With the fiftieth anniversary of the Club of Rome report approaching, a number of scientists and economists gathered in early October to assess the current state of play of the zero-growth argument, its traction in the mainstream, and how best to call attention to the data supporting these positions. They looked at this question from various angles—physics, geology, biology, economy, ecology—and discussed the major obstacles to greater acceptance of more critical approaches to economic growth as well as ways of overcoming these obstacles.
The main challenge remains how deeply wedded politicians, economists, and even the average person are to economic growth. “It’s often said that it’s easier for most people to imagine the end of civilization than the end of capitalism, and to imagine the end of capitalism than the end of growth,” quips Joshua Farley, ecological economist at the University of Vermont.
The growth narrative has indeed created certain blind spots, geologist Simon Micheaux of the Geological Survey of Finland points out. “Certain things just haven’t occurred to us to look at, let alone do the math. One is, understanding what energy does for us. The other is understanding where the raw materials come from.” Much work over the years, including modeling around economic, environmental, and resource limits, has been designed in part to eliminate these blind spots.
Still, blind spots persist. They can be found, for instance, in the discourse around the Green New Deal. “Most Green New Deal material I’ve seen is just another formula for growth,” York University economist Peter Victor notes. “With sustainable development, we used to say that we have the adjective but they have the noun. I feel the same with green growth.”
The modelers themselves are not immune from the growth imperative.
“We need projects to survive as a research group,” explains economist Jaime Nieto Vega of the University of Valladolid, adding that those projects require bigger and better modeling. “I’m increasingly convinced that we should keep the modeling simple, but the internal dynamics of academe are against that.” Universidad del Rosario ecological economist Katharine Farrell similarly highlights the need to take into account the modelling implications of “industrialization of scientific knowledge production” with its “fetishization of innovation” that reproduces within academia the same growth dynamic in society as a whole.
In recent years, critiques of growth have been emerging from a number of different disciplines. Such an intellectual convergence is producing what might well become a paradigm shift. “It’s almost as if human consciousness is ready to see certain ideas,” Simon Micheaux concludes hopefully. “Our ideas might be received a little bit differently over the next couple of years.”
Economics
Economics, on paper, is a discipline devoted to scarcity and trade-offs: budget constraints, resource limitations, the iron law of wages. As economists like to say, “there is no such thing as a free lunch.” Everything, in the end, must be paid for.
Economic growth at first glance seems to promise a shortcut out of this dismal world of scarcity by offering the promise of just such a free lunch, if not for everyone then at least for some. As economies grow, more goods and services become available, and the bounty seems to be conjured as if from thin air.
Economic growth, however, is not a conjuring trick. It has been powered by planetary resources, mostly fossil fuels. As University of British Columbia bio-ecologist William Rees points out, for most of human existence economic growth was “barely detectable until the early nineteenth century when we got into the fossil fuel era. Fossil fuel for the first time gave humans access to other resources needed to grow the rest of infrastructure and human and manufactured capital that we find ourselves ‘blessed with.’ In order to maintain that capital, we need to have a continuous supply of cheap energy.”
The bill for a “free lunch” produced by fossil fuels is now coming due in the form of global warming, biodiversity decline, and various forms of pollution.
The strange thing is that economic growth, though it exerts such a powerful influence across societies of very different political economies, is often illusory. “For much of the past 50 years, most Americans have experienced no economic growth, no increase in consumption or level of wealth,” Joshua Farley points out, because the benefits of economic growth “have all flowed to the elite.”
Yet most people don’t want to give up on even this illusory sense of growth. Farley cites the 2006 review of the economics of climate change by the British economist Nicholas Stern, who noted at the time that it would require an outlay of one percent of global GDP to stabilize emissions at a level of 550 parts per million, which would substantially reduce the risk of climate catastrophe. At a time when GDP was growing 3 percent a year, such an expenditure would mean accepting a living standard of a mere five months in the past. But Stern believed that even such a modest cut would be a tough pill for the public to swallow, and he acknowledged that more ambitious efforts to reduce the risk of catastrophe, by for instance spending 2 percent of global GDP and accepting the living standards of the previous year, would meet with even greater public resistance.
Growth is not simply embedded in national discourses. It lies at the heart of the process known as globalization, namely the elimination of barriers to the transnational flow of trade and capital and the intensification of global supply chains. But globalization, as Peter Victor notes, is not inevitable: “Globalization is built around capital mobility as the owners of capital seek better returns on their capital. It is allowed by policy, but there is also an opportunity to reduce capital mobility just as it was increased.”
Such pushback against the assumptions of globalization—that deregulation is essential, that growth is inevitable—has grown among economists.
This pushback, for Peter Victor, began with the idea that “the economy is fully embedded in the biosphere and is fully dependent on it for all materials and energy and for all waste disposal.” From this insight, he developed models for exploring the impact in Canada of a no-growth economy and a reduction of energy and material throughput. “If GDP is stable, and you’re getting efficiency gains, then you’re reducing material and energy use,” he explains. When he published his first modeling in 2007, “you could put out scenarios that showed that the cessation of growth in Canada would meet many other important social and economic objectives: less work time, more leisure time, a reduction of income inequality and environmental impacts.”
A second model, developed with ecological economist Tim Jackson, also incorporated the financial system. “We could still get scenarios where growth would end and material and energy throughput would decline, but it was harder,” Victor adds. “I don’t think that’s a surprise. The window is definitely closing in terms of any reasonably smooth adjustment to the circumstances we’re facing.”
Another hallmark of the current age of economic globalization is increased income inequality, both within countries and between countries. This polarization has been driven by the greater role played by finance in the global economy. The rate of return for financial capital is often greater than the economy as a whole, which effectively transfers even more wealth to those who possess capital in the first place. People are making money from money rather than from the production of goods. Some individuals and some countries are better positioned to prosper under such a system, which reinforces inequality.
“I see the fundamental conflict of our age as the rich versus everyone else,” Simon Micheaux argues. “People with lots of money don’t have empathy. The same ways of logic and problem-solving and appealing to a sense of right and wrong doesn’t work with them.”
Katharine Farrell calls attention to the social psychology work of biologist Mary E. Clark that the sociopathology of the profit-driven private corporation is well documented in psychological research. “A corporation has to survive by showing profit and growing,” Micheaux agrees. “If a corporation can’t grow, it loses investment, takes on debt, and goes down. They call this a free market like it’s a good thing. What do psychopaths do when they are fighting for their own survival? Do we expect them to play nice?”
Economic Transition
The global economy is under a number of pressures: stagnation, the costs of climate change and other environmental impacts, the volatility that has accompanied income inequality. “Crises have a way of bringing about unanticipated or unwanted changes,” Peter Victor notes. “But they happen. Think of the crisis European feudalism faced with the rise of the merchant class and later the industrial class. Feudalism gave way to capitalism not because Adam Smith wrote a great book but because the pressures were too great for feudalism to survive. There was a shift in the power balance. Now we have to recognize that capitalism is under stress.”
One of those stresses is the availability of raw materials. Modern capitalism is based on relatively inexpensive fossil fuels and mineral wealth. That entire system is now under threat. “This is an historic moment,” Katharine Farrell points out. “We are looking at the collapse of the physiological structures of the planet, such as we’ve been able to document them, during the small amount of time that we’ve been around to do so.”
Another energy-related challenge for any transition away from fossil fuels is the relationship between energy efficiency and the reduction of energy demand that’s imperative if humanity is to meet national and international carbon emission goals. “We are finding that energy efficiency is not able to grow at the same scope as energy reduction when economic growth is a given,” reports Jaime Nieto Vega, alluding to Jevons paradox according to which increased efficiency in resource use goes hand in hand with increased consumption of that resource. “This is one of the main challenges of the energy transition plans in the EU and concretely in Spain.”
There is more willingness among politicians to acknowledge the ongoing collapse of the existing system. Simon Micheaux describes a meeting he had with civil servants in Brussels. “They were in an echo chamber,” he remembers. “It had not occurred to them to ask certain questions. I put together some information to demonstrate that our dependency on fossil fuels is a problem, fossil fuels are about to become unreliable, and the transition plan to move away from fossil fuel has not been thought out in a practical context. At a basic level, the planned rollout of electric cars and hydrogen fuel cell powered by solar and wind and hydro won’t work. We’ve run out of time, and we don’t have the minerals in the ground. Even if we did find those minerals somehow by mining the sea floor, those systems are not strong enough to replace fossil fuels. I was met with shock. No one able to refute my work.”
Such a meeting stood in contrast to his involvement in a civil society consultation at the G20 meeting in Melbourne in 2014. “The finance ministers told us up front that if we couldn’t help them achieve 2 percent growth annum indefinitely, we shouldn’t bother coming,” he recalls. “When it became clear that we couldn’t do that, that we would be tabling some very difficult challenges, they cut out the civil society documentation to go to the G20.”
Joshua Farley agrees that the world is on the verge of transition. “The heyday of neoliberalism is fading fast,” he notes. “My students are more open to alternatives to capitalism. We’re reaching a point where the next stage is inevitable. People all around the world are coming up with the same ideas at the same time, just like Newton and Leibniz with calculus and Darwin and Wallace with evolution.”
He continues, “We are moving from a world in which individual choice and competition made sense to one in which collective choice and cooperation are necessary, not because ideologies have changed but because both the problems we face and the nature of the resources required to solve them have changed. When the costs of economic activity are collective, capitalism (i.e. private property rights and individual choice) is suicidal; when the benefits are collective (e.g. new vaccines for COVID, new forms of alternative energy), capitalism is inefficient.”
William Rees remains cautious about this transitional period. “If you believe the results of our eco-footprint and overshoot work, it’s not possible to support the present population indefinitely at average material standards,” he points out. “There are already resource shortages. To maintain the current structure requires the depletion of natural assets in the biosphere. According to our material flow analysis, half of the countries on earth are incapable of becoming even remotely self-reliant. Even China, which boasts of its huge pork production, relies on fodder grown in the United States, Brazil, and elsewhere. So, China’s eco-footprint is all over planet. They’re aware of it, at least implicitly. The Belt-and-Road Initiative is a strategy to ensure that China has access to resources all over earth. China has instructed its industrial sector and military to look for every drop of fossil fuel so that they can get in there first to maintain hegemony. Sustainability beyond mid-century will require a massive contraction of economic throughput by as much as 50 percent globally, which means 80 percent in rich countries on a per capita basis. Although modest by some estimation, are those figures realistic geopolitically?”
“Is capitalism, and the countries dedicated to it so firmly, going to fade away quietly?” he asks. “A dying dinosaur has a very dangerous tail that thrashes around.” He points out that the world is “not controlled by us thinking about ideas. It’s controlled by big money and the politics that goes with it. The military-industrial complex is alive and thriving.”
Part of any transition, then, is to minimize the influence of the beneficiaries of the dying system. “None of us know what the new economy will look like or how to implement it,” Joshua Farley says. “But I advocate removing important parts, like essential resources, from the capitalist economy. That might be perceived as less of a threat to the global market. I still want to go into a store and choose the apple I want. Markets work okay for tastes but not for needs.”
One such segment of the economy might be research. “Ideas, information, knowledge, none of this should be rationed, yet capitalism tries to push knowledge production into a market framework,” Peter Victor points out. “If I can get free information from the Internet, I will do so. I don’t consider it stealing. It’s not like bread from the baker since if I take it, there’s no less for anyone else.”
Biology
Mainstream economists view humans as “rational actors” who maximize their gains according to self-interest. Billions of such “rational actors” have over the years made decisions to increase the overall pie as well as their portion of it. The biological counterpart of this economistic view is the “selfish gene,” by which humans will do everything within their power to maximize their advantages in order to improve their chances of reproducing themselves. Growing the economy and growing the species have thus been cast as going hand in hand.
Not everyone agrees. Since Richard Dawkins introduced his “selfish gene” argument, others have marshaled evidence for the biological basis of altruism. “Love, compassion: these are characteristics of primates,” Katharine Farrell notes, adding with a dash of understatement that “even some humans have been seen to exhibit these characteristics.”
