Caroline Playne

Caroline Elizabeth Playne (1857–1948) was an English pacifist and historian.[1] Playne's 1925 book The Neuroses of the Nations used Freudian psychology to put forward a critique of warfare. [2]

Caroline Playne approached the pacifist militancy first towards 1904, when she became a founding member of Britain's National Peace Council, created to support the action of the international court in The Hague. [3] In 1908 she took part in the International Congress for Peace in London, and on this occasion she met the Austrian pacifist Bertha von Suttner, of whom years later she wrote a biography.[3] At the outbreak of the First World War, of which she had long feared, Playne engaged in relief activities of internees and prisoners of war, she continued as she could the pacifist militancy, and collected a large amount of materials and observations on the description of the psychological context of English society during the war.[3] After the war she wrote her observations in five volumes in which there is the still embryonic attempt to give life to a psychological and anthropological theory of war, and there are innumerable observations of great acuteness on the English social life before and during the war, thanks to which Playne's work conserves at least a considerable document value.

Playne was a friend of the writer Vernon Lee, who encouraged Playne to write her studies of the war.[4]