This volume culminates empirically, with an analysis of the cataclysm that ended the period and that ferociously illustrates my theory of modern society. World War I was a turning point in the history of society, its outcomes decisively determining the twentieth century. Establishing its causes is essential to understanding modern society. This war also draws our horrified fascination: It took more human lives than any other. The war's significance as a morality fable exceeds even its causal and its killing significance. For the multistate civilization of Europe, dominant in the world for centuries, almost committed suicide. Its leading philosophies of hope, liberalism and socialism, appeared to be extinguished in one crazed week in August 1914. Its leading Powers went with eyes apparently open into extinction or precipitate decline. Supposed practitioners of formal rationality, diplomats and capitalists, lent their techniques to a war that half destroyed them. Those four blood-drenched years raise the question, Are human beings, is human society, rational?

There have been countless attempts to answer. What can a nonspecialist add to the enormous literature on the causes of the war? I cannot improve on Joll's (1984a) masterly synthesis of the historical literature. Yet a sociologist may have something distinctive to contribute: concern with underlying social patterns and a familiarity with general theories of society. Even empiricist historians recognize that theory helps establish the causes of the war.