In November 2022, the book The Philosophy of War by the famous philosopher Henri-Paul Hude was published in French by the Economica publishing house in France. Its appearance was an event in the academic life of France and other countries, which resonated with scholars, intellectuals and those interested in the problems of war and peace. This philosophical essay has also been translated and published in English (2023), Spanish (2024) and Russian (2025). The book addresses the fundamental problem of modernity—war and peace.
Philosophy of war as one of the most important areas of political philosophy has a long history. As a direction, the philosophy of war begins to take shape in the 18th century. Spanish nobleman and military man Alvaro Jose de Navia-Osorio y Vigil de la Rua (1684-1732) used this term in one of his works. In its expanded form, the term is found in the English military writer Henry Lloyd (1729-1783) in a fragment from his Political and Military Memoirs, translated into French. The period of the Napoleonic Wars accelerated the process of synthesizing philosophy and military strategy. It is not accidental that in France this direction found fertile ground for development. A participant of the Napoleonic campaign in Russia, later promoted to the rank of general, Marquis Georges de Chambre published a book entitled Philosophy of War, where he substantiated the importance of a philosophical approach in the study of the phenomenon of war. This line of research was continued in the book of French captain R. Henri, published in Paris at the end of the nineteenth century , in the works of Olivier , Lanet, Lagorgette, Lavis, Letourneau, Rambaud and other compatriots of J. de Chambre. At the outbreak of World War II, the French were again reminded of the philosophy of war . A significant contribution to the development of the philosophy of war was made by Ch. de Gaulle in his works devoted to the issues of war, security and construction of the armed forces of France. The post-war period is characterized by an increased interest in the problem of war. Serious philosophical studies appear, to which can be attributed the work of the French author A. Filonenko “Essays on the Philosophy of War.” The book examines the work of various thinkers from Machiavelli, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, St. Just, Clausewitz to Prudon, L. Tolstoy, and Ch. de Gaulle. There he dwells on the problems of the correlation between war and language, logic and strategy. In the 21st century, interest in the problem of war does not disappear. This is facilitated by the trends in the development of international life, indicating that it is too early to forget about war. Thus, in 2003-2004, the Nantes Philosophical Society held lecture-debates on the theme “Philosophy in the Face of War,” which included presentations and debates with the participation of such philosophers as J. Gobert, T. Menissier, J. Ricoeur, B. Benoit, and P. Assner.
In Russia, too, there were and are proponents of a philosophical approach to the study of war. Modern Russian researchers write about them, for example, in the collection “Russian Philosophers on War” . This publication includes works by Russian philosophers on the problems of war, primarily touching on the meaning and nature of war, its spiritual and civilizational origins, Russia’s relations with the East and the West. One of the Russian philosophers and practitioners of war was Andrei Evgenievich Snesarev (1865-1937), who published in 1930 the book A Philosophy of War, which analyzes the social and epistemological foundations of war, its various forms, and reveals the evolution of this social phenomenon.
One should also pay tribute to the representatives of the Russian Abroad, who, far from their homeland, continued not only to empathize with all the events taking place there, but also tried to theoretically analyze all the processes related to the war (past and future). The heyday of their activity fell on the 30s of the last century. In 1995, a collection entitled A Philosophy of War was published , which included the works of famous representatives of military culture abroad: A. A. Kersnovsky, A. L. Mariushkin, N. N. Golovin, P. I. Zaleskii, A. K. Bayov. It is worth mentioning the works of E.E. Messner, which to a large extent anticipated the development of theoretical views on hybrid forms of warfare.
A deep interdisciplinary analysis of the totality of available works on the philosophy of war still awaits its researchers. In this regard, the book A Philosophy of War by French philosopher Henri-Paul Hude seems to be a worthy continuation of the tradition of his predecessors.
Reflecting on Hude’s scholarly contribution to the development of the philosophy of war, we would like to note a number of points.
First, the author addresses war as a social phenomenon in new socio-cultural civilizational conditions, which highlight it in a completely different way compared to previous philosophical and theoretical studies.
Secondly, this work is distinguished by the originality of its approach to the phenomenon of war through the clearly visible image of the Universal Leviathan as a project of total power, and thus war, of the postmodern era.
Thirdly, war is considered in political discourse, ways of forming a culture of peace in modern conditions are pointed out.
Fourthly, the question of the role of religion and philosophy and their synergistic influence on a world without war seems interesting.
