Peace Racket
An Argument from Inside the Tradition
Volume I traces the line of witness across more than two thousand years — from Mozi and Ashoka in the ancient world, through the Enlightenment thinkers who built the modern moral vocabulary, forward to the American witnesses of the twentieth century. The argument is not that war can be legislated away. It is that peace is a working condition requiring the deliberate maintenance of institutions, vocabulary, and civic capacity.
What the volume demonstrates, at book length, is how continuously — and how variously — that maintenance has been named across the centuries. Butler in 1935 called it a racket. Douglass in 1852 called it the honest counter-record. Bates in 1893 called it beauty beside flaws. The witnesses vary. The naming holds.
