War in Social Thought: Hobbes to the Present

The Long Peace of the Nineteenth Century and the Birth of Sociology

THE NINETEENTH CENTURY is often referred to, for good reasons, as a liberal century. No one would dispute, however, that this liberalism could take on very different forms and that socialism, liberalism’s great adversary, was beginning to gain ground. But even this countercurrent shared more than a few of liberalism’s premises. How did the manifold upheavals of the nineteenth century impact on social theoretical debates on war and peace? Which new topics were examined? Which were abandoned? Were socialist ideas on peace the only significant alternatives to the liberal utopia? And how did Kantian thought and that associated with the discourse of virtue develop? These are the questions we shall be exploring now. We should bear in mind here that liberal thinking on war and peace (no less than its socialist counterpart) constantly came up against its own (economic and political) limitations—that historical reality refused to conform to the various conceptions of history that were put forward. As a result, the liberal discourse on peace was frequently marked by surprising about-turns, and we must pay attention to these as well. The equally apparent constancy and fragility of liberal discourse is evident even in the work of the classical figures of British liberalism.

James Mill (1773–1836) is one of those nineteenth-century liberals who continued the utilitarian-liberal tradition of thought on war and peace. But we can discern in his work clear modifications of Bentham’s views, which were to become even more apparent in the work of his son, John Stuart Mill (1806–73). In the case of Mill senior at least, his arguments on how best to achieve peace are largely an elaboration of the views of Bentham, his friend and teacher: they amount to a vigorous plea for (free) trade, which he defended throughout his oeuvre against critics who claimed that it resulted in increased conflict (see Silberner 1946, 37–40). As James Mill sets out in Commerce Defended (1808),

[W]here industry is free, and where men are secure in the enjoyment of what they acquire, the greatest improvement which the government can possibly receive is a steady and enlightened aversion to war. While such a nation remains at peace, the faults of the government can hardly ever be so great, that the merits of the nation will not more than compensate them, and that society from its own beneficent tendency will not improve. Nothing however can compensate the destruction of war. The creative efforts of individuals can never equal its gigantic consumption, and the seeds of prosperity are eaten up. (1808, 120/21)

War, he (and Bentham) asserted, is a great evil. It has nothing to do with trade but in fact does terrible harm to national economies.

Given this assessment of war, it is unsurprising that James Mill, like his teacher Bentham before him, devoted considerable energy to identifying the most effective political means of achieving enduring peace. The long article “Law of Nations,” which appeared in 1825 as a supplement to the Encyclopaedia Britannica, is essentially a reflection on the opportunities and risks inherent in an international legal system. Like Hobbes and many later Enlightenment authors, Mill is highly skeptical about the effectiveness of international law. According to him, within the international state system there is little prospect of punishing violations of international law, precisely because there is no supreme executive authority at the global level. Indeed, Mill underlines that every attempt to seriously implement the “laws of nations” might increase the risk of war, especially if individual nations take it upon themselves to administer and enforce a law for the whole world, a point already thrown up in the debate on Kant’s peace plan (see p. 59ff.): “A nation is often but too easily stimulated to make war in resentment of injuries done to itself. But it looks with too much coolness upon the injuries done to other nations, to incur the chance of any great inconvenience for the redress of them” (1825, 5). So Mill is forced to conclude that the international state system offers very little scope for the effective enforcement of laws. But this does not lead him to consider the subject closed. He states that it is entirely possible to attain greater authority for international law if it is endowed with a commensurate degree of “moral power.” And this is the point of departure for his specific proposals. According to Mill, it is necessary, first, to codify existing international law in a clear and transparent way and, second, to establish a tribunal to identify infringements by applying this law (9). This tribunal would have no way of implementing its judgments by force (32), but Mill believed this would not render it powerless. The creation of a public realm for the purposes of “shaming” would surely have an impact: “In this manner a moral sentiment would grow up, which would, in time, act as a powerful restraining force upon the injustice of nations, and give a wonderful efficacy to the international jurisdiction. No nation would like to be the object of the contempt and hatred of all other nations, to be spoken of by them on all occasions with disgust and indignation” (ibid.).

Mill is fairly optimistic about his proposals’ chances of success, first because all nations gain from trade (1825, 24), which means that a stable peace is greatly in their interest, for reasons of utility as it were. Second, by no means every nation in the world must be involved in establishing such a tribunal. It would be enough for the “more civilized and leading nations” (29) to take the initiative, particularly given that under these circumstances it seems likely that other nations would eventually follow suit.

So there are undoubtedly great similarities to Bentham’s arguments on how to achieve peace, though James Mill sets out his proposals for a world tribunal with greater clarity than Bentham ever did. Like Bentham, he identifies the colonies as one of the (remaining) key causes of bellicose dynamics. As evident particularly in his 1824 article “Colony,” James Mill took the view that colonial administrative costs always greatly exceed the utility accruing to the national economy of the “mother country.” Free trade would be far better and more beneficial—to all parties—not only economically but also politically, precisely because the trade barriers that colonies inevitably entail intensify rivalries between nations and cause wars. But why do the major European nations not refrain from founding more colonies? Mill’s answer is simple—and in line with the arguments put forward by the early political economists (see, e.g., Bentham’s arguments, and those of Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations, 2007, 395–99): colonies and the resulting armed conflicts are in the interest of the “ruling few.” There is a governing class that benefits from positions within the administration and army and which therefore wishes to keep alive the existing colonial system. “Now wars, even in countries completely arbitrary and despotical, have so many things agreeable to the ruling few, that the ruling few hardly ever seem to be happy except when engaged in them” (Mill 1824, 272). This problem can be solved only if the interests of the majority prevail in a given country. Only then will the danger of war be eliminated. And in the view of Mill senior, these interests of the majority find perfect expression in a worldwide free-trade system, an argument later deployed to great effect by one of the great English political propagandists of the nineteenth century, Richard Cobden (see Greenleaf 1988, 32ff.).

It is striking, however, that in contrast to Bentham Mill senior pays almost no attention to moral arguments in his article on the colonies (Pitts 2005, 123ff.). No mention is made of the political rights of the colonized or their self-determination. As apparent in his earlier publication, History of British India (1817), Mill had never believed that British rule in India was reasonable or efficient enough, yet despite all his criticisms of British law and British policies, he believed it was Britain’s obligation, as a civilized nation, to rule India. Not much later and despite his criticisms of the East India Company, Mill was hired as an expert adviser by this very company. This did not cause him to change his views. He repeatedly emphasized that Great Britain must maintain its rule in India for the sake of the Indians: “[T]his English government in India, with all its vices, is a blessing of unspeakable magnitude to the population of Hindustan. Even the utmost abuse of European power, is better, we are persuaded, than the most temperate exercise of Oriental despotism” (Mill, quoted in Pitts 2005, 125).

Pitts argues persuasively that there was a discernible shift within the utilitarian camp. In a far more self-evident way than in the work of Bentham (let alone the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers),¹ a clear hierarchy of societies begins to emerge in the work of Mill senior, a hierarchy in which the European nations in general and Great Britain in particular are viewed as the summit of humanity. We begin to see a clear contrast between civilization and “rudeness,” which his son John Stuart was to elaborate theoretically (see below). In light of this contrast, it appeared possible to legitimize a colonial policy that seemed impossible to justify on economic grounds. In India, the empire would even prove itself capable of establishing peace.

As set out by Edmund Silberner (1946), the great historian of economic thought, the arguments put forward by Mill senior on how best to achieve peace, which were predominantly utilitarian in character, were plausible, at first sight, as long as one was willing to think in purely economic categories. But Mill’s (highly ambivalent) plea against colonies could not convince those keen on obtaining or preserving colonies for political and strategic reasons. And as we shall see, by the mid-nineteenth century nationalists and liberal imperialists were in fact to push this argument, endorsing the struggle for colonies even if there are no economic benefits, because the political gains accrued through colonies outweigh the economic losses. And in the age of nationalism, this was no longer the kind of argument—as Mill senior had still assumed—that would reflect the dividing line between the avaricious “ruling few” and a pacifist majority. We might describe this as the dark side of the “utilitarian” version of liberalism, which emerged chiefly in the second half of the nineteenth century—namely, the ease with which liberal thinkers accommodated themselves to imperialist policies.

But this accommodation with imperialist policies did not necessarily occur solely on power-political grounds. As quickly became apparent in the wake of the utilitarian debate around Bentham and the older Mill, arguments for colonies rooted in economics and a corresponding power politics were also ready to hand, and here the question arose as to whether, on these premises, war should be rejected as categorically as it still tended to be in the eighteenth century.

Various supplementary arguments paved the way for or accompanied this economic accommodation. Notably, the genuine interest in other peoples still found in the Enlightenment era gradually began to disappear, giving way to a sharp and value-laden dichotomization. This was already discernible in the work of James Mill, but John Stuart Mill’s article “Civilization” from 1836 is the first significant milestone. As we have seen, Adam Ferguson had already coined the term “civilization.” But Mill now deploys it in a sharply dichotomous way by distinguishing between civilization and barbarism (1977c [1836]). Though Mill cannot help mentioning a few negative aspects of (modern) civilization, the loss of importance suffered by individuals and the rise of the masses, the decline of heroism, and the middle classes’ exclusive focus on monetary matters (130ff.), he favors civilizations in normative terms: these are societies featuring a highly developed division of labor that are clearly superior to the barbarian peoples, not least when it comes to war, as a result of the discipline and cooperation that prevails within them (122; see also Parekh 1995, 93f., and Robson 1998).

This high regard for (European) civilization went hand in hand with argumentational shifts in the field of political economy—with far-reaching consequences for the debate on how to achieve peace. In the early 1960s, Bernhard Semmel had already pointed out that the skepticism toward any kind of colonial policy still discernible in the work of Smith, Bentham, and—in embryonic form—James Mill, and generally justified in economic terms, had begun to change by the mid-1830s at the latest. Arguments (fueled by Edward Gibbon Wakefield) now appear according to which it is not capital—as Bentham still thought—that is decisive to capitalist growth but rather the markets in which capital can be invested. New land for the surplus population to settle and new investment opportunities for accumulated capital were said to make an empire necessary. Wakefield obviously managed to convince even the aged Bentham of his views and thus of the utility of colonies (see Semmel 1961, 518). But of even greater importance was the fact that John Stuart Mill adopted this position, advancing in a highly influential way the emerging economically inspired accommodation between imperialism and liberalism. He provided free-trade imperialism with a theoretical foundation, as it were.²

In the Principles of Political Economy (1848), Mill junior underlines that Adam Smith was clearly laboring to some extent under a misapprehension in his account of the role of foreign trade, which he often considered solely in terms of its function as an outlet for surplus goods (1965 [1848], 592). According to Mill, this view is wrong or one-sided. In fact, foreign trade benefits the consumer; market expansion as a whole entails major positives and, where applicable, stimulates an “industrial revolution” (593) in any country that makes this market expansion a permanent state of affairs. But this line of argument puts Mill in an ambivalent position. He continues to make the well-known utilitarian argument that foreign trade promotes increasing contact between strangers and thus produces moral, in other words pacifying, effects, which ultimately guarantee progress. Increasingly, Mill tells us, trade replaces war: “And it may be said without exaggeration that the great extent and rapid increase of international trade, in being the principal guarantee of the peace of the world, is the great permanent security for the uninterrupted progress of the ideas, the institutions, and the character of the human race” (594). But in his view an anticolonial and anti-imperial policy based on free-trade principles can no longer be justified in a straightforward way—and the old Benthamian argument that wars are caused by colonies also becomes problematic. As Mill (735) states with explicit reference to Wakefield, in civilized countries there is a risk that the rate of profit will sink to a minimum, that accumulating capital will lead to a kind of “stationary state” that can be remedied only by investing in foreign countries or colonies. Prosperity can be assured only through investment outside of England—and colonies, among other things, provide an opportunity for such investment:

It is to the emigration of English capital, that we have chiefly to look for keeping up a supply of cheap food and cheap materials of clothing, proportional to the increase of our population; thus enabling an increasing capital to find employment in the country, without reduction of profit, in producing manufactured articles with which to pay for this supply of raw produce. Thus, the exportation of capital is an agent of great efficacy in extending the field of employment for that which remains: and it may be said truly that, up to a certain point, the more capital we send away, the more we shall possess and be able to retain at home. (746)

All of this has clear repercussions for Mill’s thought with respect to democratic theory, as is only too apparent in his Considerations on Representative Government (1861), especially chapter 18 (“Of the Government of Dependencies by a Free State”). John Stuart Mill, who like his father James worked for the East India Company, presents his argument in an astonishingly open way. Distinguishing between mature and immature colonies, he makes no bones about defending the British Empire while emphasizing that immature nations, among which he specifically identifies India, can do without full political representation (1977b [1861], 563ff.). In fact, what was needed was a “vigorous despotism” to educate these immature peoples, “a good despot” (565) who would not even require supervision by the British Parliament, as the British public lacked an understanding of the colonies’ problems (570; see also Parekh 1995, 94; Robson 1998, 360ff.). The concept of freedom—Mill junior concluded—cannot be appropriately applied to barbarian (in other words, noncivilized) peoples. It makes sense only within the context of the civilized nations: “Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable” (Mill 1977a [1858], 224; on this issue, see Mehta 1999, 102). This point in the argument of one of the forefathers of liberalism is not only surprising from a democratic theory perspective. What seems even more remarkable (though entirely logical on utilitarian premises) is how quickly economic arguments could render obsolete the aversion to war and colonial policies still present in the early days of classical political economy. As Mill explains in “A Few Words on Non-Intervention” (1984 [1859]), Britain is often simply forced to wage war by the (non-European) barbarians, whether it itself has been attacked or not: “But there assuredly are cases in which it is allowable to go to war, without having been attacked, or threatened with attack; and it is very important that nations should make up their minds in time, as to what these cases are” (1984 [1859], 118). Though determining these “cases” may be difficult in the detail, it is nonetheless clear that there is no requirement for wars against barbarian peoples and lower civilizations to be fought on the basis of international law or an international morality: “[T]he rules of ordinary international morality imply reciprocity. But barbarians will not reciprocate” (ibid.). Barbarians have no rights as nations, so the emergent critique of the actions of the colonial powers of France and Britain in Algeria or India rests on false premises: “A civilized government cannot help having barbarous neighbors: when it has, it cannot always content itself with a defensive position, one of mere resistance to aggression. After a longer or shorter interval of forbearance, it either finds itself obliged to conquer them, or to assert so much authority over them, and so break their spirit, that they gradually sink into a state of dependence upon itself” (ibid.).³ But this did not invalidate the universal rules of morality. Mill considers intervention justifiable in principle if it aids a people’s struggle for liberation from a foreign yoke or a tyranny based on foreign military power, or contributes to struggles against cruel regimes that enslave their own populations, though only if other ways of influencing events have been exhausted and the means are proportionate.