When reading the work of the French Professor, the most important aspects in terms of content attract attention.
The main problem that the author poses is related to the concept of the Universal Leviathan (hereinafter referred to as UL), which appears as a rational project and is interpreted as a single, universal, total power. This Leviathan is already in the stage of formation.
The determinants of UL are determined by the development of technologies that increase the amount of totalitarian power.
An important question posed by the author of the book : “Can we, should we make peace with or without the Universal Leviathan (UL).”
The total subjugation of the entire world by the UL implies the imposition and formation of a culture of powerlessness, understood as the total subjugation of everyone and everything to this UL. It “leads to the powerlessness of those who accept it.”
The author formulates a paradoxical thesis that in order to prevent war it is necessary to constantly wage war. And this war will not be between different individual states—not a constitutional war, but a war on the part of a single, universal state, and such a war will be called a constitutive war. This war, whose subjects are guided by the requirements of absolute security, is directed against any kind of political pluralism, against any kind of culture (except for the so-called culture of powerlessness), against freedom, both possible and real.
The UL is endowed with unique rights:
- the right to use the means of armed violence to be created from armed forces transformed into international mobile gendarmerie squadrons;
- the right to view all their opponents as irresponsible madmen, lunatics, rioters, terrorists, criminals;
- the right to suppress any manifestation of the struggle for freedom, any demand to respect natural rights;
- the right to wage war against any manifestation of pluralism;
- the right, at its discretion, to neutralize any threat, even preventively;
- the right to exceptional political, social, economic and cultural stratification in which the majority of the population, under the influence of a culture of powerlessness, would perceive their slavery as an opportunity for a life of security and freedom;
- the right to regulate demographic processes and to impose morality in this regard;
- the right to be controlled by the Authority of all and everyone: access to political, cultural, social, medical and psychiatric data; access to everyone’s body and brain;
- the right to determine who should live and who should die. The pinnacle of humanism could be human murder. New Leviathan humanism will be only for the chosen ones, and the world will be divided into its rulers and the biological mass without the right to vote.
The social class structure of the world Leviathan will include: oligarchs, a useful class of free citizens-people (policemen, soldiers, judges, engineers, etc.), who together form the “totalitarian elite,” the “party of Leviathan.” In addition, a significant part of society will be represented by useless people (as a consequence of technological progress).
“In the end, this is what Leviathan is: it is a universal Empire, a totalitarian political regime that disposes for its elite a culture of power and war, an essentially non-egalitarian, liberal and technocratic economy in various ratios, a culture of powerlessness for society,” the author emphasizes.
This is the picture of the future if we do not strive for profound cultural change.
Reflecting on the underlying causes of war from the perspective of human nature, the author poses a number of questions. In what does belligerence lie? Is it the natural (animal) beginning of man or does it have a social (civilizational, technical, cultural) conditioning?
If we take the biologizing position, war is unnatural by virtue of the fact that: humans wage wars within their own human species, not against other species; wars as a distinctively human phenomenon are waged between social groups.
What is the specificity of man as a spiritual being? The determinants lie both in the metaphysical plane and in the realm of politics, economics, etc., as well.
According to Hude, it is legitimate to appeal to the psychological roots of war. The mechanisms of involvement in war can be: Freud’s concepts of the unconscious – war is born from the frustration of aggressive impulse; in the confrontation between good and evil a person is able not only to fight evil as an absolute enemy, but also to reach for it, to be in love with this evil. As a result—inner psychic crisis leads to violence and cruelty; no less interesting is the interpretation of waging war for the sake of the war process itself—people like to do it.
The above-mentioned mechanisms, burdened with a set of civilizational and cultural factors (technological progress, transformation of humanism, urbanization), only intensify the existentially pathological craving for war.
Ultimately, Hude concludes that war is the “outward manifestation of the absence of inner peace.”
As opposed to psychological explanations of the origins of war, individual-personal (the opportunity to demonstrate one’s superiority, sense of self-worth, overcoming fear against death, etc.) and social (service to the country, struggle for peace, justice, promotion, etc.) motives are given.
At the end of Chapter 1, the author concludes that the threat of war is more than real, and with the rapid development of technology and techniques, it will have the character of the Apocalypse. The universal Leviathan as an anti-war project will impose its will on the whole world and will wage “its War.”
