"The theoretically unrestricted right to develop power, to wage war against other states, is antisocial and is doubly dangerous, because the state as a mass entity represents a low moral and intellectual level"
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Lange’s line lands like a polite indictment: the problem isn’t only war, it’s the legal and moral permission structure that makes war feel normal. By calling an “unrestricted right” to build power and attack others “theoretical,” he hints at the sleight of hand at the heart of sovereignty. States treat the ability to arm and aggress as an abstract entitlement, a kind of constitutional folklore, even as it produces very real corpses. The word “antisocial” is surgical: he’s not arguing that war is tragic; he’s arguing it’s a violation of social existence itself, a failure to recognize that states are embedded in a wider human community.
The sharper subtext is his distrust of the state’s moral psychology. A “mass entity,” in Lange’s view, doesn’t elevate individual judgment; it dilutes it. Bureaucracy, nationalism, and crowd emotion lower the ethical ceiling and flatten nuance. “Doubly dangerous” signals two compounding risks: concentrated capacity (industrial-scale violence) paired with degraded conscience (groupthink, propaganda, the ease of scapegoating). It’s an early 20th-century warning about what happens when modern organization meets primitive tribal reflex.
Context matters. Lange, a Norwegian politician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, worked in the orbit of internationalism when Europe was trying to invent guardrails for sovereignty after World War I. This is League of Nations realism without cynicism: a belief that law must restrain power precisely because the state, as a collective actor, is more impulsive and less accountable than the citizens it claims to represent. He’s making the case that peace isn’t sentiment; it’s institutional design against our lowest group instincts.
The sharper subtext is his distrust of the state’s moral psychology. A “mass entity,” in Lange’s view, doesn’t elevate individual judgment; it dilutes it. Bureaucracy, nationalism, and crowd emotion lower the ethical ceiling and flatten nuance. “Doubly dangerous” signals two compounding risks: concentrated capacity (industrial-scale violence) paired with degraded conscience (groupthink, propaganda, the ease of scapegoating). It’s an early 20th-century warning about what happens when modern organization meets primitive tribal reflex.
Context matters. Lange, a Norwegian politician and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, worked in the orbit of internationalism when Europe was trying to invent guardrails for sovereignty after World War I. This is League of Nations realism without cynicism: a belief that law must restrain power precisely because the state, as a collective actor, is more impulsive and less accountable than the citizens it claims to represent. He’s making the case that peace isn’t sentiment; it’s institutional design against our lowest group instincts.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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