War & Peace Quote by Elihu Root

Root’s move here is to strip the tuxedo off “civilization” and show the bruise-colored knuckles underneath. The sentence is built like a legal brief, but it’s aiming for moral shock: if you want to talk about the “true causes of war,” stop blaming momentary sparks and start with the uncomfortable baseline that the modern state is not the opposite of barbarism - it’s barbarism with rules, paperwork, and occasionally better manners.

The specific intent is diagnostic. Root isn’t offering a pacifist sermon or a warm belief in progress; he’s warning policymakers that war isn’t an aberration that clever treaties can permanently abolish. It’s what happens when the thin layer of institutions, norms, and self-restraint - the “partial, incomplete” modifications - fails under pressure. That’s why the phrasing “prime relevancy” matters: he’s instructing his audience to treat human aggression and group rivalry as the controlling facts of the case, not as embarrassing footnotes.

The subtext is also a rebuke to complacent elites. Calling civilization “superficial” punctures the era’s optimism that modern commerce, education, and diplomacy had civilized great-power politics. Root, a lawyer-statesman associated with early international legal architecture, is implicitly defending the need for stronger mechanisms: arbitration, enforceable norms, and institutions that assume bad faith is always on the table.

Contextually, Root’s lifetime spans the American Civil War through World War I’s aftermath - a period when industrial modernity didn’t tame violence; it scaled it. His realism is a reminder that “civilization” is not a permanent achievement. It’s a maintenance job, and the bill comes due when we pretend otherwise.