Biology is not destiny, William Rees argues, but it certainly strongly influences human actions. “The human species responds just as other species do when it finds itself in a resource trove,” he explains. “We go through rapid exponential growth until we either pollute ourselves into slowing down or deplete the assets that produced that growth. We are in the plague phase of a one-off population outbreak that will result in either slow implosion or rapid crash. That’s the choice ahead of us.”
Biological limitations also shape the efficacy of human responses to the current crisis. “We have a brain that evolved in simple circumstances: a small habitat and few people,” Rees continues. “We are not capable of dealing with complexity. We are natural reductionists. Echo chambers, disciplinary silos—that reflects our capacity to focus on one thing at a time and not much else. With every biological phenomenon there is diversity, but in the main, we’re not capable of understanding the complexity of the situation that we have created.”
The heart of the problem, he adds, is not climate change per se. “With the explosion of human numbers, we’ve put ourselves in a situation where simply maintaining the current population and infrastructure requires the depletion of natural capital assets—soils, forests, fisheries,” he says. “We are literally consuming the biophysical basis of our own existence. Climate change is a symptom of overshoot. It’s a waste management issue, caused by carbon dioxide, the largest single waste product by weight of industrial economies. Biodiversity loss is a symptom of overshoot because human expansion necessarily displaces other species and their habitats. Gross pollution is the entropic result of growing the human enterprise.”
Ordinarily, such species growth hits a wall. “Species are usually held in check by negative feedback from the ecosystem in the form of disease or competition,” he notes. “Fossil fuel relieved us from that feedback, and we could express our full biological potential to expand. The cultural meme set of neoliberal economics has reinforced the biological disposition to expand.”
Katharine Farrell, while largely in agreement with Rees, resists the notion that human nature is predetermined, by a “selfish gene” way or otherwise. She argues that “it’s very difficult to get out of one’s own orientation” and disagrees with treating the culture of capitalism as an inherent feature of being human: “industrialized capitalism, which has certainly achieved a memetic imposition on the culture of the planet, is not the natural or only option for the human being. We have to get out of the trap of the gendered state of evolution reflected in the Euro-descendent, post-medieval culture of capital accumulation that presently dominates globalized economic activity. It’s not the only option we have.”
Increasingly, humans have been behaving much like parasites, which Joshua Farley points out, constitute “the overwhelming share of species on the planet.” William Rees picks up on the theme. “Humans have broken free of any ethical obligation to non-human species or even the future,” he says. “We have become effectively parasites on the planet. The growth of the human enterprise—the production of all our toys and goodies acquired at the expense of depleting the planet of other species, soil, water—has had the entropic consequence of the parasitic destruction of our host species, which is the ecosystem.”
It all comes down, Katharine Farrell agrees, to entropy, to the inevitable marriage between the production of order and disorder. “We don’t have an energy supply problem so much as an obsessive focus on finding energy sources. We have an overproduction of entropy, of waste heat and residuals that are inevitably produced whenever we do useful work, and this entropy production problem is reflected in biodiversity loss, habitat appropriation, and an explosion of invasive species, including agriculture.”
Organization
What distinguishes humans from other creatures, Katharine Farrell points out, is not so much social interaction or organization, for ants and bees are highly organized creatures, but the creation of institutions. Ants are differentiated by their shapes: the queen versus the workers. Humans look more or less the same even as they take on different roles in social institutions.
These institutions, Peter Victor points out, mitigate to a certain degree the biological deficiencies inherent in any average individual.
“We tend to be short-sighted,” he admits. “We are good at the local, not at the global. But part of the solution to that are the institutions we construct. When they work well, they can give us a longer time horizon, because they outlast the life of an individual. Unfortunately, a lot of the organizations that get set up with that spirit in mind can get overwhelmed and become short-term and concerned with the local. But if we ‘re looking not only at how bad things are but how to get out of it, we have to look at changes at the organizational level to complement any discussion of our biological limitations.”
Social segmentation and differentiation, mediated by these organizations, also counteract the individualism of the “selfish gene” and the rational self-interest of homo economicus. “None of us has the ability to fully produce from scratch any item we’re in contact with right now,” Joshua Farley points out. “We are inherently a collective species. The individual can’t survive away from the collective any more than a cell can survive apart from the body. Even the most trained survivalist, without a knowledge of local ecosystems developed through culture, is helpless.”
One useful organizational innovation, Katharine Farrell notes, has been federalism, a method of handling complex hierarchical structures. The principle of subsidiarity is especially useful where “differentiated systems don’t try to do everything at one level” but authority is taken at the most immediate or local possible level. Peter Victor also acknowledges the virtues of federalism: “In Canada, where we have 10 provinces and three territories, we can learn from each other and be closer to politicians than in highly centralized Britain.”
Human organization nevertheless has its downsides, depending on the nature of the organization. “I wouldn’t have forced someone to produce my shirt in an exploitative manner,” Joshua Farley points out, “but buying it through the capitalist system, I don’t think twice about it.” Organizations, through their complexity, thus offer individuals a kind of plausible deniability when it comes to unjust or unsustainable practices.
The structures of globalization, William Rees adds, have had a destructive effect on more sustainable forms of organization. Globalization has destroyed “the capacity for community-level self-reliance or self-sufficiency. Now with global supply lines, everyone is utterly dependent on everyone else to survive let alone thrive. Unfortunately, that whole organizational structure presupposes abundant cheap energy to enable the global transport of goods around planet. If that system is coming to an end, we are going to be in a situation of forced reorganization, which won’t be pleasant because it will result in increasing strife over the remaining pockets of assets around the world. Globalization has been the means by which the relatively well-to-do can access these remaining pockets. This huge organizational pump has sucked the planet dry and, in the process, impoverished much of the world.”
But self-sufficiency can return, even under adverse conditions. Peter Victor enumerates a number of the survival tactics of countries under U.S. sanctions that have been forced, by their relative isolation from the global economy, to strengthen their food self-sufficiency or develop their own vaccines. Another example of this resistance is “south-south cooperation where the Global South is trying to learn from itself and wean itself to some degree of dependence on the North,” he points out. “What can we learn from these examples?”
Is versus Ought
Science attempts to describe the world as it is not as it should be.
“Both quantitative and qualitative analyses are important,” Peter Victor argues. “A lot can be learned from number-crunching and from people playing with your models. But it’s not enough. It convinces those who are already convinced, and it raises questions with those who have open minds. Quantitative analysis gives us some insight into the choices we can make. But it doesn’t tell us which one to take.”
“I believe in genetic evolution where the mechanism is genes as well as cultural evolution where the mechanism is our moral values,” adds Joshua Farley. “We need these values to live together as a group. These values are the units of inheritance upon which natural selection acts and they are every bit as scientific as genes. We’re still obsessed in science with providing better numbers. No, we need to develop better ethical values that are compatible with society and its current scale. When I ask my students to distinguish between a good person and an evil person, they usually reply that an evil person puts the individual ahead of the group and a good person puts the group ahead of the individual. If we want to be a good species, we have to put the overall planet ahead of humans.”
Katharine Farrell describes a meeting she attended where an indigenous woman from Canada and an indigenous man from Brazil discussed their perspectives on capitalism. “The man talked mainly about brutality and violence and a lack of regard for the other, the lack of reciprocity in terms of economic framing. The woman talked more about cultural complexity, that sense of responsibility, how do we raise and teach our children. I was left with a metaphor: capitalism is an adolescent male who didn’t spend enough time with his mother. It’s a vulgar oversimplification of the problem, but there’s a lot in it. We need a more neurocognitively complex approach to knowledge production that includes and exploits both the masculine and feminine aspects of the human brain.”
“I’m not suggesting that the memetic theme we’re now embedded in is the only one,” William Rees counters. “But the one we have happens to reinforce the biological theme. The whole of civilization is a set of rules and regulations established to override what would naturally happen. We are in the game of recreating the paradigmatic framework with which we move forward and much of that will have to counteract our natural predispositions.”
Impact
Given the centrality of economic growth in the mainstream, degrowth has largely hovered on the margins of debate. That seems to be changing.
“I noticed a shift in mood two or three years ago,” reports Simon Micheaux. “Instead of hitting my head against the wall, all of a sudden I started to get results. I’m not sure how this happened, but now I’m getting my work in front of senior policy decisionmakers. I’m presenting to ministers and parliaments in multiple countries.”
But, he cautions, that hasn’t yet translated into altered policies, either at a political level or even in terms of technological research. “The best and brightest are working on things that, I won’t say they won’t work, they do work, but they are not the ultimate solution. We are forced to work on lithium-ion battery chemistry when there are other chemistries. I’ve shown that there are not enough minerals in the ground to make those batteries. I’ve used their data. They have no choice but to see it.”
When a financial crisis happens or a sympathetic political party takes power, the terms of reception can change dramatically. Peter Victor remembers when a social democratic government took over in Ontario after a surprise election result in 1991. “I was given a job there, and just being able to work with a government that was interested in social change was incredible,” he says. “You couldn’t give them enough ideas! They didn’t accept them all, but they listened.”
Fifteen years later it was a crisis that gave his ideas more prominence. “My book Managing Without Growth came out in 2008 at the time of the financial crisis,” he recalls. “What otherwise would have been a marginal document published by an academic publisher and sold at a high price became more well-known. The media was looking for an economist who could say something positive about no-growth. I was invited all over the world. I got a sense that I was being listened to. But 99 percent of the time, the audience already agreed with me.”
Victor adds, “It takes a chorus. If lots of us do these things, it will make an impact.”
Degrowth is often associated with doom-and-gloom scenarios. “No one wants to hear that everything is going to go poorly,” Simon Micheaux notes. “They want a solution. If you can’t promote a solution, they are not prepared to hear the problem.” As the economist Herman Daly used to say, “If you’re falling out an airplane, it’s not an altimeter you need but a parachute.”
Finland, Micheaux continues, sits on a lot of minerals integral to battery production such as cobalt, nickel, lithium, and graphite. “If I’m right, in a few years’ time, the global production of minerals will not be sufficient to meet demand. The captains of industry will then turn to the geological surveys in Europe and say, ‘why didn’t you tell us?’ The Geological Survey of Finland (GDK) manages a battery portfolio and they will be first in the firing line. I can have a frank discussion with their executive board members about hyperinflation, peak oil, currency default. They are enlightened, but they don’t understand the implications.” Still, GDK is giving him the opportunity to develop his ideas about the circular economy and cooperate with other Finnish research groups in the industrial sectors.
“It’s pretty clear that we don’t have enough resources to go around,” Micheaux concludes. “If we do the conventional, each nation for itself, it will give war a chance until the population reduces. If we actually have a transparency of information and we all agree to share those resources, we’ll have a form of socialism to distribute those resources and a form of capitalism to exploit those resources.”
To help generate and test new ideas, Joshua Farley recommends creating a knowledge commons. “Any university can unilaterally declare that all the knowledge we create to address social ecological problems is freely available to all on the condition that any improvements to it are also freely available to all,” he suggests. Even geopolitical rivals like the United States, Iran, and North Korea could be part of this commons. Small-scale knowledge commons, like this working group, can provide help in developing certain ideas and marshalling the defense of such ideas in the public sphere.
This effort could include the creation of a social platform to rival Facebook based not on pushing people to buy more things—and offering polarizing content to keep people tuned in—but on algorithms that “reduce political polarization and focus people on common problems,” Farley adds.
Another idea Farley suggests is “secure sufficiency.” Meeting people’s basic needs is “the ultimate form of freedom.” If they are not worried about becoming unemployed or suffering a health emergency that they can’t afford to cover, they might not strive so hard to accumulate wealth or be quite so wedded to a growth economy.
The working group agreed to pool its experience of “what works” in terms of injecting no-growth arguments and modeling into the mainstream. And the group is considering efforts to work with organizations devoted to qualitatively expressed no-growth visions like “well-being” and “buen vivir,” and to challenge competing modeling based on overly optimistic assumptions about technological advances.

