First World War

First Past the Post, in Politics may find it advantageous to vote for a less preferred but more viable candidate instead of ‘wasting’ his or her vote on a candidate with little chance. In contrast, multi-member districts and even single-member districts with decision rules other than plurality may reduce the incentives for voters to deviate from their first choice. Strategic behavior and an aversion to wasting one’s vote means that FPTP elections are typified by contests between two major candidates, whereas alternative systems often exhibit several viable candidates. Extending this result to parties, FPTP systems routinely have only two major parties, a phenomenon that has been coined Du
erger’s law, named after the French scholar who extensively described the relationship (Duverger 1954). Proportional representation systems, however, usually have more than two parties, a result that has come to be known as Du
erger’s hypothesis (Riker 1982, Cox 1997). When there are only two viable candidates in an FPTP election, no abstentions, and the candidates are choosing their positions to maximize their electoral support, the candidate ideologically closest to the median voter is advantaged (Downs 1957). FPTP systems thus tend to produce more moderate outcomes than alternative systems. The incentive for candidates to take moderate positions can produce candidates who are only minimally differentiated, leading some to conclude that the choices in FPTP are often of little consequence. One potential advantage to such a system, however, is that the outcomes from one election to the next tend to be more ideologically consistent, resulting in small, incremental policy changes over time. See also: Electoral Systems; Political Representation; Voting, Sociology of; Voting: Tactical

Bibliography Arrow K J 1963 Social Choice and Indi
idual Values, 2nd edn. Wiley, New York Cox G W 1997 Making Votes Count: Strategic Coordination in the World’s Electoral Systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Downs A 1957 An Economic Theory of Democracy. Harper, New York Duverger M 1954 Political Parties. Wiley, New York International IDEA Handbook of Electoral System Design 1997. International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, Stockholm May K O 1952 A set of independent necessary and sufficient conditions for simple majority decision. Econometrica 20: 680–4 Merrill S III 1988 Making Multicandidate Elections More Democratic. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ Rae D W 1971 The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws, rev. edn. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT

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Riker W H 1982 The two-party system and Duverger’s law: an essay on the history of political science. American Political Science Re
iew 76: 753–66

G. D. Adams and W. R. Keech

First World War, The 1. Causes The outbreak of the First World War in the summer of 1914 has been attributed to accident, design and confusion. The first position suggests that no one intended that armed conflict would break out in 1914; the second, that German and Austrian military elites planned the conversion of a Balkan diplomatic crisis into an armed confrontation; the third, that political and military leaders throughout Europe began to maneuver with some notion that war was possible, but found that they could not resist the momentum of confrontation (Joll 1992). What was the sequence of events subject to these interpretations, and which has commanded the support of most historians who have addressed the issue of the descent into war in 1914? On 28 June 1914, the Archduke Franz-Ferdinand of Austria–Hungary, heir to the throne, was assassinated in Sarajevo. The crime was carried out by a group of Serb student patriots in neighboring Bosnia, then a province of the Austro– Hungarian empire. Their aim was to demonstrate the force of Slavic nationalism, and to challenge the domination of these south Slavic lands by imperialists in Vienna and Budapest. In this aim, they succeeded completely. The government in Vienna decided to make this crime a matter of state, and to lay the blame for this political murder on the independent Kingdom of Serbia, and its intelligence services. On 5–6 July, Austrian officials went to Germany to seek support for their policy of making Serbia ‘pay’ for the assassination. German officials gave their approval, offering a ‘blank check’ to their Austrian allies. With this backing, on 23 July the Austrians presented Serbia with a list of demands which constituted a challenge to the status quo in the Balkans. This is where Russia entered the conflict. A humiliation for Serbia would humiliate her Slavic ally, Russia. With Russian backing, Serbia met most of the Austrian demands, but refused to capitulate completely. In support of Serbia, Russia ordered partial mobilization of her armies on 29 July. In support of Austria, and in response to the numerical superiority of Russian forces, the German army mobilized too. Once German mobilization was in progress, then the crucial link appears between a conflict in the Balkans and an all-European war. German military

