This is a book about patterns. A common pattern in books is that the preface
is read first, but often written last, or in this case, among the last things written. Because prefaces are among the last things and they deal with beginnings
and endings, they have a certain metaphysical quality to them. They are short
pieces of reflection about a body of work that is being born and a peek at the
intellectual lives that produce them. This is especially the case with this preface. It begins a book, which has, in one way or another, occupied our intellectual lives for nine years, and it comes at the end of the life of Paul Senese,
who died a few days before the completion of the draft submitted to Princeton University Press.
I write from Buffalo, Paul’s home, the morning after his funeral, trying to
complete what will be the capstone of our collaboration together. This is a
book about war, and the factors that make human beings, all too frequently,
collectively kill each other in large numbers. Paul and I were drawn together
by a mutual scientific interest in this question—in terms of explaining it and
perhaps providing some knowledge that might some day aid in reducing the
probability of war—but not so much by a mutual political interest in the
question. We did not really know much about each other’s politics when we
began the book, and I think it came as a pleasant surprise to each of us, the
extent to which our concern with the subject stemmed from the normative
position of nonviolence, although the book itself does not deal with that normative position.