Neither Instinctive Nor Learned: Conflict as a Property of Systems

Reviews the book, Conflict in Man-made Environment by Anatol Rapoport (1974). This book has many of the features we have come to expect of Anatol Rapoport: a broad and civilized familiarity with the full spectrum of western intellectual history; lucid writing; hardheaded analysis of conflict that moves easily into mathematical analysis and yields nothing in logical rigor to any other analyst; all combined with a vigorous and refreshing moral concern for the various forms of holocaust facing the human species and the role that "strategic thinkers" may play in easing us toward the holocaust. The main weakness of the book, if it be such, is that it does not contain very much about social conflict that Rapoport has not said elsewhere. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)