So free trade, justified in economic terms, was seemingly able to enter smoothly into a symbiosis with imperialism (see also Semmel 1970), though the danger of war between the European nations and between the colonial masters and the colonized was now ignored or viewed as morally insignificant. Ultimately, this led to an ironic turn in liberal thought on war and peace, or at least certain aspects of it. In their sociopolitical ideas, James and John Stuart Mill—like Bentham before them—had abandoned all suggestion of a concept of the citizen informed by Roman virtues. They could now regard the debate—which Adam Smith and Adam Ferguson still thought necessary and which revolved around the citizen’s active participation in the republican polity—as outmoded. In this context, there was no longer any question of the ideal of the citizensoldier—so important to Ferguson in light of his praise for virtues, particularly martial ones—continuing to play a significant role. At least in England, the sociopolitical thought of liberalism moved away from any direct concern with war and the armed forces. The process of historical development was understood as in principle nonviolent, because of a faith in the (disciplining) effects of the economy and an assumption that individual and collective actors (such as states) would submit to the logic of the economy and thus refrain from violence and war. The “ironic” aspect is that it was nonetheless impossible to bid farewell to war as an intellectual possibility. It returned, in the colonial areas beyond Europe. However, these areas were far away, far enough away at least to allow influential liberal thinkers to marginalize war as a topic of relevance to social theory. This made both the Scottish debate on the role of the citizen-soldier ideal and the debate provoked by Kant on the relationship between a democratic republican constitution and war seem no longer relevant. In any event—see the reflections of James Mill (see p. 65ff.)—liberal thinkers were still quite willing to consider the “law of nations” and an international tribunal, though it was unclear what mechanisms, beyond the moral pressure applied by a transnational public and the pacifying function of markets, were to produce a peaceful settlement between the (European) nations. It is not to underestimate the significance of the transnational public sphere, which was flourishing during this era as a result of the struggle to abolish slavery (Keck/Sikkink 1998), to describe this as insufficient.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, it was only from a British perspective that the pacifying function of markets was still viewed in such unambiguous terms. Intellectuals in other nations, which faced quite different economic problems, developed highly critical views on this subject. These thinkers quickly understood that arguments for free trade were not disinterested but in fact intended to help Britain assume a leading role in the world with the minimum of violence and expense.⁴ They also understood that British propagandists of free trade were quite consciously concerned with the industrial superiority of Britain, its products, production methods, and prospects for innovation. In fact, in the thought of most British liberal free-trade enthusiasts, the link between free trade and Britain’s superiority did not occur as an afterthought or, as it were, a contingent outcome. It was consciously factored in and intended (see Semmel 1970). So it is quite understandable that, in the early 1840s, the German Friedrich List (1789–1846) responded to free-trade ideas with the argument that the universal spread of free trade would mean the perpetuation of most countries’ inferiority to the leading producing, trading, and naval powers and that the American Henry Carey (1793–1879) endorsed his view in the 1850s. The arguments put forward by both these thinkers certainly captured the intentions of the British free-trade theorists.⁵ There were good reasons for List’s (and Carey’s) plea for protectionism, and their views clearly helped weaken the utilitarian-liberal conception of peace outside Britain. If one believed that free trade merely served British interests, then the notion of the pacifying effects of trade no longer held much plausibility, because on this view economic conflicts between nations would be a likely occurrence, conflicts that might—and might have to—be fought out with military means.

Arguments espousing free trade as a means of achieving peace ran into particular difficulties in light of the non-European colonies, at least if one believed in the need to “conquer markets” in order to maintain the dynamism of capitalism. It is no coincidence that the liberal discourse changed markedly with respect to colonies. The early liberal argument that colonies could trigger wars was no longer maintained on these premises, so a strictly anti-imperialist position no longer followed automatically from liberal economic arguments. All of this points up the fact that, apart from hopes of a transnational public sphere, there were few pacifying mechanisms left within liberal thinking on war and peace if even the economy and trade offered no guarantees in this regard (on liberal economic theories’ affinity to peace, see the brief account in Burkhardt 1997, 561).

So the weakness of utilitarian-liberal arguments on peace, their openness to attack—on economic grounds—were already apparent at a very early stage, and there was no telling whether liberal premises might also come under pressure on the basis of decidedly political considerations. However much liberals might believe in trade as a mechanism that brings about peace, they were soon to face the far more pressing question of what sort of stability and, above all, what kind of reach liberal principles ultimately have against the background of nationalism, and whether liberal principles in themselves guarantee peace.

This skeptical question quickly rose to prominence even in those countries in which liberalism seemed firmly rooted. And it is telling that the answers to it, which can hardly be called “liberal,” can be found even in the work of those authors one would least expect to offend against liberal principles.

Historical research has demonstrated—chiefly with reference to the history of German liberalism in the Bismarck period and mainly in the Wilhelmine era—that only a small number of thinkers produced a free-trade-based critique of the negative economic impact of a state’s colonial acquisitions and of the wasteful character of militarism. It has also been correctly observed that this critique pushed such critics to a marginal position within the spectrum of opinion. Even those who maintained a skeptical distance from imperialist tendencies had no objections to state support for economic expansion through export policies. But this era was in fact marked by syntheses of liberalism and imperialism. We need only mention the names of Friedrich Naumann and Max Weber to illustrate this. As a liberal role model, Britain’s political, economic, and cultural ability to lead a world empire was viewed as exemplary. The “liberal imperialists” in particular regarded a German imperialism as the fulfillment and logical continuation of the policy of founding the Reich. For them, domestic liberal reforms were not justified primarily in terms of the values of freedom and popular sovereignty. Instead, reforms were intended to lay the groundwork for imperialist policies, not least because liberals were more aware of the link between the domestic and external spheres and supported this connection more vigorously than did conservative forces. We shall have more to say about this era later on. For now we wish to underline that similar ideas had in fact been expressed far earlier, not in Germany but France, in the work of an author whose name is not usually mentioned in connection with imperialist or belligerent policies—Alexis de Tocqueville.

Though the first half of the nineteenth century in particular was deeply influenced by liberal optimism about progress, this liberalism was by no means monolithic. There were (still) intellectuals who sought to reconcile “civic humanism” with liberal ideas, and who can therefore scarcely be described as “classical” liberals. The Strange Liberalism of Alexis de Tocqueville is the title of a summary of the basic political views of a thinker who brought new elements to the debate on how best to achieve peace, but who undoubtedly deployed arguments in his texts reminiscent of “civic humanism.”⁶

In his social theorizing on war, Tocqueville (1805–59) shared, at least in embryonic form, the premise that economic progress has a civilizing effect: “The ever-increasing numbers of men of property, [who are] lovers of peace, the growth of personal wealth which war so rapidly consumes, the mildness of manners, the gentleness of heart, those tendencies to pity which are engendered by the equality of conditions, that coolness of understanding which renders men comparatively insensible to the violent and poetical excitement of arms—all these causes concur to quench the military spirit” (Tocqueville 2007 [1835/40], 563). But Tocqueville’s position went far beyond this. Though he emphasized the civilizing effects of modern economic life, this did not cause him to believe in a final end to the age of war, referring as he did to the need for future national defense. But this is not the key difference from the Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, who quite explicitly took this need for granted as well, even if they were at odds over the “standing army versus militia” issue. What made Tocqueville different was the fact that he—two generations younger than the main figures in the Scottish Enlightenment—was more attentive to, and had a more sophisticated grasp of, the effects of mass democracy on the institutional structure of societies than many of his liberal contemporaries, particularly the social and cultural effects. The aristocrat Tocqueville, who grew up in the era of Napoleon and was familiar with the turmoil of the mass mobilized French public of the 1820s and 1830s, became acquainted with Jackson-era American democracy on his one-year trip through America, which he began in 1831. However highly he regarded this democracy, he was very sensitive to the dark sides of democratization. And he was able to bring this sensitivity to his theoretical analyses of the position of the army in democracies (analyses almost entirely removed from the American case). These are chiefly to be found in the third section (and esp. chapters 22–26) of the second volume of Democracy in America (see also Kernic 2001, 27ff.).

Tocqueville saw clearly that if aristocratic supremacy in society was to cease, this would also put an end to aristocratic dominance in the various national armies. The (democratic) opening of the army brings a new dynamic to it. Because military hierarchies were no longer cemented by class privileges, and were instead structured according to (democratic) principles of performance, Tocqueville thought it possible that this would make the armed forces more aggressive toward other countries. Military performance can best be demonstrated in war, so there would probably be a greater willingness to launch military adventures within an army structured according to the performance principle. From this perspective, Tocqueville believes he can discern a rift between a democratic army always ready and willing to wage war and a more peacefully inclined democratic polity: “We thus arrive at this singular consequence, that of all armies those most ardently desirous of war are democratic armies, and of all nations those most fond of peace are democratic nations” (Tocqueville 2007 [1835/40], 564). Regardless of whether Tocqueville’s prophecy here regarding the dichotomy between army and people has been borne out by history, Tocqueville was touching on a sore point, still relevant today, of any “armed” democracy. Tocqueville’s prediction, which applies equally to conscript and professional armies, that the richest, most educated, and most able citizens are unlikely to pursue a career in (democratic) armed forces,⁷ has unquestionably been proved correct, and the problem of representativity is still a live one today. The question of whether a basically unrepresentative army or army leadership can impose its own particular goals on politics is still as relevant as the question of which social strata or classes have to put their necks on the line in wars in order to achieve goals that may never have been theirs.

If we look primarily at Tocqueville’s main works, Democracy in America (1835/40) and On the State of Society in France before the Revolution of 1789 (1856), we might conclude that, while he was a highly sensitive, indeed brilliant observer or analyst of processes within societies (whether in America or France), he paid little attention to the international dimension of social processes—and thus to war itself. Ultimately, as we have seen, he discusses the upheavals that follow in the wake of democratic armies, but not war and its dynamics as such. Such a view, however, would be highly one-sided, if not wrong, though it never ceases to find exponents. As recently as 1985, Bruce James Smith came close to attributing a kind of pacifist tenor to Tocqueville’s thought: “And while Tocqueville never doubted that love of country and political liberty often called for the highest sacrifices from the patriot, he was inclined to view the war-like patriotism of the Imperial Republic as a perversion of more generous affections and a positive danger to civic vitality…. That war sustained the virtue of the ancient city (which to Machiavelli had appeared true) was, to Tocqueville’s mind, a dubious proposition” (Smith 1985, 160/61). But this is a gross distortion, which can probably be explained only in light of the way in which, overcome with enthusiasm for Tocqueville’s democratic ideals, certain writers plainly forget that there is another quite different side to him, evident in his treatment of the “Algeria question.” The literature on Tocqueville often carefully sidesteps this issue,⁸ preventing us from grasping how easily liberal thought could be seduced by imperialism before the mid-nineteenth century and suppressing how rapidly liberal thought could lead to a seemingly unproblematic justification of war.

