The emphasis upon the struggle for existence which followed the publication of Darwin's The Origin of Species, in 1859, seemed to many thinkers to give a biological basis for the necessity and the inevitability of war. No distinction was made by writers of this school of thought between competition and conflict. Both were supposed to be based on instinct. Nicolai's The Biology of War is an essay with the avowed design of refuting the biological justification of war.
Psychological studies of war have explained war either as an expression of instinct or as a reversion to a primordial animal-human type of behavior. Patrick, who is representative of this latter school, interprets war as a form of relaxation. G. W. Crile has offered a mechanistic interpretation of war and peace based on studies of the chemical changes which men undergo in warfare. Crile comes to the conclusion, however, that war is an action pattern, fixed in the social heredity of the national group, and not a type of behavior determined biologically.
The human nature of war and the motives which impel the person to the great adventure and the supreme risk of war have not been subjected to sociological study. A mass of material, however, consisting of personal documents of all types, letters, common-sense observation, and diaries is now available for such study.
Much of the literature of war has been concentrated on this problem of the abolition of war. There are the idealists and the conscientious objectors who look to good will, humanitarian sentiment, and pacificism to end war by the transformation of attitudes of men and the policies of nations. On the other hand, there are the hard-headed and practical thinkers and statesmen who believe, with Hobbes, that war will not end until there is established a power strong enough to overawe a recalcitrant state. Finally, there is a third group of social thinkers who emphasize the significance of the formation of a world public opinion. This "international mind" they regard of far greater significance for the future of humanity than the problem of war or peace, of national rivalries, or of future race conflicts.
4. Race Conflict
A European school of sociologists emphasizes conflict as the fundamental social process. Gumplowicz, in his book Die Rassenkampf, formulated a theory of social contacts and conflicts upon the conception of original ethnic groups in terms of whose interaction the history of humanity might be written. Novicow and Ratzenhofer maintain similar, though not so extreme, theories of social origins and historical developments.
With the tremendous extension of communication and growth of commerce, the world is today a great community in a sense that could not have been understood a century ago. But the world, if it is now one community, is not yet one society. Commerce has created an economic interdependence, but contact and communication have not resulted in either a political or a cultural solidarity. Indeed, the first evidences of the effects of social contacts appear to be disruptive rather than unifying. In every part of the world in which the white and colored races have come into intimate contact, race problems have presented the most intractable of all social problems.
Interest in this problem manifests itself in the enormous literature on the subject. Most of all that has been written, however, is superficial. Much is merely sentimental, interesting for the attitudes it exhibits, but otherwise adding nothing to our knowledge of the facts. The best account of the American situation is undoubtedly Ray Stannard Baker's Following the Color Line. The South African situation is interestingly and objectively described by Maurice Evans in Black and White in South East Africa. Steiner's book, The Japanese Invasion, is, perhaps, the best account of the Japanese-American situation.
The race problem merges into the problem of the nationalities and the so-called subject races. The struggles of the minor nationalities for self-determination is a phase of racial conflict; a phase, however, in which language rather than color is the basis of division and conflict.