First World War, The planning had for years established a set of priorities to safeguard the security of the German empire. The primary point here was the need to avoid fighting a two-front war. Thus, it was necessary for Germany to eliminate a western threat on the part of Russia’s ally, France, before facing the huge armies Russia could put in the field. To do so, a military plan—the Schlieffen plan—was developed through which German forces could move in a huge arc from Cologne in southwestern Germany westward through Belgium and then southward through France. The destination, after 42 days, was in the vicinity of Paris, where the French army would be destroyed, just as had occurred in 1870. The Schlieffen plan was thus a German response to the threat of a two-front war. That threat had materialized out of the confrontation of Germany’s ally Austria–Hungary with Russia’s ally Serbia. But the German plan to destroy the French army by an arcing move through Belgium threatened to bring in the UK, guarantor of Belgian independence (Ritter 1958). And that is precisely what happened. The German invasion of Belgium precipitated a state of war among the five great powers: Germany and Austria–Hungary on one side, and France, Russia and the UK on the other. By 4 August 1914, the First World War had begun. Had anyone intended this moment to occur? Probably not. While the chief catalyst of the war crisis was the decision by Austria and Germany to press Serbia to pay a political price for the assassination, the outbreak of war was less a conspiracy than a complex mixture of arrogance, a sense of national ‘honor,’ ignorance, and confusion. All the actors in this drama misjudged the other side. Each move forward in the crisis was followed by a further heightening of tension. First Austrian honor was at stake; then Russian honor; then German fears of encirclement led her to respond to a perceived threat from Russia by threatening Russia’s ally, France; and when confronted by a likely invasion of France, the UK hesitated, and then in defense of her honor, she declared war on Germany. Two elements in the crisis were crucial in the prevention of a diplomatic solution. The first was temporal; the second, structural. First, timing. The war crisis lasted for one month. But a closer view of these events presents us with an even shorter timetable in the slide towards war. One week separated the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia—on 23 July—from Russian and German mobilization—29–31 July. In that time period, it was simply impossible for alternatives to be explored, or for the weight of antiwar and pacifist opinion, by no means negligible, to be brought to bear on political leaders. The crisis moved too fast to be stopped. The second determinant of a general European war was, broadly speaking, structural. That is, the chronic instability of southeastern Europe was insufficient in

and of itself to bring the Great Powers to war. What turned a minor conflict into a major crisis was the linkage between the Balkan conflict and the longerterm balance of power between Germany and the UK. Once the UK and Germany were aligned on opposite sides, then the crisis of 1914 became a contest for control over northwestern Europe. Should Germany defeat France in 1914, as she had done in 1870, the German navy would occupy the Channel ports. British shipping lanes, necessary to feed her home population, would be open at the pleasure of the German navy. No British government could accept that prospect (Kennedy 1980). It is true that the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Grey, did not make this issue clear in his diplomatic handling of the war crisis. The German Chancellor, Bethmann-Hollweg hoped that the UK would stay out of the war. But geographical and strategic imperatives overshadowed diplomatic miscalculations. An invasion of Belgium and France posed a real and present danger to British vital interests. And when the UK entered the war, so did the British empire. What had started in Sarajevo, echoed in Sydney, Capetown and Calcutta. By 4 August 1914, the world was indeed at war.

2. Conduct The 1914–18 war spanned the globe, but its outcome was determined by what happened on the battlefields of Western Europe. This article therefore offers an outline of the major military encounters of the war, encounters which left lasting traces both on the landscape of Europe and on the contours of the rest of the twentieth century. The battlefield in 1914 was Victorian in character. Artillery provided more fire power than ever before, but most of it was horse-drawn. Four years later, the battlefield was transformed. By the end of the war, it took on contours recognizable to most soldiers who would come to fight in later conflicts. Infantry, artillery, tanks, and air power were all coordinated through communications systems and supply systems of great complexity and sophistication. Supplying animal power meant relatively little; supplying machines meant everything (van Creveld 1977). The ‘storm of steel’ in the words of the German infantryman Ernst Ju$ nger, had come to stay (Ju$ nger 1929). 2.1 1914 The two major military encounters of 1914 produced very different outcomes. In Belgium and France, the German army, one million strong, pushed forward in a swing westward and then southward. It met stiff resistance from Belgian forts, and then was harried by stubborn French and British defensive action. As the 5689

