Head and Heart: The Dilemmas of American Attitudes Toward War

In recent years, Afghanistan and Iraq have drawn new attention to an old subject: American attitudes toward warfare. This essay surveys the existing literature to approach this problem through the interlocking factors of reason and feeling. At first, Americans reconciled these factors, and justified their wars, because republicanism, romantic nationalism, and Victorian culture created the comforting sense of a chosen nation in an orderly, moral cosmos. When two world wars and the Great Depression produced modernist doubt, Americans used nationalism, pragmatism, and faith in technology to guide and sustain them. By the late twentieth century, however, modernist challenges to old universals in a larger and more pluralistic society became harder to reconcile as debates over wars polarized along emotional extremes, while reason’s proponents clung to a precarious middle ground. Currently, the prospect of a revived consensus appears remote.