If anything, the focus on the omnipresence of self-interest understates the motivational diffculty. Albert Hirschman (1977) has traced the effort 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 confidence 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 stifling constraints of bourgeois life. Courage, sacrifice, brutality, and death were the coin of the military
realm.