War appears to be as old as mankind, but peace is a modern invention.
— Henry Maine
As soon as they decided to bring rival civilizations into their game of Civilization to compete with the one being guided by the player, Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley knew they would also have to bring in ways of fighting wars. This understanding may be a depressing one on some level, but it squares with the realities of history. As far back as we can observe, humans have been killing one another. Even the possibility of long-term, lasting peace in the world is, as the Henry Maine quote above says, a very recent idea.
Tellingly, The Iliad, the oldest complete work in the Western literary canon, is a story of war. Likely written down for the first time in the eighth century BC, it hearkens back to the Trojan War of yet several centuries earlier, a conflict shrouded in myth and legend even at the time the supposed blind poet Homer first began to chant his tale. The epic does devote space to the ultimate pointlessness of being pawns in the sport of the gods that was the Bronze Age Greeks’ conception of war, as well as the suffering engendered by it. Yet that doesn’t prevent it from glorying in all the killing, thus illustrating that ultra-violent popular entertainments are anything but a modern phenomenon. The goriest videogame has nothing on Homer:
He hurled and Athena drove the shaft
and it split the archer’s nose between the eyes —
it cracked his glistening teeth, the tough bronze
cut off his tongue at the roots, smashed his jaw
and the point came ripping out beneath his chin.
He pitched from his car, armor clanged against him,
a glimmering blaze of metal dazzling round his back —
the purebreds reared aside, hoofs pounding the air
and his life and power slipped away on the wind.
Just as Homer looms large in the early Greek literary tradition, one Heraclitus does the same in early Greek philosophy; legend tells us he wrote around 500 BC. Only fragments of his works remain to us today, mostly in the form of quotations lifted from them by later philosophers. Those fragments and the things those later commentators wrote about him identify Heraclitus as a philosopher of flux and change; “No man ever steps in the same river twice,” goes his most famous aphorism. He was apparently the first to identify the tension between physis, the reality of being in all its chaotic, ever-changing splendor, and logos, meaning literally “word” or “speech” in Greek — all of the rules of logic and ethics which humans apply in the hopeless task of trying to understand and master physis. A disciple of Heraclitus would call the narrative of progress a pathetic attempt to bridle the physis of history by forcing a comforting logophilic structure upon it.
As a philosopher of unbridled physis, Heraclitus was also a philosopher of war, of conflict in all its forms. “We must know that strife is common to all and strife is justice,” he wrote, “and that all things come into being through strife necessarily.” Neglected for a long time in favor of the cooler metaphysics of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, Heraclitus burst back into prominence at last in the early nineteenth century AD, when he was rediscovered by the German school of idealist philosophers. Later in the same century, Friedrich Nietzsche, who loathed the rationality of the Enlightenment and the narrative of progress it inspired, saw in Homer and Heraclitus alike a purer, more essential reflection of the reality of existence.
But we need not agree with Nietzsche that the Greeks of the Bronze Age had everything right and that it’s been all downhill from there to find something of value in Heraclitus. Consider again this assertion that “all things come into being through strife.” There is, it seems to me, some truth there, perhaps more truth than we’d like to admit. As Nietzsche’s contemporary Charles Darwin taught us, this is how biological evolution works. Strife is, in other words, what made us, the human race, what we are as a species. And it would certainly appear that our earliest civilizations too came into being through strife.
During the Enlightenment era, two dueling points of view about the nature of primitive peoples dominated. The Swiss/French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau coined the cliché of the “gentle savage,” who lived in a state of nature with his companions in an Eden of peace and tranquility, untouched by the profanities of modern life; progress in all its guises, Rousseau asserted, had only led humanity to “decrepitness.” Rousseau saw the narrative of progress as a narrative of regress, of civilization and all its trappings serving only to divorce humanity more and more from the idyllic state of nature. But Thomas Hobbes, whom we already encountered in my previous article, took the polar opposite view, seeing the lives of primitive peoples as “nasty, brutish, and short,” and seeing the civilizing forces of progress as the best things ever to befall his species. He believed, in other words, that humanity’s distancing itself more and more from the primitive state of nature was an unalloyed good thing.
