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 dis-
tricts 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. Ex-
tending 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 sys-
tems, 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 Assis-
tance, 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
5688
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 sup-
port 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 govern-
ment 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 intel-
ligence 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 hu-
miliation for Serbia would humiliate her Slavic ally,
Russia. With Russian backing, Serbia met most of the
Austrian demands, but refused to capitulate com-
pletely. 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

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 Ger-
man 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? Prob-
ably 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 altern-
atives 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
First World War, The
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 longer-
term 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 (Ken-
nedy 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 in-
vasion 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 ma-
chines meant everything (van Creveld 1977). The
‘storm of steel’ in the words of the German infan-
tryman 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 ge-
ography 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 Ger-
man 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 Constan-
tinople would be indefensible. The defeat of Ger-
many’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 re-
sistance. 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 re-
asoned, 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 some-
what 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 that year. How did it happen? First, the political and
million men fell, and the lines remained roughly where economic balance of power shifted with US entry into
they had been at the beginning of 1916 (Keegan 1976). the war in 1917. Given the time needed to raise and
Stalemate was also the rule at sea, where the British then move an army of two million men across the
fleet kept the German fleet penned up to the east of Atlantic, it was apparent that US troops and US
Denmark. One attempt to shift the war to the west at supplies would directly enter the balance of power
Jutland resulted in mixed fortunes for both navies. But only in 1918. This gave the Allies a new and deep
the ultimate result was that the German high seas fleet reservoir of men and materiel which the Central
was kept away from Britain. Powers could not match. Thus, it was not US firepower
that turned the tide, but US reserves.
This became apparent after German army launched
2.4 1917 its last major military gamble of the war. On 21
March, 47 divisions of the German army broke
In 1917, the balance of power remained unchanged on
through at the point where British and French forces
the Western front. But in the east and in Italy,
met on the Western front. Finally, the Western front
Germany and Austria were in the ascendant. First
moved. Within a week, German forces had moved 40
came the crisis in Russia. After the February rev-
miles (65 km) to the west. In April they attacked at
olution which toppled the Czar and put a provisional
Ypres; in May and June to the south, reaching the
government in power, a provisional government
Marne. But there the offensive broke down. The
vowed to carry on the war. This was its worst mistake,
gamble had failed. The German army had lost one
made evident by a catastrophic offensive launched on
million men in a last, desperate and futile effort to win
1 July 1917. When the Russian offensive failed, a
the war (Keegan 1999).
counter-offensive produced a massive Russianretreat
When German forces saw that they could not win,
which effectively destroyed the Russian army as a
the balance of power shifted radically towards the
fighting force. When the Bolsheviks came to power in
Allies. Starting in early August, German troops began
October, they saw what had to be done. They sued for
to surrender en masse. High Command was getting
peace, and signed an armistice on 3 December 1917.
reports of low morale among troops, who were
Germany and her allies had won the war on the
convinced that further sacrifices were in vain. At this
Eastern front.
point, unrest on the home front merged with despair
In Italy, the Allied cause suffered a series of alarming
over the military situation. The High Command saw
reverses. At Caporetto, the Italian army collapsed,
that the game was up (Deist 1991). At the same
and fled westward 100 km where a new defensive line
time, Austrian and Bulgarian positions crumbled.
was hastily formed. In France, a spring attempt to
Ludendorff urged the Kaiser to turn to the US
pierce German lines at the Chemin des Dames failed,
