Encouraged by therapists, people search for their inner selves. Groups and corporations develop “identities,” to which their members are “invited” to internalize. Political leaders encourage us to distinguish ourselves from...

The opening chapter provides an historical, philosophical and psychological overview of the project and its central ideas. The first few pages are especially important in this regard.

The Iraq invasion of 2003 was justified by the Bush administration on the grounds of national security. But all of the principal advisors of the administration of president George W....

Good books draw in readers in their opening pages. I hope Forbidden Fruit does the same.In those pages I justify my choice of title. I also explain the need for...

Three shifts in thinking influenced the frequency of war and its motives.The first concerns the nature of wealth. Until Adam Smith and modern economics, the world’s wealth was thought to...

History and social science largely rest on Humean causation: the belief in causes that can be established by something approaching a constant conjunction between two events, one envisaged as a...

There is a burgeoning literature on war and its causes. Almost all major studies approach the problem from a realist perspective. They assume security is the principal motive of states...

Counterfactuals are “what-ifs.” They change a feature of the past in the expectation of changing the present. The antecedent (the change introduced in the past) is connected to the consequent...