This duality has remained with us to the present day. You can see much of Rousseau in the Woodstock Generation’s claim that “we are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the Garden,” as you can in some aspects of the modern environmental movement and our societies’ general fetish for all things “natural.” Meanwhile Hobbes’s ideology of progress is, of course, the core, driving idea behind the game of Civilization, among other signs of the times.
So, we have to ask ourselves, who’s right — or, at the very least, who’s more nearly right? There are few if any human communities left in the world today who live in so complete a state of nature as to conclusively prove or disprove the theory of the gentle savage. We can, however, turn to the evidence of archaeology to arrive at what feels like a fairly satisfying answer.
Almost all of the most famous finds of Stone Age corpses show evidence at the least of having suffered violent trauma, more commonly of having died from it. Indeed, the fact that it can seem almost impossible to turn up any human remains that don’t show evidence of violence has become something of a running joke among archaeologists. Ötzi the Iceman, as a 5000-year-old body discovered in the Austrian Alps in 1991 became known, turned out to have been shot with a bow and arrow and dumped into the crevasse where he was found. Kennewick Man, a 9500-year-old body discovered in Washington State in 1996, had been shot in the pelvis with some sort of stone projectile that remained embedded there. Lindow Man, a 2000-year-old body discovered in rural England in 1984, had been bonked on the head with a blunt object, had his neck broken with a twisted cord, and then, just to make sure, had his throat cut. Another 2000-year-old body found more recently in England had been beheaded, probably in a form of ritual sacrifice. Yet another recent discovery, a 4600-year-old family consisting of a man, a woman, and their two children, showed evidence of having been killed in a raid on their encampment. The Garden of Eden theory of early human history, it would appear, is right out.
Rather than being their antagonist, violence — or, often, the threat of violence — was a prime driver of early civilizations. Sentiment may have sufficed for primitive humans to keep their family and perhaps their friends close, but it was the logic of survival that pushed them to begin to enlarge their circles of concern, to band together into the larger communities that could form the basis for civilization. Long before humans had any inkling of a narrative of progress, the most important, tangible benefit of civilization was protection from the depredations of hostile neighbors. The Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant called this development, which paradoxically arose out of the impulse toward conflict rather than cooperation, “asocial sociability”:
In a sense, this reality that civilizations are born in violence is baked into the game of Civilization. From the mid-game on, it’s possible to make a very good go of it as a peaceful democracy, to be a good global citizen not declaring war unless war is declared on you, striving to trade and research your way to Alpha Centauri. Before you reach that stage, however, you have to be a despotic state no better than any of the others. As every Civilization veteran knows, it’s absolutely vital to establish sovereignty over your starting continent during this early stage in order to have enough cities and resources to be competitive later on. Thus you can’t afford to play the gentle savage, even if you believe such a person ever existed. If, as is likely, there are rival civilizations on your starting continent, you have to conquer them before you can think about peaceful coexistence with anyone else.
But the debt which the narrative of progress owes to war and the threat of war extends far beyond a civilization’s early stages, both in real history and in the game. In fact, the modern world order, built around fairly large nation-states with strong centralized governments, is, along with all of the progress it has spawned on so many fronts, a direct outgrowth of the need to project military power effectively.
Early twentieth-century writers, reacting to the horrible wars of their times, concocted the legend of war as a more honorable affair during earlier ages, one in which civilians were spared and soldiers comported themselves as civilized men. One has only to read The Iliad to know what a load of bunk that is; war has always been the nastiest, most brutal business there is, and codes of behavior have seldom survived an army’s first contact with the enemy. And if one was unfortunate enough to be a civilian caught between two armies… well, raping and pillaging were as popular among soldiers of earlier centuries as it was among those of the twentieth, as the stories of same in The Iliad once again cogently illustrate.
Still, there were important differences between the wars that were fought prior to the eighteenth century and those that came later. It’s easy today to overlook how differently societies were organized prior to the Enlightenment era. Such modern countries as Germany and Italy were still collections of small independent states, cooperating at best under a framework of uneasy alliances. Even where there existed a centralized government, the monarch’s power was sharply limited under the feudal systems that held sway. If he wished to go to war, he was often reduced to begging his nobles for the money and manpower necessary to do so. In addition, economies in general had very limited resources to set aside from the basic task of feeding themselves in favor of waging war. It all added up to make wars into hugely inefficient businesses, where months or even years could go by between significant battles. In many ways, of course, that was good for the people of the countries fighting them.