First World War, The German army moved west into Belgium, the French army moved east towards Alsace and Lorraine, provinces lost to Germany in 1871. German defenses held and inflicted massive casualties on the French. On one day, 24 August 1914, over 24,000 French soldiers died in action. This ‘Battle of the Frontiers’ was a massive defeat for the French. But the strength of their east–west rail links enabled the bulk of French forces to move west to meet the real threat of the German advance towards Paris. There on the river Marne, the German thrust was stopped. The German army retreated northward and dug in on the river Aisne. When French and British forces pursuing the German army reached the Aisne, they were unable to move the invaders. There the ‘Western Front’ was born. It soon stretched from Belgium to Switzerland. There is little doubt that the Battle of the Marne was a German catastrophe. The whole purpose of German strategy had failed. There would be a two-front war. By the end of 1914 the chief of staff of the German army, von Moltke, had been replaced by Erich von Falkenhayn. But what redressed the strategic balance was a massive German military victory on the Eastern front. Two columns of Russian troops advanced into East Prussia at the same time as the German army moved through Belgium and France. These columns were separated by a string of lakes. A German staff officer, Max Hoffmann, took advantage of the geography and of the existence of a north–south rail link. Under the cover of darkness, the German army in the north moved south. The Russian column in the north had no idea they were facing an empty landscape; the Russian column in the south had no idea they were facing a numerically superior force, that is, until they were annihilated at the Battle of Tannenberg. The commander of Russian forces in the south, Samsonov, committed suicide. The two commanders of the German forces, who had not planned the operation, but who reaped its rewards, became national heroes. They were Paul von Hindenburg and Eric Ludendorff (Showalter 1991). 2.2 1915 The war spread in 1915, but the rough stalemate of 1914 remained unbroken. One major attempt to break it was in Turkey, then an ally of Germany. To ‘stop our troops from chewing on barbed wire’ on the Western front, as Winston Churchill, Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty, put it, a plan was hatched to knock Turkey out of the war by a naval operation. The aim was to use British naval power to force the straits that connected the Mediterranean Sea to the Black Sea. Once done, then the Turkish capital of Constantinople would be indefensible. The defeat of Germany’s ally Turkey would serve many purposes. It would open supply lines to Russia; it would convince all and sundry, especially in the Islamic world, of the error of siding with Germany in the world war; it 5690

might even convince Germany to withdraw from France and Belgium. Nothing of the sort happened. Here too, a mixture of arrogance, ignorance and confusion ruled. The enemy was Oriental, and all the distortions attending Western attitudes towards the Orient flourished. The enemy was underestimated. Attempts to push a naval force through the Dardanelles failed in March 1915. The Allies decide to mount a joint land–sea operation, but no one had a clear idea of the terrain on which soldiers would land. When they went ashore on 24–25 April, they faced steep cliffs and stiff Turkish resistance. They never got off the beaches. A six-month stalemate ensued, after which Allied forces withdrew. 2.3 1916 Two further attempts were made to shift the balance of power on the Western front. The first was at Verdun, in eastern France. There on 21 February 1916, more than one million shells fell on French positions in the hills north of the garrison city of Verdun. The idea was to force the French into total defense of this relatively unimportant position. The French, Falkenhayn reasoned, valued Verdun as a symbol of French freedom and power (Afflerbach 1994). He was right. The French committed 259 out of its full complement of 330 infantry regiments to the struggle for Verdun. They moved into Verdun along a vast conveyor belt, which the French called la
oie sacreT e, the sacred way. It certainly was a field of sacrifice. Falkenhayn succeeded in bleeding the French army white, but he did so at a massive cost to his own troops. Perhaps half a million men died at Verdun, where, by November, the French army had recaptured all the ground lost in the early days of the battle. Lasting ten months, the Battle of Verdun was the longest battle in history. The front remained about where it had been before the bloodbath (Horne 1962). The same failure to break the stalemate occurred further to the north, where the British and French armies opened a major offensive on 1 July 1916. Here the fault lay in an underestimate of the enemy’s fortifications and an overestimate of the power of artillery to destroy them. A one-week barrage by British guns was supposed to obliterate German defenses between Amiens and St Quentin in the lowlands of the Somme. But the deep dugouts under the German lines withstood the barrage, and when British forces moved out early in the morning of 1 July, they were mown down by German machine guns. Of the 100,000 men who went over the top, 60,000 were casualties, of whom 20,000 died in that single day. Thereafter, British and German forces regrouped. A further advance on 14 July was somewhat more successful, but by September, it was apparent that no breakthrough would take place. German lines held, but at a high price. German casualties numbered approximately 450,000; together

