Kenneth Anderson, Washington College of Law, American University, has posted Time Out of Joint, his review of War Time: An Idea, Its History, Its Consequences by Mary L. Dudziak, which will appear in volume 91 of Texas Law Review. Here is the abstract:
The meaning of time in war is the topic of legal historian Mary L. Dudziak's 2012 book. This extended review essay (30 pp) considers both on its own terms of cultural criticism, and then from the standpoint of rationalist and realist critics. The book's overall cultural claim is that time in war is its own category and has effects and meaning in war independent of the considerations of security, liberty, and necessity in war that are often thought to be all that matters, with time merely an dependent cultural phenomenon.Read more »
Dudziak argues that American culture is long disposed to regard war as an extraordinary time, compared with the "normal" time of peace, a disposition reinforced by America's experience in World War II, World War I, and the Civil War, which each had sharp beginnings and endings. This sense that war is temporary helps soothe acceptance of supposedly short lived suppressions of liberty in the name of emergency and security. She argues that wartime has been historically far less fixed than the American historical imagination believes, and that particularly in the war on terror, as with the Cold War, war time that is seemingly has no end brings about cultural changes that alter the culture of peacetime liberties permanently. The book concludes by arguing for resistance to the idea of war as temporary, and resistance to the idea that the tradeoffs that she finds in the war on terror should be understood as temporary.