President, Woodrow Wilson, to broker an Armistice.
and when the French commander Nivelle persisted in
Ludendorff resigned. The Kaiser fled to the Nether-
trying to do the ‘un-doable,’ his army mutinied (Smith
lands, leaving it to others to face a disaster he and
1994). Nivelle was replaced by Pe! tain; the offensive
his military had engineered. The Armistice came on
was called off; the anger of frontline troops abated.
11 November 1918. The Great War was over.
British attempts to shift the balance of power in
Flanders were also unsuccessful, in part through the
unhappy coincidence of their attack at Ypres oc- 3. Consequences
curring in the wettest summer on record. The British
offensive, which ended in the rubble of the village of 3.1 Demographic
Passchendaele on 10 November 1917, literally drow-
Total casualties and losses as a proportion of those
ned in mud (Prior and Wilson 1996).
who served passed a threshold beyond previous
The German navy attempted to shift the balance of
experience. Wherever the threshold is, the total of
power by launching unrestricted submarine warfare in
roughly nine million dead soldiers (according to
February 1917. This was a colossal miscalculation. It
varying estimates) is beyond it: this constitutes roughly
did not starve the UK into negotiating an armistice.
one in eight of the men who served. Adding statistics
Despite massive losses to British shipping, domestic
on other casualties, it is apparent that roughly 50
food supplies remained adequate (Offer 1991). What
percent of the men who served were either prisoners of
was worse from the German point of view, was the
war, wounded or killed.
provocation posed by naval attacks to the USA, which
The most murderous theatre of operations was the
entered the war in April 1917.
Eastern front, where disease and enemy action de-
scribed the course of a nineteenth century war waged
with twentieth century weapons. Of all Serbs who
2.5 1918
served in the war, 37 percent were killed; roughly one
In January 1918, it would have been difficult for a in four Rumanians, Turks and Bulgarians also perish-
neutral observer to predict Allied victory by the end of ed. 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. Conse-
quently 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 epi-
demic 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 Prewar male Total Total killed
killed Total population prewar
or died mobilized (aged 15–49) population per 1,000
per 1,000 males per 1,000
Country (in thousands) mobilized (aged 15–49) people
Britain and Ireland 723 6,147 11,540 45,221 118 63 16
Canada 61 629 2,320 8,100 97 26 8
Australia 60 413 1,370 4,900 145 44 12
New Zealand 16 129 320 1,100 124 50 15
South Africa 7 136 1,700 6,300 51 4 1
India 54 953 82,600 321,800 57 1 0
France 1,327 7,891 9,981 39,600 168 133 34
French colonies 71 449 13,200 52,700 158 5 1
Belgium 38 365 1,924 7,600 104 20 5
Italy 578 5,615 7,767 35,900 103 75 16
Portugal 7 100 1,315 6,100 70 5 1
Greece 26 353 1,235 4,900 73 21 5
Serbia 278 750 1,225 4,900 371 227 57
Rumania 250 1,000 1,900 7,600 250 132 33
Russia 1,811 15,798 40,080 167,000 115 45 11
USA 114 4,273 25,541 98,800 27 4 1
Allied total 5,421 45,001 204,018 812,521 120 27 7
Germany 2,037 13,200 16,316 67,800 154 125 30
Australia–Hungary 1,100 9,000 12,176 58,600 122 90 19
Turkey 804 2,998 5,425 21,700 268 148 37
Bulgaria 88 400 1,100 4,700 220 80 19
Central Powers’ total 4,029 25,598 35,017 152,800 157 115 26
Grand total 9,450 70,599 239,035 965,321 134 40 10
Source: Winter (1985).

5692

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 pol-
itical 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, Ger-
many, and throughout Eastern Europe, mixing ideo-
logical 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 count-
ries 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.
First World War, The
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 econ-
omic life. State interest in and intervention in scientific
research and education also expanded during and
after war, in the light of evident strategic considera-
tions (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, His-
tory of; Military History; Russian Revolution, The;
Second World War, The; War: Anthropological
Aspects; War: Causes and Patterns; Warfare in
History
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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
5694
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences
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 Keynes-
ianism. 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 math-
ematical 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—Mathemati-
cal 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 mathe-
matics. 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 ivory-
tower academician was no longer sufficient to satisfy
him. Indeed he was convinced that scientific profes-
sionals 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.
ISBN: 0-08-043076-7