5
Sociology and Social Theory from the End of the First World War to the 1970s
THE “GREAT WAR,” this rupture with the civilization of the nineteenth century, surely might have prompted profound sociological analyses of war and peace. But such expectations were to be disappointed. It is true that the war brought in its wake a dramatic upheaval in the cultural landscape; prewar culture lost its credibility, particularly in the defeated countries or in those worst affected by the war. The Enlightenment faith in progress was eroded, while liberalism as a political movement with mass appeal disappeared in almost all European countries. From now on, numerous analyses were published expressing a pessimistic view of civilization. In the 1920s, while some of the relevant authors were American social scientists (see Knöbl 2001), many more of them were European. But there was clearly a large gulf between a general cultural pessimism and increasing skepticism about the realism of Enlightenment ideals on the one hand and precise sociological studies of the phenomenon of war on the other. Such studies continued to be few and far between. In fact, far fewer sociological texts on war appeared than in the pre-1914 period, in sharp contrast, incidentally, to works of fiction. From 1925 on, a number of novels that were seen as attempts to come to terms with the war appeared. In comparison to fiction, sociology remained largely silent, and we must scour the broader field of social theory to find new approaches worth mentioning for the period between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the Second, especially any that satisfy modern-day scientific criteria. But even if we extend our search in this way, we will find that the amount of material varies according to the national context, not least because the relevant disciplines developed very differently in different countries.
After 1918, French sociology proceeded along the channels laid down by Durkheim, for which close cooperation with anthropology was always a distinguishing feature—an approach still associated with the name of Marcel Mauss. This approach certainly included an interest in the phenomenon of war. But it was difficult to analyze the connection between war and modern society within its framework, as had analyses produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. So it was not until the 1930s that innovative studies of war appeared. At the center of these efforts lay the Collège de Sociologie, which was founded in Paris in 1936 and survived for just three years. The Collège, a loose-knit grouping initiated by Georges Bataille (1897–1962), Roger Caillois (1913–77), and Michel Leiris (1901–90), aimed to foster a sociology that would investigate the forces observable in modern society that bind people together, particularly the energies released in collective experiences and effervescences, energies expressed in rituals, festivals, and games (Moebius 2006, 13). This was an ambitious scientific agenda, particularly given that such a sociology “saw itself not as a sociological specialism, such as the sociology of religion, but as the general sociological investigation of ‘communitizing movements’ ” (135/36). The aims of this program for a sacred sociology, as it was called, were not solely scientific in nature. Grounded in a critique of contemporary civilization, those close to the Collège also wished to promote the revitalization of society through such collective effervescences. This reflected a normative and political aspiration drawn from numerous sources, one that proved equally suited to the pursuit of artistic goals and the struggle against fascism.
Roger Caillois (1913–78) was the key driving force behind analyses of war within the Collège.1 Born in Reims, Caillois, like Leiris a student of Marcel Mauss, joined the surrealists at an early stage. The title of his crucial essay, “War and the Sacred” (1980 [1939]), already indicates the thrust of his arguments, which were anchored in anthropology and above all the sociology of religion, arguments that he fleshed out in subsequent writings, particularly his book Bellone ou la pente de la guerre (1963). Caillois attempts to establish a link, a peculiar one at first sight, between elements of Durkheim’s sociology of religion and Ernst Jünger’s text on the “Kampf als inneres Erlebnis” (Battle as Inner Experience). His arguments here are initially embedded in general reflections on the nature of the sacred and of religion in “primitive societies.” According to him, sacred objects give rise to horror and reverence, leading to a more or less sharp separation between the profane and these sacred objects. This separation sets in motion a specific social dynamic because people constantly attempt to overcome it. A festival, for example, Caillois believes, connects participants to the sacred because the orgiastic character of the festival, the process of losing oneself, the nocturnal frenzy, and so on convey a sense of horror, of the forbidden—in other words, the sacred—and thus intimate a return to a time before this separation had occurred. “In fact, the festival is presented as a reenactment of the first days of the universe, the Urzeit, the eminently creative era that saw all objects, creatures, and institutions become fixed in their traditional and definitive form” (1963, 103; emphasis in original). But the evolution of societies eliminates the stirring character of the festival, which loses its wildness, and this may, Caillois suspects, be functionally necessary for societies whose structures become ever more complex as this process of evolution unfolds. Festivals lose their power or are substituted by other things, and Caillois points out that, with the rise of states, recurrent periods of festival may be replaced by alternating phases of war and peace (127). War, according to Caillois’s thesis, is in a sense a substitute for the festival, and therefore armed violence is another way of approaching the sacred. Just as the festival rips people out of their familiar world, from their private and family lives, armed violence also transports them into a kind of transcendental frenzy. Caillois’s speculations are certainly very daring, but his analyses clearly show that we may profitably view war and the armed forces from a defamiliarizing anthropological or sociology-of-religion perspective. Is not the military uniform a mechanism through which individuals give up their personalities, symbolic of their perfect slotting into society? Is not violence in modern wars of such monstrous proportions that it is difficult even to grasp it rationally or understand it normatively? Is violence not underpinned by a kind of delight in destruction, which must perhaps even be understood as the true essence of war? Does war not often entail a revitalizing power, as Hegel believed—a figure, incidentally, who played an important role for the Collège (Moebius 2006, 213)? Here Caillois is trying to capture those experiences of the soldier in battle that defy comprehension from an instrumentally rational or normative standpoint and conceptualize them theoretically through the category of the extraordinary. In the spirit of Durkheim’s study of tribal religion, characteristic features of war—such as its waste through destruction, or license to commit acts of violence—are interpreted as a modern form of collective unfettering, enabling counterintuitive insights into the “functionality” of war.
Caillois was by no means blind to the fact that festivals unite, whereas wars often aggravate the differences both within and between societies (Caillois 1980 [1939], 178). He cannot be accused of abandoning conceptual nuances in order to suggestively evoke simplistic analogies (e.g., between the war and festival). However, it ultimately remains unclear in Caillois’s work whether (and if so, to what extent) First World War battles of mass annihilation bear any resemblance to war in comparatively “simple,” albeit state-based societies2—in other words, whether and to what extent insights gleaned from ethnological materials can be applied to modern societies.3 Furthermore, for all the fascination that Caillois’s texts exercised and continue to exercise, there is often a thin dividing line in his work between harnessing these insights gleaned from a sociology of the sacred and a hazardous turn toward a “sacred sociology” (Hollier 1987; Joas 2008, 51–64) that carried out sectarian group experiments and encouraged people to live out violent fantasies, these being celebrated as a route out of the ruptures of modernity, as a form of liberation leading to true personal sovereignty. This was undoubtedly reflected in Caillois’s self-image as intellectual aristocrat (Moebius 2006, 365f.). Nonetheless, Caillois’s arguments are just as important as the thinking of Sumner and Hegel: the writings of all three authors can serve as a corrective to the instrumentally rational interpretations of violence and war that dominated both “liberal” and “Marxist” sociology.
The Collège de Sociologie was a collection of fairly idiosyncratic individuals; they were certainly not representative of the French academic sociology of the time. But they set new trends within a social scientific milieu in which there was little interest in tackling the topic of war.4 These intellectuals did not, however, get to the point of exploring the link between war and modern society in a truly systematic way.