The worst cases, however, seem to involve bullying law-enforcement in more extreme forms: e.g., law-enforcement units such as the intense and often-overkill emergency response teams. The most extreme of such law-enforcers storm into crime suspects’ homes, screaming, with fully-automatic machineguns or handguns drawn, at the homes’ occupants (to “face down!”), all of whom, including infants, can be permanently traumatized from the experience.
I’m led to sincerely believe that some of these (mostly male) law-enforcement employees get into such fields of work for the sheer power-trip of it all.

In 1949, the first Secretary-General of NATO, described NATO’s mission as “to keep Russia out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” Seventy years on, the security landscape has totally changed. The Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact are no more. The Berlin Wall has fallen, and Germany has no territorial ambitions on its neighbors. Yet, America is still in Europe with a NATO alliance of twenty-nine countries.

In 1993, one of the co-authors, David Speedie, interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev and asked him about the assurances he claimed to have received on NATO’s non-expansion eastwards. His response was blunt: “Mr. Speedie, we were screwed.” He was very clear in his judgment that the trust that the Soviet Union had placed in the West, with the reunification of Germany and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, was not reciprocated.

This raises a fundamental question: whether NATO today enhances global security or in fact diminishes it.

We believe that there are ten main reasons that NATO is no longer needed:

One: NATO was created in 1949 for the three main reasons outlined above. These reasons are no longer valid. The security landscape in Europe is totally different today than seventy years ago. Russian president Vladimir Putin actually proposed a new continental security arrangement “from Dublin to Vladivostok,” which was rejected out of hand by the West. If accepted, then it would have included Russia in a cooperative security architecture that would have been safer for the global community.

Two: It is argued by some that the threat of present-day Russia is why America needs to stay in Europe. But consider this: The economy of the EU was $18.8 trillion before Brexit, and it is $16.6 Trillion after Brexit. In comparison, the economy of Russia is only $1.6 trillion today. With an EU economy more than ten times the economy of Russia, do we believe that Europe cannot afford its own defense against Russia? It is important to note that the UK will surely stay in a Euro defense alliance and will very likely continue to contribute to that defense.

Three: Cold War I was one of extreme global risk—with two superpower adversaries each armed with thirty-thousand-plus nuclear warheads. The current environment presents an even greater danger, that of extreme instability arising from non-state actors, such as terrorist groups, acquiring weapons of mass destruction. Russia and the NATO principals are uniquely capable of addressing these threats—if they act in concert.

Four: The only time a NATO member has invoked Article 5 (the “attack on one is attack on all” clause) was the United States after the terrorist attack of Sept 11, 2001. The real enemy was not another nation but the common threat of terrorism. Russia has consistently advanced this reason for cooperation—indeed Russia provided invaluable logistical intelligence and base support for the post–9/11 Afghan engagement. Coronavirus has dramatized another grave concern: that of terrorists possessing and using biological weapons. This cannot be underestimated in the climate in which we now live.

Five: When Russia has a potential enemy on its border, as with 2020 NATO military exercises, Russia will be more compelled to veer toward autocracy and the weakening of democracy. When citizens feel threatened, they want leadership that is strong and affords them protection.

Six: The military actions of NATO in Serbia under President Clinton and in Libya under President Barack Obama, along with almost twenty years of war in Afghanistan—the longest in our history—were substantially U.S. driven. There is no “Russia factor” here, yet these conflicts are used to argue a raison d’etre chiefly to confront Russia.

Seven: Along with climate change, the greatest existential threat is that of a nuclear holocaust—this sword of Damocles still hangs over all of us. With NATO having bases in twenty-nine countries, many along Russia’s borders, some within artillery range of St. Petersburg, we run the risk of a nuclear war that could destroy humankind. The risk of accidental or “false alarm” was documented on several occasions during the Cold War and is even more frightful now, given the Mach 5 speed of today’s missiles.

Eight: As long as the United States continues to spend close to 70 percent of its discretionary budget on the military, there will always be a need for enemies, whether real or perceived. Americans have the right to ask why such exorbitant “spending” is necessary and whom does it really benefit? NATO expenditures come at the expense of other national priorities. We are discovering this in the midst of the coronavirus when the health-care systems in the west are woefully underfinanced and disorganized. Diminishing the cost and needless expense of NATO will make room for other national priorities of greater good to the American public.

Nine: We have used NATO to act unilaterally, without congressional or international legal approval. America’s conflict with Russia is essentially political, not military. It cries out for creative diplomacy. The truth is that America needs more robust diplomacy in international relations, not the blunt military instrument of NATO.

Ten: Lastly, exotic war games in Russia’s neighborhood—coupled with a tearing up of arms control treaties—provides a growing threat that can destroy everyone, particularly when international attention is focused on a more elusive “enemy.” The coronavirus has joined the list of global threats that demand cooperation rather than confrontation even more urgently than before.

There will inevitably be other global challenges that countries will face together over time. However, NATO at seventy is not the instrument to address them. It is time to move on from this curtain of confrontation and craft a global security approach, one that addresses the threats of today and tomorrow.

Link: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/nato-still-necessary-145917?