At the beginning of Chapter 2, Hude puts forward the thesis that “Leviathan cannot be the solution to the problem of war.”
The institutionalization of UL requires the formation of an illusion of freedom in the public consciousness. The means will be information control mechanisms, inculcating a culture of powerlessness, deconstructing thinking and all of existence, and creating an atmosphere of constant fear, real or imaginary.
It is difficult for the UL project to come true because of a number of reasons that hinder the stability of its existence and functioning (economic, technical, political). It is hardly possible for it to ensure lasting peace due to a number of contradictions: between the need for a unified, holistic UL and the culture of powerlessness that it forms and that permeates it; between the importance of possessing rationality on the part of UL and the absence of it as such, without which UL itself is impossible.
The manifestation of growing irrationality, the loss of the sense of objectivity of truth and goodness, the fear of war with the simultaneous fear of loss of power, and the UL elite’s propensity for suicide constitute the grounds for the growing threat of probable war.
Hude analyzes the political world without the Universal Leviathan. A justified appeal to world history leads him to the conclusion: all wars were carried out by nations, between nations.
At the beginning of Chapter 3, he articulates the following thesis: If UL does not solve the problem of war through monism of political wills, there must be another way – “consistent pluralism among nations.”
At the same time, each nation can be a factor in war. Guided by the ideal of freedom, it strives for independence, while falling into the temptation to reduce, or better, to deprive other nations of their freedom. Hence the nations’ focus on domination, their competition, makes the potential for their belligerence irreducible. Therefore, modern culture, in which freedom is absolutized, leading to political-ideological fanaticism, is positioned as a culture of war. While the culture of peace is based on the culture of love—philia.
History testifies to wars of empires, for empires and against empires. If in the modern era the creation of a universal empire (read UL) is an unfulfilled, delusional project, then the realization of the imperial function (management of universal goods by each nation) is a legitimate goal and duty of each nation.
A civilized path of peaceful coexistence can be proposed in the direction of a “coherent pluralism of structured nations” based on a culture of peace implicitly funded by philia.
If the absolute moral ideal of modern culture is freedom, the foundation of postmodern culture is greed and aggression. These feelings were fully manifested in the first postmodern culture (before 1945), while in the second postmodern culture the flourishing of greed is accompanied by the condemnation of violence and aggression. Postmodern civilization has unleashed vitality and sensuality by abandoning rationalistic morality. While seemingly striving for pacifism, postmodern culture is not a culture of peace. This type of civilization has nurtured a generation of hedonists, adherents of a culture of powerlessness, bad citizens and soldiers who are not prepared to fight for their freedom.
Meanwhile, within the framework of postmodernity, an anti-nationalism gradually emerged, which is considered by Hude on three levels:
- The ethico-strategic level is characterized by the rejection of nationalism because of the change in the content of war under the influence of superpower means of mass destruction;
- The ideological level is associated with the gradual emergence of neoliberalism, which is characterized by: the strengthening of the oligarchy in liberal states; the creation of unelected international organizations controlled by the liberal oligarchy at the international level; an unelected judiciary; control over the media; the imposition of sexual freedom; and an emphasis on the physical body of man to the detriment of the social body;
- at the level of the anti-national Leviathan there is an interpenetration of neoliberalism and Leviathan ideology, where the deconstruction of cultures leads to the destruction of nations and their identity.
According to Hude, since the late 2010s, postmodern culture has been characterized by a tendency to shift the vector of movement towards “enlightened despotism” on the part of Leviathan, who, under the pretext of fear of war, and actually through war itself, paves the way.
Is there a political solution to the coexistence of nations without Leviathan, and thus without war? Hude asks a rhetorical question. And he answers that there is, he sees it in the unification of nations, in their “ultramodern” alliance against UL, built on the principles of new humanism.
In Chapter 4, the author makes a judgment: a portrait of the political structure of a world without UL must be complemented by the culture of the world and the cultural structure of a world without it.
The culture of peace can be provided by religion, primarily Christian religion as the most humanistic, according to Hude.
In this case, the main principles of the culture of peace are: the principle of social understanding (philia); the principle of correlation of reason with philia; the principle of metaphysicality, which includes a close unity of ontology, theology and their critical reflection.
The philosophical foundation of the new culture of peace should be a philia that balances nature—society—man, his freedom and equality.