In Germany, after the end of the First World War, historians such as Hintze, economists like Sombart, and sociologists such as Lederer continued their scholarly studies of the links between war and modern society; but it is fair to say that after the death of Max Weber the German social sciences failed to maintain the once-high standard of macrosociological reflection. Though a new generation of scholars with significant theoretical potential emerged (such as Karl Mannheim or the authors of the early Frankfurt school), the sociology of the Weimar Republic era was afflicted by acute crisis, a predicament then aggravated by National Socialist rule and the forced emigration of many intellectuals during this period. The question of whether Weimar sociology as a whole in fact saw the start of something new and sustainable (and that there was therefore no crisis)—a new beginning that was all too quickly nipped in the bud by Nazism—can be left to one side here. All that matters for our purposes is that between 1918 and 1933 the problem of war and peace never really became an important topic of scholarship. War in general or the world war that had just ended failed to inspire sociology or the other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities in any appreciable way. The few authors who were exceptions to this rule linked the topic of war directly with that of the German state, which was either rejected on political grounds or credited with little stability following the end of the Reich. It was in this context that the first major analyses to at least touch on the topic of war appeared in the mid-1920s.
Friedrich Meinecke’s Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’État and Its Place in Modern History (originally 1924), for example, was an attempt to interpret the modern state against the background of the experiences of the First World War. The historian Meinecke (1862–1954), who accepted the departure of the monarchy and nailed his colors to the Weimar constitution as a “republican by reason,” interpreted the history of the modern state essentially as one of conflict between empiricism and rationalism, between the actual state with its often brutal power politics on the one hand and the reason-based state of the kind envisaged by Enlightenment thinkers on the other. According to Meinecke, the control of state power politics from below imagined in the Enlightenment did not occur; even worse, the triumph of the Enlightenment in the wake of the French Revolution had in fact unleashed armed violence on an unprecedented scale, because in modern democracies power politics and raison d’état could develop a virtually inexorable momentum (Meinecke 1957 [1924], 347). Tremendous forces were mobilized in the wake of conscription, introduced in the painful aftermath of 1789, forces that thwarted Kant’s hopes of peace. As a result of the republicanization of political life, of the nation-state itself, war had become a “daemonic force which scorned the rein of raison d’état and threw its rider in the abyss” (422). Through its interplay with an ever-advancing military technology, the French Revolution ultimately destabilized the European state system, such that the relative tranquillity of earlier times was now a thing of the past: “The very restrictedness of the power-resources had been the means of salvation to European humanity and ultimately even to the State itself, and had constantly warded off the hypertrophy of power” (418). The new age was structured quite differently, as evident in the world war that had just ended. The raison d’état that had applied hitherto could no longer be the principle underlying the (European) political order. The new will to annihilate the enemy expressed in the world war had destroyed the essence of European political life, “that group of free and independent states, which at the same time felt themselves to be one large family, and amongst which the balance of power was always eventually restored” (423/24). As a result, Europe had lost its world historical role.
Meinecke’s own reference to the near-inexorable momentum of a spiral of violence triggered by processes of democratization and nationalization leaves him at something of a loss. In his view, we cannot rid ourselves of raison d’état, power politics, and Machiavellianism; so the crucial thing is to guard against any idolization of the state and to reshape the state in such a way that it accords with moral law (429). This is good Enlightenment thinking, but fails to take account of the very thing that Meinecke himself had described shortly before as leading to the collapse of the European state system, namely the nationalization of the masses, which “scorned the rein of raison d’état.” Meinecke does not really pay theoretical attention to societies’ internal dynamics, which have an effect on international politics and are thus crucial to the question of war and peace. He is left with no more than vague hopes of the emergence of a “European sense of community” and of a genuine league of nations not dominated by a single power (431)—unlike the contemporary League of Nations founded in Geneva. How such a “genuine” league of nations should be established and, above all, how it should achieve stability against the background of the near-inexorable dynamics of violence he describes remains unclear. But Meinecke suggests that the sophisticated arguments for an eternal peaceful alliance between nations so common in the Enlightenment era would probably be thwarted by reality now. Even building on these arguments no longer seems a promising approach to Meinecke, whose basic stance is one of barely concealed resignation or at least bafflement.
Alfred Weber (1868–1958), who had occupied a chair in national economics in Heidelberg since 1907 and—along with his brother Max—played a central role in the establishment of sociology in Germany, published Die Krise des modernen Staatsgedankens in Europa (The Crisis of the Modern Idea of the State in Europe) in 1925, just one year after Meinecke, a book with similar ambitions to Meinecke’s in aspiring to explain the contemporary age. But in contrast to Meinecke, Alfred Weber refers not just to a crisis of the European state system but to a crisis of the state itself, and—again unlike Meinecke—is particularly interested in the sociopolitical “foundation” of the contemporary state and the processes of change occurring within it. Weber concludes that the early modern state was originally closely entwined with capitalism, though in such a way that the state’s leading role was never in question. This applied not only to the mercantilist state but also and in particular to the liberal state as it developed in the nineteenth century. But this liberal state had been transformed in the 1880s—with incalculable consequences for the politics of peace, as comparative analysis lays bare. While the liberal state was still a “peaceful entity” (A. Weber 1925, 73) in the sense that it embodied an autonomous rationality that made it possible to coolly calculate the preconditions for the state’s continued existence, this subsequently changed radically. With the end of the liberal era, the state had in a sense been subdued by capitalism. Capitalist interests had penetrated the state, as a result of which it had got out of control (74). This was one of the key reasons why the armed forces had gained such autonomy and a militant “neo-imperialism” (102) had arisen that ultimately caused the world war. A “pervasive sickness” (75) leading to disastrous conflicts had gripped the state, but by no means just in Germany, and Weber tries to apportion blame for the war evenly among the European nations.
But this is as far as Alfred Weber’s sociological reflections on state and war go; they remain on a relatively abstract level, as a result of which—in much the same way as in Meinecke’s work—his ideas on how to achieve a peaceful order are also rather vague. Weber doubts that it will be possible to establish a European equilibrium on the same basis as before. Harshly criticizing the League of Nations, he calls for the European countries to regulate their affairs themselves (154) and for a kind of European federation in which Britain, France, Germany and Italy would play a central role (165). But it remains unclear how such a federation could be realized in view of his earlier comments on the overpowering of the state by capitalist-militarist interests. As with Meinecke, Alfred Weber fails almost entirely to link his normative perspective back to his sociological analyses.
With hindsight we must surely regard this failure to make such a link, to mediate between empirical analysis and normative stance, as a shortcoming. Nonetheless, it should be acknowledged that both Meinecke and Alfred Weber—both of whom supported the Weimar constitution—made a serious effort to produce analyses that were clearly linked to empirical reality and understood war as a normative problem requiring resolution. This could by no means be taken for granted in Germany at the time. Writers on the far right of the political spectrum often failed entirely to ground their analyses empirically or attempted simply to elide the gulf between norm and reality that was clearly visible in the work of Meinecke and Alfred Weber. This was done in very different ways and the intellectual level was generally low. But there were exceptions, and two authors are still of interest here, Hans Freyer (1887–1969) and above all Carl Schmitt (1888–1985).
