War & Peace Quote by Samuel E. Morison

Morison’s sentence is a tidy act of intellectual policing: it frames Charles Beard’s antiwar stance not as a moral position with analytical consequences, but as a bias that disqualifies his method. The opening clause, “Throughout this evolution from left to right,” compresses Beard’s political life into a trajectory story, the kind that implies drift, inconsistency, even opportunism. It’s a subtle way of saying: whatever Beard argued, he was always moving, never anchored in the steady ballast Morison wants history to have.

“Detested war” does double duty. It’s emotionally loaded (detest is visceral, not merely skeptical), and it sets up “Hence” as a prosecutorial link: sentiment causes distortion. Morison’s real target isn’t just Beard’s conclusions; it’s the legitimacy of Beard’s premise that war can be read as an outcome of deeper structures. By calling Beard’s work “slanted,” Morison asserts a norm of historical writing that pretends to be neutral while quietly defending a hierarchy of subjects in which military decision-making and great-power conflict deserve center stage.

The subtext is disciplinary. Beard’s economic interpretation had threatened an older, more heroic narrative of American development. Morison, writing from within the mid-century establishment that had lived through two world wars and watched the U.S. become a military superpower, is insisting that you can’t demote war to epiphenomenon without also demoting the statesmen, admirals, and institutions that historians like him treated as history’s prime movers.

It’s criticism, but also a boundary marker: antiwar feeling is permissible; letting it reorganize causality is not.