It was the unification of England and Scotland as Great Britain in 1707 that marked the beginning of the modern nation-state. Thirty years before said unification, the entire English army consisted of no more than 15,000 soldiers, a number that could be packed into a typical modern sports arena and leave plenty of seats to spare. The historian John Brewer describes what followed:
The late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw an astonishing transformation in British government, one which put muscles on the bones of the British body politic, increasing its endurance, strength, and reach. Britain was able to shoulder an ever more ponderous burden of military commitments thanks to a radical increase in taxation, the development of public-debt finance (a national debt) on an unprecedented scale, and the growth of a sizable public administration devoted to organizing the fiscal and military activities of the state.
This radical remaking was driven by two principal factors. One was advances in technology and engineering that freed up more and more people to work at tasks other than food production; this was, after all, the period of the Enlightenment, when the narrative of progress went into overdrive. The other was the need to efficiently project military power to ever more far-flung locales in the world — the need of a burgeoning British Empire.
Alongside a centralized government bureaucracy and standing military grew that necessary evil for funding it: taxes. The effective average British tax rate rose from 3.5 percent in 1675 to 23 percent a century later, to no less than 35 percent at the height of the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. And, what with the people from these earlier centuries not being all that different from us at bottom, lots and lots of them didn’t like it one bit. One William Pulteney spoke for them:
Let any gentleman but look into the Statute Books lying upon our Table, he will see there to what a vast Bulk, to what a Number of Volumes, our Statutes relating to Taxes have swelled. It is monstrous, it is even frightful to look into the Indexes, where for several Columns together we see nothing but Taxes, Taxes, Taxes.
The modern developed nation-state — bureaucratic, orderly, highly centralized, and absurdly highly taxed in comparison to any other era of human history — had been born, largely to meet the needs of the military.
With one country having remade itself in this more militarily efficient image, the other countries of the world felt they had no choice but to follow in order to remain competitive. In Europe, France and Spain concentrated more power than ever before in the hands of a central government, while the various small kingdoms that had traditionally made up Italy and Germany finally felt compelled to unify as centralized nations in their own right. The Ottoman Empire too remade itself after suffering a series of humiliating defeats at the hands of the ultra-modern nation-state of Napoleonic France, as did faraway Japan after the American Commodore Matthew Perry waltzed into Edo Bay with a small fleet of modern warships and held the shogunate hostage at gunpoint; “rich country, strong army” became the slogan for Japan’s economic, bureaucratic, social, and of course military modernization.
The game of Civilization does a rather remarkably clever job of depicting most of the factors I’ve just described. The deeper into the game you play, the more your maintenance costs go up, meaning that you have to tax your people more and more to maintain your civilization. And the game also captures the spur which the threat of war constantly gave to the progressive impulse; if you let your civilization fall too far behind its rivals in military terms, they will pounce. This alone provides a strong motivation to keep researching the latest advances, exactly as it did historically. The narrative of progress, in the game and in history, owes much to war.
But when we come to the second half of the twentieth century of our own planet’s history, the notion of war and/or the threat of war as a prime driver of the narrative of progress becomes more fraught. It has long been commonplace for critics of progress to contrast the bloody twentieth century with the relatively peaceful nineteenth century, using a range of seemingly telling statistics about death and suffering to anchor their contention that the narrative of progress has really only made us better at killing one another. Yet their insistence on passing their statistical judgment on the twentieth century as a whole obscures something rather important: while the first half of the century was indeed inordinately, almost inconceivably bloody, the second half was vastly less so. The statistics for the century as a whole, in other words, are hopelessly skewed by what we can all agree to hope were the historical anomalies of the two biggest wars ever fought.
Since the end of World War II, the situation has been much different. While small wars have certainly continued to be fought, two proverbial “great powers” haven’t met one another directly on a battlefield since 1945: that’s 73 years as I write these words, a record for all of post-classical human history. As the political scientist Robert Jervis could write already in 1988, “the most striking characteristic of the postwar period is just that — it can be called ‘postwar’ because the major powers have not fought each other since 1945. Such a lengthy period of peace among the most powerful states is unprecedented.” The change is so marked that historians have come up with a name for the period stretching from 1945 to the present: “The Long Peace.” This is the aspect of the Cold War which was overlooked by a public justifiably worried about the threat of nuclear annihilation, which was obscured by the small-scale proxy wars and police actions fought by the Americans in places like Vietnam and by the Soviets in places like Afghanistan. And yet the Long Peace has now outlasted the Cold War with which it overlapped by more than a quarter of a century.