Hans Freyer’s Der Staat (The State) appeared in 1925, the same year that Freyer took up the first chair in sociology at the University of Leipzig, thus laying the basis for the later so-called Leipzig school of sociology. This school produced scholars such as Helmut Schelsky who were to play a significant role in the discipline in the later West Germany. Freyer is often placed within the spectrum of the “conservative revolution” (see, e.g., Breuer 1993). In a neo-Hegelian tone, he takes the elevation of the state to an extreme in this book. In contrast to Meinecke and Alfred Weber, right from the outset Freyer has no interest in the history of the modern state or the different forms of statehood in modernity. Instead, he outlines an ideal state whose innermost core is revealed in war. Deploying language with mystical overtones, Freyer, whose roots lay in the youth movement of the later Wilhelmine empire and was close to the philosophy of life (Lebensphilosophie) while he worked on his postdoctoral thesis under Georg Simmel (see Sieferle 1995, 164ff.), sees in the state the telos of cultural development: “The goal of spirit is the state…. The state … is spirit at its final destination, it is culture as the most complete realization of its purpose; it is the most conclusive form and most objective manifestation of destiny imaginable in the here below” (Freyer 1925, 20). But this state is by no means an abstract entity. Rather, Freyer believes, it is the expression of a naturally ordered, unequal community whose members all submit to a hero or leader: “A form of human life that is based on the law of the community reaches its apogee in the hero. The community is represented by the hero, who is able to capture the spirit of faith within the bounds of his great soul. The community is held together by a hero who towers above it” (62). In his view, the state is not only the expression of a community based on unity of blood (see also Breuer 1993, 91); it is also the creator of this community, and here the leader must play his historical role. Only through the “political act does the state weld a living form of human life, with all its productive powers, into the unity of the people, and the wealth of forms into the unity of the realm” (Freyer 1925, 98).
Freyer leaves us in no doubt about what he means by “act,” first and foremost. The task of statesmen is to “give the realm its place within space, its duration in time, its power among the powers, and its reality in the real world” (148); this goal is to be achieved primarily through war, which stands to reason given that Freyer sees politics as a battle. Politics thinks in terms of “victory and defeat,” so it “always reckons with war” (142). Freyer thus elevates war to the status of normative benchmark. Taking up and extending Hegel’s bellicist arguments, Freyer asserts that the essence of the people is expressed in absolute war—that it is only through war that the people can truly find itself: “Those wars to the death that put the state to the ultimate test not only tend to demonstrate to friend and foe the intensity of the state’s vitality in a practical sense; they also reveal to our understanding the state’s structural character. Never again can the object of our concern, namely the state, be presented by historical reality itself in such a pure form as during this time of the greatest demands and greatest achievements” (141). Freyer does not think in terms of a crisis of the state; rather, he has his sights set on a new state, and he reinterprets the horrors of war, including the world war, as an opportunity for the emergence of a new Führer state in which the conflicts and diverging opinions of bourgeois society no longer have any place. The invigorating role of (armed) violence should be used to build a new, truly organic state “community,” though we are left wondering how the positive and community-creating experience of (armed) violence relates, in concrete terms, to the notion of the blood-based unity of this community, to which Freyer himself repeatedly refers.
While few modern-day readers are likely to get much out of Freyer’s writings, by now no more than testimony to the fascination exercised by blood-and-soil rhetoric and bellicism within Germany, even among sociologists, the same cannot be said of the work of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt rejects the label “bellicist” as applied to his work, and with some justification. For him, in contrast to Freyer, while war is the origin of the political sphere, it is not necessarily an end in itself. And although anti-Semitic invective is by no means absent from Schmitt’s work, he largely kept his distance from the language of blood-and-soil deployed by Freyer. He specialized mainly in polemical, often cynical, and sometimes very one-sided conceptual and historical analyses that prepared the ground for National Socialism in a quite different way from in the case of Freyer. But the undoubted argumentational brilliance displayed by Schmitt, an expert in constitutional law, makes him a figure with whom we must get to grips even today, particularly if we are examining war and peace from a social theory perspective, and not just if we stand on the political right.
By the mid-1920s, Schmitt had already coupled his characteristic conception of the political with reflections that led directly to analyses of the European state system and thus to the question of war and peace. This is particularly clear in Schmitt’s essay The Concept of the Political from 1927 (Schmitt 2007a/1994a [1927]), in which he sweeps aside pluralistic theories of the state and democracy and declares the question, “Who decides?” the central political and constitutional problem. Schmitt immediately equates this question of decisions with that of the identification of friend and enemy. Pluralist and liberal conceptions of the state and democracy, according to Schmitt, shirk the question of “which social entity … decides the extreme case and determines the decisive friend-andenemy grouping” (Schmitt 2007a [1927], 43; emphasis added). But, in fact, the distinction between friend and enemy is the very core of the political, and the sovereign is that individual who can enforce this distinction. How and on the basis of which considerations this distinction between friend and enemy occurs is of no further concern to Schmitt and he leaves this to the workings of highly contingent circumstances and contexts. So all that matters is that a decision is made as to who is the enemy (see Hofmann 2002, 159). Schmitt is advocating a view of the state in which the unity of the state is guaranteed by these clear distinctions between friend and enemy—in other words, by the exclusion of those that are declared enemies. Political identity is possible only through identification of the enemy, according to Schmitt, who, incidentally, makes peculiar reference to Emil Lederer’s masterly essay “On the Sociology of World War,” though the thrust of this work was quite different from what Schmitt suggests here (Schmitt 2007a [1927], 45, n. 19).5
For Schmitt, this conception of the political by no means applies only to the field of domestic politics; he leaves us in no doubt that it also applies to international politics.6 The state, according to Schmitt, defines the right to wage war. To the state “as an essentially political entity belongs the jus belli, i.e., the real possibility of deciding in a concrete situation upon the enemy and the ability to fight him with the power emanating from the entity. As long as a politically united people is prepared to fight for its existence, independence and freedom on the basis of a decision emanating from the political entity, this specifically political question has primacy over the technical means by which the battle will be waged, the nature of the army’s organization, and what the prospects are for winning the war” (45/46). Schmitt’s existential conception of war as expressed here is based on the assumption of the inevitability and inescapability of the political. But Schmitt does not necessarily want war as Freyer seems to and therefore does not endow it with an elevated normative status. And, in fact, Schmitt wishes to steer clear of normative statements in general. So he merely concludes that war requires no justification and in any case cannot be justified. It is a form of self-assertion against “a real enemy” (49) that closes off all normative questions from the outset.7 The existential struggle with the enemy is neither just nor unjust, it “is,” which is why for Schmitt a “discriminatory concept of war” is not only meaningless but detrimental and leads inevitably to an uncontrolled escalation of violence. Schmitt justifies this at first glance counter-intuitive assertion by stating that the notion of just and unjust enemies, the conclusion that by waging a war a state has violated universal norms of justice that apply to the whole of humanity, criminalizes this state and can only lead us to conclude that this state and its (criminal) leaders must be destroyed. This would make the deployment of every conceivable means virtually imperative for both parties to war, as an honorable defeat would be simply unacceptable on these premises: through strict application of a discriminatory concept of war, Schmitt concludes, existential war of the kind that had prevailed so far within the European state system would turn into a wave of genuine wars of annihilation.
Schmitt makes it clear that he wishes to avoid such outcomes. In any case, in his view there is no such thing as a norm of justice with a claim to universal validity, and that includes any that might relate to wars. At most, universal norms are a cover for specific power interests, which is why in reality wars in the name of humanity—to enforce universal norms or rights, for example—do not and cannot exist. For Schmitt, the notion of war in the name of humanity is just propaganda intended to conceal national ambitions, nothing more. Schmitt’s critique of universalist ideologies here follows almost logically from his definition of the political sphere. The identification of friend and enemy leads automatically to the pluralism of states. A political entity simply cannot be universal; there can be no world state, because the identity of the state arises solely by identifying other states as enemies (see Hofmann 2002, 103). Humanity, according to Schmitt, is not a political concept (1994a [1927], 80ff.), so that references to the supposed interests of humanity or the claim that we need a world state are at best irrelevant and at worst deliberately misleading.
