Just War: A Select Bibliography

Noam Chomsky, “An Exception to the Rules,” Inquiry, vol. 1, no. 11, (April 17, 1978). A review of Michael Walzer’s Just and Unjust Wars concentrating on the exceptions that Walzer makes for the Israeli government.

_______ “The Rule of Force in International Affairs,” in For Reasons of State (New York: Random House, 1973). a review of Telford Taylor’s Nuremberg and Vietnam.

Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1959). Discussion of the dispute among sixteenth-century Spanish philosophers over whether the Indians were inferior and whether war against them was justified. One of Hanke’s many excellent books on the subject.

James Turner Johnson, Ideology, Reason and the Limitation of War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975). History of the development of just war doctrine from 1200 to 1740.

H.D. Lewis, “The Non-Moral Notion of Collective Responsibility,” in Peter A. French, ed., Individual and Collective Responsibility (Cambridge, Mass.: Schenkman, 1972). Excellent criticism of the notion that society in general rather than individuals can be held morally responsible.

Richard A. Wasserstrom, ed., War and Morality (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth, 1970). An anthology of twentieth century philosophical writings on war, the most useful of which is John C. Ford’s on obliteration bombing.

Williamson M. Evers is Editor of Inquiry magazine.