First World War, The French and British casualties surpassed 600,000. One million men fell, and the lines remained roughly where they had been at the beginning of 1916 (Keegan 1976). Stalemate was also the rule at sea, where the British fleet kept the German fleet penned up to the east of Denmark. One attempt to shift the war to the west at Jutland resulted in mixed fortunes for both navies. But the ultimate result was that the German high seas fleet was kept away from Britain. 2.4 1917 In 1917, the balance of power remained unchanged on the Western front. But in the east and in Italy, Germany and Austria were in the ascendant. First came the crisis in Russia. After the February revolution which toppled the Czar and put a provisional government in power, a provisional government vowed to carry on the war. This was its worst mistake, made evident by a catastrophic offensive launched on 1 July 1917. When the Russian offensive failed, a counter-offensive produced a massive Russianretreat which effectively destroyed the Russian army as a fighting force. When the Bolsheviks came to power in October, they saw what had to be done. They sued for peace, and signed an armistice on 3 December 1917. Germany and her allies had won the war on the Eastern front. In Italy, the Allied cause suffered a series of alarming reverses. At Caporetto, the Italian army collapsed, and fled westward 100 km where a new defensive line was hastily formed. In France, a spring attempt to pierce German lines at the Chemin des Dames failed, and when the French commander Nivelle persisted in trying to do the ‘un-doable,’ his army mutinied (Smith 1994). Nivelle was replaced by Pe! tain; the offensive was called off; the anger of frontline troops abated. British attempts to shift the balance of power in Flanders were also unsuccessful, in part through the unhappy coincidence of their attack at Ypres occurring in the wettest summer on record. The British offensive, which ended in the rubble of the village of Passchendaele on 10 November 1917, literally drowned in mud (Prior and Wilson 1996). The German navy attempted to shift the balance of power by launching unrestricted submarine warfare in February 1917. This was a colossal miscalculation. It did not starve the UK into negotiating an armistice. Despite massive losses to British shipping, domestic food supplies remained adequate (Offer 1991). What was worse from the German point of view, was the provocation posed by naval attacks to the USA, which entered the war in April 1917. 2.5 1918 In January 1918, it would have been difficult for a neutral observer to predict Allied victory by the end of

that year. How did it happen? First, the political and economic balance of power shifted with US entry into the war in 1917. Given the time needed to raise and then move an army of two million men across the Atlantic, it was apparent that US troops and US supplies would directly enter the balance of power only in 1918. This gave the Allies a new and deep reservoir of men and materiel which the Central Powers could not match. Thus, it was not US firepower that turned the tide, but US reserves. This became apparent after German army launched its last major military gamble of the war. On 21 March, 47 divisions of the German army broke through at the point where British and French forces met on the Western front. Finally, the Western front moved. Within a week, German forces had moved 40 miles (65 km) to the west. In April they attacked at Ypres; in May and June to the south, reaching the Marne. But there the offensive broke down. The gamble had failed. The German army had lost one million men in a last, desperate and futile effort to win the war (Keegan 1999). When German forces saw that they could not win, the balance of power shifted radically towards the Allies. Starting in early August, German troops began to surrender en masse. High Command was getting reports of low morale among troops, who were convinced that further sacrifices were in vain. At this point, unrest on the home front merged with despair over the military situation. The High Command saw that the game was up (Deist 1991). At the same time, Austrian and Bulgarian positions crumbled. Ludendorff urged the Kaiser to turn to the US President, Woodrow Wilson, to broker an Armistice. Ludendorff resigned. The Kaiser fled to the Netherlands, leaving it to others to face a disaster he and his military had engineered. The Armistice came on 11 November 1918. The Great War was over.

