Civil Wars: A History in Ideas

A highly original history, tracing the least understood and most intractable form of organized human aggression from ancient Rome through the centuries to the present day.

We think we know civil war when we see it. Yet ideas of what it is, and what it isn’t, have a long and contested history, from its fraught origins in republican Rome to debates in early modern Europe down to the present day. Defining the term is an acutely political act: whether a war is “civil” often depends on whether on...