Tocqueville was interested in Algeria even before his trip to America and—after his return—he even thought seriously about relocating there (Jardin 1962, 62). He was also a very enthusiastic supporter of France’s Africa policy in this connection, a policy that, for rather trivial reasons, led to the capture of Algiers in 1830 and subsequently to the full-scale occupation of the area, previously under Ottoman supremacy, by huge numbers of French troops (see Richter 1963, 368ff., and Hereth 1986, 145ff.). Tocqueville was a keen observer of Algeria and published his thoughts on events there. In preparation for his entry into politics, he ultimately became a sought-after expert on the country, though at this point he knew it solely from his reading of administrative documents. As a shareholder in the local newspaper Journal de Seine-et-Oise, he published two long letters on Algeria in that publication in 1837 to make himself known to his potential voters. Here he provides a kind of long-range analysis of the sociostructural conditions of Algerian “society,” describing the different cultures of Kabyle and Arabs, the role of religion, the effects of centuries-long Turkish rule on the prevailing mentality, and the sometimes disastrous consequences of the rapid abolition of Turkish administrative structures by the new French colonial masters (Tocqueville 2001b [1837], 14–17). For our purposes, this is of relevance only insofar as his proposals on French colonial policy and French settlement are very cautious in nature. Tocqueville is doubtful that every part of the country can be penetrated to the same degree—in his opinion, the Kabyle area seems unsuited to French settlement, and the same probably applies even to parts of the majority-Arab regions. The area around Algiers, meanwhile, provided suitable structures. And here Tocqueville states optimistically that an amalgamation of the French and Arab population is quite possible—in fact, he suggests that a blending of the inhabitants, so disparate ethnically and religiously, is a probability, in part because of processes of secularization (24ff.). So Tocqueville, who was already writing against the background of the Abd-el-Kader Arab uprising against the French colonial masters, still hopes in good liberal fashion that the ethnoreligious and sometimes violent conflicts can be resolved through a reasonable—in other words, moderate—settlement policy and that the expansion of trade structures will also ultimately alleviate these conflicts.

But his first trip to Algeria in May–June 1841 seems to have brought about a significant shift in his views, at least if we consult his roughly fifty-page “Essay on Algeria” from the same year, a result of this trip that was never published during his lifetime. Here, Tocqueville emerges as a convinced nationalist, who—like the later liberal imperialists in Germany—calls without reservation for French expansion and supports a merciless war against the Algerian population. The aversion to colonies still common in the eighteenth century has disappeared, and his nationalism is so aggressive that even John Stuart Mill, who corresponded with Tocqueville, was highly irritated by his remarks on the Algeria question. Tocqueville—as he states at the start of “Essay on Algeria”—wants the colonies to bolster the greatness of France! The difficult political and military situation should not cause France to conclude that it ought to withdraw from Algeria, as giving up this colony could only be interpreted as weakness on the part of France. “Any people that easily gives up what it has taken and chooses to retire peacefully to its original borders proclaims that its age of greatness is over” (Tocqueville 2001c [1841], 59). France must hold on to Algeria because only colonies guarantee influence in world politics, and rule over the North African coast guarantees geostrategically important control of access to the Mediterranean. The specific actions to be taken by the French colonial administration and the French troops in Algeria must be determined in light of these premises. Since—in contrast to 1837—Tocqueville no longer considers it possible to amalgamate the French and non-French populations, as he sees no prospect of assimilating the latter to the French way of life and the Arabs’ social structures clearly cannot be changed,⁹ now the only aim must be to systematically populate the country with French settlers. Under no circumstances must an Arab nation be allowed to emerge in this context (67), which is why the ultimate goal must be France’s “total domination” in Algeria (66). And this domination can be achieved only through massive use of force, and Tocqueville is quite specific here: “What type of war we can and must wage on the Arabs” (69) is the heading of one section. Tocqueville calls for a military strategy that destroys the foundations of the Arab way of life. Crops should be destroyed, foodstuffs confiscated or withheld, women and children placed under detention, and a ban on trade implemented (70f.). “Small mobile corps” must do their utmost to lay waste to the country—though while safeguarding “humanity and … the law of nations”—and destroy Arab cities (71f.): “I think it is of the greatest importance not to let any town remain or rise in Abd-el-Kader’s domain” (72).

To repeat, Tocqueville does not justify this belligerent policy toward Algeria with reference to economic benefits. He is quite emphatic that political considerations eclipse all conceivable economic interests: “I know that metropolitan commerce and industry will protest that we are sacrificing them; that the principal advantage of a colony is to provide an advantageous market for the mother country and not to compete with it. All of this may be true in itself, but I am not moved by it. In the current state of things, Algeria should not be considered from the commercial, industrial or colonial point of view: we must take an even higher perspective to consider this great question” (92). And as we have seen, for Tocqueville this “higher perspective” means endorsing whatever will enhance the power and greatness of France; it is these that must be promoted, by every possible means, even means that Tocqueville himself subsequently seemed to fear. In a quite prophetic way—and here he can build on his observations on “military sociology” in Democracy in America— he warns of the political consequences if the leaders of an African army estranged from French society should one day demonstrate their will to power in France: “God save France from ever being led by officers from the African army!” (78).

In his later years, Tocqueville found his way back to a more moderate stance on Algeria (see Richter 1963, 392f.); but the problem remains of how the understanding of liberalism and democracy articulated in his key texts can be reconciled with those his “Essay on Algeria” expressed so vehemently in 1841. In the 1960s, in one of the first major political science analyses of Tocqueville’s writings on Algeria, Melvin Richter put forward the irreconcilability thesis, asserting the existence of an inexplicable rupture between his liberal and nationalist arguments. “Tocqueville’s stand on Algeria was inconsistent with the Democracy. When this issue forced him to choose, he placed nationalism above liberalism; the interests of ‘progressive’ Christian countries above the rights of those that were not” (1963: 364; emphasis in original). But this view has recently been questioned by a number of authors (see the remarks by Fredrickson 2000, 112ff.; Bohlender 2005; Pitts 2005, chs. 6 and 7) who believe that it may in fact be possible to identify parallels with Democracy in America.

Toward the end of the first volume of this work (in the chapter “The Present and Probable Future Condition of the Three Races That Inhabit the Territory of the United States”), Tocqueville comments on the ethnic minorities in the United States and is highly skeptical about the prospects for integration of black and native Americans. Tocqueville, who rejects slavery on Christian grounds (see Gershman 1976, 470), believes that the United States will face great problems if it is abolished,¹⁰ prompting him to call for a process of gradual change. Tocqueville’s remarks on the integration of the nonwhite population are marked by melancholy and irony, an attempt to conceal the fact that he is unable to put forward any political solutions (Bohlender 2005, 527ff.). Tocqueville had no answer to the question of how the different cultures and ethnic groups might live together in harmony. He could be sharply critical of the British or European settlers’ behavior towards the indigenous population and slaves; but this criticism is frequently mixed with understanding for the settlers’ brutality, as he saw westward expansion and its economic foundations as indispensable to the political vitality of the United States: “He presents a complex historical argument about the causes of Amerindians’ suffering that enables him at once to defend and to deplore European expansion, as well as to refrain from offering any more just alternative” (Pitts 2005, 197). With respect to Algeria as well, in view of the difficulties of social integration in this multiethnic colonial society, Tocqueville could do no more than fall back on his ultimate value, the greatness of France. And this is what gives his argument its particular bite.

We must bear in mind that Tocqueville was no racist. It is true that he has a rather low opinion of Islam (Dion 1990, 68; Fredrickson 2000, 114), but he largely explains the behavior of the Kabyle and Arab population in historical and sociological terms. And we must also bear in mind that Tocqueville did not think primarily in terms of a civilizing mission in Algeria (Welch 2003, 242). You will search his works in vain for arguments extolling the blessings to be bestowed on Algeria’s Muslim population by France (Dion 1990, 69). And it is precisely this—as we hinted above—that distresses Tocqueville’s British correspondents and debating partners. They were shocked by his argument expounding conquest for the sake of national glory, particularly given that Tocqueville quite openly doubts the civilizing effects of (any) imperial policy: “Unlike J. S. Mill … who maintained that despotic rule over ‘barbarians’ was justified only when it was calculated to improve them … Tocqueville could admit that he believed the French had barbarized the Algerians rather than benefited them and still argue for expanding French rule” (Pitts 2005, 220).

In the end, Tocqueville’s concern was to revitalize France through foreign policy, and this definitely included the acquisition or retention of colonies through force of arms. In America—as Bohlender (2005, 525) rightly argues—Tocqueville had got to know democratic society as a highly expansive way of life, which he assumed could be kept stable only through this constant dynamism. He was compelled to make much the same assumption about France and its democratic structures during the July Monarchy, so that for him (colonial) expansion became the antidote to the recurring pathologies of democracy (529). But how to achieve this revitalization and eliminate these pathologies remained far from clear (Pitts 2005, 194). This problem was already present in latent form in the Scottish discourse on virtue. Adam Ferguson called for a militia because he regarded martial virtue as a key component of civic life. But how this martial virtue should make itself felt within the framework of the British world empire, which, even as a Scot, he viewed very positively, remained rather hazy. How did the small Scottish militia fit into Great Britain’s relatively large maritime military machinery and how can virtue be achieved in such a complex political and military structure? Ferguson provided no answer, probably because he had none to give. Rousseau’s position on this was more consistent. He rejected war and thus martial virtues and right from the outset called for small republics. In such manageable political communities, injecting vitality into the political sphere is not a particularly pressing problem because the citizens’ close contact with one another through civil society itself guarantees a continuous political dynamism. In large territorial states, meanwhile, this is harder to imagine. So Tocqueville’s call for an imperialist approach to injecting vitality and dynamism into French society may be understandable, but he remained very unclear or contradictory with regard to the mechanisms involved. Is it solely the chauvinism and imperial pride of the French masses that is ultimately to ensure the vitality of France and its democratic culture? And if so, how does this chauvinism relate to liberal principles and to freedom in French society and in the colonies?

After all, with respect to freedom in the colonies we must assume that the rights of the peoples crushed by democratic expansionism will play no more than a subordinate role. In the end, warlike colonialism serves to protect the freedom of the citizens of France (Dion 1990, 65). This seemed to mark the end of the universalism of the Enlightenment era, which at least ensured a consistent anticolonial critique. In contrast to John Stuart Mill, Tocqueville—in Bohlender’s interpretation (2005, 536)—saw very clearly that (colonial) violence is far from alien to democracy; and at least in his posthumously published “Essay on Algeria,” he spelled this out with unprecedented consistency and ruthlessness.

So Tocqueville’s position on the “Algeria question” is also problematic because of its theoretical inconsistencies—and not just its normative implications. We should not overlook the reasons why Tocqueville ran into such difficulties. As we have underlined, Tocqueville was no classical liberal. There are certainly echoes in his writings of the ancient Roman ideal of virtue, which he regarded as necessary to a lively democracy. Because of this, he felt called to find a means of injecting vitality into the democratic culture of France. Of course, Tocqueville does not call for a citizens’ militia in Ferguson’s sense. But the associated intentions were certainly not alien to him. This topic largely disappeared from the social theoretical debate in the nineteenth century; there seems to have been a widespread faith that “negative freedom” is enough to preserve liberality and democracy, particularly among liberal thinkers. As a result, most commentators adopted a linear idea of progress with respect to their particular conceptions of peace, and nowhere were hopes of the positive and ultimately peaceful effects of economic and scientific development articulated more strongly than in France. Auguste Comte, the founder of the new science of sociology, shared this optimism, in a stronger form not only than Tocqueville but even than liberals “of like mind” in England, such as John Stuart Mill, in whose work the issue of war remained present, at least under the surface, in light of what he saw as the necessity for colonial civilizing missions. In the work of the French authors to whom we shall turn now, on the other hand, certain arguments rooted in the Enlightenment achieved such dominance that war and violence were relegated to an extremely marginal position, which was to have major consequences for the emerging subject of sociology.

In view of what we have said about Tocqueville’s “strange liberalism,” it will come as no surprise that other liberals—not least Auguste Comte (1798–1857), who gave sociology its name—put forward arguments different in many ways from their contemporary Tocqueville. In a quite specific way, Auguste Comte codified the classical-liberal thesis of the incompatibility of war and economy, later so widespread within sociology, partly because his writings drew on very different traditions from those of Tocqueville.¹¹

Comte’s thought was characterized by the search—the desperate search—for social order in an era still marked by the chaos of the French Revolution, the subsequent wars, and Napoleon’s rule. “Bringing the Revolution to an end without having to give up its achievements—this was the problem that Comte’s generation found itself confronted with and that many, along with him, attempted to resolve” (Fetscher 1979, xxi; emphasis in original). We have already described Tocqueville’s “imperialist” solution. Comte’s solution, the reconciling of “order and progress,” had quite different aims in mind but was also deeply intertwined with the topic of war and peace. As Comte states in his early “Plan of the Scientific Work Necessary for the Reorganization of Society” (Plan des travaux scientifiques nécessaires pour réorganiser la société) from 1822, which laid the ground for his subsequent ideas, two key tendencies would shape the present age: “two different kinds of movement …: one of disorganization, the other of reorganization” (1998 [1822], 49). He saw it as his task to achieve this work of reorganization with intellectual means, to bring, guided by science, the disparate currents of French society into a harmonious or “truly organic” order (Comte 1973 [1822], 45).¹² Because this could not occur—at least not solely—through a voluntaristic act, Comte had to place his trust in more or less autonomous historical processes that would guarantee this future harmony. He found the intellectual means to this end in certain elements of French Enlightenment philosophy and—of key importance for our purposes—in social theories produced in direct response to the Napoleonic Wars.

