IDEE E MODELLI DEL PACIFISMO TRA XIX E XX SECOLO

This essay reconstructs the debate on pacifism between the XIX and XX centuries. The author preliminary uses the reflections of some contemporary philosophers and sociologists, such as Norberto Bobbio, Mulford Quickert Sibley, Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann, Michael Allen Fox, David Cortright, Larry May, John Rawls, Eric Reitan, Johan Galtung, and David Boersema. This debate was livened by famous intellectuals: from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, Bertrand Russell, Sigmund Freud and Albert Einstein passing through John Atkinson Hobson, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Friedrich Nietzsche, Norman Angell, Ernesto Teodoro Moneta, Romain Rolland, Luigi Einaudi, Lord Lothian, Lionel Robbins and Jacques Maritain. They encapsulated the main dilemmas derived from the changed political conditions of their time: the crisis of internationalism, the affirmation of imperialism, the spread of irrationalism, the beginning of the Great War, the establishment and failure of the League of Nations, the consolidation of totalitarian regimes, the outbreak of the Second World War, and the escalation of the Cold War. They developed various ideas and models which could ideally be linked to a “positive pacifism” according to which, as foretold by Spinoza, peace could not be conceived as mere absence of war, but above all the presence of justice, law and order.