social thought throughout periods of peace and war and up to our day, contextualized temporally, nationally, theoretically, and sometimes also thematically. In their short conclusion, Joas and Knöbl outline an alternative theoretical approach to the study of peace and war. Their proposal, which is adopted from the work of German international relations scholar Dieter Senghaas and his “civilizational hexagon,” is 1) to go beyond the monothematic and monocausal nature of many of the theories analyzed in the book, 2) to avoid being fooled by overoptimism regarding the prospects of peace, and 3) to strive for terminological precision (pp. 252–56). Admittedly, this proposal is sketchy and requires further elaboration and even justification. It is not entirely clear, for example, how the suppression of war necessarily arises out of its monothematic and monocausal nature, and it is thus unclear how Senghaas’s “civilizational hexagon” can in any way ameliorate this problem.

A second problem results from some terminological imprecision. Thus, the scope of War in Social Thought is indeterminate. Is it a book about theorizing war and peace in sociology or about theorizing war and peace within a broadly understood view of social thought? The book hovers indecisively between the two options. For example, the introduction starts out by depicting the development of sociology, only to make a startling shift on page 6 where it begins addressing the broader concept of social thought. And although the authors’ aim is indeed to analyze the broader category of social thought, the various chapters’ titles mostly refer to sociology. Even the blurbs on the cover are divided between praise for the authors’ engagement with sociology and praise for their engagement with social theory and/or social thought. And as Joas and Knöbl go through the process of defining social thought, it becomes not only broader than sociology but also fuzzier: “Social theory and—with an even broader meaning—social thought are thus essentially the analysis of social action, social order, and social change” (p. 6). This very broad categorization could have been useful if the intention was only to apply it inclusively. However, the authors also use it to exclude expertise and specialization, such as military sociology and conflict studies, which naturally cannot suppress war. They justify their suppression of these specializations, explaining that although “we are concerned with the abstract problems of action, order, and change, we are not interested in every social scientific analysis ever published on the topic of war” (p. 6). They use this declaration to rationalize their filtering of writers and disciplines that do not reflect the suppression of war. They thus succeed in portraying a coherent postdisciplinary history, presenting a scholarship entirely affected by war suppression. But this coherency comes with a heavy price tag, that of precision.

In a sense, however, this problem is unavoidable because of the authors’ wish for broad analysis. Their mission is impossible. Inasmuch as they wish to present a “post-disciplinary history of disciplines” (p. 6), this task cannot be accomplished within 256 pages of text, even one as rich as War in Social Thought. The result is especially evident in their references to international relations. They do no justice to the history of IR and its present-day theoretical richness. It may be unfair to expect them to succeed in this vast task of postdisciplinary history, which is really beyond human grasp. The problem is that they are the ones who set it. More modesty would certainly have helped to validate their argument about the existence of war suppression.

The authors’ decision to even attempt the task is awkward in another sense. IR is the discipline of the study of war and peace (as well as a myriad of other global/transnational issues), and so by its own vocation cannot suppress war. At least in the case of IR’s history, liberal assumptions committed the discipline to theorize war, its origins, and the ways in which to attain peace (a commitment that in the early days led to accusations of idealism). So even attempting to theorize IR as suffering from war suppression creates problems for the validity of Joas and Knöbl’s findings and argument. By focusing on sociology, their argument might have been a little less encompassing and sweeping but it surely would have been more precise.

Joas and Knöbl’s problematic analysis of IR is not their fault alone, however. It is also a forceful indictment of the division of academia into disciplines and subdisciplines. Anyone who has attended the annual International Studies Association conventions long enough will probably encounter a sober discussion of the failure of IR to communicate its theoretical innovations to other disciplines, that somehow IR always (superficially) borrows ideas from other disciplines yet never lends its own original ideas to them. This excellent book, with all its forcefulness and intellectual brilliancy, provides strong evidence supporting this soberness, at least in part. IR ideas rarely cross disciplinary borders in their full richness. Even the deliberate effort by Joas and Knöbl to engage IR in this way has not proved entirely satisfactory. This might be symptomatic of the proliferation and insurmountable explosion of knowledge and social theorizing, but it may also be evidence of the strictness of disciplinary borders. Be that as it may, even two contemporary polymaths and this excellent book cannot fully succeed in the incredibly vast task of producing a “post-disciplinary history of disciplines.”