If we want to identify what changed in the nature of warfare itself at the end of World War II, the answer is blazingly obvious: the atomic bomb entered the picture. The idea of a weapon so terrible that it would bring an end to war wasn’t, it should be noted, a new one at the time the bomb entered the picture. In 1864, Victor Hugo, looking forward to a future replete with flying machines, proposed that their potential on the battlefield would be sufficient to make armies “vanish, and with them the whole business of war.” Even the logic of mutually-assured destruction wasn’t really new at the dawn of the Cold War. In 1891, Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, suggested to an Austrian countess that “perhaps my factories will put an end to war sooner than your congresses: on the day that two army corps can mutually annihilate each other in a second, all civilized nations will surely recoil with horror and disband their troops.”
Still, nuclear weapons, with their capacity to mutually destroy not just opposing armies but opposing civilizations — and, indeed, the entirety of the world that built them — were clearly something new under the sun. It’s thus not hugely surprising to find that the game of Civilization doesn’t seem quite sure what to do with them when they finally appear so late in the day. After doing a credible job in the broad strokes, all things considered, of portraying the global balance of military power through World War II, the edges really begin to fray at the advent of the nuclear age. The game makes no space for the total destruction of an all-out nuclear exchange. Nuclear strikes come at a considerable cost to the environment, but it is possible in the game to win a nuclear war, sending what some critics regard as a regrettable message. To be fair to Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley, it would be very difficult indeed to implement nuclear weapons in a way that feels both true to history and satisfying in the game. Thus Civilization fell victim here to Meier’s old maxim of “fun trumps history.” That said, the designers did make an obvious attempt to simulate what a Pandora’s Box nuclear weapons really are in at least one way. When one civilization builds the Manhattan Project Wonder, all civilizations in the game who have researched the Rocketry advance get instant access to nuclear weapons.
This side of the game serves as a fine illustration of an aspect of strategy-game design that’s very easy to overlook. Many players believe that the ideal artificial intelligence plays just like a human would, but this isn’t always the case at all. If the more militaristic civilizations in the game were to start wildly nuking the player, ruining the civilization she’d spent so long building, she wouldn’t feel pleased that the artificial intelligence was so smart. Not at all; she’d feel like she was being punished for no good reason. Fun, it seems, also trumps perfect artificial intelligence. Your opponents in Civilization are notably reluctant to employ nuclear weapons in light of this maxim, only doing it to you if you start doing it to them.
The one memorable exception to this rule is down to a bug. Gandhi, the leader of the Indian civilization, is coded to be extremely non-aggressive. Problem is, his “aggression” setting is so low that it can actually loop back around to the maximum value when modifiers get subtracted. The upshot of all this is that he winds up being passive-aggressive rather than non-aggressive, avoiding all conflict until he acquires nuclear weapons, then letting the nukes fly with abandon. One can see this behavior as an unfortunate if unintentional bit of ethnic stereotyping. But one can also, of course, see it as kind of hilarious.
At any rate, there is nothing like the Long Peace accounted for in the game. (Admittedly, the Long Peace was much shorter at the time that the original Civilization was made.) As for historians: their points of view on the subject can be broadly sorted into two opposing camps, which I’ll call the realpolitik view and the globalist-idealist view. Both camps give due deference to the importance of nuclear weapons in any discussion of postwar geopolitics, but they diverge from there.
Those who fancy themselves the sober realists of the realpolitik school believe that the fundamentals of war and peace haven’t really changed at all, only the stakes in terms of potential destruction. From the first time that a primitive tribe armed itself with spears to make a neighboring tribe of warlike neighbors think twice before attacking its camp, weapons of war have been as useful for preventing wars as for fighting them. Nuclear weapons, the realpolitik camp claims, represent only a change in degree, not in kind. From this point of view arose the rhetoric of peace through strength, deployed liberally by steely Cold Warriors on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Safety, went the logic, lay in being so militarily strong that no one would ever dare mess with you. The Long Peace was a credit to the fact that the United States and the Soviet Union — and, after the Cold War, the United States alone — were so thoroughly prepared to kick any other country’s ass, with or without employing nuclear weapons.