Inevitably, Schmitt’s critique of universalism is also aimed at the Enlightenment project of a federal community of nations, first realized (however imperfectly) after 1918 in the so-called League of Nations. His rejection of all such projects is not solely due to a German nationalistic perspective but has much deeper roots: as we have just seen, any trace of a political approach with the merest hint of universalism seems suspect to him. Ultimately, from Schmitt’s perspective, any league of nations would entail the risk outlined above of aggravating armed conflicts, because the discrepancy between universalism and federalism cannot be eliminated: the norms that supposedly express the solidarity of the league’s individual member states would continue to collide with their actual conduct. And it is this fact that immediately throws up the question of who gets to decide about the violations committed by individual member states and how they are to be assessed. But, according to Schmitt, this inevitably brings us back to the debate on just and unjust wars, in other words the discriminatory concept of war, which inevitably leads to an escalation of violence. Warring protagonists branded as lawbreakers and to some extent enemies of humanity would have no other choice than to opt for total war in order to avoid physical and moral annihilation by the enemy. Simply because of its structure, the League of Nations necessarily becomes a means of legitimizing a total war intended to destroy completely the criminalized enemy—a war that, in contrast to earlier times, no longer recognizes any neutral positions in conflicts, as no one can evade the (violent) punishment of a criminalized state (Schmitt 1999 [1938], 41f.). Yet Schmitt deliberately kept quiet about the fact that the First World War itself was virtually a total war and that Adolf Hitler, whose rule he had tried to justify in his writings, was now gearing up for a far more “total” war on the basis of a deeply particularist ideology.
But Schmitt’s evidently profound resentment toward what he saw as an amalgam of Versailles, Geneva, and Weimar, and the National Socialist vision of the international political order that he developed in response, should not cause us to reject his thinking too quickly, particularly given that similar arguments can be found in the work of Western democrats such as George Kennan (see Waltz 1959, 113). In fact, a dispute between universalists and traditionalists occurred within the American debate on peace prospects and international law between the two world wars, and some of the arguments put forward here resemble those of Carl Schmitt (see Krakau 1967). Once again, in attempting to outlaw the use of violence, the universalists, in an internally consistent way, came up with new justifications for the use of violence in order to enforce the prohibition on violence. This argumentational dilemma and the small step from universal moral responsibility to a crusading political mentality have been key characteristics of American liberal thinking on peace and American foreign policy itself. President Wilson’s policies and their intellectual background, for example, were referred to as an “imperialism of good intentions.” The danger of allowing one’s own side unlimited scope for definition and rashly deploying violent forms of intervention in order to bring about liberal orders—through mechanisms intended to ensure the peaceful resolution of international conflicts—should be regarded as the dark side of the republican conception of peace.
In any event, Schmitt leaves us in no doubt that Germany can have no interest in the postwar status quo, and that the contemporary European system must be viewed as one that subjugates Germany, a state of affairs that is worse than war because Germany’s “right and honor” are being violated (Schmitt 2000 [1925], 294). For Schmitt, Germany’s subjugation, made permanent by the League of Nations, is in substantial part an effect of modern imperialism, namely American imperialism. First, Schmitt believes, the Geneva conception of a league of nations is merely an appendage to the American Monroe Doctrine. This doctrine preceded the League of Nations not only temporally but also in a logical and objective sense: while the United States gave the League, which it initiated but did not ultimately join, a seemingly universalist structure, at the same time it implanted particularist interests in this structure, namely the Monroe Doctrine. As a result, the United States of America could block off any European influence in the Western Hemisphere, while at the same time retaining every means of applying pressure to Europe. The United States was both present and absent in Geneva: “Eighteen American states [most of which are dependent on the United States], a third of the membership of the League, now take part in decisions on all European or Asian affairs[.B]ut the American Monroe Doctrine, whose primacy is … recognized in Article 21 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, has precedence over the League Covenant and prevents the interference of the Geneva League in American affairs” (Schmitt 2011 [1932], 40). Second, Schmitt is hugely critical of Schumpeter’s broadly accepted theory of imperialism, which simply denies the political character of the economy (184). The emerging economic dominance of the United States in the world economy is by no means due solely to economic dynamics but was secured by a whole series of international agreements. The specific form of imperialism may be different from what it was in the nineteenth century. Yet nonetheless, American imperialism is merely the continuation of a form of power deployed by the British in the nineteenth century. And Germany must defend itself against this political and economic imperialism of the United States, Schmitt asserts, as he lays the ground intellectually for the expansionist policies of the National Socialists.
Schmitt’s call for Germany to defend itself against American imperialism cannot be understood as a normative appeal. Instead, his argument is anthropological in character, and here he relies heavily on Hobbesian ideas. He shares Hobbes’s pessimistic interpretation of human nature (Schmitt 1996 [1938], 36), and like him he takes the view that what exists between states is merely a more or less unregulated state of nature (Schmitt 1994b [1928], 122). The lively “combat of elementary forces” between states (Schmitt 1996 [1938], 49) can only find expression under pre- or extralegal conditions, a state of affairs that can only apparently be overcome—whether through a league of nations or an imperialism posing as mere economics.
This, however, compels him to sketch out new notions of international political order. If European international law has become invalid (not least because of the rise of the United States as a world power and the open enforcement of a discriminatory concept of war that was part and parcel of the Versailles Treaty), we are left with the question of what might replace Europe’s traditional system of international law beyond what he views as the hypocritical universalist ideas underpinning the League of Nations. So it comes as little surprise that Schmitt makes use of a National Socialist vocabulary and expresses National Socialist ideas in 1939. For Schmitt, at the beginning of the Second World War, the “Reich”—as a geopolitical order that he consciously views as an alternative to the Anglo-American universalism of the League of Nations—seems the only conceivable system that promises new global political stability while not undermining that conception of the political sphere that arises from the inevitability of the struggle between states: “As soon as … large regional spheres of interest are recognized under international law with a prohibition on outside intervention, and the concept of the empire gains traction, it becomes possible to imagine the coexistence of clearly defined regions in a sensibly divided-up world, and the principle of nonintervention can have its ordering effect within a new international law” (Schmitt 1994c [1939], 344). In Schmitt’s view, however, this stability existing between such regional spheres can only ever be temporary, as it will never be possible to eliminate the Hobbesian state of nature between states (or major powers within their spheres of influence).
After 1945, Schmitt could no longer propagate the theory of political order developed in 1939; but this did not induce a shift in the basic structures of his thinking. Instead, in such works as The Nomos of the Earth in the Jus Publicum Europaeum (2003a [1950]) and Theory of the Partisan: Intermediate Commentary on the Concept of the Political (2007b [1963]), Schmitt builds on, develops, and adds nuance to his old arguments. He now focuses on interpreting the historical genesis and specific features of the traditional European system of international law, asking what its end might mean for the present and what might happen in the future. In this connection, Schmitt again underlines that the European state system and traditional international law laid the foundations for a political order based on Europe, which could become established precisely by excluding other parts of the world. Schmitt’s thesis, which is still worth considering, is that, with European expansion and the incipient division of the world by the major European powers, the discourse of international law began to embrace the notion of a world with global lines of demarcation (Schmitt 2003a [1950], 88, translation modified, HJ/WK) from the fifteenth century at the latest, a mode of thought that separated the European sphere of power and law from its non-European counterpart. Beyond the so-called amity lines, beyond the sphere in which the “memory of a common unity in Christian Europe” held sway (94), a state of lawless freedom was assumed to exist:
This freedom meant that the line set aside an area where force could be used freely and ruthlessly. It was understood, however, that only Christian-European princes and peoples could share in the land-appropriations of the New World and be parties to such treaties. But the commonality of Christian princes and nations contained neither a common, concrete, and legitimating arbitrational authority, nor any principle of distribution other than the law of the stronger and, ultimately, of effective occupation…. This was a tremendous exoneration of the internal European problematic. The significance in international law of the famous and notorious expression “beyond the line” lies precisely in this exoneration. (ibid.; emphasis in original)
So the establishment of a fighting zone beyond Europe’s borders was in a sense the precondition for limiting war in Europe (97).