Probably no one had more faith in social progress than certain thinkers of the French Enlightenment. While hopes of progress were always very much alive in Scottish moral philosophy generally (not just in the work of Ferguson, but especially that of Adam Smith), these hopes were radically qualified by an awareness of the ever-present contingencies of history. Certain French philosophers, meanwhile, placed considerably more emphasis on progress. The ideas of Turgot and Condorcet were decisive for Comte in this regard (see also Misch 1969, 47ff.). Turgot’s (1727–81) influential writings from the mid-eighteenth century have become one of the key points of departure for philosophers of history and historians because for the first time, and in an easily understandable way, they viewed the human race as a homogeneous subject of history (see Rohbeck 1990, 39): “[T]he human race, considered over the period since its origin, appears to the eye of a philosopher as one vast whole, which itself, like each individual, has its infancy and its advancement” (Turgot 1973, 41). On the basis of this idea, the historical process could be described as a coherent one in which we can merely observe differing rates of progress among nations (42). Turgot made it quite clear that the greatest state of advancement was to be found in Europe. In contrast to many other Enlightenment thinkers, he took an extremely dim view of the (alleged) despotism of Asia and especially China (Turgot 1990, 99, 105; Turgot 1973, 47), causing him to devalue other cultures and civilizations. These premises and the assumption of linear progress forced Turgot to correct the negative view of the Middle Ages and especially of medieval Christianity so widespread in the French Enlightenment. In fact, Turgot referred to the liberal effects of the feudal system (Turgot 1990, 106) and produced an interpretation of Christianity suggesting that it had reinforced the natural feelings between people and alleviated the horrors of war (123f., 134; see also Manuel 1962, 40). Only by reinterpreting European history in this way could he establish an uninterrupted historical connection between the ancient and modern worlds. It now became possible to conceive of a “universal history” as the “consideration of the successive advances of the human race, and the elaboration of the causes which have contributed to it” (Turgot 1973, 64). We are looking at the birth of a highly appealing form of philosophy of history, capable of conceiving of progress independent of empirical chronology (Rohbeck 1990, 48).

Condorcet (1743–1794), whom Comte was to refer to time and again, mostly in a positive way (Comte 1875, 570ff.; see also Pickering 1993, 51ff.), built on this foundation a few decades later. In his Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind (1795), he too assumes that history has a subject, by positing a parallel between the development of individual abilities and the progress of humanity (Condorcet 1955 [1795], 4). He understands this progress as in principle infinite (ibid.), such that it even seems possible that (individual) death will one day be consigned to history (200f.). Condorcet not only sees many indications that a new stage of civilization has in fact been reached (according to him, politics is already taking its lead from public opinion and philosophy) (127). He is also confident that the unconscious tendencies of history, which bring about progress (such as increasing trade, which prevents wars) (194), can soon be supplemented by conscious processes of control, such that it becomes plausible to imagine an end to the “empire of fate” (fate as the enemy of progress!) (201). The “application of the calculus” (191) will make it possible to steer human or societal affairs, dismantle prejudices, and thus abolish “war as the most dreadful of scourges” (194).

The belief in progress outlined above was not necessarily shaken by the aftereffects of the French Revolution and the devastation caused by the Napoleonic Wars, but the arguments made about it certainly required some reworking. At the very least, in light of the unleashing of revolutionary and national passions, the faith in “calculus” could no longer be upheld in any straightforward way. Once again, there was a need to rely more on the unconscious tendencies or inevitable forces of history if the faith in progress, and especially faith in an ultimately peaceful future, was to be justified.¹³ For Comte, a significant role was played here by the writings of Benjamin Constant (1767–1830), who had outlined the contrast between military and industrial societies a few years before Comte’s most creative period (on Constant’s influence on Comte, see Pickering 1993, 174ff.).

Constant, perhaps the central, though often unappreciated intermediary between the “liberalism” of Montesquieu and that of Tocqueville, had already completed his Principes de politique (Principles of Politics) in 1810 (it was to appear in abridged form in 1815) and in it he made a serious effort to grapple with issues of war and peace. The chapter on war (“De la guerre”) includes profound reflection on the change in mentality that occurred in the modern age, which indicated that war would soon be no more. Constant begins by praising war, which—if truly a war waged between peoples and not just inspired by the wishes of rulers—contributed a great deal to the development of human abilities in the past. But Constant believes this is no longer the case. A warlike mood among the general population is a thing of the past, not least because modern mechanized warfare has rid war of any appeal: “The new mode of combat, the changes in weaponry …, artillery: these have deprived military life of what used to be most attractive about it. There is no longer a struggle against danger; there is fatality. Courage today is no longer a passion; it is indifference” (Constant 2003 [1810], 278). So nations are no longer belligerent, in part because the damage done by wars has become incalculable and—as experience shows—armed conflicts always lead to internal repression (ibid.). This shift in mentality, according to Constant, is also apparent in the fact that it is no longer possible to legitimize wars merely on the basis of political leaders’ thirst for fame. Wars must be justified in new ways, and with great matter-of-factness Constant points to the ever-present danger that the public will be manipulated, which is another reason why he is skeptical about the possibility of ever achieving a truly clear distinction between wars of aggression and defense (287). Constant emerges as a deeply political thinker, whose primary concern is with the negative political effects of wars. In particular, he notes the contradiction between the citizen and the soldier in the great territorial states of the modern age. What may have converged in antiquity is now out of touch with reality. In any case, the ideal of the citizen-soldier seems undesirable to Constant, probably in part because he had always taken a skeptical view of the revolutionary messianism of the French Revolution that was based upon it. Further—as we have underlined—he always sees the danger of internal repression that arises from the presence of a strong army. Simply put, it is near impossible to control armies (288), and this applies particularly if there is conscription. For Constant, not only are conscript armies disadvantageous because the productive (young) male population is taken out of the economy; conscription should also be opposed because it involves the curtailment of individual freedom, which should be resisted from Constant’s liberal perspective (289f.). At most, Constant is willing to countenance a voluntary army, as this is not only likely to respect citizens’ freedoms but also at least risk of developing into a state within a state (291).

In view of ongoing international tensions, Constant does not, however, dispute the need for an army. It is true that the experience of the European revolutionary wars immediately calls into question the efficiency of voluntary armies. But Constant is not prepared to work on the assumption that such voluntary armies are inefficient, though he clearly has his doubts. If need be—he argues—governments could always fall back on conscription (292). But from a long-term perspective—and this is the crucial point, through which Constant tries to wriggle out of liberal difficulties with standing armies—the question of army structures will eventually become meaningless, because the key currents of the age will put an end to armed conflicts between nations.

Constant goes on to develop this argument, conceived in the era of the Napoleonic Wars and thus very surprising, in the chapter “De l’autorité sociale chez les anciens” in particular. He was familiar with the writings of Adam Smith and others through his studies in Scotland, and here he draws attention to the generally peaceful spirit of the new age. But for Constant, who admired Machiavelli and had also got to know that spirit of “civic humanism” that pervaded the writings of Montesquieu and the “Scots” (see Capaldi 2003, xix), the warlike ancient republics ultimately differ from the big modern states because the former combined a great deal of political freedom with negligible individual freedom: “By a remarkable singularity, however, those who offer us antiquity as a model choose by preference exclusively bellicose peoples like the Spartans and the Romans. This is because only these nations lend support to their theoretical viewpoint, only they brought together great political freedom and an almost total absence of individual freedom” (Constant 2003 [1810], 353). Constant, on the other hand, is no longer prepared to pay this price of giving up individual freedom, particularly given that peace—as he states—is inherent in the prevailing Zeitgeist: “Today everything is reckoned in terms of peace” (ibid.). War is a legacy of the past. At most, it is now a means of achieving certain goals, and no longer an end in itself. But even the suitability of war as a means is increasingly in doubt, because it is simply no longer worth the effort (354). As the spirit of the present age is a trading one and the effects of trade are entirely positive, this will eventually lead to a transformation in international relations as well—as Constant argues, referring positively to Adam Smith in particular (356f., 373).

In the treatise “De l’esprit de conquête et de l’usurpation dans leurs rapports avec la civilisation européenne” (The Spirit of Conquest and Usurpation and Their Relation to European Civilization) from 1814, Constant condenses his argument and again makes a highly dichotomous distinction between trade and war: “We have finally reached the age of commerce, an age which must necessarily replace that of war, as the age of war was bound to precede it. War and commerce are only two different means to achieve the same end, that of possessing what is desired…. It is clear that the more the commercial tendency prevails, the weaker must the tendency to war become. The sole aim of modern nations is repose, and with repose comfort, and, as source of comfort, industry. War becomes every day a more ineffective means of attaining this aim” (Constant 1988 [1814], 53/54).¹⁴ This established the dichotomy between bellicose and industrial society, which was to have such a decisive impact on nineteenth-century thought.

In fact, this dichotomy between military and industrial society is present in Comte’s previously mentioned early text, the “Plan of the Scientific Work Necessary for the Reorganization of Society” (1822) (on the fundamental significance of this text, see Pickering 1993, 222ff.). There are “only two possible goals of activity for a society, however numerous it may be, as for an isolated individual. These are conquest, or violent action on the rest of the human race, and production, or action on nature to modify it to the advantage of man. Any society which is not clearly organised for one or other of these ends is just a hybrid association devoid of character. The military goal was that of the old system, the industrial goal is that of the new” (Comte 1998 [1822], 66/67; emphasis in original). This dichotomy also finds reflection in the famous Comtean law of the three stages, whose main features are also developed in this text and which were subsequently to remain essentially unchanged (see Scharff 1995).The teleological notion of the necessary historical sequence of a theological-military, metaphysical, and finally—present-day—positive or scientific age, ascribes constitutive significance to different forms of activity (warfare or industrial work). Like Constant, Comte too works on the assumption that in the earliest times, in the theological and then in the transitional metaphysical age, war had functional significance. In times when industrial skills as yet played no role, “society naturally had to take war as the goal of its activity, especially when we think that such a state of things made the means of war easy to come by, at the same time as imposing the law of war by the most energetic incentives that act on man, the need to exercise his faculties and the need to live” (Comte 1998 [1822], 91). But times have changed. Industrial development is now generating different problems. The sciences—most recently “social physics” or “sociology,” as it was later to be known—have now entered a phase that might be described as “positive,” because in contrast to the metaphysical era the imagination no longer dominates observation, and instead—in sharp contrast—theory building is guided by observation (Comte 1973 [1822], 84).¹⁵

As Comte argues—and he builds here on the ideas of Condorcet—the time has now come for a scientific analysis of history and society, an analysis, in other words, that is in keeping with the times and that grasps the inherent laws of history and societal development. As he was to state later, in 1844, “Thus the true positive spirit consists above all in seeing for the sake of foreseeing; in studying what is, in order to infer what will be, in accordance with the general dogma that natural laws are invariable” (Comte 1903 [1844], 26; emphasis in original). Like Condorcet, Comte is at pains to eliminate chance from history (Comte 1998 [1822], 95), as this is the only way to comprehend “that civilization is subject to a determined and invariable course” (ibid.). Ultimately, understanding these necessary developments will not only help prevent future violent revolutions, whose harmful impact Comte had experienced (Comte 1973 [1822], 101). Supervision of positive societal formation by the “scholars” (“savants”) on the one hand and the “heads of industrial works” (“chefs des travaux industriels”) (68) on the other will also put an end to war between states. According to Comte, following Constant, there is a contrast between “military and working life,” between the “military and industrial spirit.” Though war may have had its positive functions in earlier times, it loses them in the positive age (Comte 1933, 162ff.). The military sphere’s loss of function is also evident in a change of mentality, as people are increasingly unwilling to volunteer for military service, and ultimately—as Comte argues with reference to recent American history and drawing on arguments from British political economy—also because the “decline of colonial rule” invalidates all the reasons for war (393). Finally, Comte assumes that the existing armed forces will also be pervaded by the positive spirit and will ultimately function solely to maintain domestic order—in other words as a gendarmerie. However, even this will not become too large, as Comte assumes that violence will disappear within societies as well, particularly given—as he expects—that the leadership role and skills of the new elites will be universally recognized (see also Fuchs-Heinritz 1998, 205, 230). At any rate, with respect to the foreign policy aspects of interest to us here, Comte is consistent: he calls for the freeing of the French colonies and, especially in his later works, proposes that existing states be broken up into smaller entities (230ff.). All of this is clearly intended to help bring about, more quickly or comprehensively, the transition to the positive, peaceful-industrial form of society that is inevitably happening anyway.

