If anything, the focus on the omnipresence of self-interest understates the
motivational diYculty. Albert Hirschman (1977) has traced the eVort of social
theorists, starting in the seventeenth century, to replace the politics of the passions
(aristocratic as well as religious) with the politics of the interests. Commercial
society, it was hoped, would mute aggression and reduce violence. Fear for one’s
life and livelihood would tame the unruly excesses of the human spirit. This thesis
culminated in the Edwardian conWdence that the spread of trade and commercial
relations had rendered war among developed nations unthinkable. The First World
War delivered what turned out to be a permanent blow to this shallow optimism.
Many young men eagerly embraced warfare as an antidote to the stiXing constraints
of bourgeois life. Courage, sacriWce, brutality, and death were the coin of the military
realm