3. Consequences 3.1 Demographic Total casualties and losses as a proportion of those who served passed a threshold beyond previous experience. Wherever the threshold is, the total of roughly nine million dead soldiers (according to varying estimates) is beyond it: this constitutes roughly one in eight of the men who served. Adding statistics on other casualties, it is apparent that roughly 50 percent of the men who served were either prisoners of war, wounded or killed. The most murderous theatre of operations was the Eastern front, where disease and enemy action described the course of a nineteenth century war waged with twentieth century weapons. Of all Serbs who served in the war, 37 percent were killed; roughly one in four Rumanians, Turks and Bulgarians also perished. On the Western Front, where the war was won and 5691

First World War, The lost, combat was about half as lethal: German and French losses were about one in six of those who served; British losses were one in eight. Initially casualties among social elites were higher than among the rest of the population. The longer the war lasted, the greater was the democratization of loss. The reason is that officer casualties were higher than those in the ranks, and the social selection of the officer corps mirrored inequalities in prewar life. Consequently in its initial phases, the higher up in the social scale a man was, the greater were his chances of becoming a casualty of war. By 1917, elites were sufficiently decimated to require the armies to draw junior officers from wider social groups which in their turn suffered disproportionately higher casualties in the last two years of the war. Among the poor and the underprivileged, the story is different. Prewar deprivation saved the lives of millions of working class men and poor peasants, whose stunted stature and diseases made it impossible for them to pass even the rudimentary standards of medical fitness for military service during the war. In the British case, roughly 35 percent of the men

examined for military service were either unfit for combat or unfit to wear a uniform at all (Winter 1985). Numerically, workers and peasants formed the vast majority of the army of the dead. The same was true of disabled men, visible reminders of the war on street corners and in farming villages throughout the world. More lethal than combat was a visitation of epidemic influenza, colloquially known as ‘the Spanish flu.’ In 1918 and 1919 this mutant virus killed young, healthy adults throughout the world. The war may have helped spread the disease, though it did not cause it. 3.2 Political The Treaty of Paris, the peace settlement ending the Great War, was signed on 28 June 1919, five years to the day after the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Its major effects were to ratify the break-up of the Austro–Hungarian and Turkish empires, and to establish a new state system in Europe, wherein Germany was stripped of Alsace and Lorraine in the west and much of East Prussia in the east. Primary

Table 1 Some estimates of military losses among combatant countries in the 1914–18 war Total killed or died Country

Total mobilized

Prewar male population (aged 15–49)

Total prewar population

(in thousands)

Total killed per 1,000 mobilized

per 1,000 males (aged 15–49)

per 1,000 people

Britain and Ireland Canada Australia New Zealand South Africa India France French colonies Belgium Italy Portugal Greece Serbia Rumania Russia USA Allied total Germany Australia–Hungary Turkey Bulgaria Central Powers’ total

723 61 60 16 7 54 1,327 71 38 578 7 26 278 250 1,811 114 5,421 2,037 1,100 804 88 4,029

6,147 629 413 129 136 953 7,891 449 365 5,615 100 353 750 1,000 15,798 4,273 45,001 13,200 9,000 2,998 400 25,598

11,540 2,320 1,370 320 1,700 82,600 9,981 13,200 1,924 7,767 1,315 1,235 1,225 1,900 40,080 25,541 204,018 16,316 12,176 5,425 1,100 35,017

45,221 8,100 4,900 1,100 6,300 321,800 39,600 52,700 7,600 35,900 6,100 4,900 4,900 7,600 167,000 98,800 812,521 67,800 58,600 21,700 4,700 152,800

118 97 145 124 51 57 168 158 104 103 70 73 371 250 115 27 120 154 122 268 220 157

63 26 44 50 4 1 133 5 20 75 5 21 227 132 45 4 27 125 90 148 80 115

16 8 12 15 1 0 34 1 5 16 1 5 57 33 11 1 7 30 19 37 19 26

Grand total

9,450

70,599

239,035

965,321

134

40

10

Source: Winter (1985).