At first sight, the ideas on the incompatibility of war and industrial structures put forward by Comte (and ultimately Constant as well) seem to be a mere continuation of certain arguments already set out in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, particularly by Adam Smith. As we showed in the preceding chapter, in Wealth of Nations Smith had also presented a historical-sociological analysis of the link between basic socioeconomic structures and the potential for the existence of specific military institutions. Smith’s question was: What forms of army are possible in specific socioeconomic contexts? (see p. 35ff.). In a sense, this was simply a question about the compatibility of institutions. So Smith’s remarks may be interpreted as a cautious functionalist argument, as he only outlines possible types of military organization but does not really examine whether violence and war per se are incompatible with certain social structures. This functionalist caution is now abandoned in the arguments of Constant and Comte, as they assert that modern industrial society in itself will more or less rule out the possibility of violence and war. This is a far stronger functionalist supposition, which later liberal thinkers often found fascinating and impossible to resist, despite rapidly being confronted with major difficulties and contradictions.

This was soon apparent in the work of the Englishman Herbert Spencer (1820–1903), who also had an outstanding influence on the early theoretical development of sociology. His theory of differentiation was taken up by later theorists of modernization and evolution in the second half of the twentieth century, while time and again the classical figures of American sociology such as Charles H. Cooley and George Herbert Mead, along with their French counterpart Émile Durkheim, drew explicitly on his work, mostly to define their differences from him.

It is quite difficult to determine Spencer’s social theoretical position within the debate on war and peace because his later interpreters tended to immediately drag his evolutionary theory into the vehement disputes over Darwinism, Lamarckism, and Social Darwinism. Not only that, but his views changed markedly during his lengthy period of creativity. There is a long tradition within sociology of writers stressing their differences with Spencer while nonetheless, consciously or unconsciously, taking up elements found in some of his works. Furthermore, through his ultraliberal work The Man “Versus” the State, Spencer was declared the epitome of the radical libertarian and an ideological stooge of the “robber barons.” This may in fact be defensible in the case of this particular text, but not if we include consideration of many of his other works (Francis 2007, 250f.; Taylor 1992, 73). All in all, it is difficult to interpret Spencer’s theory in general, and this applies even more to his statements on war and peace.

A fair characterization of Spencer would be to call him a moderate evolutionist (Boudon/Bourricaud 1984, 345; for a more antiteleological interpretation of Spencer’s work, see Haines 1998). In reality, though he coined the term “survival of the fittest” at an early stage (a term often wrongly attributed to Darwin), he was by no means directly interested in Darwin’s key concerns. The main difference between Spencer and Darwin was simply that Spencer was not concerned with the problem of the historical alteration of biological species; he was not convinced that long periods of time were necessary to bring about a significant change among species (Francis 2007, 190). Spencer was interested in the issue of species’ environmental adaptation in the here and now and put forward a number of arguments on this subject, some of which were very close to the views of Lamarck.

In light of this it comes as no surprise that by the 1850s, a few years before the publication of Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, Spencer was developing his evolutionary ideas and applying them immediately to human societies. Drawing on the arguments of Adam Smith and Malthus, he supported the idea of the free play of social forces (see Peel 1971, 138). Spencer assumes a perfect fit between the social organism and the environment as the goal of evolution (Francis 2007, 197), and even in his early writings he makes no distinction between human and nonhuman life. Progress, in any event, is certain. So Spencer deploys an identical descriptive formula to capture both spheres of evolution, the social and the biological: the famous “law of development” from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous, with this process obviously being driven forward by life itself.¹⁶ It should be noted that Spencer’s reference to the move “from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous” is quite alien to Darwinian thought. For Darwin,—as J.D.Y. Peel (1971, 142f.) has pointed out—there is no need for the development of ever more complex organisms. But Spencer works on the assumption that such development does indeed occur, clearly drawing on the debate that had been going on at least since the emergence of Scottish Enlightenment philosophy or early political economy with respect to the advancing division of labor. And this was presumably also the reason why Spencer never really abandoned Lamarckian arguments, because to do so would have opened up a gap between biological and sociocultural evolution—which would have conflicted with Spencer’s entire theoretical system. The transfer of patterns from one generation to the next, precisely what happens in human culture in other words, would not have fit within his framework without Lamarckian arguments; but the absence of such arguments would have wrecked the notion of the unity of evolution, biological and social, which Spencer made so much of, as well as casting doubt on the notion of a shift from the homogeneous to the heterogeneous (143).

What sounds so simple in the phrase “survival of the fittest” and what Spencer’s early writings perhaps suggest is the Social Darwinist notion of perpetual, merciless, predatory competition between individuals on the one hand and between nations on the other. Yet Spencer did not advocate this notion in this form. Again and again, at least in his early and middle work, Spencer balances out individualist-liberal or even libertarian views with references to issues of justice that must also be taken into account (see Francis 2007, 250f.; Taylor 1992, 73). And neither did he assume that this struggle would be “perpetual.” His evolutionism was “moderate” or with reservations, in part because it was intertwined with the dichotomy between the bellicose and industrial social formations with which we are familiar from the work of Comte.¹⁷ The key point here is that the certainty about progress still observable in the work of Spencer in the mid-nineteenth century, the faith that (social) evolution can be equated with progress, is coming unstuck, as evident, apart from anything else, in this dichotomy.

Spencer is not quite sure how this dichotomy can fit into his evolutionary thinking. As particularly evident in the Principles of Sociology, the first part of which was published in 1874, he applies the distinction between bellicose and industrial societies both in the sense of extreme types and in the sense of developmental stages. The second line of argument is better known. But at many points in this work Spencer argues as if, at each developmental stage, societies can move more toward a bellicose or industrial type—dependent on contingent circumstances. “As, during the peopling of the Earth, the struggle for existence among societies, from small hordes up to great nations, has been nearly everywhere going on; it is, as before said, not to be expected that we should readily find examples of the social type appropriate to an exclusively industrial life” (Spencer 1885, 615; see also Haines 1998, 105). Neither is it certain that bellicose societies will disappear completely in the present era, nor can we rule out the possibility that societies existed in prehistoric times in which the warlike spirit was absent. This dimension must be taken into account at all stages of development. Nevertheless, it makes sense to Spencer to work with this dichotomy and affirm that in bellicose societies individualism plays very little role, that the political structures are highly centralized, that questions of status and rank are hugely important and trade is only marginal, and that economic self-sufficiency and autarchy are key characteristics of these bellicose societies. While militant societies are characterized by “compulsory cooperation,” in industrial societies “voluntary cooperation” leads to a high degree of individualism and generally egalitarian structures.¹⁸ Among other things, “industrial” social structures are characterized by a relatively pronounced dissociation between military service and citizenship, in other words the armed forces become a kind of profession, decoupled from the status of citizen. And this is linked with the fact that the number of citizens who actively participate in war is fairly small relative to the population as a whole, which in turn makes the high degree of individualism in industrial societies possible in the first place (Spencer 1885, 478ff.). With the advance of industrial society, Spencer therefore expects not only more peaceful but also more democratic structures. In the past, wars have often led to state centralization and thus almost always to restrictions on freedom. So the decline in the number of wars as the number of “industrial” societies increases will also facilitate a major advance in liberalization and democratization.

It is at this point that Spencer’s critique of Comte begins. He believes that Comte was unable to see that his own account of the basic structures of industrial societies in the positive age is scarcely compatible with the spirit (which Comte saw as typically French and “militaristic”) of anti-individualism, elitism, and collectivism that pervaded his writings (257; see also Boudon/Bourricaud 1984, 349). Spencer’s writings do in fact feature an inherent individualism, which sets them apart clearly from Comte’s arguments. But—very much in line with his merely typological use of the dichotomy between bellicose and industrial societies—Spencer is not entirely sure whether individualistic features inevitably advance ever further, that is, whether there is a more or less linear developmental path from bellicose to industrial societies. As many of Spencer’s interpreters have noted, toward the end of his writing career he becomes ever more skeptical about the ideas of progress he himself had earlier expounded (see, e.g., Francis 2007, 288). A kind of political and social relativism (though still of an evolutionist hue) seems to have made itself felt. In Principles of Sociology, Spencer no longer expresses the belief that the ways of life of “civilized” peoples can be straightforwardly transferred to “more primitive” ones and that such transferal can in itself produce a positive outcome (1885, 233). Not only that, but according to Spencer his conviction that the process of evolutionary development and the emergence of true “civilizations” ineluctably promote humanitarianism is a misconception. “Whatever relation exists between moral nature and social type, is not such as to imply that the social man is in all respects emotionally superior to the pre-social man” (239). More important in this context is the fact that Spencer sees disturbing tendencies at work in the highly developed social formations of his own time that seem to undermine all hopes of progress. Prussia and its move toward militarism demonstrated to him (588ff.) that the distinction between militant and industrial societies can only be a typological one and does not point to a linear development. And Spencer does in fact refer repeatedly to the alternation between “militancy” and “industrialism,” which seemingly pervades all of human history (429, 568; see also Turner 1984, 28).

It is, however, unclear how this alternation between bellicose and industrial societies in Spencer’s theory can in any way be reconciled with his basic evolutionist thesis of development from the “homogeneous to the heterogeneous.” If the differentiation of social structures that are increasingly organized in line with the division of labor is truly the hallmark of social change, it remains an open question why militant forms have repeatedly arisen featuring the “compulsory cooperation” that is of course distinguished by dedifferentiated structures. We might conclude that coincidences contribute to this dedifferentiation and thus to the repeated reemergence of militant societies. But as social evolution advances, such coincidences must be ever less likely to occur or the crucial factors leading to militarism must be ever less pronounced. This is because the more radically structures are differentiated, the more difficult it becomes to imagine returning to dedifferentiated forms of social organization in the first place.

Spencer seems to have shared this view. It is true that he refers to the negative example of Prussia in Principles of Sociology, warning of the rebarbarization of contemporary European societies. And in view of the ongoing possibility of barbarism and the risk of war, he emphasizes the uncertainty of the future; he even questions the thesis of the unilinear development of humanity and the idea that types of political regime will move closer to one another. But despite all of this, the notion of seemingly objective tendencies toward the development of industrial society appears—quite abruptly—toward the end of the book, which ultimately leads him to reinterpret the typological dichotomy between bellicose and industrial societies as a schema of evolutionary development. So Spencer does assert that in future there will be ever fewer cases of government intervention and thus that political and social structures will become further differentiated. He evaluates the (imperialist) militancy of European nation-states of his time as a (temporary) relapse within a fundamentally advancing process of evolution and differentiation: “Citizens will carry still further their resistance to state-dictation; while the tendency to state-dictation will diminish. Though recently, along with reinvigoration of militancy, there have gone extensions of governmental interference, yet this is interpretable as a temporary wave of reaction” (Spencer 1885, 660; emphasis added). This should be viewed merely as a relapse because, according to Spencer, war is no longer productive or has been completely overtaken by the productivity of industrial civilization: “Thus, that social evolution which had to be achieved through the conflicts of societies with one another, has already been achieved; and no further benefits are to be looked for” (665). For Spencer: “From war has been gained all that it had to give” (664). This applies to imperialism as well. Though the expansion of the European societies made sense in earlier times and the barbarian peoples were quite rightly “civilized,” it is now questionable whether this imperialism, which has always been advanced by military means, can still do justice to the demands of highly differentiated industrial societies, especially given that this imperialism inevitably gives rise to the very militaristic structures that run counter to the industrial type of society (see Turner 2003, 78; Battistelli 1993, 206).

Overall, there is a notably tense relationship between Spencer’s functionalist evolutionism and his awareness of the ever-present possibility of a relapse into (warlike) barbarism. As Italian sociologist Fabrizio Battistelli has highlighted, Spencer’s naturalistic conception of society’s inevitable advancement to ever higher levels not only conflicts with the pacifist and anti-imperialist politics that he openly propagated. It is also unclear why the original driving force of (biological and social) evolution, the conflict between biological organisms or social units, should suddenly have come to a standstill in Spencer’s own time toward the end of the nineteenth century, at least in the social sphere, and should tend to promote peace between industrial societies. By taking this stance, Spencer is not only abandoning the still-cherished thesis of the unity of evolution; such a stance is really plausible—see Spencer’s conviction that war is no longer productive—only if we understand societies as highly rational, coherent actors, which keep their distance from war for reasons of utility. Spencer frames his argument in such a way that the problematic nature of this supposition that society is unified is no longer evident, as societies are now understood as functionally differentiated wholes. But, as a result, the differences between social groups and classes in terms of power and interests are left systematically out of account. What was still present in classical political economy, in the work of Adam Smith, for example, but also that of utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham and the two Mills, was namely the notion that there are also different classes in highly developed societies, that the “ruling few” have an interest in colonies, that this contributes to the constant risk of war, and that because of this the colonies must be emancipated (at least according to Bentham)—Spencer’s argumentational tropes are devoid of all this. Even if it is true that, in contrast to Comte, Spencer used the concept of organism merely as an analogy to social structures, it is clear that he pays little or no attention to conflicts within societies as systematic problems of industrial societies. And this makes it very difficult to ask whether and how, for example, sets of circumstances arise within societies in which (military) force can either become a rational or at least understandable option, or (military) force can be repeatedly deployed, more or less unexpectedly, as the unintended result of actions. So on the basis of theoretical premises, Spencer’s functionalism once again reinforces what was in any case already inherent in the liberal tradition of thought and the thesis of the pacifying effects of trade, namely the assumption of the fundamental peacefulness of modern societies (see Battistelli 1989, 28f.).