“Those involved aren’t paying taxes, but they are typically producing goods that formal firms would produce,” she says. Such activities could include unlicensed construction or illegal sales by food vendors.

The size of this sector of the economy has grown large in some countries.

“As a percentage of GDP, it ranges from 25-60% in South America, [and] from 13-50% in Asia,” according to a recent paper by Prof. Terra.

Among members of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the so-called rich countries, the average size of the shadow economy is smaller, at around 15%, though for some European countries the figure is as high as 30%, according to the report.

This issue matters now for two main reasons.

“For some countries, it is [important] due to budget deficits,” says Prof. Terra. The government simply isn’t collecting enough revenue. “When the informal firms [of the shadow economy] become formal, they start paying taxes.”

The other reason: “Informal firms are constrained in their growth,” says Prof. Terra. “If they grow too big, they attract attention from the government. In addition, they don’t have access to credit markets.”When the percentage of economic activity in the shadow economy is high, these constraints slow down the entire economy.”

Link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-is-the-shadow-economy-and-why-does-it-matter-1488769322

The incentives are part of a broader plan to more than double maritime traffic in the Northern Sea Route, on Russia’s northern coast — and give a boost to state energy companies like Gazprom, Lukoil, and Rosneft.

But analysts say their immediate impact will be increased exploration and development for offshore oil and natural gas.

With Canadian and U.S. offshore oil developments still on ice, here’s what Russia’s big spending could mean for the Arctic — and Canadians.

How is the money being spent?
Russia’s government is offering tax incentives for offshore oil and gas developments, including a reduced five per cent production tax for the first 15 years for all oil and gas developments.

Projects in the east Arctic, closer to Canada’s Beaufort Sea, receive an even greater incentive — no extraction tax for the first 12 years of operation.

Russia may be borrowing a page from Canada’s book in drafting the policy. Doug Matthews, a Canadian energy writer and analyst, said the incentive package sounds “rather like our old national energy program in the … Beaufort [Sea] back in the ’70s and ’80s.”

What new projects are getting the go-ahead?
Russia’s minister of the Far East and Arctic, Alexander Kozlov, said in a press release that those incentives are resulting in three new massive offshore oil projects.

Currently, there is only one producing offshore oil platform in Russian waters — the Prirazlomnaya platform, located in the Pechora Sea.

Russia’s state oil companies are also expected to massively intensify their onshore Arctic operations.

Rosneft’s Vostok Oil project, billed as the “biggest in global oil,” will involve the construction of a seaport, two airports, 800 km of new pipelines, and 15 new towns in the Vankor region.

“The project is expected to become the stepping stone for large scale development of Arctic oil,” said Nikita Kapustin, an energy researcher with the state-funded Energy Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, in an email.

Developments in the Laptev, East Siberian and Chukchi Seas — nearer to Alaska — are “more distant prospects,” Kapustin said.

But massive incentives for Arctic ports and pipelines could make exploiting those regions more feasible in the future.

What could the environmental impacts be?
Simon Boxall, an oceans scientist at the University of Southampton, said sending more goods via the Northern Sea Route could actually have a positive environmental impact.

“You’re knocking thousands of miles off of that route, and that of course saves energy, it saves fuel, it saves pollution,” he said.

The problem, Boxall says, comes with what those ships are carrying. Any spilled oil degrades slowly in cold Arctic waters, and is easily trapped beneath ice.

Boxall is optimistic that moderate spills from Russia’s offshore oil projects could be contained to “a fairly small locality,” and would be unlikely to affect Canadian shores.

But Tony Walker, an assistant professor at the School of Resource & Environmental Studies at Dalhousie University, disagrees.

“Any petroleum products released into surface water could easily get to the Northwest Territories in just a matter of days,” he said.

“Basically, it’s everybody’s problem.”

Walker says most Arctic nations have limited capacity to perform cleanups in the region. Russia’s fleet is mostly based in Murmansk, near its western border, he says, and is mostly decommissioned anyway.

“So it would really be virtually impossible,” he said.

How could this affect oil and gas prices?
Despite enabling access to more than 37 billion barrels of oil — equivalent to about a fifth of Canada’s total remaining reserves — analysts say the effect on prices should be negligible.

“The main intention of Arctic oil is to replace production of some of the more mature Russian fields,” said Kapustin.

“I don’t see much of an effect on price,” said Matthews.

The primary market for Russia’s Arctic oil and gas is China. Canada’s market share there is so small, Matthews says, it’s unlikely to make a difference.

Could Canadian businesses benefit?
Since U.S. and EU sanctions were put in place in 2014, international oil companies have been reluctant to co-invest in Arctic oil projects. Sanctions prohibit collaboration on offshore oil projects with Russia’s biggest companies.

Canadian businesses also might not have the expertise needed any longer, according to Matthews.

“We were really the leaders back in the ’70s and ’80s for technology for Arctic exploration,” Matthews explained. But “when the oil industry in the Beaufort [Sea] shut down in the mid-’80s … we really lost that technological edge.”

Canada’s recent investment in pipelines means some Canadian companies have built expertise in their construction, including in cold-weather environments.

But Matthews and other analysts say Russia is more likely to look to the East for expertise and investment — to Japan and China, and to India, which Kapustin said has already invested in the Vostok Oil project.”

City of New York pension funds should not be used to support any aspect of nuclear weapons production, plain and simple,’ Councillor Helen Rosenthal told the Count the Nuclear Weapons Money action. ‘Helping to fund nuclear proliferation runs contrary to what this city and our 300,000+ municipal workers stand for. Our teachers, fire fighters, social workers, and so many other public sector workers have devoted their careers to making life better for their fellow New Yorkers. We cannot in good conscience assist in underwriting the catastrophic loss of life and environmental ruin that would result from a nuclear conflict.’

The Hearings

The public hearings on Thursday were run jointly by Council member Daniel Dromm and Council member Fernando Cabrera, chair of the NYC Committee on Governmental Operations. They included testimony from a wide range of New Yorkers and civil society organisations, including from labour, education, academia, finance, health, religious and law sectors and from communities impacted by the production, testing and use of nuclear weapons. Witnesses stretched in age from 19-90.

As the public hearings opened on Thursday, the two measures were one-vote short of a veto-proof majority. By the end of the hearings, Council Member Fernando Cabrera had affirmed his support thus ensuring the required votes for adoption. As such, it looks fairly certain that the measures will be adopted.

Resistance from New York City Administration:

Issues that were presented by the city as difficulties in adopting and implementing the resolutions were the human and financial resources required to implement them, and which city department would be responsible.

Ms Penny Abeywardena, New York City’s Commissioner for International Affairs, testified argued that her department (the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs) had neither the expertise, resources nor the mandate to implement the measures.

However, her concerns were addressed fully in the oral testimony of Jonathan Granoff, represeting Move the Nuclear Weapons Money, who argued that the expertise and human resources were available from the disarmament and investment communities present at the hearings, and that the mandate for the Mayor’s Office for International Affairs to act already existed in their commitments and programs for implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals – Goal 16 of which includes the role of local authorities to implement universal peace and disarmament obligations.

New York City and Mayors for Peace:

The written testimony of Move the Nuclear Weapons Money included a proposal that a key action New York City should take in implementing the resolutions once adopted would be for them to join Mayors for Peace.

Jackie Cabassso, North America Representative for Mayors for Peace, in her oral testimony outlined some of the actions of Mayors for Peace – including introduction of nuclear disarmament resolutions that were adopted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Ms Cabasso reminded the City Council of the invitation from Mayors for Peace to New York to join, and she urged that they do so.

At the end of 1931 the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation [IIIC], a League of Nations agency, invited Albert Einstein to initiate an exchange of letters with a fellow ‘leader of intellectual thought’ on a subject ‘calculated to serve the common interest of the League of Nations and of intellectual life’.[1] Einstein selected Sigmund Freud as his correspondent and the question he wished to explore with him was, simply and ambitiously, ‘is there any way of delivering mankind from the scourge of war?’.[2]

Although occupying dominant positions in their respective fields, the two had had little to do with each other up to that time and such previous contact as there was had hardly amounted to a meeting of great minds. At a brief meeting a few years before, Freud had found Einstein personally agreeable but lacking in any real knowledge of psychology.[3] Later, a short correspondence took place from which, according to Freud, Einstein’s ‘complete lack of understanding for psychoanalysis became evident’.[4] Yet despite what he felt to be his would-be collaborator’s limitations, Freud agreed to be involved in the project. Though Freud would later dismiss the undertaking as ‘tedious and sterile’[5], the prospect of reaching a wider audience for psychoanalysis than had hitherto been available may well have persuaded him to participate.

The tone of the letter he wrote to the IIIC Secretary, Leon Stenig, accepting the invitation was perhaps less than enthusiastic but it does not suggest any serious misgivings: ‘I have indulged in as much enthusiasm as I am able to muster at my age [76] and in my state of disillusionment … your hopes and those of Einstein for a future role of psychoanalysis in the life of individuals and nations ring true and of course give me great pleasure … Thus practical and idealistic considerations induce me to put myself and all that remains of my energies at [your] disposal’.[6] Accordingly, Einstein initiated the correspondence at the end of July 1932 and Freud replied two months later. The letters were published by the League of Nations the following March simultaneously in English, French and German under the title Why War? In Germany however, where Hitler had come to power two months previously, circulation of Warum Krieg? was banned.

Fortuitously, the project coincided with that later period in Freud’s life when his interests were widening into new areas of philosophical and sociological speculation. By the end of the 1920s he had, as he put it, returned to the ‘cultural problems’ which had concerned him in his youth.[7] In 1930 he had published his major statement on psychoanalysis and society, the 30,000 word essay Civilization and its Discontents. The ideas put forward in this – on the process of civilization and its repressive effect on the instinctual drives – form the basis of the Why War? correspondence and represented Freud’s final position on civilization, aggression and conflict.