Here again, in analogy to his friend-enemy distinctions, Schmitt thinks in terms of exclusion: it was the exclusion of non-European territories that laid the foundation for a European identity. However, according to Schmitt, in order to consolidate this plural identity consisting of a great variety of states, constitutional and international law had to develop essentially as follows. The emergence of the modern state, with the three key attributes of centralized law making, domestic territorial unity, and the overcoming of confessional civil war (128f.), gave rise to a political form that made it possible for jurists to understand it in analogy to a person. The personification and personalization of the state as “magnus homo”—and this was crucial to the issue of war and peace—enabled the legalization of relations between states, with the same law of jus ad bellum applying to all those states adhering to this legal framework. The idea of the justus hostis, the just enemy, went hand in hand with this right from the start; because he has the right to wage war, this enemy should not be criminalized. It was precisely this, Schmitt believes, that paved the way for the rationalization and humanization of war, with pure war between states, war as duel, being the end product of the development of international law in Europe. The issue of just war, in other words the discriminatory concept of war, had been successfully suppressed—the indispensable precondition for limiting war in Schmitt’s view. As he was to write elsewhere, it is “extraordinary … an incredibly human accomplishment, that men disclaimed a discrimination and denigration of the enemy” (Schmitt 2007b [1963], 90).
For Schmitt, it was this limitation of war that was the result and achievement of European international law. But as he repeatedly underlines, this limitation did not function so well solely because of the discipline of the European states, but also because international law created a Europe-centric geopolitical order, which was stable precisely because it excluded other regions of the world and the Europeans created for themselves a more or less lawless sphere of action in these regions. Europe’s geopolitical structure as established through international law, Schmitt thought, “made possible a continental law of European sovereigns against the background of the immense open spaces of a particular type of freedom” (Schmitt 2003a [1950], 148).
This is also Schmitt’s point of departure for explaining the decline or end of this European international law and the geopolitical order established by it. For Schmitt, first, the independence of the Anglo-American and Latin American countries and concomitant emergence of a “Western hemisphere” is the beginning of the end for the old Europe-centric geopolitical order, as this equalized colonial and European territories in legal terms such that the identity of Europe, attained through exclusion, could no longer be maintained (220). Second, Schmitt draws a parallel between the development of a world economy that was clearly up and running around 1900 and the rise of universalist thought (234), a type of thought that conflicted with the principles of traditional international law in that greater emphasis was again placed on the propagation of universal standards of justice, including with respect to war. The notion of the just war, in other words the discriminatory concept of war, which was for long successfully suppressed, now reappears—not least in the form of an American universalist interventionism, which was the intellectual basis for the League of Nations (so hated by Schmitt) and later the UN. Third and finally—as Schmitt asserted in 1950 in his final, highly topical argument—the discriminatory concept of war, by now widely accepted and ultimately undermining traditional international law ever further, was also backed up by the monstrous impact of nuclear weapons; for Schmitt, the use of such terrible weapons against anything other than an “unjust enemy” would be unthinkable—and in the early days of the Cold War their deployment was both envisaged and planned for. The enemy, according to Schmitt, must necessarily be an unjust one, because otherwise there would be no way of justifying the use of such weapons (321). This finally pulled the rug from under European international law and ultimately the state as “bearer of the most astonishing of all monopolies, namely the monopoly of political decision-making, this showpiece of European form and occidental rationalism” (Schmitt 1991, 10).
It is no coincidence that in the period after the Second World War Schmitt begins to take a particular interest in the figure of the partisan, whom he finds fascinating because he has always operated outside of international law. The partisan embodies “true enmity,” so for Schmitt he represents the political figure par excellence. As an irregular combatant without uniform, the partisan, who according to Schmitt is distinguished by irregularity of battle, high mobility, political engagement, and closeness to nature (Schmitt 2007b [1963], 20), has always been an alien element for European international law. Yet the Spanish partisans of the early nineteenth century—and they are probably the epitome of such fighters in Schmitt’s eyes—were the first to take up the struggle against Napoleon and thus restore the seriousness of war (88), in contrast to the disgraceful stance of the German governments of the time, which generally hesitated over whether to go to war and resist aggression and constantly put off such decisions, ultimately proving themselves to be unpolitical. As long as European international law still functioned, the partisan of this period—and he found his German equivalent in 1813 in the wars of liberation—was in any event the exception. Now however, Schmitt indicates, this figure seems to be increasingly significant. In view of new revolutionary ideologies, the image of the partisan has changed—he has become more offensive and no longer necessarily close to nature. But in a world in which traditional European international law has collapsed and—in view of the global political deadlock between the rival atomic powers—a “normal” war between states, now waged on a different basis, scarcely seems possible, he is more than ever the embodiment of the political actor. He has taken the decision to engage in battle through his will to define the enemy. In Schmitt’s somehow nostalgic view, the partisan is both an anachronistic and admirable manifestation of the political. Though conventional war is finished, casting a veil over the heart of the political, there is still the partisan. From time to time at least, the partisan breathes new life into the political realm, awakening its timeless power, namely the will to choose one’s enemy (see Münkler 1992, 121f.).
Looking back on Schmitt’s analyses, it seems fair to say that the brilliance of his arguments is often due to major conceptual biases and theoretical inadequacies. The very definition of the political through the friend-enemy distinction causes Schmitt to work toward a completely uniform and homogeneous notion of state and society from the outset. For him, genuine state authority represents the political unity of the people, such that he simply nips the question of the (graduated and empirical) legitimacy of the state in the bud. The state either is—or is not. There is nothing in between. As commentators have noted (Hofmann 2002, 15), this not only abolishes the gulf between is and ought but makes it impossible from the outset to examine empirically the particular relationship that exists between state and social forces, because the “true” state both creates and embodies social unity. All of this has repercussions for Schmitt’s understanding of war. Questions concerning, for example, the connection between capitalism and war, the interplay of war-promoting and war-inhibiting forces, and the consequences of wars, of the kind still common in the social theories formulated under the German Empire, become almost impossible to pose in this way. Of course, Schmitt discusses such things as the imperialism (of the United States), which presents itself as mere economics. But at the same time the interpretive foil of the political sphere, which he always regarded as crucial, prevents him from considering economic and cultural phenomena in their own right and with regard to their possible repercussions for the political sphere. Ultimately, Schmitt is indulging in a political reductionism to which all other manifestations of the social must submit conceptually and theoretically.
This also molds his assessment of intellectual currents and positions, whose capacity to inhibit wars was still considered worthy of discussion in the classical phase of sociology at least. We are not, of course, required to share the optimism of a Durkheim or Mead with respect to the universalization of values, in other words their profoundly humanistic vision of purely peaceful competition between nations based on this process. But neither must we accept Schmitt’s brute and virtually unfounded dismissal of the impact of norms and values as such. Because of his radical view of contingency, Schmitt himself is unable to answer the eminently sociological question of what brings about specific friend-enemy distinctions in the first place; so it is quite plausible to take values seriously into account when analyzing the causes of war and peace. Nor is it empirically proved that universalism is primarily responsible for the dissolution of traditional European international law and the concomitant brutalization of war. It is not just that wars of annihilation have also been waged in the name of particular values. Even more important in this connection is the fact that right from the start the raison d’état that developed along with European international law proved largely incapable of limiting the desire for territorial expansion—regardless of universalist “ideologies.” Attempts to keep raison d’état within ethical bounds—as already noted by Meinecke—had always failed. In this sense Schmitt’s depiction of the European geopolitical order as stable glosses over the reality (Hofmann 2002, 204). Though Schmitt has good reason to emphasize that the European geopolitical order established by European international law has gained its specific form through the exclusion of other parts of the world, it is also true that he makes no effort to relate the intra-European stability attained as a result of exclusion to the normative costs of this exclusion. Despite his seemingly strict antinormativist pose, Schmitt’s position is ultimately based on highly particularist values and ignores all the extra-European consequences and costs of European stability. From Schmitt’s perspective, the “benefit” to extra-European regions made possible by the collapse of the jus publicum europaeum, the emerging possibility that they might be included within a larger global framework on an equal basis, is of no further interest.