It was in the writings of Comte and Spencer that the classical nineteenth-century liberal conception of peace found its true expression. This was the view held by those who believed they could plausibly lend credence, with sociological and historical arguments, to hopes of worldwide progress—and thus hopes of an end to war—which had formerly often been justified solely in philosophy-of-history terms. In that sense this conception was the very embodiment of bourgeois optimism and the mood that a new era was dawning—a widely held sentiment in European and North American society during the first phase of industrialization.

Even within Marxism—the great antagonist of liberalism in the second half of the nineteenth century—this optimism about progress was widely shared. As much as it saw itself as the great opponent of liberalism, Marxism adopted some of its central premises. At the very least, Marx and his supporters shared Enlightenment hopes and therefore expected the emergence of a nonviolent world order following the socialist revolution; as a result, there was simply no discussion of whether there could still be diversity and thus conflict between peoples, religious communities, or other groups following the socialist revolution (see Berki 1971). How such an Enlightenment-style expectation of peace could be entertained in the first place becomes clear in Friedrich Engels’s Anti-Dühring (“Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science” from 1878). In a brilliant critique of Dühring’s ideas on the crucial importance of war to social change, Engels (1820–95), Marx’s closest comrade-in-arms, again sets out explicitly the “fundamentals” of the materialist conception of history, which he and Marx regarded as established by science. Engels was extremely well versed in the literature on war and undoubtedly a good deal more knowledgeable about military history than Marx (see Neumann 1952, esp. 158). Here, step by step, he seeks to demonstrate that all military conflicts and their results are determined by and dependent on the relations of production. So they can never be regarded as the key movers of history. According to Engels, at no point in history has violence been an independent driving force but only ever a means to given—and genuinely decisive—economic ends (1975 [1878], 192). There may be a small number of exceptions, in cases where, under favorable circumstances, economically backward peoples overrun civilizations economically superior to them (219). But this is the exception rather than the rule. In fact: “[A]lways and everywhere it is the economic conditions and the instruments of economic power which help ‘force’ to victory” (205).

In Anti-Dühring, Engels goes so far as to describe the history of war and warfare as fundamentally a history of technological innovation, which must itself be understood as dependent on the relations of production. In this connection he puts forward two arguments intended to prove that, as an expression of the tensions in capitalist societies, militarism is on the point of abolishing itself. First, Engels tells us, the course of the Franco-German war of 1870/71 shows that there is little scope left for further development of the tools of war. War has clearly gone as far as it can technologically. Weapons have now “reached … a stage of perfection” (204). At the same time—and this is the second sociological argument, which must be taken rather more seriously—the development of the military sphere will also come to an end because of the now necessary mass mobilization. In this connection Engels refers to a dialectic of militarism. The introduction of mass armies and universal conscription made necessary by the dynamics of conflict in Europe—the counterpart of or supplement to the extension of suffrage—will be the financial ruin of the existing states, as the costs of the associated armaments explode and become impossible to meet. In addition, as a result of universal conscription, weapons will increasingly end up in the hands of those who have a great interest in toppling the existing capitalist-militarist order, namely the workers (and peasants):

Militarism dominates and is swallowing Europe. But this militarism also bears within itself the seed of its own destruction. Competition among the individual states forces them … to resort to universal compulsory military service more and more extensively, thus in the long run making the whole people familiar with the use of arms, and therefore enabling them at a given moment to make their will prevail against the war-lords in command. And this moment will arrive as soon as the mass of the people—town and country workers and peasants—will have a will. At this point the armies of the princes become transformed into armies of the people; the machine refuses to work, and militarism collapses by the dialectics of its own evolution. (204; emphasis in original; see also Münkler 1992, 63ff.)

So militarism, Engels concludes, will be rent “asunder from within” (1975 [1878], 205; emphasis in original).

Engels’s interpretation of war in terms of a technological materialism also implies that violence and war must be understood—and, if applicable, legitimized—within the context of the historical process (220). The euphemistic but pithy phrases that Engels uses here exercised a tremendous influence on revolutionary thought and action, particularly in the twentieth century. Deploying Marx’s vocabulary, Engels states that (revolutionary) violence is the “midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one” (ibid.). Violence is appropriate or even required if it aids the emergence of a new mode of production. Of course, violence will finally disappear—and here we can see Marxism’s liberal inheritance—when there are no longer economic reasons for it, in other words, when communist society has been established. Assuming the lawlike advance of the historical process, Engels is able to provide instructions for action, such that the victims of revolutionary war and revolutionary violence are neglected. This is one of the wellsprings of the fateful tendency, which was to become so typical of Marxist thought, to justify the agony and suffering of the present as a means of bettering the lives of future generations.¹⁹

Engels does in fact follow the materialist conception of history through to its ultimate conclusion—with major reductionist consequences. However we might assess Eugen Dühring’s “contribution” and his emphasis on the role of war in the detail (and Engels’s counterarguments are often quite correct), we obstruct the path to adequate historical understanding if we declare certain aspects of reality, such as military factors, to be of merely secondary importance on a basic conceptual level and per definitionem. And in fact, while the economic reductionism within Marxism has proved useful in ensuring that our analyses take account of the vested interests of the arms industry, overall it has emerged as out of touch with reality and a hindrance to genuine understanding. Again and again during the past century—always with great difficulty and by mustering every conceivable rhetorical device—Marxists had to reconcile the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, which was highly aggressive in practice, with the theoretical postulate of a fundamentally peaceful socialist mode of production. They even had to explain the unthinkable, namely, the war between the socialist states of Vietnam and China in the 1970s. Of course, such “explanations” were far from convincing, and it comes as no surprise that well-informed leftists within Anglo-American sociology, who saw Marxian ideas as quite legitimate, began to think afresh about the independent role of politics and war in history (see Mann 1988a [1977]; Evans/Rueschemeyer/Skocpol 1985; and p. 194ff. below).

References to “Marxism” are, of course, always problematic, when we consider that Marxian theory, before being given its seemingly final codified form by the authorities in Stalin’s Soviet Union and in the “fraternal” socialist states, was constantly reinterpreted and thus modified in the debates of the second half of the nineteenth century. By the 1880s at the latest, in view of the progressive improvement in the living standards of sections of the working class, it had become ever more questionable, at least for some “Marxist” intellectuals, whether key tenets of Marxist theory—the labor theory of value and its prognosis that the proletariat would be increasingly impoverished—were in fact tenable. If legitimate doubts could be raised about these core theoretical elements, then it was naturally quite possible to question the likelihood of the revolution that Marx and his supporters expected to occur as well. From this perspective, the integration of the working class into the various nation-states must at least be viewed as a thinkable option. But this led to the insight that—unless one wished to abandon all hopes of a revolution—the revolution was probably still some way off, and that even revolutionary socialists must therefore accommodate themselves to existing conditions for the time being. In an age of competing and highly armed nation-states, this also meant that one had to tackle the question of peace: from the perspective of socialist intellectuals and party leaders, it was very likely to be their own clientele who would be sent to slaughter in any new war (on the political thrust of the German Social Democrats’ critique of the armed forces in the German Empire, see Neff 2005). And, in fact, it was not just revisionists but even Engels himself who responded to this problem following Marx’s death, going so far as to relativize his hopes of a dialectic of militarism expressed in Anti-Dühring. His essay “Can Europe Disarm?” from 1893 is an intelligent attempt, bristling with expert knowledge, to propose detailed measures that might put a stop to the military build-up in Europe.

Right at the start of this text, Engels expresses his fears of total military and economic devastation in Europe, which would shatter all hopes of a socialist revolution, even over the long term (1990 [1893], 372). It is clear from the profound and serious anxieties expressed by the leading socialist intellectual of his time that he is no longer able to believe in the inevitable dialectic of militarism, which he was still expounding in Anti-Dühring. Instead, what mattered was to take action in order to preserve the (economic) bases for a socialist revolution, that is, to ensure that these were not destroyed in a European war. So Engels appeals to the major European governments and must therefore fall back—no less than his opponents in the bourgeois camp—on power-political and liberal arguments. In this context, he states that disarmament without revolution is in fact possible. He sees the key to a process of disarmament, which all the European states would have to accept, in the reduction of the terms of service required in the standing armies, because he believed that the longer an army’s term of service, the greater its offensive power. He therefore proposes that terms of service be limited and then gradually reduced and—in a peculiar move for a socialist theorist—that the freed-up military personnel be integrated into “civil society,” as the noncommissioned officers could help educate children in the schools (380f.).

But it is not this detail that is theoretically significant, but the fact that, in this context, the socialist and internationalist Engels refers to the interests of Germany, to “our” interests (see Münkler 2001, 177). He points out that it is particularly important for Germany to implement this plan to achieve disarmament by reducing terms of service, as this would force France—then Germany’s archenemy—into action. Germany would in any case be at an advantage. If France accepts, the risk of war would be massively reduced, especially given that the other European states would most likely follow suit. If France does not accept, Germany could at least be sure of having world opinion on its side (Engels 1990 [1893], 397).

Engels’s late writings on war and peace were marked by a pronounced realism. It should also be acknowledged that his writings of the 1890s are pervaded by a spirit of responsibility toward the German but also the European working class, whose sacrifice in a great war he was determined to resist. But, despite this, it is clear that Engels’s (and Marx’s) thought was characterized—like its liberal counterpart—by significant aporias. And this was bound up, to a significant degree, with social theoretical deficits and biases that the “forefathers” of scientific socialism never truly faced.

Engels was smart enough to realize in his later years that there was little sociological basis for the thesis of the dialectic of militarism that he was still advocating in Anti-Dühring. By the 1870s, the idea that the armed masses of workers and peasants would rise up against their governments was plausible only if one ignored nationalism entirely and paid no heed to the fact that the upper echelons of power hierarchies generally had no trouble in “out-maneuvering,” in organizational terms, those subject to their rule. Engels did at least revise his original view. But even his works of the 1890s left unresolved how the notion of “our interests” and his appeal to the German government could be reconciled with a consistently internationalist theoretical approach, which both eschews nationalist emotions as aberrations and postulates an objective “course” of history, in which the crucial steps are taken behind the backs of actors.

In view of all this, it is clear that in many respects Marxism (in the shape of Engels’s writings) embraced the legacy of liberalism. Marxism shared with Enlightenment and liberalism hopes of an inevitably approaching future peace, though this peace was explained differently than in the liberal debate. This was still Engels’s position in Anti-Dühring. Within the theoretical debate, hopes of “perpetual” peace through an imminent revolution evaporated in the 1890s. From this point at the latest, thinkers within the socialist movement were reliant on a strategy of argumentation and action oriented toward the rules of the existing European state system, making it difficult for them to convincingly set themselves apart from liberals or even power-political realists. This applies in particular to the reformist portion of the socialist movement. The main thrust of Marxist thought was increasingly determined by the various attempts to construct a theory of imperialism, most of which were made around the time of the First World War. Here, the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 and the subsequent dispute between Rudolf Hilferding and Walter Ulbricht drew the decisive dividing line. The Social Democrat Hilferding adopted a theory of totalitarianism to explain the alliance between Hitler and Stalin, whereas Ulbricht went so far as to declare British imperialism more dangerous than the Nazis (see Joas 2003, 130f.).

If we have looked only at liberal conceptions of peace in the nineteenth century, and if the thinkers mentioned so far discussed war on liberal premises and even socialist theorists relied on liberal figures of thought, it seems natural to ask whether this truly reflects the intellectual developments of the period. Other than the tradition of power-political realism, were there no other approaches that contrasted with the various liberal currents and with socialist conceptions, approaches that offered resistance to the suppression of war, the tendency to divert one’s gaze from the historical role of armed violence? In a certain sense this question is rhetorical. At least below the surface, an antiquated bellicism did of course continue to exist in the nineteenth century, a school of thought that saw war as the source of all good things and viewed the idea of a peaceful civilization and the disappearance of martial virtues as concomitant with a general moral decline, an increasing wimpishness and feminization. And in the course of the nineteenth century, this became linked with a biologization of social and political facts that built on Darwin and others and became extremely influential, a biologization that was intended to justify the cutthroat competition between individuals as well as races or ethnic groups. In the shape of Ludwig Gumplowicz (1838–1909) and Gustav Ratzenhofer (1842–1904), there were certainly exemplars of such thinking among the early representatives of German-speaking sociology; they are not part of the discipline’s living legacy today. Though there are good normative reasons to be wary of adopting these authors’ ideas in any simplistic way, their writings contain important arguments with which we must engage if we wish to understand the role of violence and the significance of war to modernity. (On the issue of a militaristic tradition in sociology, see Joas 2003, 134–62.)

But—from the perspective of our mostly chronological approach—there is no need to advance to the end of the nineteenth century or to the period immediately before the outbreak of the First World War to find such arguments, nor is it necessary to look in the work of those authors who many would prefer to erase from the legacy of sociology because their Social Darwinist arguments now seem embarrassing and unworthy of the subject. Such ideas appear far earlier, and in the work of highly respectable authors, not least among representatives of classical German philosophy.