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First World War, The responsibility for the war, and for making material reparations for it, were laid at the feet of the new German Republic. Through a League of Nations, international conflict would be regulated, if not resolved. An International Labour Organization was established to help address problems of working class life, a clear response to the Bolshevik revolution. The new Soviet Union was not a party to the peace negotiations or to the settlement. Instead a kind of quarantine was applied to the Soviet Union, and tacit support was given by the victorious powers to modest military intervention in Russia on the side of the anti-Bolshevik forces. This intervention was a total failure. While the principle of self-determination for all was established, colonial and imperial issues were resolved through bilateral talks among imperial powers. Thus spheres of influence in the Middle East were divided between France and the UK, and contradictory promises were given to Arabs and Jews as to the future postcolonial disposition of the area. In short, the Great War set the terms of the international order for the rest of the twentieth century (Boemeke et al. 1998). Domestically, the political consequences of war were mixed. Socialist and labor parties had participated in government. Right wing nationalist groups also grew. Among them were fascist parties, whose elevation of the virtues of armed struggle was mixed with a hatred of the political left. The center of politics weakened, evidenced by the waning of support for Liberal parties. The polarized left–right divide took on violent form in Italy, Germany, and throughout Eastern Europe, mixing ideological and territorial conflicts in such a way as to ensure the outbreak of a new and more lethal world war in just 20 years. The war opened a phase of domestic strife in which the upheaval of war was mixed with revolutionary struggles. Civil war in Russia lasted for three years after the Armistice; armed conflict continued in the new states of Poland and Hungary. The victorious Allies quarantined the new Soviet Union, and began a phase of cold warfare which lasted for 70 years. For this reason alone, some historians see the war as inaugurating the ‘short twentieth century,’ from 1914–91 (Hobsbawm 1995). 3.3 Economic and Social The Great War was both the apogee and the beginning of the end of European domination of the world economy. The big loser was the UK, whose export economy suffered from import substitution in countries throughout the world who developed finished goods during the conflict, when British exports were unavailable. Chronic financial instability weakened London as a banking center. The era of free trade was over (Milward 1984). The losers paid for the war in a host of ways.

Reparations were forced on Germany, though she managed to avoid paying most of the bill. Worse was the continuation and acceleration of wartime inflation into the postwar years, wiping out savings and deepening domestic social and political conflict in Germany and Austria (Feldman 1993). This drastic reduction in the value of money had serious effects on the social structure and political outlook of middle class groups, threatened by proletarianization (Kocka 1984). Domestically, economies of scale were introduced during the war which proved important after it. Hence military conflict helped accelerate the movement away from the small, family firm towards corporate economic life. State interest in and intervention in scientific research and education also expanded during and after war, in the light of evident strategic considerations (Hardach 1987). After the war, the state continued to play a greater role in economic life than ever before. This was not through the ownership of industry, but through the management of debt. In most industrialized countries, taxation levels doubled over the war decade, and much of it was spent servicing war debt. The USA was the exception here, turning because of the war from a debtor to a creditor nation, though the chronic weakness of countries indebted to it after the war, like the UK, helped turn the Wall Street crash of 1929 into the world depression. 3.4 Cultural Every combatant country mourned its war dead in public. The outcome is a vast array of war cemeteries near the fields of battle and of war memorials dotted in villages and towns throughout Europe, North America, Africa, Asia and the Antipodes. Annual commemorative ceremonies were (and still are) held on 11 November (Winter 1995) (Table 1). The monumental character of the war has indelibly marked the literature, poetry, and visual arts of the twentieth century (Cork 1994, Fussell 1977, Hynes 1991). The Great War is the point of reference for much subsequent writing about catastrophe, and has introduced terminology—like shell shock—which has entered colloquial language. In many countries, though not in the former Soviet Union or the USA, its shadow is longer than that of the Second World War. See also: Contemporary History; Imperialism, History of; Military History; Russian Revolution, The; Second World War, The; War: Anthropological Aspects; War: Causes and Patterns; Warfare in History

Bibliography Afflerbach H 1994 Falkenhayn: Politisches Denken und Handeln im Kaiserreich. Oldenbourg, Munich, Germany

