Customer Reviews

The Great Illusion: 1933 (World affairs: national and international viewpoints)

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The above review by "Lee T" is inaccurate and poorly supported.

First, the premise of The Great Illusion is not that war is "inconceivable," but that it is an "economic impossibility for one nation to seize or destroy the wealth, or for one nation to enrich itself by subjugating another". So yes, war is conceivable, it's simply ill-advised.

If you've read any of Norman's other works, you would know that the Fruits of Victory (1921 shows how the results of World War I DID bore out the propositions first explained in The Great Illusion.

Accordingly, if you read and truly understand this seminal piece of work, you will most certainly not agree with the asinine notion that people must "wake up and smell the gunpowder."

A must read for modern pundits -- if you update the language slightly it would read exactly as if it were written by a modern idealist political pundit.

The premise is that world economies, particularly on continental Europe, are so interdependent, and the disruption of these economic ties would be so devastating to all concerned, that it is inconceivable that there will ever be another major war on the European continent. The author was the toast of the European cocktail circuit, and his treatise was lauded by all. It was written in 1910 and originally published in 1913. For all those pushing the same ideas today, wake up and smell the gunpowder....