Review of the book by Norman Walter (1950) - The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare: Being a New Theory of the Cause of War and an Inquiry into the Possibility of War-Prediction. London: The Mitre Press, pp.208, ISBN: 978-0705191319

Abstract

This book review is long overdue. The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare was printed in 1950 in London, which makes this review late by seventy years. To my knowledge, even the publisher doesn't exist anymore. However, many of its readers agree that this one is of the most underrated books on the topic of polemology ever. Among those readers was Anthony Burgess, the author of A Clockwork Orange (1962), who wrote that it is "shamefully neglected" (Burgess et al., 1970, p. 322). Considering that this critique came from a novelist whose work on extreme and grotesque violence marked the second half of the 20th century and changed the way we have viewed gratuitous violence forever thanks to S. Kubrick's masterpiece film (1971) that was inspired by it, maybe it is time to look back and examine this volume.The Sexual Cycle of Human Warfare was written by a former British colonel, Norman Walter. Nowadays, the book belongs to what we would call 'the rare books' and it is almost impossible to purchase a hardcopy. Luckily, few fans of social sciences and those interested in human behaviour have made it possible for potential readers to access it online 1 . The forward to this book was written by an anonymous author (N.I. McN.W) in October 1948, two years before the volume was actually published. This is a significant detail because it offers a historical framework to this volume: it means that it was written immediately after WWII, hence the author's need and desire to elaborate on the phenomenon of war drastically differently from the fashionable theories of that time. This after-war era was an intellectually stimulating period: Raphael Lemkin published https://securityandefence.pl/