Einstein’s own letter betrays something of the liberal dilemma of the period as the ‘idealist’ position on international relations, widespread among progressive thinkers in the 1920s, began to lose ground to the ‘realism’ which would dominate the coming decades. The decisive challenges to collective security as a peacekeeping mechanism – in Abyssinia and Central Europe – remained in the future but the recent Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the absence of any effective collective response to it had been a clear pointer to the limitations of security through international organization. For Einstein the ‘ill-success, despite their obvious sincerity, of all the efforts made during the last decade to reach this goal [of collective security], leaves us no room to doubt that strong psychological factors are at work which paralyse these efforts’.[8] In his view, which was a fairly typical one on the liberal left at the time, the immediate problem was the baleful symbiosis between the arms manufacturers and power-hungry politicians. This ‘ruling class [had] the schools and press, usually the Church as well, under its thumb’. But still this did not provide a complete explanation for the periodic explosions of international conflict:

How is it that these devices succeed so well in rousing men to such wild enthusiasm, even to sacrifice their lives? Only one answer is possible. Because man has within him a lust for hatred and destruction. In normal times this passion exists in a latent state, it emerges only in unusual circumstances; but it is a comparatively easy task to call it into play and raise it to the power of a collective psychosis. Here lies, perhaps, the crux of all the complex of factors we are considering, an enigma that only the expert in the lore of human instincts can resolve.[9]

The question he wished Freud to address was whether psychoanalysis could offer any hope that the individual might become proof against these destructive urges.

Freud’s reply consisted of an exploration of two basic psychoanalytic themes: civilization as a process which progressively repressed the instinctual drives biologically present in the human organism; and aggression as a product [though an indirect and partially controlled one] of these instinctual drives. The prospects for a future free of war would depend on the outcome of this elemental struggle between the process of civilization and the innate instinctual impulses.

Basic Premises: Civilization and Instinct

In outlining to Einstein his view of civilization as repressor of the instincts, Freud was reiterating a theme which had its origins in the earliest stages of psychoanalytic thinking. In May 1897 in a letter to his friend Wilhelm Fliess, Freud had observed that ‘civilization consists in progressive renunciation’.[10] Twelve years later he remarked, in the context of a paper by Alfred Adler on the psychology of Marxism, that ‘our civilization consists in an ever-increasing subjection of our instincts to repression’.[11] Freud’s conjectures on the origins of civilization were first outlined in Totem and Taboo published in 1913 in which he asserts that civilization began when the young males of the ‘primal horde’ rebelled against the dominant, female-monopolising patriarch. The rebellion was possible only by collective action and this could not be achieved without the relinquishment of instinctual gratification by those involved.

The new ‘civilization’ which then came into being was, therefore, built on the repression of hitherto untrammelled instincts and conditioned by the collective guilt over the parricide involved in its creation. It consolidated itself by the introduction of prohibitions [or taboos] which further suppressed the instinctual drives, one of the first and most significant being an insistence on exogamy which protected the community against any repetition of the original oedipal revolt.[12] In his letter to Einstein, Freud follows the development of civilization through to the emergence of the concepts of ‘law’ and ‘right’. Right, he suggests, ‘is the might of the community. It is still violence ready to be directed against any individual who resists it …’.[13] In this way the anger of the primal horde, disciplined through the renunciation of instinctual gratification and sharpened by guilt, had evolved into the sanctions of society against those who flout its rules.

The degree of control which civilization could exert over the instincts was, however, open to question. The process operated through the agency of the intellect and the instinctual drives, surging up from the unconscious, could only be suppressed by continuous struggle. Freud had considered this problem in the early part of the First World War when many of the comforting assumptions held by Europeans about both human and political behaviour which had developed in the relative peace of the preceding decades were being overturned. Despite his own initial enthusiasm for the Austro-German cause [which in fact was in marked contrast to the anti-war position of Einstein][14] he took a characteristically pessimistic view of the psychological origins of the conflict. In a letter written in December 1914 to a former colleague from his period in Paris, the Dutch non-analytical psychologist Frederic Van Eeden, Freud argued that the war confirmed two theses of psychoanalysis. Firstly, destructive impulses are kept in check by the intellect but constantly seek opportunities to express themselves and, secondly, the intellect is a weak guardian, easily overcome by the emotions which open the way for the revolt of the instincts:

Psychoanalysis has concluded from the dreams and parapraxes [mental slips] of healthy people, as well as from the symptoms of neurotics, that the primitive, savage and evil impulses of mankind have not vanished in any of its individual members, but persist, although in a repressed state, in the unconscious … and lie in wait for opportunities of becoming active once more. It has further taught us that our intellect is a feeble and dependent thing, a plaything and tool of our instincts and affects … If you will now observe what is happening in this wartime, all the cruelties and injustices for which the most civilized nations are responsible, the different way in which they judge their own lies and wrongdoings, and those of their enemies, at the general lack of insight which prevails – you will have to admit that psychoanalysis has been right in both its theses.[15]

This theme was pursued the following year in an article Freud wrote for the psychoanalytic journal Imago. In ‘Thoughts for the Time on War and Death’ he exhibits the disillusion of his Weltanschauung:

We had expected the great world-dominating nations of the white race upon whom the leadership of the human species has fallen, who were known to have world-wide interests as their concern, to whose creative powers were due not only our technical advances towards the control of nature but the artistic and scientific standards of civilization – we had expected these peoples to have succeeded in discovering another way of settling misunderstandings and conflicts of interest [that they] would have acquired so much comprehension of what they had in common, and so much tolerance for their differences, that ‘foreigner’ and ‘enemy’ could no longer be merged … into a single concept.[16]

But, he insists, in the psychoanalytic view people ‘have not sunk so low as we feared because they had never risen so high as we believed’. They were in fact merely withdrawing ‘for a while from the constant pressure of civilization … to grant a temporary satisfaction to the instincts which they had been holding in check’.[17] His colleague Karl Abraham, on reading the proofs of the article, pointed to the similarities between war and certain totemic orgies in which behaviour is sanctioned by the community which at other times would be regarded as intolerable.[18] Freud agreed with the observation and indeed the article contains one quite suggestive passage in this respect in which he speculates that ‘the state has forbidden to the individual the practice of wrongdoing, not because it desires to abolish it, but because it desires to monopolize it …’.[19] An interesting question arises here of the relationship between ‘civilization’, ‘community’ and ‘the state’. In the Imago essay he implies that the state and civilization are antipathetic to each other as the former is ready to exploit for its own purposes the instinctual drives which the latter is attempting to repress. It will be recalled, however, that in his theory of the origins of society outlined in Totem and Taboo and later in Why War? itself, he suggests that society is the product of civilization [through renunciation of the instincts] and, implicitly, that the modern state has developed from the early rule-making collective. This evident contradiction remains unresolved in his later writings.[20]

In his letter to Einstein, Freud’s conclusion on the relationship between the process of civilization and the phenomenon of war is boldly stated: ‘whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war’. The two most important psychological characteristics of the process were ‘a strengthening of the intellect, which is beginning to govern instinctual life, and an internalization of the aggressive impulses’.[21] Ultimately, however, ‘civilized’ people are not pacific by intellectual conviction but because they ‘are obliged to be for organic reasons’.[22] The repressive process of civilization has, in his view, brought about a phylogenetic change in those subjected to it. The ‘civilized’ human is, in short, biologically different from the ‘uncivilized’.

There can be detected here a fundamental change in Freud’s position from the time of the First World War. A central thesis of both the Van Eeden letter and the Imago article was that the intellect was an ineffectual brake on the instincts when once the emotions were brought into play. Civilization was a fragile construction subject to recurrent collapse through wars unleashed by the freeing of instinctive impulses. By the time of the Einstein letter, however, civilization has become a biological process whose subjects are not merely armed against instinctual impulses but constitutionally invulnerable to them.

The key to this revision is to be found in 1920 when Freud produced an entirely new theory of instincts replacing that which had governed psychoanalytic thought hitherto. Prior to this date the structure of the instincts was seen as a duality between, on the one side, the libidinal impulses of sexuality and on the other that of the drive for self-preservation. From 1920, however, a new bipolarity was postulated with the life instinct [or ‘eros’] opposed by a death instinct. This revised structure had far-reaching consequences both for clinical practice and for sociological speculation. At this point therefore it is necessary to shift attention from Freud’s views on civilization as an anti-instinctual process and look more closely at the nature of the instincts in question. Most importantly, Freud’s views on the relationship between these instincts and human aggressiveness must be examined. This, it will be recalled, was the second dominant theme of the Why War? correspondence.

The ‘Final’ Theory: Aggression and the Death Instinct

If the generality of Freud’s views on civilization and its repressive effect on instinctual impulses have a somewhat commonplace sound to late twentieth century ears, it is in part because of the impact that psychoanalytic thinking has had on the collective intellect. The more thoroughly yesterday’s insights become integrated in today’s systems of thought then the less startling they appear in reiteration. The second, related, theme in Freud’s letter to Einstein – that of aggression as a product of an inherent death instinct – is much less familiar. Partly this is due to its relative complexity but it is also because of its failure to find favour with either subsequent psychological theorists or the broader public.[23]

Although Freud’s ideas on aggression underwent a number of fundamental changes, one constant feature was that at no time did he see it as a primary instinct in its own right. Aggression was always viewed as either a component or an affect of another dominating drive. In 1909, when Alfred Adler began to explain anxiety as the product of suppressed primary aggression, Freud could not ‘bring [himself] to assume the existence of a special aggressive instinct alongside of the familiar instincts of self-preservation and sex, and on an equal footing with them’.[24] At this time Freud was still in the first of three more or less distinct phases of his thinking on aggression and the instincts. The first two of these belong to the period in which the duality of sex and self-preservation held sway. The third, on which his Why War? letter was based, belongs to the post-1920 period when the duality was redrawn as one between the life and death instincts.