The globalist-idealist view doesn’t ignore the awesome power of nuclear weapons by any means, but sees it through a more nuanced framework. Many people at the dawn of the nuclear age — not least many of scientists of the Manhattan Project who had helped to build the bomb — hoped that its power would lead to a philosophical or even spiritual awakening, prompting humanity to finally put an end to war. Some went so far as to advocate for the sharing of the technology behind the bomb with all the countries of the world, thus placing the whole world on a level playing field and ending the dominion of strong over weak countries everywhere. Such a thing wasn’t done, but there may be reason to believe that the idealistic impulse which led to proposals like this one found another outlet which has done the world an immense amount of good.
Looking back to the actual horrors of the previous few decades and the potential horrors of nuclear war, countries across the world after World War II instituted an international system of order that would have sounded like a utopian dream five years before. Its centerpiece was the United Nations, a forum unlike any that had existed before in human history, a place to which disputes between countries could be brought, to be hashed out with the help of neutral peers before they turned into shooting wars. Meanwhile an International Court of Justice would, again for the first time in history, institute a binding, globalized system of law to which all of the United Nations’s signatories, big or small, would be bound.
These are the major, obvious institutions of the globalized postwar order, but the spirit that spawned them has led to countless other international organs of communication and dispute resolution. Perhaps the most amazing of these — and an institution whose amazingness is too often overlooked — is the European Union. Known throughout most of history as the world’s preeminent powder keg of war, Europe, with its dozens of culturally, ethnically, and linguistically diverse countries packed together more closely than anywhere else in the world, has at last managed to set aside ancient rivalries and the many wars to which they historically led in favor of a grand continent-spanning cooperative project that’s made the idea of another general European war all but unimaginable. Even the recent decision by Britain to withdraw from the European Union hasn’t, as was breathlessly predicted by so many Cassandras, led to the dissolution of the project. Instead the latest polling shows substantially increased support for the European Union among the citizens of its remaining member states, as if the blow that was Brexit caused many to wake up to just how precious it really is.
To the extent that it takes a position, the game of Civilization winds up pitching its tent with the realpolitik school, although one does sense that this is done almost by default. Its mechanics are suited to depicting a global order based on the military balance of power, but, while the United Nations does make a token appearance, the game has no real mechanism for transcending nationalism and the wars that tend to accompany it. Only limited cooperation between rival civilizations is possible, and, especially at the higher difficulty levels, it’s a careful player indeed who manages to avoid wars in the climactic stages of the game. All of this is perhaps unfortunate, but forgivable given the long arc of history the game has to cover.
In the real world, however, your humble writer here does see reason to believe that we may be edging into a new, post-national, postwar-in-the-universal-sense era. Of course, we need to be very careful when we begin to assert that we’re privileged to live in a unique time in history. Many an earlier era has been foolish enough to regard itself as unique, only to learn, sometimes painfully, that the old rules still apply. Yet recent decades really do seem to have altered our attitudes toward war. The acquisition of territory by military force, once considered a matter of course, is now looked upon so unfavorably by the world at large that even as established a bad actor on the world stage as Vladimir Putin’s Russia felt compelled to justify its annexation of the Crimea in 2014 with a sham referendum. The United States, widely regarded with some justification as the last remaining warmonger among the well-developed Western nations, nevertheless goes to lengths that would have been inconceivable in earlier eras to avoid civilian casualties in its various military adventures. The same reluctance to accept war for the ugly business it is does everything to explain why, despite having the most powerful military the world has ever known, the same country tends to clearly win so very few of the wars it starts.
Changing attitudes toward war in the West can also be charted through our war memorials. London’s Trafalgar Square, a celebration of a major naval victory over Napoleon, is almost a caricature of extravagant triumphalism, with an outsized Admiral Horatio Nelson looking proudly down on the scene from the top of a 170-foot column. The Vietnam War Memorial in Washington, D.C., on the other hand, engages with its subject — one of those recent wars the United States failed to win out of an unwillingness to behave as brutally as was necessary — not as a triumph but as a tragedy, being a somber roll call of the ordinary soldiers who lost their lives there. But perhaps nowhere is the transformation in attitudes more marked than in Germany, which, after instigating the most terrible war in history well under a century ago, is now arguably the most fundamentally pacifistic nation in the West, going so far as to anger free-speech advocates by banning blood in videogames and banning right-wing political parties that venture anywhere close to the ideological territory once occupied by the Nazi party.