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First World War, The Boemeke M F, Feldman G D, Glaser E (eds.) 1998 The Treaty of Versailles: a Reassessment after 75 Years. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Cork R 1994 A Bitter Truth: A
ant Garde Art and The Great War. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT Deist W 1991 MilitaW r, Staat und Gesellschaft: Studien zur Preussisch—Deutschen MilitaW rgeschichte. R. Oldenbourg, Munich, Germany Feldman G D 1993 The Great Disorder: Politics, Economics, and Society in the German Inflation, 1914–1924. Oxford University Press, New York Fussell P 1977 The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford University Press, London Hardach G 1987 The First World War, 1914–1918. Penguin, Harmondsworth, UK Hobsbawm E J 1995 Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–91. Abacus, London Horne A 1962 The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916. St. Martin’s Press, New York Hynes S 1990 A War Imagined: the First World War and English Culture. Bodley Head, London Joll J 1992 The Origins of the First World War, 2nd edn. Longman, New York Ju$ nger E (ed.) 1929 Storm of Steel: From the Diary of a Storm Troop Officer on the Western Front. Chatto and Windus, London Keegan J 1976 The Face of Battle. Cape, London Keegan J 1999 The First World War. A Knopf, New York Kennedy P M 1980 The Rise of the Anglo–German Antagonism 1860–1914. Allen and Unwin, London Kocka J 1984 Facing Total War: German Society 1914–1918. Berg, Leamington Spa, UK Milward A S 1984 The Economic Effects of the Two World Wars on Britain, 2nd edn. Macmillan, London Offer A 1991 The First World War: An Agrarian Interpretation. Clarendon Press, Oxford, UK Prior R, Wilson T 1992 Command on the Western Front: the Military Career of Sir Henry Rawlinson, 1914–18. Blackwell, Oxford, UK Prior R, Wilson T 1996 Passchendaele: The Untold Story. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT Ritter G 1958 The Schlieffen Plan: Critique of a Myth [Wilson A, Wilson E trans.]. Praeger, New York Showalter D E 1991 Tannenberg, Clash of Empires. Archon Books, Hamden, CT Smith L V 1994 Between Mutiny and Obedience: The Case of the French Fifth Infantry Di
ision during World War I. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ van Creveld M 1977 Supplying War. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK Winter J M 1985 The Great War and the British People. Macmillan, Basingstoke, UK Winter J M 1995 Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK

J. Winter Copyright # 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Fisher, Irving (1867–1947) Irving Fisher is widely recognized as one of the greatest American scientific economists. He has been credited

with being a primary architect of the ‘pillars and arches’ of modern economics—to borrow a phrase from J. A. Schumpeter—through his contributions to the theory of capital and interest, to monetary theory, and to the construction of index numbers. He was also an activist in the promotion of economic and social reforms. His reputation suffered in the 1930s when his approach to the discipline was eclipsed by Keynesianism. His accomplishments were then neglected and had to be rediscovered.

1. Beginnings Irving Fisher was born on February 27, 1867 in Saugerties, New York and was the elder son of a Congregational clergyman. His was a home grown talent, nurtured in a single American institution: Yale University. Thus, unlike most American economists reaching professional maturity in the last decades of the nineteenth century, he had no direct exposure to the teachings of the German historical school. His intellectual development was shaped by two forceful members of Yale’s faculty: Willard Gibbs, a mathematical physicist, and William Graham Sumner, a political economist who was also a champion of Social Darwinism. Their joint influence was observable in his choice of topic for a Ph.D. dissertation—Mathematical In
estigations in the Theory of Value and Prices. With the publication of this exercise in general equilibrium theorizing in 1892, Fisher was hailed as a path breaker in mathematical economics. Fisher joined the Yale faculty in 1892 as an instructor in mathematics. In the following year, he married Margaret Hazard, a daughter of a wealthy Rhode Island textile manufacturer; their union was to produce two daughters and a son. In 1895, his appointment at Yale was shifted to the Department of Political Economy, an affiliation he retained until retirement in 1935. In 1898, he was promoted to full professor, but was soon diagnosed thereafter with a potentially fatal case of tuberculosis that idled him for the next three years. Upon recovery, he decided that the life of an ivorytower academician was no longer sufficient to satisfy him. Indeed he was convinced that scientific professionals had an obligation to engage with the world by promoting economic and social uplift.

2. Contributions to the Theory of Capital, Income, and Interest Fisher had undertaken preliminary inquiries into the nature of capital before the interruption occasioned by illness. He returned to this theme in 1904 when his energies approached full restoration. Results emerged quickly in two major treatises.

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International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences

ISBN: 0-08-043076-7