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Jonathan Schell
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The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence and the Will of the People Hardcover – Bargain Price, March 25, 2004

by Jonathan Schell (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 27 ratings
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Throughout history civilisation has been shaped by war. Now, after a century of unprecedented devastation, it seems humankind is preparing to embark on another cycle of violence. Are we condemned to be in a state of perpetual warfare?Jonathan Schell has consistently been one of the most influential and eloquent voices in the debate about global warfare and the arms race. His bestseller, The Fate of the Earth, focussed on the case for nuclear disarmament and may have halped shape two decades of thinking about man?s relationship with agents of destruction. Now, as the international order is once more in a state of upheaval, Schell has written another provocative book that aims to point the way out of the bloodshed of the twentieth century.Schell strives to show how the underlying dynamics of history have often been shaped not by military actions, but by battles for the hearts and minds of the people. His close re-examinations of the British, French and Russian revolutions, the collapse of Soviet power in eastern Europe in 1989, the war in Vietnam and other key moments in history illustrate how all these events can be understood in a new way when viewed through the prism of non-violence. Schell?s aim is to show that there is, and always has been, an alternative to war as a way of directing human society.
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  1. Print length
    448 pages
  2. Publisher
    Allen Lane
  3. Publication date
    March 25, 2004
  4. Dimensions
    6.69 x 1.46 x 9.45 inches
  5. See all details
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Top reviews from the United States

  • Indigo With Stars
    5.0 out of 5 stars The real skinny on non-violent action for positive change
    Reviewed in the United States on September 30, 2014
    Verified Purchase
    Fascinating book on the history of war and of non-violent action, and the surprising ability of people committed to nonviolence to triumph over their violent and autocratic oppressors. Whether you are fascinated by history (as I am) or looking for positive avenues for societal change (as I am, also), this book is an indepensible addition to your library. Note: Don't be put off by the long chapters about the history of war at the beginning. Or, skip them.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Pdxman
    5.0 out of 5 stars How the world works explained well
    Reviewed in the United States on July 27, 2012
    Verified Purchase
    The book my be getting a little old now, but I think it still applies thoroughly. The basic point is that nuclear weapons make conventional war impossible between major powers and guerrilla war (now called terrorism) makes military subjugation by outside powers largely impossible. Well expanded upon with historical context and sound reasoning. If only Dick Cheney and W had read it before we squandered our empire in Iraq and Afghanistan.
    2 people found this helpful
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  • thomas e.
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on June 22, 2015
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    Quality book in fine condition delivered in a timely way. Thanks.
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  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on February 10, 2017
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    Excellent, hard read but important.
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  • Peter-S
    5.0 out of 5 stars Power In The People
    Reviewed in the United States on January 17, 2004
    Schell's identification of the phenomenon of "people's war," the
    bottom-up fight for freedom waged by colonized peoples over the last 250
    years is nothing short of revolutionary. The basis of the analytical framework he builds to explicate the different varieties of colonial oppression and local resistance, Schell historicizes people's war in its most important incarnations starting with the Spanish resistance to Napoleon's invasion, moving through Gandhi's non-violent formulation which he developed in South Africa and employed against the British in India, discussing how this form of resistance taken up by Martin Luther King to fight the people's war against the squalid Jim Crow regime in the American South. He notes that over time, "people's war" has been successful more often than it has not, that colonial regimes cannot win against forces which refuse to fight using oppressor's tactics, or use the narrow forms of redress, such as "working through the system," which are offered by those in power under the head of democracy.
    He begins by examining the great military strategist Von Clausewitz's theory of warfare. In a section that it perhaps somewhat overlong, Schell takes apart Clausewitz in light of the changes in warfare since Clausewitz's time. Clausewitz did witness the first examples of total war in which every citizen was enlisted in the war as either a soldier or as a possible target of war -- the great "democratic" army of Napoleon, and wrote about it in contrast to prior European wars where relatively small forces of men fought limited conflicts for their aristocratic masters. What Clausewitz could not see was that with the emergence of the atomic bomb, total war was extended beyond competing nations, their peoples and ideologies, to include the entire world and the possible destruction of humanity. He notes, as does Jeremi Suri does in his history of the post-nuclear age, POWER AND THE PEOPLE, that the possession of nuclear weapons and the protests such weapons engendered (including the proxy wars fought by client states which became a feature of the post WWII landscape and were much more likely to end a global conflagration than skirmishes before the bomb) ultimately served to push together the Soviet Union and United States out of fear of their own people.
    Schell also discusses various theories of power, including the Hobbesian justification of power, the Weberian observation that the state holds power by reserving the right to violence. He upends a lot of this theory by noting that fear and intimidation only work for so long. Eventually people begin, like water freezing in a crack in the sidewalk, to break apart the structures of such regimes. He discusses how Vaclav Havel and his friends during the Soviet occupation initiated a small scale alternative "government" which sought to deliver minimal social goods, a stop that worked to give citizens a way to see they could exert control over their own lives even in the shadow of the totalitarian state. This strategy that has been used since the American elite formed the Committees of Correspondence and the Continental Congress to throw off the oppressive economic policies of their colonial masters. The "people's government" was in place and thus Washington's task was to outlast his opponents so that this government could take its rightful place -- a strategy which has been used in successful "people's war" ever since. Once the state is made irrelevant, it ceases to exist, an analysis growing out of Hannah Arendt's discussions of power.
    It is hard to do justice to a work like this in a short review. Schell advances a fairly radical theory here, but his evidence is sound, his argument is clear and straightforward (although a bit repetitive). Perhaps most compelling in this age of "terror," Schell helps us see that resistance against colonial powers and homegrown totalitarian regimes has a long history, and that for the most part, that people's war has been successful.
    21 people found this helpful
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  • TBD
    4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting.
    Reviewed in the United States on May 8, 2008
    I bought this book about 2 years ago, but I just recently got around to reading it after some recent related posts:

    [...]

    So I read through the book with those posts in mind, along with looking for 5GW ideas ([...] )and xGW ideas in general.

    My notes:

    * The book of course doesn't use terminology like 4GW and 5GW, but it is in the ballpark.
    * The book does outline its own conflict taxonomy: Total War (think 2GW and 3GW), People's War (think 4GW) and Non-violent Action and Activism (think 5GWish).
    * He does not quite get all the way to a 5GW theory though.
    * 5GW-ish Examples used: Ghandi, MLK, non-violent movements in eastern Europe and Russia that (helped) bring down the USSR.
    * The People's War Section (aka 4GW) covers Mao and China, and Vietnam.
    * "It was the genius of the inventors of people's war to challenge this deceptively self-evident proposition [Pslog: That an enemy is defeated when they are ready to do are will] by discovering, in the very midst of battle, the power of politics. What if, the inventor's of people's war asked, the people on the losing side declines to do the will of the conqueror and, taking a further step, organized itself politically to conduct its own business? In people's war, political organization did not stand on its own; it was interwoven with the military struggle into Mao's seamless fabric."
    * The general purpose strategies for states in relations among each other are: Universal Empire (aggressive), seeking to maintain a balance of power (defensive), collective security by a group a sates pooling together.
    * Quoting a 5GW statements of John Adams on the American Revolution: "The revolution was in the minds of the people, and in the union of the colonies, both of which were accomplished before hostilities commenced"
    * He is a lefty, and found those parts of the book off-putting.
    * I quite liked the historical parts on China, Ghandi and MLK.
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Julian y
    5.0 out of 5 stars Courageous, well researched and readable.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 21, 2003
    Verified Purchase
    To write a book about nonviolence in the wake of 9/11 takes a rare sort of intellectual bravery. But Schell, who spent more than a decade researching and writing the book, pulls no punches. "In a steadily and irreversibly widening sphere, violence, always a mark of human failure and a bringer of sorrow, has now also become dysfunctional as a political instrument," he writes.
    This is more than a book supporting pacifism. Schell does not argue against military intervention per se. Rather, his thesis is that military power is not only becoming an increasingly ineffective political tool, but one that creates more problems than it solves.
    This is an important, accessible book, that will no doubt join the works of Paul Kingsnorth and Naomi Klein as one of the 'must reads' for those involved in the anti-globalization movement.
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