This notion that we are on the cusp of a new era of peaceful international cooperation, that soon the brutality of war might be as unthinkable to the modern mind as that of slavery or institutionalized torture, was a key component of Francis Fukayama’s assertion that humanity might be reaching the end of its history. A quarter-century on from that audacious thesis, the international order has been shaken at times, particularly by events in recent years, but the edifices built in the aftermath of World War II still stand. Even if we can only partially agree with the statement that humanity has finally found an orderly alternative to war through those edifices — reserving the other half of the Long Peace equation to the old realpolitik of might makes right, in the person of the peace-guaranteeing power of the United States and that ultimate deterrent of nuclear weapons — we might be slowly leaving behind the era of nationalism that began with the emergence of strong, centralized nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and led eventually to so much bloodshed in the first half of the twentieth. Even more optimistically, we might soon be able to say farewell to war as humanity has always known it. “Last night I had the strangest dream,” goes a lovely old folk song. “I dreamed the world had all agreed to put an end to war.” Today we are, by any objective measurement, closer to achieving that strange dream than we’ve ever been before. War has defined our past to a disconcerting degree, but perhaps it need not do the same for our future.
What would and should a postwar world really be like? Many have looked askance at the idea of a world free of war, seeing it as a world free as well of the noble virtues of honor, sacrifice, and courage, a world where people live only to selfishly gratify their personal needs. Unsurprisingly, Nietzsche is counted among the critics, painting a picture of a world full of “men without backs” who are no better than slaves to their creature comforts. More surprisingly, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, that original architect of a narrative of progress climaxing in a peaceful and prosperous end of history, shared many of the same concerns, going so far as to state that nations at the end of history would need to continue to require military service of their citizens and continue to fight the occasional war in order to keep the noble virtues alive. Modern critics of the lifestyle of developed Western nations, speaking from both inside and outside those nations’ umbrellas, decry their servile “softness,” decry the way that the vicissitudes of fashion and consumerism take the place of the great feats that once stirred men’s souls. Peace and prosperity, goes another, related argument, are ultimately boring; some theories about the outbreak of World War I have long held that its biggest motivator was that countries just got tired of getting along, wanted a little mayhem to break up the monotony. Certainly our fictions — not least our videogame fictions — would be a lot duller without wars to relive.
I can understand such concerns on one level, but feel like they reflect a profound lack of imagination on another. I can’t, alas, count myself among the younger generation or generations who must put the finishing touches on a post-national, postwar world order, if it should ever come to be. Yet I can say that our current younger generation’s greater tolerance toward diversity and marked disinclination toward violence don’t strike me as being accompanied by any deficit of idealism or passion. And there is much that can replace war in their souls that is even more stirring. They could finally get serious about cleaning up this poor planet which their elders have spent so many centuries trashing. They could do something for the poorest regions of the world, to bring the benefits of the prosperous postwar international order to all. They could follow the example of humanity’s grandest adventure to date — the Apollo Moon landing, which truly was shared by the entire world thanks to the progressive technology of television — and look outward, first to Mars, perhaps eventually all the way to Alpha Centauri. For that matter, my own generation could make a solid start on many of these things right now. With all due respect to Hegel and Fukuyama, the end of war need not mean the end of history. It could mean that our real history is just getting started.
(Sources: the books Civilization, or Rome on 640K A Day by Johnny L. Wilson and Alan Emrich, The Story of Civilization Volume I: Our Oriental Heritage by Will Durant, The Past is a Foreign Country by David Lowenthal, The Sinews of Power by John Brewer, The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined by Steven Pinker, The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama, The Iliad by Homer, Fragments by Heraclitus, The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes, Lectures on the Philosophy of History by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche, A Treatise of Human Nature by David Hume, Basic Writings of Kant by Immanuel Kant, and Nationalism: A Very Short Introduction by Steven Grosby; the article “Strategic Digital Defense: Video Games and Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ Program, 1980-1987” by William M. Knoblauch, found in the book Playing with the Past: Digital Games and the Simulation of History.)