The culture of peace must be based on the inseparable union of religion and wisdom (philosophy), in which reason is directed to the search for truth. This union will be characterized by friendly and interested dialogue between civilized, intelligent and spiritually developed people.
Turning to religion, Hude emphasizes the idea that it should not be considered a universal factor of war; religious wars are a relic of the past, and modern wars have other reasons related to human benefits. All war has underlying economic, political, cultural grounds, taken in different ratios, in different hierarchies. Religious war in this context appears only as a special case of the war of cultures.
The future of humanity should be sought in the plane of religious and philosophical (wise) humanism, the union of which constitutes the culture of peace.
In fact, belief in the Absolute (in God) does not guarantee whether or not there will be war. On the one hand, in order to achieve the religious goal—the salvation of the human soul—war is possible, which justifies the use of force. But, on the other hand, the freedom of the individual in relation to the Absolute gives hope for the transformation of religion into a factor of peace.
What are the “causes of the world” or, in other words, what does the world depend on?—asks the author of the book. And explains it by the interaction of reason, aimed at understanding the absolute Truth, and faith, aspiring man to the Absolute, which emphasizes the harmonious union of religion and the wisdom of philosophy.
Emphasizing the adherence to laws, Hude argues that divine laws and state laws should be harmonized with each other. At the same time, the law is interpreted extremely broadly and abstractly: as a natural law and, accordingly, the law of the Absolute (since nature is a work of the spirit) and as the laws of reason.
Law must include Nature, Reason and the Absolute taken together, undivided and united through philia.
Recognizing natural law as the dominant principle promotes the peaceful coexistence of different cultures and religions.
But law without force support, without the right to use force (judicial, police, military) can lead to arbitrariness, anarchy. Then Power is justified and “legitimate to the extent that it ensures compliance with the natural law.”
Religion, embedded in the world of culture and civilization, can manifest itself both as a culture of peace (through teaching people the natural law of peace) and as a culture of war (meaning constitutive war).
Any law must be the result of a contract between individuals. Neglect of this postulate leads inevitably to polytheism of the Superman as God and ultimately to war.
The law is the foundation of all religion as well as all wisdom. Love of the law can be interpreted as a manifestation of the law of love. The law is not important in itself, but in its relationship to the people who live in accordance with the provisions of that law.
The natural law of peace, according to T. Hobbes, correlates with religious laws coming from Christ. At the same time, the defense of self and others does not contradict this natural law, which inevitably puts before us again the dilemma of peace-without-war or war-without-peace.
Hude repeatedly emphasizes the determining role of religion and philosophy, which “along with natural families as guardians of the idea of nature and natural law” oppose Man to the newfangled Leviathan.
Interesting is the author’s message about the formation of the culture of courage, connecting and disconnecting the materialistic culture of Leviathan’s power and the culture of powerlessness of his subordinates. In contrast to the courage of those who are ready to risk their lives to protect everyone they love, Leviathan will: promote the ideas of material goods (egoism, hedonism, consumerism); erase social and historical memory; devalue the belief in the immortality of the soul; destroy the family, culture, civilization; parasitize on the fear of ecological crisis; transform the social structure (increase the number of the rich, minimize the number of the poor, replacing them with robots).
Leviathan’s practical activity involves choosing several courses of action:
- First option is to support “passéists” whose thoughts and aspirations turn to the past in favor of UL interests;
- The 2nd option is to bet on “modernists” who have come under the expanding influence of a culture of powerlessness;
- The 3rd option is to seek to split religions and wisdom by cultivating animosity between them;
- Option 4 is the separation of religion and wisdom, forming a relativism of powerlessness.
Are there possibilities to counteract these practical actions of the UL? The survival of nations and humanity is seen in the direction of: preserving the identity of religions and wisdom; their mutual support, respect; preventing ideological polarization within individual religious confessions.
The deep essence of the spiritual conflict between UL and the whole world in all the diversity of its religions and wisdom is Leviathan’s desire to level people and man’s struggle for the right to be Man.
In the conclusion of his book, Hude emphasizes the grave concern that all right-thinking people have that humanity is once again on the brink of a “nuclear abyss.” This “nuclear storm,” as the author calls it, is the most dangerous and prolonged since 1962.
On the one hand, sane people realize that nuclear war would mean the end of humanity; on the other hand, what happens if Leviathan, as a consequence of postmodern culture, does lose its sanity?