So as brilliantly as Schmitt develops his arguments, he abandons many of the insights gained in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He did not, for instance, produce an analysis of the connection between war and modern society based on the classics of sociology. In the period between 1918 and 1945, useful analyses of this kind were generally to be found in other national contexts (on the few exceptions in Germany, see Kehr 1970 [1930]), not least in the United States, where large portions of the German social sciences’ macrosociological legacy ended up as a result of forced emigration from 1933 on. The German social sciences, which in many ways still played a leading role during the establishment of the discipline at the turn of the twentieth century and which—see Sombart and Hintze—had also produced important studies on the topic of war, were either destroyed or at least subject to major restrictions as a result of Hitler’s rule. Many high-ranking social scientists chose or were forced to emigrate, and it was mostly the less intellectually significant figures who offered their services, often quite consciously, to the National Socialist racial program, producing racist studies of use to Volkstumspolitik— policies rooted in the ideology of the Volk. This meant that new developments in social theory increasingly occurred elsewhere—particularly in the United States, though even here there were very few intensive and systematic studies of war and peace. The liberal legacy prevented this from happening, especially in the United States, and once again it was intellectual loners who took an interest in the topic of war.
The Berlin-born Hans Speier (1905–90) was just such a loner. Under the Weimar Republic, in the shape of studies published much later as German White-Collar Workers and the Rise of Hitler (1986 [1933]), he wrote one of the classic works of political sociology and sociostructural analysis; he brought his macrosociological skills, gained among other things through practice of a Weberian mode of analysis, with him to his new home, to which he had fled from the National Socialists. As an expert in the study of public opinion, Speier was immediately absorbed into the machinery of the American government to investigate German propaganda methods when America entered the war in 1941 (see, e.g., Speier 1948). But he had already engaged intensively with the topic of war before that date; as he himself put it (Speier 1989a, 13), he was the first social scientist in the United States to hold lectures on the sociology of war before the Second World War. He was in fact particularly well equipped for this task, having been assistant to Emil Lederer in Heidelberg, who, as we have seen, produced one of the few substantial sociological studies of the First World War. Speier became his colleague once again in the 1930s, this time at the university-in-exile, the graduate faculty of the New School for Social Research in New York City.
Speier was never in any doubt that Hitler spelled war. As early as 1936, in the essay “Militarism in the Eighteenth Century,” he attempted to produce a typology of modern militarism after 1789, which he tried to differentiate from the bellicose culture of feudalism and from the militarism of the absolutist era. According to Speier, we are dealing with an extreme form of militarism “when the distribution of power and esteem assumes the form of centralization of control, an attendant state monopoly of raising, controlling, and equipping armies, and a universality of military mores” (Speier 1989b [1936], 70). No significant connections between modern militarism and feudalism can be found on the basis of this definition, and only a few between modern militarism and absolutism (71). According to Speier we should not, however, make too much of this absolutist legacy—the key features here being a tendency toward centralization, bureaucratization, and state control of the economy—as a clear division between military and nonmilitary activities was constitutive of the absolutist system of rule, a division that is no longer to be found in this form in modern militarism. Furthermore, for Speier, absolutist militarism was always counteracted by the antiheroism of European Enlightenment thinkers and their often critical view of the armed forces (84), so that mitigating factors undoubtedly played a role here. Speier also notes that industry made its arrival in European societies following the end of absolutism. This, he claims, must have engendered the devaluation of heroic-bellicose virtues (86), as liberal currents of thought had of course always claimed (see chapters 2 and 3).
Yet militarism has not disappeared as a result of industrialization, which throws up the question of what sustains it under these new conditions. Here Speier is faced with a question to which he was to find no satisfactory answer. In 1943, in “Ludendorff: The German Concept of Total War,” he interpreted the militarism of the German Empire as a “class militarism on a half-feudal basis” (Speier 1989c [1943], 99), though this is rather unconvincing given that he had tended to downplay the feudal roots of modern militarism in his 1936 essay. Speier is compelled to remain on the level of description, describing the militarism of Ludendorff and his concept of “total war” and the related concepts deployed by the National Socialists as a specific reaction to the experiences of the First World War, though without managing to produce a plausible account of the militarism that had led to that war.
But despite these conceptual and theoretical difficulties, Speier continues to study the topic of war, and in some cases his analyses are very much in line with those of Emil Lederer (1979 [1920]) on “Die ökonomische Umschichtung im Krieg” (Economic Fluctuations in War). In “Class Structure and ‘Total War’ ” (1939), Speier analyzes “total war” and predicts a trend toward ever larger firms, a change in labor relations, a lessening of social inequality, and changes in the structure of capitalism as a result of increased control of property, before going on in 1940 to examine typologically different forms of warfare and battle in the essay “The Social Types of War.” Heavily influenced by his reading of Clausewitz, Speier distinguishes between absolute war, instrumental war, and the antagonistic battle. For Clausewitz, absolute war was still a kind of ideal type, which he believed would never be waged so unconditionally in reality. For Speier, born later, it was almost inevitably a real type, because “unrestricted and unregulated war” intended to wipe out and destroy the enemy completely (Speier 1940, 445)—to quote his definition of absolute war—had become a reality in the age of insane ideologies.8 Speier’s types may also be read as a critique of the dangerous tendency to endow war with a special status, a tendency found in the work of some of the authors dealt with here. As Speier makes only too plain, references to the playful and extraquotidian elements of battle (as Caillois had made) make sense only if we relate them to a specific form of conflict, namely the antagonistic battle (451). For Speier, to try to describe absolute war through these categories is completely misguided and out of touch with the reality of modern war.
With respect to their broad historical and macrosociological arguments, Speier’s analyses were something of an exception in the 1930s and early 1940s. Speier saw his intensive engagement with war and militarism as—in today’s terms—“political sociology.” He viewed the study of wars as a means of gaining key insights into the division of power and power dynamics in modern societies. At the time, similar ambitions were present in the work of just one other American scholar, a political scientist who had also been grappling with new war-related forms of power since the 1930s, namely Harold D. Lasswell (1902–78). His essay “The Garrison State,” which he published in the American Journal of Sociology in 1940 (see also Berghahn 1981, 43ff.), has become quite famous. In much the same way as Speier, Lasswell, one of the few American social scientists to make use of psychoanalysis to explain clearly irrational mass and political behavior, emphasized the tremendous social and economic upheavals that twentieth-century wars had caused and would continue to cause. Going beyond Speier, he warned that in future the war efforts of differentiated modern societies would require two things if they were to be successful: psychological manipulation and the brutal, sometimes terroristic disciplining of citizens (Lasswell 1940, 458ff.). Lasswell feared that in every warring state democratic rights would be dismantled sooner or later, that the people would soon be entirely at the mercy of the “specialists on violence.” Although he did not consider the rise of such war-induced “garrison states” inevitable, he thought it at least possible—and not just in the totalitarian societies of Germany, Russia, and Japan, but, with much piquancy, in the United States as well. Though some of his ideas seem over-drawn from a modern-day perspective and his pessimism about the future excessive, and while it is particularly irritating that he made such a close connection between the (possible) developmental characteristics of the United States and those of the totalitarian regimes (see Friedberg 2000), Lasswell’s arguments are still of considerable significance. For the first time, a prominent American social scientist was reflecting systematically on the social, economic, and political consequences of international conflicts in the age of total war. Lasswell’s ideas opened up a new understanding of military conflicts: even more than Speier, he no longer viewed war as an isolated event, as a mere interruption of civilizational progress, but as the hallmark of an entire era that was capable of setting the course for the rise of quite different social and political worlds. This, of course, included a good deal of cultural and civilizational critique, yet, in contrast to so many other authors, this did not cause Lasswell to eschew serious empirical study of social change.