In 1895 in their early presentation of psychoanalytic theory, Studies on Hysteria, Freud and his collaborator Josef Breuer saw aggression simply as a natural adjunct to male sexuality.[25] Ten Years later in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality Freud expanded on this by suggesting that male sexuality requires an element of aggression in order to overcome resistence from the sex object. Aggressiveness therefore was a ‘component instinct’ of the primary sexual one.[26] In this phase then aggression was placed firmly on the sex side of the polarity and, in a dialectical process, its expression was opposed by the self-preservative instinct. The ‘pleasure principle’ – which sought the reduction [through satisfaction] of the psychic tension [or ‘unpleasure’] generated by the sex instinct – was modified by the ‘reality principle’ which was associated with the drive for self-preservation. In 1915 the second phase began. Although the same instinctual duality was maintained, aggression had now passed across from the libidinal instinct to become an affect the of the self-preservative one. In Instincts and their Vicissitudes Freud argued that aggression was an early ego-reaction to the inflow of unwelcome stimuli. The ego, according to this latest view, protected the psyche by adopting an aggressive posture towards what it interpreted as the hostile encroachments of the outside world during the process of infantile development.[27]

The major watershed in Freud’s thinking on the relationship between the instincts and aggression, however, came with the publication of Beyond the Pleasure Principle in 1920. Sex and self-preservation were now no longer opposed to each other but united on one side of a new duality as the component parts of eros or the life instinct. This was opposed by a new postulation – that of a primary death instinct. The existence of the death instinct was posited on the basis of the already familiar principle of tension reduction which had hitherto explained the drives of the independent sex instinct. The tension reduction theory was neither new nor exclusively psychoanalytic.

Freud, though, now forced it to a new extreme. The return to ‘constancy’ which was the underlying aim of tension-reduction must ultimately, he argued, involve a return to the ‘pre-living’ condition. After the emergence of living matter on earth ‘the tension which then arose in what had hitherto been an inanimate substance endeavoured to cancel itself out. In this way the first instinct came into being: the instinct to return to the inanimate state’.[28] The ‘pleasure principle’ then could be said to have given way to the ‘nirvana principle’. And, what was more, the new primary instincts were not merely behavioural constructs but physically present within each living cell.[29] If civilization was itself a biological process, as suggested in Why War?, then the instincts which it was its function to repress must accordingly provide an organic focus for its activity.

At this point, of course, an obvious objection arises: if such a death instinct does indeed occupy all living matter then all life must be bent on self-destruction and suicide would be the ultimate instinctual achievement. According to Freud, however, the death instinct is confronted by its antithesis, eros. The erotic instinct acts to divert it from its self-destructive purpose by a process of ‘externalization’. Therefore, outwardly directed aggression ‘is the derivative and the main representative of the death instinct’.[30] The hypothesis was outlined for Einstein in these terms:

As the result of a little speculation, we have come to suppose that this instinct is at work in every living creature and is striving to bring it to ruin and to reduce life to its original condition of inanimate matter. Thus it quite seriously deserves to be called a death instinct, while the erotic instincts [sic] represent the effort to live. The death instinct turns into the destructive instinct when, with the help of special organs, it is directed outwards onto objects. The organism preserves its own life, so to say, by destroying an extraneous one. … If these forces are turned to destruction in the external world, the organism will be relieved and the effect must be beneficial. This would serve as a biological justification for all the ugly and dangerous impulses against which we are struggling. It must be admitted that they stand nearer to Nature than does our resistance to them.[31]

If, though, the self-destructive aspect of the death instinct is neutralized by externalization in the form of aggression, the question must be posed: why is conflict not perpetual? How is peace achieved even in the intervals between wars? Freud offers an implicit answer to this in Civilization and its Discontents by returning to his characterization of civilization as repressor of the instincts. The outwardly directed destructiveness is partially re-internalized by the process of civilization: ‘aggressiveness is introjected … it is, in point of fact, sent back to where it came from – that is, it is directed towards [the] ego’. There it is taken over by the super-ego and ‘is ready to put into action against the ego the same harsh aggressiveness that the ego would have liked to satisfy upon other, extraneous individuals’.[32] In this way civilization appears to protect itself not merely by the long-term process of repression of the instincts but also by the more immediate expedient of distorting their primary expression.

In Why War? Freud appears not altogether to have abandoned the earlier phases of his thinking on aggressiveness and the instincts. He suggests, for example, that some of the externalized aggression is put to the service both of sexual acquisition and self-preservation [views expressed respectively, it will be recalled, in 1905 in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality and in 1915 in Instincts and their Vicissitudes].[33] In the new formulation, however, this is evidently seen as a marginal process in which eros, now combining the one-time opposing libidinal and self-preservative instincts, ‘co-opts’ some of the force of its antagonist which has already been redirected outwards.

Briefly then, Freud’s ‘mature’ theory sees aggression as an outward directing of the death instinct effected, in the interests of self-preservation, by the life instinct. In turn, ‘civilization’ must cope with this released destructiveness and does so by introjecting it back into the individual [after the life instinct has expropriated a portion of it for its own uses]. On being re-internalized the aggression does not, however, return to its source in the unconscious – the id – to resume its primal drive towards inanimacy. Instead it becomes located in the super-ego [the seat of the ‘conscience’] where it is used to punish the ego for any transgressions of the behavioural rules acquired in infancy. In this way civilization bends the individual’s aggression to its own ends – and in so doing demonstrates its fundamental antipathy towards the free expression of the instinctual impulses.

Einstein’s purpose in the Why War? correspondence was not merely to determine Freud’s interpretation of the phenomenon of war; he wished also to elicit from psychoanalysis proposals for its elimination. In this, perhaps, lies one explanation of Freud’s underlying distaste for the project. Neither psychoanalysis as a general theory nor Freud as its originator had ever demonstrated much capacity for social prescription. Freud, although never politically active, might loosely be described as on the ‘Hobbesian right’.[34] The anti-utopianism implicit in his work is frequently expressed as opposition to the currently most popular model, Soviet communism. In Why War? the communist view – that aggression derives from material deprivation and will become extinct once all such needs are satisfied – is dismissed as an illusion.[35] Nevertheless, as the object of the exercise was to provide answers, Freud does his best with the fundamentally unpromising material provided by the psychoanalytic world-view. In places, the price even of this limited optimism is the contradiction of aspects of his previous writings.

According to Freudian theory, the death instinct operates through division and fragmentation while eros is concerned to unify into ever greater wholes. As he put it in Civilization and its Discontents, ‘civilization is a process in the service of eros, whose purpose is to combine single human individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations into one great unity’.[36] Thus, he concludes in Why War?, ‘anything that encourages the growth of emotional ties between men must operate against war’. ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself’ is cited as a difficult but nevertheless necessary aspiration in this respect.[37] As the process of civilization advances the instinctual urges will be further repressed. War as an expression of the externalized death instinct ought therefore to become both less frequent and less destructive.[38] This argument was in fact presented in a more tentative form in 1915 in ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ when Freud, abhorring the obliteration of ‘all moral acquisitions’ in wartime, hoped that this might be changed by ‘later stages of development’.[39]

Here, however, we can detect a considerable inconsistency in Freud’s hypothesis. If, as he maintains throughout his work, civilization continually strives to repress instinctual life as a whole, then both the death instinct and its opposite, eros, must be equally subject to the process. How then can eros act as the handmaiden of civilization as he suggests? Eros although the enemy of the death instinct is also the source of the sex drive and therefore ought properly to be subject to repression by the process of civilization as well. Indeed, one of Freud’s concerns in Why War? is that part of the price of civilization was an impairment in the sexual functioning of its beneficiaries as the libidinal aspect of the life instinct was repressed. His fear was that this might ‘perhaps be leading to the extinction of the human race [because] uncultivated races and backward strata of the population are already multiplying more rapidly than highly cultivated ones’. The biologically ‘uncivilized’ were numerically stronger than the ‘civilized’ as a result of their unrepressed life instinct. They were therefore in a better position to bring about the apocalypse through the exercise of their similarly unrepressed death instinct.[40]

Despite this laboured and self-contradictory search for an acceptably optimistic prognosis, the more familiar Freudian pessimism prevails. Whatever the theoretical feasibility of his proposals, the march of history may well bring them to nothing. The struggle of civilization to repress the instincts which create aggression and war must be carried out within a certain timescale with annihilation as a constant and increasing risk. in Freud’s view, the outcome of this struggle is far from predetermined: ‘an unpleasant picture comes to mind of mills that grind so slowly that people may starve before they get their flour’.[41]

The Limits of Speculation

We have already pointed up some immanent contradictions in Freud’s position – such as the unresolved ambiguity between civilization, community and state and the inconsistencies in his thinking on the repressive action of civilization on the life instinct. The arguments outlined in Why War? have, however, been challenged at a more fundamental level from two separate directions. Firstly, the entire edifice of Freud’s position is based on speculation unsupported [and indeed unsupportable] by empirical evidence. This is true both for his general theory of instincts and for his postulation of the death instinct in particular. Secondly, even if we are willing to accept these speculative hypotheses as providing a valid aetiology of human aggression, we are still faced with the problem of its eventual expression: literally, why war? This latter question of course is the crux of the matter as far as any possible Freudian contribution to International Relations theory is concerned. No explanation is offered for the manifestation of aggression in the specific form of conflict between states.