In this context, however, it should be noted that it would make little sense to interpret these authors as diametrically opposed to liberalism in light of their bellicist views. This would be mistaken because certain liberal dogmas—such as the belief in the beneficial effect of competition between individuals and groups—could be interpreted in very different ways, both in a general political sense and with respect to how best to achieve peace. Liberal approaches often took surprising turns.

We might ask, for example, whether Spencer’s functionalist thought, his conceptualization of social entities as organisms, might not have led to a very different conclusion from that of an ever more probable and stable peace. In fact, fundamentally different conclusions had already been reached some decades earlier, in post-Kant Germany. Arguments anchored in functionalism, differentiation theory, and evolutionary theory played no real role here, but the metaphor of the organism was nevertheless the starting point for a radical reinterpretation of Enlightenment ideas. In Germany, this intellectual turn and process of reinterpretation are closely linked with the name of G.W.F. Hegel, whose figures of thought were to be crucial to the bellicist and thus essentially “nonliberal” discourse discernible beneath the surface in the nineteenth-century.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) is no longer part of the world of Kant, and not just because he had a different way of looking at conflicts. By reading the works of political economists, he had learned that the development of the market economy inevitably leads to the development of classes and class conflicts, adding a threat from within to the external military threat facing liberal or republican states (Habermas 1997, 121). Hegel (alongside Schelling) was one of the most important critics of the modern theory of natural law. Modern natural law (see p. 17) had been constructed initially on individualist-mechanistic premises. Based on the natural rights of the individual, the form of the legal and political order was explained in terms of its having to comply with the needs and rights of the individual. This made separate “state goals,” detached from the goals of individuals, unthinkable. This applies even to the arguments of Thomas Hobbes, which can only be described as an apologia for absolutism, in that even he saw it as the task of the Leviathan to protect citizens’ interest in their own survival, which he took to be the ultimate point of departure for social theory.

But the political whole as the overall sum or expression of specific individuals, that mechanistic or static notion, was thrown on the defensive with the onset of romanticism at the latest, when organism metaphors became increasingly popular, metaphors that were ultimately applied to politics and even whole societies (on what follows, see the first-rate account by Mori 1999, 232ff.; see also Taylor 1975, 438). The concept of the “body politic” spread rapidly in the first few decades of the nineteenth century, and it was chiefly qualities such as totality, autonomy, and vital motion that were attributed to such “organisms.” The linking of such attributes to this concept of organisms and subsequently to the phenomenon of war was to build up a momentum of its own, which was most clearly apparent in the work of Hegel and which could lead to a speedy departure from the liberal discourse of peace.

As at least one aphorism in Hegel’s Jena “Wastebook” (1803–6) reveals, he was deeply ashamed of Germany’s political and military passivity, its lack of unity in view of the aggressive policies pursued by Napoleon. The German nation—Hegel complains in the above text—is in fact nonexistent; the Germans are at best “Europe’s Quaker nation. They allow everything to be taken from them, the jacket, and in their good-heartedness, lest anyone scowl at them, they hand over the doublet as well. If they receive a slap across the cheek from one quarter, one of the warring powers, they make sure they are lined up to get the other cheek slapped as well” (Hegel 1986 [1803–6], 564). In any case, Hegel refers to the German tendency to shy away from vigorous armed resistance to Napoleon’s expansionism as a disgrace, unworthy of a true nation. These private notes by Hegel, unpublished during his lifetime, were anything but fleeting reflections that found no expression in his systematic published writings. In Hegel’s case, it is impossible to separate his published writings from his unpublished material (as could be done so straightforwardly and for so long by interpreters of Tocqueville’s writings because it was more or less impossible to discern traces of his reflections on Algeria in his “major” works).

This is evident in Hegel’s so-called “Verfassungsschrift” from 1800 to 1802. In “The German Constitution,” Hegel postulates frankly that it is only in war that the vitality of a state becomes apparent, because it is only in this extreme situation that “the strength of the association between all and the whole,” the degree of willingness to sacrifice oneself that the citizen must be ready to demonstrate, is revealed (Hegel 1999a [1800–1802], 7). According to Hegel, the behavior of the different parts of society toward the state as a whole should reflect a “common, free subjection to a supreme political authority” (10). But it is precisely this organic integration of the parts into a large, superordinate whole that is missing in Germany, which is why there is no true state there and that strangely neutral stance toward Napoleon’s policies prevails. What is the state? What are the essential components of any state, what are its merely “incidental” ones? Hegel asked himself these questions and his answer is unmistakable. The state is not defined through shared customs or a common religion (20); neither is there a true state even if it exercises comprehensive control over citizens—the state should not be seen merely as a great machine (22ff.). A state exists only if its citizens grasp, of their own accord, the need to identify with it and, crucially, are prepared to engage in collective defense (of the entirety of their property): “For a mass to form a state, it is necessary that it should form a common military force and political authority” (16).

For Hegel, there are good reasons for this focus on the readiness of the state and nation to use violence. For him, perpetual peace is simply inconceivable, because—following Hobbes—he works on the assumption of an ever-present and necessary clash of interests between states. And it is against this background that Hegel interprets international law. The raison d’état of individual states simply cannot be opposed to the law, which means that little importance can be attached to international law. Law can be asserted only through power. Given that, happily, there is no world state, “international law” is invalid or does not exist in reality. All Enlightenment-era conceptions of peace anchored in international law and Kant’s cosmopolitanism are dismissed with biting contempt: “If the philanthropic friends of right and morality did have an interest, they might realize that interests, and hence also rights themselves, can come into collision, and that it is foolish to set up a dichotomy between right and the interest of the state (or, to use a morally more repugnant expression, the advantage of the state)” (69/70). And it is this notion of the law’s dependence on power that Hegel then calls upon to legitimize violence—violence in aid of the unification of Germany. For Hegel, this violence is a power-political rather than legal or moral philosophical problem, which is why he can call hopefully for the coming of a “conqueror” who will unite all Germans through violence, compelling them “to regard themselves as belonging to Germany” (100). Hegel takes the existence of a German nation, a German people, for granted, a people that might have to be forced to acknowledge itself in order to rescue it from historical “madness”: “[F]or madness is simply the complete isolation of the individual from his kind. The German nation may not be capable of intensifying its stubborn insistence on particularity to the degree of madness encountered in the Jewish nation, which is incapable of uniting with others in common social intercourse. Nor may it be able to attain so pernicious a degree of isolation as to murder and be murdered until the state is obliterated. Nevertheless, particularity, prerogative, and precedence are so intensely personal in character that the concept of necessity and insight into its nature are much too weak to have an effect on action itself. Concepts and insight are fraught with such self-distrust that they must be justified by force before people will submit to them” (101).

In his essay on natural law (“On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, On Its Place in Practical Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Right”) from 1802/3, Hegel was to sharpen this view still further, producing the kind of reinterpretation of typical modern arguments on natural law mentioned above. He criticizes the usual Enlightenment constructions of natural law inasmuch as their point of departure lies in a fictitious state of nature. According to Hegel, such a construction provides us with a faulty foundation, because the positing of isolated individuals as in Hobbes’s thought experiment automatically leads to an initial thesis of random “diversity.” This makes it impossible to conceive of all the chance attributes of atomized individuals as any kind of unity: “Now in making this distinction, empiricism in the first place lacks any criterion whatsoever for drawing the boundary between the contingent and the necessary, between what must be retained and what must be left out in the chaos of the state of nature or the abstraction of the human being” (Hegel 1999b [1802/3], 111).

This, so Hegel believes, is the wrong starting point for philosophy, as apparent in the fact that the “empiricism” he refers to entails a highly abridged understanding of freedom. Here the individual is understood merely as a singularity, yet as an isolated entity it must be determined by the external world and thus be dependent on it. But this means that true freedom can only be understood as the abolition, the “nullification of singularity” (137), which leads directly to the notion of an all-embracing whole. With this notion of the People as the “absolute ethical totality” (140), Hegel deploys the metaphor of the organism which, through its peculiar linkage with the phenomenon of war very generally (and not only in Germany), was to lead to bellicist arguments. As Hegel immediately makes clear, this ethical totality of the People can only ever assert itself by marking itself off from other totalities, from other peoples. The dignity and function thus ascribed to war takes us clearly away from the Enlightenment thought discussed so far. It can no longer be a matter of conceding the utility of war in the early days of humanity before going on to explain its imminent disappearance because of countervailing social phenomena and forces (be it the spread of republics, be it trade or industry). A very different mode of argument now comes into play. If war now functions to establish identity, then war is a genuine and constant component of the state system. What is more (and Hegel has already used this argument with respect to the unification of Germany), war can now be waged for the sake of identity, with ends and means becoming merged with remarkable rapidity. Is war just a means to the end of establishing and maintaining an ethical totality? Or, because the unique vitality of a people finds expression in it, should war perhaps be understood as an end in itself? Hegel never gave a positive answer to the second question. It was left to authors of later generations to do so.²⁰ But it can hardly be denied that Hegel paved the way to an affirmative answer.

And Hegel’s view of this issue is no different in his far more influential philosophy of law. The Elements of the Philosophy of Right was published in 1821, already some years after the passions of the Napoleonic era. Here, in the section on “international law,” Hegel again makes it perfectly clear that the Kantian idea of a perpetual peace is utterly implausible because the state of nature between states cannot be eliminated. On the international level there is quite simply no power capable of enforcing the law. At best, there is an assumption that the law “ought” to be obeyed—making peace an invariably precarious state of affairs (§ 333). So disputes between states can be resolved only through war (§ 334), which means that politics must first and foremost promote the state’s own survival, its “substantial welfare” (§ 337). But—particularly given that the state embodies the ethical totality—this means “that the welfare of a state has quite a different justification from the welfare of the individual. The immediate existence of the state as the ethical substance, i.e. its right, is directly embodied not in abstract but in concrete existence, and only this concrete existence, rather than any of those many universal thoughts which are held to be moral commandments, can be the principle of its action and behaviour” (ibid.). So morality, Hegel tells us, must not be confused or mixed with politics. As ethical totality, the state’s field of activity is beyond any moral claims of the individual.

These remarks by Hegel on international law are the logical consequence of his account of the basic features of state “external sovereignty.” Here, Hegel again makes it clear that he views relations between states in analogy to the problem of recognition developed in Phenomenology of Spirit (Mori 1999, 230). The state is understood as an individual that can preserve its identity only by setting itself apart from other individuals, in other words from other states (Mori 1989, 68). In Phenomenology of Spirit, the problem of recognition between servant and master is described as a life and death struggle (see Kojève 1969, 3–30), and the relationship between states in the state of nature is understood in the same way. But Phenomenology on the one hand and the philosophy of law on the other require quite different solutions to the problem of recognition. The struggle for recognition that goes on between servant and master must not, of course, end in the death of either protagonist, as this would render the problem of recognition null and void. Hegel makes much the same argument with respect to international relations, as other states must also continue to exist, so that from this perspective a world state and thus the “death” of all other states is out of the question. As he puts it in § 338, “states reciprocally recognize each other … even in war—as the condition of rightlessness,” such that there is a “bond” between states “whereby they retain their validity for each other in their being in and for themselves, so that even in wartime, the determination of war is that of something which ought to come to an end” (emphasis in original). But in Phenomenology—and this is the key difference—the way out of, or solution to, the problem of recognition is an emphasis on work, through which the servant can find fulfillment as a human being. On the level of states, such a solution makes no real sense, which is why Hegel is compelled to conceive of the struggle between states as never-ending (and always bound to occur intermittently at the very least), a struggle that forever revolves around the question of identity and that obviously cannot be finally resolved—because this fragile identity can only be strengthened and renewed in battle.

For Hegel independence and differentiation from other states is in fact “the primary freedom and supreme dignity of a nation” (§ 322). It is this differentiation from the external world that constitutes a state’s “own … moment”; it is only involvement with other states (individuals) that brings the substance of the state “[to] existence and … consciousness … as the … absolute power over everything individual and particular, over life, property and the latter’s rights” (§ 323; emphasis in original). The ethical moment of war reveals the necessity to sacrifice the individual person in order to preserve the state’s independence: the cause of war is not an “absolute evil,” it is not a “purely external contingency”; rather, it lays bare the organic core of the state: “The ideality which makes its appearance in war in the shape of a contingent external relationship is the same as the ideality whereby the internal powers of the state are organic moments of the whole. This is apparent in various occurrences in history, as when successful wars have averted internal unrest and consolidated the internal power of the state” (§ 324). It is in the moment of war in particular that citizens must show courage. This is not individual courage but rather the courage to maintain the sovereignty of the state. The citizen should see himself as part of a greater whole, and Hegel put a particular spin on this argument by asserting that the mechanization of warfare, the invention of the “gun,” is the expression and evidence of the overcoming of individual bravery. “The principle of the modern world—thought and the universal—has given a higher form to valour, in that its expression seems to be more mechanical and not so much the deed of a particular person as that of a member of a whole. It likewise appears to be directed not against individual persons, but against a hostile whole in general, so that personal courage appears impersonal. This is why the principle of thought has invented the gun, and this invention, which did not come about by chance, has turned the purely personal form of valour into a more abstract form” (§ 328; emphasis in original).

