I can't talk about the writing of that phrase, but I can tell you what such a proposition can mean in the historical community: historicism.

I've talked about it before, so here's a bit from an earlier answer.

Historicism has had many names and forms in the past three centuries, but I'm talking about the idea that human society is entirely defined by its history. This concept derives from the thoughts of Leopold von Ranke. His works and views, based on empirism and positivism, on the idea of seeking sources and evidence as the major factor in historical investigation, and his firm belief in the concept of societies as primarily defined by their history, influenced many historians both in Europe and in the United States. American historian Edward Gaylord Bourne, famous for his views on Spanish colonialism, wrote works entirely on Ranke, such as Leopold von Ranke (1896). History as a defining part in the construction and constitution of the Zeitgeist (the spirit of an epoch) of a society, together with the idea of giving paramount importance to the specific figures of "great men", people whose deeds and actions were more important in the development of historical events, comes from Ranke and his disciples, who are known as the German School of Historicism (I apologize if that's inaccurate in English, that's what Spanish speaking scholars call them). In The Life and Work of the German Historian Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886): An Assessment of His Achievements (2015) Andreas Boldt says that the necessity to mark specific events and specific people as key in the development of human history, became paramount in the context of the aftermath of the French Revolution, when nationalistic and militaristic sentiments became the norm in academia throughout Europe. The German School is responsible for the establishment of what we still know as the Ages of History. As empirists (even though Popper heavily criticized them in his fairly well known 1957 work, The Poverty of Historicism), they believed that the search for "objectivity" and general rules had to be the main focuses of any scientific endeavor. However, as Popper stated, they ended up being reductionistic (yes, I know, a positivistic hardliner calling others reductionistic is ironic to say the least). He wasn't wrong however, because this school of thought's measure of time is indeed reductionistic. According to them, classical antiquity corresponded essentially to the Hellenistic world, particularly the Greeks and Romans. We still think that way. The middle ages range from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 (which as any expert will tell you is just too reductionistic, because the WRE didn't fall in a day, it was a long and complex period of unrest that lead to the its dissolution), and ends either with the fall of Constantinople in 1453 or with Columbus' arrival to America in 1492. We still think of it that way. And so on with the modern and contemporary periods. What do these measurements have in common? They are marked by specific events, which were either in or important to the development of European history; they had key players, "great men"; and they were often associated with military events. Gerda Lerner criticized this view because, as she states in The Creation of Patriarchy (1986), both the idea of "great men" and the importance given to militarism are key parts in the development of patriarchy, and in its continuation and furtherance.

So, the idea of the fundamental importance of violence and militarism comes from this current, but it was heavily defied after the end of WWII by what we now call the new history. Many scholars begun proposing new approaches to historiography, focusing increasingly on social history, usually interacting with concepts and analytical categories proposed by other disciplines within the humanities. The influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Bertrand Russell in the development of the linguistic turn in philosophy lead to new ideas in sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, international relations, history and every single humanity really. The linguistic turn didn't just mean focusing on language, but also on communication, which, for the purposes of this specific monograph, can be understood as the diametrical opposite of violence.

On the same vein came the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, proposed by thinkers like Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. They proposed a new approach to social studies that may help explain the rise of reactionarism via a critical revisiting of Marx's dialectical materialism, from a social perspective. Thus, they attempted to explain their recent historical developments by abandoning historicist militarism, and instead focusing on the symbolic and ideological factors behind events. While they wrote in the 40s and early 50s, and they weren't exactly historians, they contributed to the furthering of Marxist and neo-Marxist categories within historical academia.

Interestingly enough, this emergence of Marxism could mean a paradoxical return to militarism, except for one distinctive factor. Most of the historians who saw the attractiveness of Marxist analysis, did so from what we in the "third world" like to call subaltern studies: the history of the unaligned, the marginalised. The sixties saw the incipient birth of emancipation history, that draws on the violence inflicted by imperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism in Latin América, Africa and Asia, to analyze the construction of our own identities. The idea behind subaltern studies is to further the development of total history, that is, history of everyone within a nation, not just the history of the elites as Eurocentric historicism defended.

One of the most renowned neo-Marxist historians, albeit not a subaltern one, was Eric Hobsbawm, a British historian who wrote the history of violence from outside the "great men" figures, focusing instead on the consequences of imperialism and capitalism in creating revolutionary movements and subaltern national identities. His most famous books are of course The Age of Revolution 1789-1848 (I wonder what happened in 1848 to make a Marxist use that as an important date?), The Age of Capital 1848-1875, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 and The Age of Extremes 1914-1991.