Throughout his writings Freud’s view of instincts betrayed a typically Germanic partiality to the notion of dialectic dualism. Despite changes in the nature of the poles [sex versus self-preservation giving way to life versus death] the bipolar structure was maintained. But what grounds other than theoretical symmetry are there for accepting such a duality? Its existence is asserted purely by intellectual fiat. Freud’s resistance to a polymorphic view of multiple primary instinctual drives comes in part from the intellectual tradition in which he developed. It was hardened, no doubt, by his characteristically fierce defensiveness in the face of the ‘dissidence’ of the early schismatics like Adler, Stekel and Jung who came to question his architecture of the instincts, its theoretical elegance notwithstanding. At no time does Freud provide any evidential case against, for example, the existence of a multiplicity of co-existing primary instincts.

Even if we accept Freud’s bipartite structure of the instincts we are still confronted by the problem of their nature. The concept of the death instinct is one which has found little support from subsequent generations of psychoanalytic theorists. Even orthodox Freudians, who as a group are not remarkable for their willingness to diverge from the original writ, have tended to gloss the idea of a primary death instinct by reference to vaguer concepts such as ‘the destructive drive’ and are more ready to accept non-instinctual factors such as frustration in the generation of aggression.[42]

Among the less orthodox neo-Freudians only the ‘right wing’ British school associated with the theories of Melanie Klein has retained the concept in anything like its original form while it has been most vigorously rejected by the sociologically-oriented ‘left wing’ schemes such as those of Karen Horney and Erich Fromm.[43] For the latter the implications of a death instinct are reactionary and defeatist.[44] And, in common with other commentators from outside psychoanalysis, they argue that a major problem with the concept – even as speculation – is that the only indications of its existence are to be found in its consequences.[45] The reality of the construct is extrapolated from its secondary manifestations. Violence exists as a verifiable phenomenon, it’s instinctual base however does not.

The death instinct is presented by Freud as the ultimate expression of the principle of tension reduction, the inherent tendency of all psychic activity to aim at the relief of the ‘unpleasure’ of stress. The basic notion of tension reduction has, however, been convincingly challenged. It has been shown in animal studies, for example, that in certain circumstances subjects will actively seek the stimulus of tension – and not merely as a contrived preliminary to its cathartic relief [the concept of ‘forepleasure’] as Freudians would suggest?[46] And, even if the tension reduction model is valid, does the postulation of a death instinct as its vehicle constitute a logical conclusion or merely a reductio ad adbsurdum? Prior to 1920 Freud’s ‘pleasure principle’ was based on the reduction of tension to ‘constancy’ resulting in a ‘stable degree of excitation’. The drive to inanimacy [the ‘nirvana principle’ on which the death instinct operates] has no more scientific legitimacy than the earlier formulation and considerably less support from contemporary psychology.[47]

Beyond these questions surrounding Freud’s theories on the origins of aggression, there are others to be raised concerning its forms. Fromm objects to the failure to distinguish between the various manifestations of aggressiveness whatever its source. What determines why externally directed aggression should express itself in one type of behaviour rather than another? Sadism, destructiveness, mastery and the will-to-power are all different expressions of human aggression which, he suggests, must be considered separately. Even if they do derive from the same redirected death instinct, Freud provides no elaboration of the process of differentiation which occurs in the course of externalization.[48] In other words, there is no effective attempt to integrate instinctual behaviour with its social manifestations. Although Fromm’s concern here is with individual psychopathology, it hints at the problem of political expression touched on earlier. What is the connection between human aggression and international war and what determines that the former should be expressed in the form of the latter?

The Freudian scheme is supremely subjective; it is concerned wholly with the individual and the psychic origins of his or her behaviour. In contrast to some of his contemporary ‘depth’ psychologists and many of his subsequent revisers, Freud had no great interest in the teleology of behaviour – the social ends which it sought to achieve.[49] Consequently, orthodox psychoanalysis has had little to contribute to social psychology. Freud’s level of analysis was the individual, not the social system within which he or she interacted with others. This lacuna obstructs the making of connections between the instinctual theory of the origins of aggression and its political expression in war. As one writer has observed, ‘there is always the missing link in these fascinating speculations … between the fundamental nature of man and the outbreak of war’.[50] It is the failure to provide this link in the letter to Einstein which makes Why War? a particularly inapt title for the published exchange.
Aggression and War: Inferring a Link

In various places in his writing, Freud does in fact touch on such ‘political’ subjects as group behaviour and the nature of leadership. While ‘social psychology’ in the sense of the operation of social ‘systemic’ pressures on the individual has no significant place in the Freudian scheme, the role of the individual in shaping the ‘system’ is given some consideration. Is there anything in this aspect of Freud’s work which might allow the connections between instinctual aggression and its manifestation in warfare to be made, so to speak, on his behalf?

In 1914 in his essay On Narcissism Freud wrote of the ‘ego-ideal’, which was the conceptual predecessor of the conscience-wielding super-ego. As well as its individual side it had social manifestations as ‘the common ideal of a family, a class or nation.’[51] Loyalty to [and by extension, one must suppose, violence on behalf of] the state was interpreted in terms of the oedipal relationship formed between infant and father in early childhood development. In later life the nation might displace the father but it too exerts an unconscious influence over the individual.

This draws its force from two characteristics of the oedipus complex: fear of punishment and the need for approval. The theme was developed further in 1921 in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego. Here Freud suggests that all groups in society are unconscious echos of the ‘primal horde’ first described in Totem and Taboo. And, the ‘leader of the group is still the dreaded primal father [who] is the group ideal which governs the ego in the place of the ego-ideal’.[52] This basic structure is, however, adaptable in its social manifestations. The primal father might be represented not by a leader but by an ideology. Similarly, the love relationship with the ego-ideal might take a negative form and the group would then cohere through shared hatred of a particular object or belief.[53] Here, perhaps, a mechanism for the differentiation of aggressiveness suggests itself. A ‘constructive’ focus for the externalization of aggression may be provided for the group through this ‘negative’ ego-ideal.

Freud expanded on the political implications of group cohesion a few years later in his treatise on religion, The Future of an Illusion, where he referred to the ‘narcissistic satisfaction’ provided by a cultural ideal which had the effect of combatting intra-cultural conflict. Here he suggests that a positive ego-ideal in the form of ‘national’ identity can combine with its negative form – hatred of the outsider:

This satisfaction can be shared in not only by the favoured classes but also by the suppressed ones, since the right to despise the people outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer within their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen one has one’s share in the task of ruling other nations and dictating their laws. This identification of the suppressed classes with the class who rules and exploits them is, however, only part of a larger whole. For, on the other hand, the suppressed classes can be emotionally attached to their masters; in spite of their hostility to them they may see in them their ideals; unless such relations of a fundamentally satisfying kind subsisted, it would be impossible to understand how a number of civilizations have survived so long in spite of the justifiable hostility of large human masses.[54]

The ego-ideal in a cultural form therefore is seen as a force operating in the interests of political cohesion. It does so through the enhancement of group – or national – identity. The first stage is the displacement of the oedipal relationship from the father to the political unit. This is then reinforced through contrast with the ‘non-group’ [or non-national] outsider. Freud in fact refers to this tendency, although only tangentially, in Why War? when dismissing the utopian claims of Soviet communism; the Russians themselves, he observed, ‘are armed today with the most scrupulous care and not the least important of the methods by which they keep their supporters together is hatred of everyone beyond their frontiers’.[55]

Where might we locate the point of contact between the primary death instinct and this process of oedipal displacement? The death instinct, according to Civilization and its Discontents, is first externalized as aggression and then partly introjected back to the psyche where it is put at the disposal of the super-ego. The super-ego, it will be recalled, was originally characterized as the ego-ideal. Both concepts represent the displacement of the oedipal relationship from the father. Freud argued, as we have seen, that this displacement may take the form of national or ideological identification. Or, it may manifest itself in a negative form as a communal hate-object. In these circumstances, the introjected aggression commanded by the ego-ideal/super-ego might be said to undergo a process of externalization once more – this time expressed collectively; in short, as war. This secondary externalization which is socially legitimised might then be said to take command of that ‘natural’, unfocussed aggression which had not been introjected to the super-ego. The co-option of this ‘free-floating’ aggression by the super-ego might be explained by the Freudian concept of ‘cathexis’ – the concentration of psychic energies into one channel.

But, of course, there is an clear danger of going too far in such attempts at integration. We must be wary of making such theoretical connections in Freud’s name. The conceptual platform on which this type of theoretical extension must be built is, as we have observed, itself rather insecure. Having questioned the intellectual basis of the original theory, such an exercise is of doubtful legitimacy both in itself and also in its tendency to repeat the type of unsupportable speculation around which fundamental objections to the Freudian view have been based.

In addition to criticisms of the basic premises and the internal logic of the theory, others have been made from the perspective of International Politics as a field of study – the main one on which the hypotheses impinge. The idea of a monistic explanation of such a central concept as war has long been unacceptable to students of International Relations. As one scholar of Freud’s social theory has complained, ‘plunging below war, psychology turns up varieties of “aggression” as if these somehow subsume diplomatic history and the development of modern weapons’.[56] Generally speaking, the sub-systemic, sub-state microcosmic level of analysis is little considered in contemporary International Relations theory.

The prevailing orthodoxies of British and American thought on International Politics have differed in focus and methodology but have been generally united in their commitment to collectivities [whether states or ‘systems’] as the basic levels of analysis. Freudianism, with its rejection even of the dynamic dimension of social psychology, is non-collective and microcosmic to the ultimate degree.[57] On grounds both of its mono-causal nature and its unit of analysis, therefore, the psychoanalytic theory of war finds little favour in its second half-century.

