A Physicist’s Question

In the spring of 1932, the League of Nations’ International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation invited Albert Einstein to choose any person and any topic for a published exchange of letters. Einstein chose Sigmund Freud. The topic: “Why War?”

Einstein’s letter, written from Caputh, Germany, opened with disarming directness. He acknowledged that as a physicist he lacked expertise in “the dark places of human will and feeling,” but the question gnawed at him. Why do human beings accept war when its destructiveness seems so obvious? Why do small groups of rulers successfully mobilize entire populations into mutual slaughter?

Einstein proposed a partial answer. He identified a “lust for hatred and destruction” that he believed existed in every person, normally latent but available for exploitation by those who profit from war. The armaments industry, nationalist propaganda, the control of schools and media — all of these, Einstein argued, served to channel this latent destructiveness toward organized violence.

But Einstein did not write to Freud merely to share his own analysis. He wanted to know: could anything redirect that destructive energy? Could human psychology offer a path toward preventing war?

A Psychoanalyst’s Answer

Freud’s reply, written from Vienna in September 1932, refused easy optimism. He began by agreeing with Einstein’s basic framework but pushed it further. Human beings, Freud argued, carry two fundamental classes of instinct: Eros (the drive toward connection, preservation, and love) and Thanatos (the drive toward destruction and death). These instincts never operate in isolation — they always intermingle, so that even constructive acts carry traces of aggression, and even destructive acts carry traces of attachment.

War, in Freud’s analysis, does not arise simply because rulers manipulate populations. It succeeds because it channels genuine psychological drives. People do not merely tolerate war — they find in it an outlet for aggressive impulses that civilization otherwise suppresses.

This might seem like a counsel of despair. If destructive drives remain permanently embedded in human psychology, how could any institution prevent their expression?

Freud offered two responses. First, he argued that strengthening emotional bonds between people — what he called “identification” — could build resistance to war. When people recognize shared identity across national boundaries, mobilizing them against each other becomes harder. Second, and more consequentially, Freud proposed that institutional structures could redirect aggressive energy into less destructive channels.

“Whatever fosters the growth of civilization works at the same time against war,” Freud wrote. Civilization, in his framework, operates by redirecting instinctual energy — imposing constraints that transform raw aggression into competition, argument, political contest, or creative work. The stronger and more legitimate the institutional framework, the more effectively it performs this redirection.

The Exchange the Drafters Read

The League of Nations published the Einstein-Freud correspondence in 1933 as a pamphlet titled Why War? The timing proved cruelly ironic — Hitler had already taken power in Germany. Einstein had fled to the United States. Freud would flee Vienna for London in 1938, dying there in 1939. The institutions they discussed proved too weak to prevent exactly the catastrophe they feared.

But the exchange did not disappear. It circulated among the intellectuals and diplomats who, after 1945, set about building new institutions from the ruins of the old ones.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) drafting committee may have included people who had encountered this correspondence — evidence suggests it had circulated among diplomats and intellectuals involved in postwar institution-building, though direct documentation of specific drafters reading it remains sparse. René Cassin, who had lost 29 relatives in the Holocaust, understood viscerally that declarations alone could not contain human destructiveness. The institutional framework mattered — not as a utopian project, but as a practical mechanism for channeling conflict into less lethal forms.

The UDHR’s structure reflects this insight. It does not merely enumerate freedoms. It establishes a framework of mutual obligation — between individuals and states, between states and the international community. Economic rights (Articles 22–27) serve a structural function: they address the material conditions that, when absent, make populations vulnerable to the kind of manipulation Einstein described.

Structural Violence Before the Term Existed

In 1969, the Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung formalized a concept that Einstein and Freud had circled around without naming: structural violence. Where direct violence involves a clear actor causing harm, structural violence operates through systems — economic arrangements, political exclusions, institutional designs — that predictably produce suffering without any individual pulling a trigger.

Galtung’s framework recognizes multiple forms: poverty that shortens life expectancy constitutes structural violence, as does lack of healthcare access that produces preventable death, and educational exclusion that locks populations into economic precarity.

Freud’s framework anticipated Galtung’s insight. When institutional structures fail to redirect aggressive energy, that energy does not vanish — it manifests as exploitation, deprivation, and systemic harm. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) addresses structural violence directly by establishing obligations around work, education, healthcare, and an adequate standard of living. These obligations function as the institutional constraints Freud described: mechanisms that channel social energy toward human development rather than destruction.

Why This Matters Now

Einstein asked his question during a period of rapid technological change and institutional weakness. Radio and film had created new tools for mass persuasion. Industrial technology had made war exponentially more destructive. The institutions designed to manage international conflict — the League of Nations, the international court system — lacked the authority to constrain powerful actors.

The parallels to the current moment deserve careful attention without overstatement. AI introduces new capabilities for economic disruption and social manipulation. Existing institutional frameworks — including the incomplete human rights architecture created by the U.S. ratifying the ICCPR but not the ICESCR — may prove insufficient to manage the transition.

Freud did not claim that institutions could eliminate destructive drives. He argued that strong, legitimate institutions could redirect them. The UDHR’s drafters took that argument seriously. The question facing the United States in 2026 remains whether to complete the institutional framework they began — or to continue operating without the structural protections that 173 other nations have accepted.

EPISTEMIC FLAGS

  • Indirect evidence for drafter familiarity: The claim that UDHR drafters encountered the Einstein-Freud correspondence rests on circumstantial evidence (publication by the League of Nations, known circulation among internationalist intellectuals). No direct citation from a drafter referencing Why War? appears in the sources consulted.
  • Structural violence framing applied retroactively: Galtung formalized “structural violence” in 1969. Attributing that concept’s precursors to the 1932 exchange involves interpretive framing — Einstein and Freud did not use the term or explicitly theorize structural harm.

This post continues a three-part series on the historical foundations of economic rights. Previously: how WWII created the universal human rights framework. Next: the treaty the U.S. signed and never ratified.