What can motivate people to do this? Hude draws several options for answering this question: belief in the immortality of the soul – the possibility of going to heaven themselves with the hope that the enemy will be in hell; fatigue with life and hopelessness, as a consequence – willingness to commit suicide; a shift from rationalism to irrationalism with all its consequences; a game of blackmail, where the supporters of Leviathan do not seem to inspire fear, but, realizing this humiliation, are nevertheless ready to commit suicide.
It seems that the world has never known such a clear threat of nuclear war. That is why the thought of the seventeenth-century Spanish philosopher Balthasar Gracian crowns the end of the book: “To live, let us live. The peace-loving not only live, but also reign.”
Thus, a careful and close analysis of the presented work gives grounds for a conclusion: the work is of undoubted interest, first of all, for those in power, in whose hands is the present and future of human civilization; for the scientific community. To a certain extent, Hude’s work can serve as a theoretical and methodological reference point for military science.
The monograph is attractive because the author creatively uses the rich scientific potential accumulated by mankind on this problem from Antiquity to the present day. Naturally, his monograph reflects the ideas put forward by French politicians, thinkers and philosophers in the course of several centuries. Continuing the solid tradition in France of viewing war through the prism of philosophy, the author of the book raises the problem of the emergence and the possibility of eliminating war from the life of mankind in our time.
Henri-Paul Hude is a worthy successor of the established national tradition. Undoubtedly, his life and creative path played a certain role in the formation of scientific interest, which was reflected in his work A Philosophy of War. The professional interest and moral side of the problem of ethics in military affairs were predetermined by his professional interest and the moral side of the problem when he was the founder and head of the center “Ethics and Legal Environment” at the Military Academy of Saint-Cyr-Coetquidan and his participation as a co-founder and member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Military Ethics in Europe. The result of fifteen years of reflection in the process of teaching military ethics to senior French officers was his book Philosophy of War. As French readers have noted, his book turned out to be a philosophy of war in the spirit of Sun Tzu and Clausewitz. Of course, this is not enough to characterize the work of Hude, as it is marked by the author’s desire to penetrate into the essential aspects of military activity, relying on the world humanist tradition of high level. In the spirit of the European tradition, his A Philosophy of War differs from the works of his predecessors. The appeal to the figure of Hobbesian Leviathan and its connection with the phenomenon of war seems to be successful. This runs through the entire work of Hude, which is evident from the table of contents.
The reader’s desire to understand the book’s place among other contemporary works on war is understandable. In this regard, Martin van Creveld’s The Transformation of War (2008) and Mary Kaldor’s New and Old Wars (2015) involuntarily come to mind. Without trying to compare them in order to determine the authors’ contribution to the problem of conceptualizing war as a socio-political phenomenon, it is the philosophical orientation of Hude’s work that should be noted. While the above-mentioned authors emphasize the transformations of war, its changing nature, the French author focuses rather on the invariant side of the phenomenon under study. It can be said without any stretch that implicitly the author constantly refers to the problem of freedom and justice in relation to war, the state, and the individual. When trying to define the methodological and conceptual style of the work, the notion of “political theology” in the context of philosophical understanding of the phenomenon of war is suggested. This is confirmed by the impressive list of authors to whom Hude.
In part, the style of the work is reminiscent of J.P. Sartre’s famous play “The Devil and the Lord God.” Of course, there are no direct analogies, but the problem of Good and Evil is clearly present in both works, with the difference that one work is a literary play with philosophical overtones, and the other is a philosophical essay in which the path to peace, freedom and truth is sought. Both there and there we see dialectical transitions of some phenomena into others. The high philosophical level of Hude’s work is evidenced by the absence of ideologization of the problem, but the desire for a philosophical vision of the contradiction between Leviathan and what contextually opposes it. In the epilogue, Prof. Hude draws attention to the relevance of the philosophy of war. The author writes that while he was teaching military ethics to French officer trainees, he emphasized the crucial role of nuclear deterrence in shaping their professional skills. When everything seemed to have been said about deterrence, the philosopher thought it appropriate to try to rethink it. According to Hude, it is the human heart, “so great and unhappy,” that could be the best counselor in this matter.
Undoubtedly, the book ha has a philosophical character. It is felt that the author attaches great importance to the problem of war and the possibility of its elimination. The book is not so large in volume, but deep in its penetration into the causes of wars. There is a strong ethical message to find ways to prevent a nuclear apocalypse threatening modern civilization.
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