As we have underlined, even in the United States few authors were as ambitious as Speier and Lasswell. Scholarly interest in armed violence did pick up there in the 1930s because of the growing threat of a new war. But this interest went unchanneled by a theory of social change, a shortcoming of the American social sciences as a whole at the time (Knöbl 2001, 39–154). The spectrum of studies produced thus ranged from a general critique of civilization that included consideration of war to detailed studies of war-related phenomena that paid little heed to theory.
In the United States, the cultural and civilizational critique concerned with the new phenomenon of totalitarianism was grouped mainly around the Review of Politics, founded in 1939, a journal to which a large number of European immigrants contributed.9 Economic historian John U. Nef (1899–1988) was one of those close to the journal who took a fairly persistent interest in war (see, e.g., Nef 1943), but his historically oriented texts failed to reach great theoretical depth. The studies in history and political science by German immigrant Alfred Vagts (1892–1986) (A History of Militarism, 1937; see Berghahn 1981, 38ff.) and by political scientist Quincy Wright (1890–1970) (A Study of War, 1942) were certainly more significant, though here again issues in social theory tended to stay in the background.
“Cultural critique without much theory”—this description also applies to Pitirim Sorokin (1889–1968), former private secretary to Russian prime minister Kerenski in the period following the February Revolution of 1917. After being exiled by the Bolsheviks, he eventually ended up in the United States in 1923 and obtained a post at Harvard, where he became the dominant figure in the sociology department before the Parsons era. He had published a number of studies on war while still in Russia (see Ionin/Cernych 1989, 137ff.), was fascinated by the subject throughout his life, and devoted important passages to it in his magnum opus Social and Cultural Dynamics: A Study of Change in Major Systems of Art, Truth, Ethics, Law, and Social Relationships, published between 1937 and 1941 (but see also Sorokin 1943/44 and 1945). Because he lacked the Enlightenment optimism about progress, because he had a generally cyclical view of history and saw his own time as materialistic and thus degenerate and believed it would come to an end in the near future, he was able to devote particular attention to the negative aspects of history—including wars. He did not however develop a refined theoretical perspective. His main thesis was that historical study of the course and frequency of wars offers few grounds for the Enlightenment faith in progress—but also few grounds for any equally problematic emphasis on decline: “As in the data presented there is nothing to support the claim of disappearance of war in the past, so is there nothing to support the claim, in spite of the exceptionally high figures for the twentieth century, that there has been (or will be) any steady trend toward increase of war: no, the curve just fluctuates, and that is all” (Sorokin 1937, 361/62). Sorokin essentially provides a wealth of data on wars, which show among other things that since the twelfth century the number of casualties in (European) wars has increased significantly faster than the numerical strength of armies and that, since then, the structures of wars have changed in many other important ways as well.
The United States’ entry into the Second World War attracted the attention of many other leading American social scientists. Even the nucleus of sociology in the United States, the so-called Chicago school of sociology, which had seen its center of gravity as lying within micro- and mesosociology since the time of Park, Mead, and Thomas and had largely failed to develop much interest in international conflicts, now wished, or was compelled, to make a contribution.
Not all of the work that flowed from this is of the highest caliber. Robert E. Park’s (1864–1944) “The Social Function of War: Observations and Notes,” a late essay from 1940, is generally disappointing and rather vague. Other authors of the Chicago school, meanwhile, produced interesting analyses, the main figures here being Everett Hughes and Louis Wirth. Hughes’s (1897–1983) essay from 1942, “The Impact of War on American Institutions,” which was anchored in democratic theory, considers the effects of war on the structure of American institutions and value system. Chiefly against the background of the debate on America’s core values kicked off during the war, Hughes discusses the question of whether the institutional system typical of the United States, often based on the voluntary principle and established by private benefactors, can survive in view of massive economic changes, and especially the state intervention that was on the increase as a result of the war. “Our minds and the economy of our emotions will undoubtedly have to become adjusted to less apparent freedom than we have become accustomed to” (Hughes 1942, 402). Hughes’s essay provides surprising insights into the shift in Americans’ willingness to participate against the background of war-related changes.
Louis Wirth (1897–1952), originally from Germany, rose to prominence mainly on the back of his studies of the Jewish ghetto in differing national contexts (The Ghetto, 1928) and general reflections in urban sociology (“Urbanism as a Way of Life,” 1938); as a student at the University of Chicago, he had helped spearhead the movement opposing America’s entry in the war between 1916 and 1919 (Boyer 2004). During the Second World War he wrote a number of sociological commentaries on the war and joined the debate on Hobbesian “power-political realism” in his essay entitled “International Tensions as Objects of Social Investigation,” though this appeared only in 1948 and was written with the incipient “Cold War” in mind. His reflections attempt to clarify the concept of “international tension.” Here Wirth exposes the hollowness of this term; he stresses the need to differentiate between the rulers and ruled of two rival nations, and shows that seemingly immutable state interests may change, that they are often redefined in such a way as to aggravate or alleviate conflict, and that these tensions—against the assumptions of power-political “realists”—rarely follow a rational and thus predictable pattern. Wirth is a Kantian in that he believes that the majority’s judgment is sounder in a free country and the rulers have fewer opportunities to drive the masses into a war through the construction of scapegoats (1948, 49). But he is enough of a skeptic to know that a democratic form of government will not take hold in a short span of time and that evil, the will to commit wicked acts, will not simply disappear among peoples and rulers: “The widely held faith, especially among scholars and educators, that lack of understanding between peoples lies at the root of international conflict, is not always justified. Correlatively, the almost universal belief that better understanding would prevent the development of tensions or ease those that exist, may also be questioned” (52). In situations in which governments, as in Nazi Germany, desire power and have evil intentions, such understanding takes us no further; in such cases, as we might interpret Wirth, violent resistance is the only remaining option. Overall, through his nuanced arguments and his reflections on the concept of interests and the meaning of the term international “tensions,” Wirth often shows himself to be more realistic than most power-political “realists”—a surprising feat for someone who rarely argued on the level of international relations over the course of his life’s work (for a review of Wirth’s sociology, though from a different perspective than interests us here, see Vortkamp 2003).
As interesting as the works of Hughes and Wirth are, they are not representative of the processes of change that now set in within the American social sciences. The social sciences’ involvement in the war was related mainly to the fact that the relevant disciplines, which were now rather better established than in the period between 1914 and 1918, provided significant empirical knowledge and were thus of potential use to the war effort. Conversely, this also injected into these disciplines an interest in war-related issues, providing major stimulus to research on wars, their causes and consequences. In sociology, this stimulus immediately led to the development of the subdiscipline of “military sociology.” As it was simply a fact that American sociology had the tools to produce knowledge of use to administration of the war effort, it makes sense that those sociologists working for the American armed forces underwent increasing professionalization within the discipline as well—not least because of their ever-greater and subsequently near-exclusive focus on the armed forces. For the most part, this was no longer a political sociology in the sense of Speier or Lasswell, featuring multiple points of contact with social theory, but rather a highly specialized organizational sociology that had few repercussions for the development of the discipline as such. This resulted in a problematic division of labor between a subdiscipline of military sociology entrusted with the analysis of the armed forces and a general sociology that paid almost no attention to violence and war. This would have been of little import had military sociology developed a substantial and stable interest in issues of social theory of its own accord. But this did not happen. As the field became ever more specialized and divided into ever more subdivisions—as also occurred in other subdisciplines—it no longer paid attention to the discipline’s theoretically ambitious questions, and studies worth mentioning from a social theory standpoint are few and far between within the field of military sociology (for recent surveys of military sociology and its history, see Kernic 2001; Heins/Warburg 2004; and Leonhard/Werkner 2005).
