War & Peace Quote by Roger Nash Baldwin

Baldwin’s line reads like a quiet ultimatum: if we’re serious about retiring war, we can’t just wish violence away; we have to build something sturdier than goodwill to take its place. The “rule of law” here isn’t courtroom etiquette or civics-class piety. It’s a rival system for settling conflict, one designed to absorb power struggles without letting them default to force.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “Always basic to my thinking” signals a long-held conviction, but “now takes on a new relevance” admits history has changed the stakes. Baldwin lived through two world wars and the rise of modern state power; after 1945, “a world where, if war is to go” suggests the dawning reality that industrialized conflict is no longer merely tragic but existential. The conditional “if” is the tell: peace isn’t inevitable, it’s a political project.

Subtext: Baldwin is arguing against both romantic pacifism and hard-nosed realpolitik. Pacifism that treats war as a moral failure misses the institutional question of what enforces restraint. Realpolitik that treats force as the final arbiter becomes, in Baldwin’s view, an admission of civic laziness: refusing to do the painstaking work of creating rules that bind even the strong.

Context matters: as a civil-liberties activist, Baldwin also understood law’s double edge. Law can curb power, or launder it. His intent, then, is not blind faith in statutes but a demand for legitimate, rights-based legal order capable of commanding consent. He’s saying the alternative to war isn’t peace; it’s governance.