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"Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain"

Aired on Wednesday, January 4th.

On this edition of ST, we speak with Frances McCall Rosenbluth, a Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the co-author of a new book called "Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain," which she discusses with us. As was noted in a starred review of this book by Kirkus, this is a "sometimes-counterintuitive but always fascinating interrogation of the history and uses of war.... [The book argues that] war is a kind of 'alchemy of iron and blood' that, though fiercely destructive, can give birth to social orders more just and advanced than the ones that preceded them. The authors, known in scholarly circles for work on 'warlike democracies,' offer numerous case studies taken from the broad sweep of world history. As they note, one reason for the expansion of popular power is that when governments depend on the support of their lower classes for survival, as in the case of war, then they tend to loosen up. Thus, 'warfare appears to have been instrumental in brokering the modern democratic compromise between wealth and manpower.' Monarchies can be more democratic than aristocracies precisely because they levy popular armies instead of hired guns; in medieval England, for instance, 'the wars that the king undertook were generally wars that the nobles, and increasingly the commoners, had agreed to fund and support.' Yet presumed democracies are not always paragons of democratic virtue; one extensive case study involves the interplay of the Vietnam War with the civil rights movement, with racism being a major obstacle to military recruitment among blacks in the South. This densely argued but readily accessible book is full of fascinating asides worthy of books of their own -- e.g., the role of women voters in pushing peacetime social spending and the fear of outside enemies in forging stronger unions of rich and poor. Yet, as the authors write in conclusion, 'war has stopped functioning as a democratizing force' today; even in the fury of destruction, inequality reigns. [This is] a book of big ideas backed by fine-grained analyses, worthy of attention by readers with an interest in history and contemporary events alike."

Rich Fisher passed through KWGS about thirty years ago, and just never left. Today, he is the general manager of Public Radio Tulsa, and the host of KWGS’s public affairs program, StudioTulsa, which celebrated its twentieth anniversary in August 2012 . As host of StudioTulsa, Rich has conducted roughly four thousand long-form interviews with local, national, and international figures in the arts, humanities, sciences, and government. Very few interviews have gone smoothly. Despite this, he has been honored for his work by several organizations including the Governor's Arts Award for Media by the State Arts Council, a Harwelden Award from the Arts & Humanities Council of Tulsa, and was named one of the “99 Great Things About Oklahoma” in 2000 by Oklahoma Today magazine.
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