In his interpretation of Hegel’s writings on war, Massimo Mori states that Hegel stepped up the disparaging of happiness already present in the work of Kant, while his suppression of eudaimonism was ultimately to lead to a radical reevaluation of war. The idea of the sublimity of war seems more prominent here than before (Mori 1999, 237f.), though it is true that even some of the Enlightenment debates on eternal peace provoked a large number of bellicist counterreactions (Kunisch 1999, 70). Nonetheless, Hegel’s figures of thought reverse Montesquieu’s thesis of the disciplining and pacifying effects of trade. It is not trade that subdues the martial passions. Quite the reverse: only war can “rein in the pettymindedness of peoples” (Mori 1999, 240), so the promise of a peaceful future cannot be taken seriously. Hegel’s trope of recognition through total negation leads—to repeat—almost inevitably to the idea of revitalization through risky, violent undertakings, as the state might seek its truth by consciously jeopardizing its own as yet unthreatened existence. So war as the radical negation of all security may even seem imperative for a state or society as a means of reasserting its true character. In sharp distinction to the Enlightenment, there is no longer any opposition between war and civilization. In fact, war may even express the innermost essence of a civilization. This represents a challenge to the contemporary philosophical revitalization of recognition theory.

It would be doing Hegel an injustice to interpret his bellicism merely as ideological justification for slavish obedience of the typically German or Prussian variety, as it is embedded in an argument that emphasizes that war takes people beyond everyday life and highlights the new dimensions of experience that this makes possible (see also Avineri 1972, 196ff.). As we shall see in a moment, it was by no means only German intellectuals of the nineteenth century who were preoccupied by this idea. Certainly, Hegel’s remarks on war contain unmistakable ideological excesses. But we should keep in mind that French intellectual history is also full of mythologizing justifications for violence. These range from the ultrareactionary, antiliberal critique of the French Revolution in the work of Joseph de Maistre, which has been interpreted as protofascism (Berlin 1990), through Georges Sorel’s reflections on the liberating force of workers’ violence in the syndicalist struggle, to Frantz Fanon’s comments on the use of force by the colonized to liberate themselves from colonial rule, which inspired panegyrics from Jean-Paul Sartre. In the United States, as the exemplary democratic state, one figure of thought related to Hegel’s has taken on considerable force. We are referring to the warlike violence—often invoked in myths as well as practiced in reality—on the “frontier,” the border with uncivilized nature and “savage” Indians, a violence that always accompanied the establishment and stabilization of democratic polities (as Tocqueville suspected, see p. 80). The notion of the vitalizing experience of violence was also articulated beyond the frontier context. This is evident, with surprising twists, in the work of William Graham Sumner (1840–1910). His work, which appeared in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, had a considerable influence on the American public and was also important within the emerging discipline of sociology. Sumner’s take on this idea is surprising, among others things because, while he endeavored to popularize the ideas of Herbert Spencer in the United States, he came to some very different conclusions about how best to achieve peace.²¹

Sumner’s essay “War” from 1903, published just under one hundred years after the works of Hegel discussed here, is interesting chiefly because he takes up certain Spencerian and Hegelian motifs (we shall leave aside the question of whether this was conscious in the latter case), weaving them into an argument with Social Darwinist underpinnings. Sumner was made chair in political economy at Yale University in the early 1870s but, as a former preacher, also felt a great need to make an impact beyond the university. He can probably be described as one of the first American sociologists who explicitly saw himself as such—before the actual professionalization of the discipline in Chicago.

Like Spencer, Sumner attempted to establish the theoretical proximity between sociology and biology. In “Sociology,” an essay from 1881, he explained this closeness by pointing out that in both disciplines the struggle against nature is in a sense the foundation of all theorizing: “We have already become familiar, in biology, with the transcendent importance of the fact that life on earth must be maintained by a struggle against nature, and also by a competition with other forms of life. In the latter fact biology and sociology touch. Sociology is a science which deals with one range of phenomena produced by the struggle for existence, while biology deals with another. The forces are the same, acting on different fields and under different conditions” (Sumner 1919b [1881], 173). According to Sumner, the ratio of population to the size and bounty of the earth is one of the key determinants of human life, and sociological theories must be designed with this in mind. Human beings’ battle with nature to ensure their subsistence (“the struggle for existence”) is, as it were, the natural substrate on which the social body must be built. It is only the construction of the social body that is a conflictual process in the literal sense, as it is initially a matter of ensuring one’s control over the earth’s bounty in competition with other people. So this construction is the result of human beings’ struggle over resources, of the “competition of life” (176). According to Sumner, in view of this unavoidable conflict it is clear that the basic principle of the “survival of the fittest” is the fundamental condition of all human life, an eternally valid principle to which human action must necessarily adapt: “The law of the survival of the fittest was not made by man and cannot be abrogated by man. We can only, by interfering with it, produce the survival of the unfittest” (177). And this is the basis of Sumner’s radical laissez-faire credo, which rejects all state intervention, such as that intended to eliminate poverty—because it goes against the principles of nature.

It was on these premises that Sumner was to write his essay, “War,” which was published posthumously but conceived in 1903. Here he defines war as an organized conflict between human beings, which is why it must be considered a relatively late product of humanity’s development. As a late historical outcome of the “competition of life,” war is a struggle between fairly highly developed societies (Sumner 1919a [1903], 3). As we have seen, Sumner believed that even before the emergence of large human groups, the exclusion of every other individual was a key principle of action within the context of competition between people, a principle aimed at ensuring the maximum of resources for oneself. Cooperation with other individuals and thus the formation of groups takes place only if there is a reasonable expectation that shared effort is more profitable than individual effort (8). What looks here at first sight like a purely utilitarian construction is in reality more complex in character. Sumner ascribes a variety of motives to the human being—not just the pursuit of narrow, selfish interests. According to Sumner, human action is guided by four basic motives: hunger, love, desire for fame, and religious needs. These motives drive the struggle among individuals but also structure the struggle between groups. It is in this context that Sumner introduces his famous distinction between “in-group” and “out-group,” claiming that groups and societies—and here we can detect a Hegelian motif—can be kept stable only by setting themselves clearly apart from the external world. Group conflicts, according to Sumner, lead to an enhanced sense of togetherness, while collective identity building occurs via—or may be accelerated by—conflicts and the process of marking one’s group off from, or defending it against, another or others: “[E]very other group is to us an ‘others-group’ or an ‘out-group’ ” (9). He goes on: “We can now see why the sentiments of peace and cooperation inside are complementary to sentiments of hostility outside. It is because any group, in order to be strong against an outside enemy, must be well disciplined, harmonious, and peaceful inside; in other words, because discord inside would cause defeat in battle with another group…. It is no paradox at all to say that peace makes war and that war makes peace” (11). “Ethnocentrism,” according to Sumner, is the necessary basis of all group formation and thus of human history per se. Ethnocentrism is the emotional bond that prevents potential internal conflicts and clashes of interests and establishes the necessary internal unity of societies amid the never-ending “competition of life” (12).

In this connection, Sumner takes up Spencer’s distinction between militant and industrial societies, though without wishing to assert the existence of a historical process leading to a peaceful society as Spencer had done. What is more, he considers this clear distinction between societal types to be misguided, and it was he, rather than overly optimistic liberals hoping for peace, who was to be proved right, at least in historical terms. In any case, for Sumner the will to use violence is present now and always, fed by the four basic human motives, which are crucial to the analysis of the causes of war. So Sumner highlights the irrational factors in human action and draws attention to the emotions that conflicts and wars release. If one accepts this, then according to Sumner there can be no real hopes of a peaceful future: “It is evident that men love war …” (29).²² According to Sumner, the circumstances of the Spanish-American War of 1898 demonstrate that it is pointless to place hopes in human rationality, as philosophy and sociology have always done. It is quite possible, Sumner believes, for human beings to want violence regardless of means-ends calculations: “[W]hen two hundred thousand men in the United States volunteer in a month for a war with Spain which appeals to no sense of wrong against their country, and to no other strong sentiment of human nature, when their lives are by no means monotonous or destitute of interest, and where life offers chances of wealth and prosperity, the pure love of adventure and war must be strong in our population…. The presence of such a sentiment in the midst of the most purely industrial state in the world is a wonderful phenomenon. At the same time the social philosophy of the modern civilized world is saturated with humanitarianism and flabby sentimentalism …; by it the reading public is led to suppose that the world is advancing along some line which they call ‘progress’ towards peace and brotherly love. Nothing could be more mistaken” (29; see also Curtis 1978, 362). In line with this, Sumner does not anticipate peace in the twentieth century but rather—prophetically—”a frightful effusion of blood in revolution and war” (1919a [1903], 30).

What is interesting about Sumner’s position is that his Social Darwinist views by no means lead him to a straightforwardly positive evaluation of war. His work does not endorse the notion of the will to war, the idea of war as an end in itself or—because it is liberating—as a revitalizing force, as did authors building on Hegel’s writings. This is because his Social Darwinist credo is fenced in by a number of other considerations. Sumner does state that one frequently observable effect of wars is the liquefaction of social relations. He asserts that in the past wars undoubtedly drove civilization forward, drawing attention to the “modernizing effect” of the Napoleonic Wars: “The Germans tell of the ruthless and cruel acts of Napoleon in Germany, and all that they say is true; but he did greater service to Germany than any other man who can be mentioned. He tore down the relics of mediaevalism and set the powers of the nation to some extent free from the fetters of tradition; we do not see what else could have done it” (32). We cannot, Sumner thinks, rule out the possibility that wars will have such positive effects in future as well. But he is far too aware of the unintended consequences of social action to truly welcome the waging of wars to achieve specific goals. Wars are always going to break out because of the “competition of life,” so they must be accepted as a “natural” occurrence. But—in line with Sumner’s laissez-faire credo—they should not be deployed as an instrument, because this simply overestimates the human capacity for control: “A statesman who proposes war as an instrumentality admits his incompetency; a politician who makes use of war as a counter in the game of parties is a criminal” (35).

It is this that explains the “peculiarity” of the anti-imperialist arguments in Sumner’s text (see also Marshall 1979, 273f.). It by no means necessarily contradicts his Social Darwinist worldview if he criticizes careless references to “raison d’état” and the Monroe Doctrine as unacceptable attempts to justify the United States’ expansionist foreign policy (Sumner 1919a [1903], 36ff.), or if he refers to the great chances of peace in an America relatively insulated from global politics while calling for the integration of Indians and “negroes” into American society (27f.). Quite the reverse: for all his Social Darwinism, Sumner was a convinced anti-imperialist.²³

As early as the 1890s, Sumner had penned vehement polemics against American imperialism. In the essay “The Fallacy of Territorial Expansion” (dating from 1896), Sumner vigorously disputes that the strength of a state is linked to its territorial extent, which is why it makes no sense for America to seek constantly to acquire new territory. Imperial adventures are best left to others, particularly the British; because of its anti-imperialist origins, the United States is ill-suited to such things. According to Sumner, expansion beyond a certain point, which he does not define more closely, would only produce ever more disadvantages, from higher taxes and a burgeoning machinery of state to restrictions on individual freedom (Sumner 1919c [1896], 292). But it was only with his essay entitled “The Conquest of the United States by Spain” from 1898 that Sumner truly caused a furor. The sarcastic-ironic title presages a text that is concerned with the prehistory and history of the conflict between the United States and Spain in the late nineteenth century, and it is a sophisticated anti-imperialist pamphlet. The Americans, Sumner observes, are conquering Spanish territory. But from a cultural point of view, what is “actually” happening—Sumner tells us—is precisely the opposite. Through their imperialism, the Americans are taking on the very cultural features that had characterized the Spanish colonial power since the late fifteenth century. The United States will become like Spain. Sooner or later it will come to resemble that at once despotic and lethargic power whose death throes over the preceding centuries had been the result of colonial expansion, because this very expansion had always prevented the Spanish rulers from carrying out internal reforms.

Sumner describes it as the great fortune of the United States that it was able to develop in comparative isolation from world events (Sumner 1919d [1898], 332) and thus develop democratic characteristics. But the “pest of glory” (313), the imperialist craving for foreign adventures in order to achieve a dubious expansion of the national territory, is now threatening those very democratic achievements. The militarism that is part and parcel of imperialism—and here Sumner takes up Spencer’s distinction between militant and industrial societies (323)—merely encourages plutocracy and thus antidemocratic tendencies that run counter to American political culture. This militarism obstructs awareness of necessary internal reforms, he tells us, referring once again to racism and the failure to integrate the black population, particularly in the southern states (331, 309).

Sumner’s fusion of Social Darwinist and strictly anti-imperialist arguments was certainly far from common in the United States. But against the background of American culture and history, especially against the background of Americans’ self-interpretation as citizens of a deeply anti-imperialist polity, the emergence of such views among intellectuals and social scientists comes as no real surprise. This mentality was part of the theoretical repertoire of the still young discipline of sociology when the First World War mounted a massive challenge to every theory on war and peace.