All this notwithstanding, however, the Freudian ‘presence’ in late twentieth century social thought is pervasive – both as a significant orthodoxy in its own right and as the starting point for subsequent and, for many, more credible revisions. Moreover, historically the decade of the 1930s was clearly one of immense significance for the whole question of inter-state conflict and its avoidance. Psychoanalysis was one of the most significant intellectual movements of the period. The Why War? correspondence brought these historical and intellectual concerns together by attempting to elicit an answer to the former from the theories of the latter. However unsatisfactory the results of the exercise and however much the central theories involved have been superseded by modification and revision, it remains one of considerable significance in the history of European ideas in the inter-war period.

NOTES:

[1] James Strachey, Editor’s Note to Why War? [1933], The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Standard Edition [London 24 volumes 1953-74] [hereinafter SE] Volume XXII [1964], p.197.

[2] Ibid, p.199.

[3] ‘He is cheerful, full of himself and agreeable. He understands as much about psychology as I do about physics and we had a very pleasant talk’. Quoted in Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work [Volume III] The Last Phase: 1919-1939 [London 1957], p.139.

[4] Ibid, p.164.

[5] Ibid, p.187.

[6] Quoted in William Clark, Freud: the Man and the Cause [New York 1980], pp.485-86.

[7] An Autobiographical Study [1925/1935 Postscript], SE XX [1959], p.72.

[8] Why War?, p.200.

[9] Ibid, p.201.

[10] Quoted in Jones III, p.359.

[11] Ibid, p.360-61.

[12] Totem and Taboo [1913], SE XIII [1953], pp.141-46.

[13] Why War?, p.205.

[14] Ernest Jones, his official biographer, observed: ‘Freud’s immediate response to the declaration of war was an unexpected one. One would have supposed that a pacific savant of fifty-eight would have greeted it with simple horror, as so many did. On the contrary, his first response was rather one of youthful enthusiasm, apparently a reawakening of the military ardours of his boyhood’. Sigmund Freud: Life and Work [Volume II] Years of Maturity 1901-1919 [London 1967], p.192.

[15] Letter to Frederic Van Eeden [1914], SE XIV [1957], pp.301-02.

[16] ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’ [1915], SE XIV pp.276-77.

[17] Ibid, p.285.

[18] Jones II, p.415.

[19] ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, p.279.

[20] It is certainly true that Freud found little to admire in the political processes of the state. In the Freudian view, as represented by Philip Rieff, ‘the state holds no promise of elevating human nature, except through irrational and transient enthusiasms; in general, the state epitomizes the worst elements of human desire’. ‘Psychology and Politics: the Freudian Connection’, World Politics, Vol.7 No.2 [January 1955], p.299. Yet it is difficult to reconcile this distaste with the implied acceptance of the state as the institutional embodiment of the civilization process.

[21] Why War?, pp.214-15.

[22] Ibid, p.214.

[23] Several writers from within psychoanalysis have provided accounts of varying usefulness of Freud’s theories of the instincts and aggression. The most concise is that given by the editor of the Standard Edition of the Collected Works, James Strachey, in his introduction to Civilization and its Discontents [1930], SE XXI [1961], pp.ix-xiii. Another orthodox Freudian examination is offered by Rose Edgcumbe in her chapters on ‘The Death Instinct’ and the ‘Aggressive Drive’ in Humberto Nagera [ed], Basic Psychoanalytic Concepts on the Theory of Instincts [London 1970], pp.67-70 and 71-79. Perhaps the most exhaustive and challenging exploration is that by the Marxist neo-Freudian Erich Fromm in ‘Freud’s Theory of Aggressiveness and Destruction’ which forms an appendix to The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness [London 1974], pp.439-78.

[24] Analysis of a Phobia in a Five Year-Old Boy [‘Little Hans’] [1909], SE X [1955], p.140. This was at the time of the final conflict between Freud and Adler which ended with the latter’s departure from the Vienna circle. It is perhaps reasonable to suppose that Freud’s deep resentment against his one-time collaborator helped to confirm rejection of the concept of an autonomous aggressive instinct.

[25] Studies on Hysteria [1895], SE II [1955], p.246.

[26] Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality [1905], SE VII [1953],pp.157-58. Freud argued here that sadism was the consequence of the disordering of the relationship in which the aggressive component usurped the primary position.

[27] Instincts and their Vicissitudes [1915], SE XIV, p.137.

[28] Beyond the Pleasure Principle [1920], SE XVIII [1955], p.38.

[29] Ibid, p.40.

[30] Civilization and its Discontents, p.122.

[31] Why War?, p.211.

[32] Civilization and its Discontents, p.123. Freud was able to ‘locate’ the process in this way as a result of the formulation of his structural theory in The Ego and the Id [1923], SE XIX [1961], pp.19-39. Here he introduced the now widely familiar tripartite concept of the psyche. The ‘id’ was the seat of the instincts and the successor to the earlier concept of the unconscious; the ‘ego’, a term already widely used to describe the conscious self, was now defined more closely as an excrescence of the id which mediates between it [the id] and the outside world; the ‘super-ego’ is the portion of the psyche which assimilates parental prohibitions and acts, approximately, as conscience.

[33] ‘The instinct for self-preservation is certainly of an erotic kind, but it must nevertheless have aggressiveness at its disposal if it is to fulfil its purpose. So, too, the instinct of love, when it is directed towards an object, stands in need of some contribution from the instinct for mastery if it is in any way to obtain possession of that object’. Why War?, pp.209-10.

[34] Freud’s own political outlook and his view of himself as ‘a liberal of the old school’ is discussed by Paul Roazen in Freud and his Followers [London 1975], pp.518-19.

[35] Why War?, pp.211-12.

[36] Civilization and its Discontents, p.122.

[37] Why War?, p.212. In the earlier work however the same precept is seen as not merely difficult but impossible – and ridiculed by Freud in consequence. Civilization and its Discontents, pp.109-11.

[38] Why War?, pp.213-14.

[39] ‘Thoughts for the Times on War and Death’, p.288.

[40] Why War?, p.214.

[41] Ibid, p.213.

[42] Not even that most loyal of his followers, Ernest Jones, could summon up much enthusiasm when he dealt with that part of Freud’s theory in his official biography; Jones III, pp.297-300.

[43] The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ here are meant in a figurative rather than an explicitly political sense following the usage of J.A.C. Brown in his Freud and the Post-Freudians [Harmondsworth 1964], p.129. Both Horney and Fromm were however on the political left as well.

[44] As Karen Horney puts it, ‘If man is inherently destructive and consequently unhappy, why strive for a better future?’; New Ways in Psychoanalysis [London 1939], p.132. Interestingly, some support for the death instinct is offered from the left by Marcuse who sees it at work in the psychic destructiveness of modern industrial capitalism and thus takes up the unlikely position of defender of Freudian orthodoxy against its progressive critics; Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization [Boston 1955], pp.270-73.

[45] See, for example, Alasdair MacIntyre’s critique of the Marcusian position in this respect in Marcuse [London 1970], p.50.

[46] See Leonard Berkowitz, Aggression: a Social-Psychological Analysis [New York 1962], pp.9-11 for an account of the experimental evidence against the ‘nirvana principle’.

[47] Fromm discusses Freud’s changing position on the principle of tension reduction in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, pp.472-478.

[48] Ibid, p.470.

[49] This concentration on the aetiology of neurosis – and particularly on its sexual basis – was of course a major factor in Freud’s break first of all with Adler and then with Jung. The social ‘purposes’ of neurotic behaviour were later explored by analysts such as Fromm, Horney and Harry Stack Sullivan in the 1930s and 1940s. As a result, the Adler school, during its subsequent decline, insisted that this group was neo-Adlerian rather than neo-Freudian. See, for example Heinz L. Ansbacher and Rowena R. Ansbacher, The Individual Psychology of Alfred Adler, [London 1958], pp.16-17.

[50] Werner Levi, ‘On the Causes of War and the Conditions of Peace’, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol.4 No.4 [December 1960], p.415. Levi points out that what ‘these [psychological] explanations fail to do is to indicate how these human factors are translated into violent conflict involving all citizens, regardless of their individual nature, and performed through a highly complex machinery constructed over a period of years for just such a purpose’.

[51] On Narcissism [1914], SE XIV. p.101.

[52] Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego [1921], SE XVIII, p.127.

[53] Ibid, p.100. As one of Freud’s most ‘political’ works, Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego has attracted the attention of a number of political theorists. See for example Paul Roazen, Freud: Political and Social Thought [London 1969], pp.226-32 and Philip Rieff, ‘Origins of Freud’s Political Thought’, Journal of the History of Ideas, XVII [April 1956], pp.235-249.

[54] The Future of an Illusion [1927], SE XXI, p.9.

[55] Why War?, p.212.

[56] Philip Rieff, ‘Psychology and Politics’, p.305.

[57] The decade after the end of the Second World War appears to have been something of a high-water mark for applications of psychoanalytic thought to political theory with major works by T.W. Adorno, Harold Laswell and Herbert Marcuse bringing Freudian insights to such questions as authority and alienation. By the mid-1960s however the Freudian vogue seemed largely to have passed.

Norrie MacQueen – Department of Political Science and Social Policy, University of Dundee

“Climate change is a risk to the stability of the global financial system,” Casten said. “This bill presents a market-based solution to understand the impact of a changing climate on companies and provide investors, lenders, and insurers with better information.” . . .. https://www.climateliabilitynews.org/2019/07/17/sec-climate-risks-disclosure/

In particular, this letter highlights some systematic violations of human rights in Egypt. While we acknowledge that you may well be aware of certain issues raised in this letter, we bring them to light due to the appalling situation and gravity of the violations…

https://www.civicus.org/index.php/media-resources/news/3972-cso-s-letter-to-the-african-union-commission-about-the-state-of-human-rights-in-egypt