He has written several books in his fields of European intellectual history and human rights history, including The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (2010), and edited or coedited a number of others. Samuel Moyn is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University. This provocative book argues that this development might not represent progress at all. As American wars have become more humane, they have also become endless. Humane examines how America went off to fight and never came back, and the transformation of armed combat from an imperfect tool for resolving disputes into an integral component of the modern condition. Eventually, however, reformers shifted their attention from opposing the crime of war to opposing war crimes, with fateful consequences. Leo Tolstoy prominently opposed their efforts, reasoning that war needed to be abolished, not reformed―and over the subsequent century, a popular movement to abolish war flourished on both sides of the Atlantic. In the nineteenth century, the founders of the Red Cross struggled mightily to make war less lethal even as they acknowledged its inevitability. In Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War, Samuel Moyn asks a troubling but urgent question: What if efforts to make war more ethical―to ban torture and limit civilian casualties―have only shored up the military enterprise and made it sturdier? To advance this case, Moyn looks back at a century and a half of passionate arguments about the ethics of using force.

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Humane by Samuel Moyn