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COMMENTARY: HISTORY FROM ANCIENT TO MODERN

Steven Pinker quotes the historian F.H. Hinsley, who wrote:

Historians are, rightly, nearly unanimous that ... the causes of the Second World War were the personality and the aims of Adolf Hitler.

Pinker quotes John Keegan as agreeing. Keegan: "Only one European really wanted war -- Adolf Hitler." And Pinker quotes the political scientist John Mueller, who wrote that if Hitler had died anytime before September 1939 "Europe's greatest war would most probably never have happened." (The Better Angels of Or Nature, p. 208-09)

In my opinion it is easy to ignore social context in developments and to over-emphasize the power of a single individual. Had Hitler never existed, probably World War I would have emerged the same as it did and German politics would have remained the same through the 20's and 30's. Whoever emerged as fuhrer of the fascist party in Germany might have been as eager to undo the Versailles Treaty and to push Poland back from Danzig.

No German politician could have led his nation into a war against Poland if Germans in 1939 viewed war as Germans in general do today -- the social context. It was this social context that allowed Hitler to create war in 1939 and might have produced a war under another fascist leader.