The American Soldier, a study produced under the direction of Samuel A. Stouffer (1900–1960), was the first major empirical work in military sociology in the United States. Social theoretical ambitions are very much in evidence here. Based on data collected within the American army itself, this four-volume work from 1949 produced important findings on class-specific behavior; the adaptability and morale of ordinary soldiers and officers; the significance of group processes to the functioning of the units; and the soldiers’ immediate experience of battle. The passages on “combat experience,” specifically on coping with fear in battle, not only provide—for the first time within the discipline of sociology—an empirically grounded insight into the enormous psychological stresses to which soldiers are exposed in battle. Stouffer’s analyses also form a very interesting contrast to those of Roger Caillois, which were more philosophical and speculative in intent and which built on the literary accounts of battle produced by Ernst Jünger. Neither Stouffer himself nor other sociologists, however, analyzed in more depth soldiers’ profound emotional experiences in battle that emerge so clearly in The American Soldier. There was an obvious opportunity here to use these extreme behaviors and experiences to reconsider traditional models of action, to ask, for example, what we can learn about “normal” action from action in extreme situations, how crucial security is to coping smoothly with everyday actions, for instance. None of this happened; the trend toward the “sealing off” of military sociology was already evident at a fairly early stage.
Much the same can be said of “Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II” by Edward A. Shils (1910–95) and Morris Janowitz (1919–88), another famous work in military sociology. On the basis of interviews with German prisoners of war, they brought out the importance of group processes to the morale of the troops in Hitler’s army and demonstrated—contrary to expectations—that a robust Nazi worldview or nationalistic belief in Germany played a comparatively minor role in comparison. In recent times critics have raised objections to their ideas. The explanatory power of the “primary group,” of which Shils and Janowitz made so much, they assert, has been overestimated. This is simply because, given the huge losses suffered by the Wehrmacht, especially on the eastern front, these groups never existed for very long, and the idealization of the group by the soldiers themselves was undoubtedly ideological to some degree (see Bartov 1991, esp. 29ff.). Yet Shils and Janowitz still deserve credit for being the first to highlight the great importance of informal structures in such a strongly hierarchical and formalized social formation as an army. Their study not only laid the foundations for primary group research as a whole, of the kind that was to become so influential within American sociology in the 1950s, but also stimulated the study of informal behavior patterns within organizational sociology. The analyses produced by Shils and Janowitz were not really harnessed to advance social theory; but both authors, here and in subsequent publications, at least attempted not to decouple those issues of special interest to military sociology from more general ones.
Studies in the sociology of the armed forces and war that appeared after 1945, at least those with social theoretical aspirations, came predominantly from the United States, and there were good reasons for this. These lay both in the history of the discipline and in the history of the world itself. In the United States the discipline underwent an uninterrupted process of establishment and development, while the wars and crises that had afflicted Europe prevented this from happening there in the same way. For the first time, American sociology took on a clear leadership role within international sociology, which also meant that social theoretical analyses of war—when they appeared, which was rare enough—were developed chiefly in America. The sociologies of other democratic countries could not keep up, either because—as in France—the preconditions for the development of the subject were for a long time simply absent as a result of the German occupation and the political upheavals caused by the war or because—as in the United Kingdom—sociology was weakly institutionalized and still required disciplinary development. In the case of Germany, at least West Germany, a difficult new beginning had to be made following the forced migration of many intellectuals and the Nazis’ appropriation of sociology; unsurprisingly, German sociology often took its lead from its already highly professionalized American counterpart.
So sociology’s geographic center of gravity shifted as a result of the war. Nonetheless, it is fair to say that the topic of war continued to be marginalized within the discipline. As mentioned above, in the shape of a fairly strong military sociology, a sociological subdiscipline had become established in the United States since the 1940s that grappled intensively with the institution of the “armed forces.” But otherwise sociological and social theoretical studies of war remained thin on the ground. This was reinforced by the hegemonic position attained by modernization theory within macrosociology since the 1950s, as its Enlightenment assumptions resulted, from the outset, in a distorted view of violent phenomena. Beneath the surface, the “dream of a non-violent modernity” was having its effect. Researchers studied isolated societies, interpreting developments and processes within them as wholly endogenous. They paid no attention to war. Given the terrible violent events that had taken place just a few years or decades before, events in which the American nation and especially the European countries were embroiled, this can only be described as a spectacular case of the suppression of war. The ever-present risk of nuclear annihilation arising from the arms race between the United States and USSR was also largely ignored. Only a very small number of theoretically minded sociologists made any effort to exploit the insights gained within military sociology, let alone continue the military-related “political sociology” of a Hans Speier or Harold D. Lasswell. Again, those who did so were the exceptions. Raymond Aron (1905–83) stands out here—one of the few non-American sociologists who enjoyed great international prestige in the 1950s and 1960s (see Hall 1981, 157–96).
Aron, the leading French sociologist of the early postwar period and the key “bourgeois” rival of the left-wing intellectuals around Jean Paul Sartre, was influenced more by German than French intellectual traditions. In any case, he was not rooted in the Durkheimian tradition. He had lived and worked in Germany from 1930 to 1933 and took his lead from Max Weber’s conceptualization of the state, with a particular interest in conflicts and international disputes. After France’s occupation by German troops, Aron went to Great Britain, where he published articles in support of de Gaulle’s struggle against Germany. After liberation in 1944, he immediately returned to France, where again he initially worked mainly as a journalist, before being appointed chair in sociology at the Sorbonne in 1955 (see Aron 1990).
Aron’s wide interests ranged from the history of sociology to empirical analyses of industrial society (see also Aron 1958); a few years earlier, in 1951, he had produced one of the first major analyses of the Cold War, combining both political science and sociology, in the shape of The Century of Total War (Les Guerres en chaîne). This topic was to preoccupy him over the next few decades. Aron takes a clear political stand here, calling for Europe to arm itself in order to ward off the (military) threat emanating from the Soviet Union. This first required good relations between France and Germany (Aron 1954 [1951], 314). Aron shows himself to be a “power-political realist” in this study. He acknowledges that the world political situation with regard to nuclear weapons has rung in a new age of international relations, referring to “the recession of national states, the rise of the continent-states” (165). But, he believes, this changes nothing about the fact that conflicts determine world politics, and these must be subjected to rational reflection, particularly with respect to the USSR’s desire for power and expansion. Idealistic notions of politics are of no use in the present situation; and, of course, they also came to grief in the 1930s when confronted with Hitler’s Germany. The mistakes made then must not be repeated, which is why Aron turns to the topic of Europe’s warring past again and again.
In this connection, Aron makes it clear that the imperialism of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was by no means economically determined, that in fact the key factor was the pursuit of power. Political will was the real driving force behind imperialism: “It will not be denied that capitalism tends to incorporate underdeveloped territories into its system. Nor is it to be denied that colonial conquest may be regarded as a function of economic expansion. But whatever the plausibility of such a view, two questions remain to be answered: Were the African colonial empires founded in accordance with this pattern? Were the European wars a consequence of these quarrels for the division of the planet? The facts, if invoked without bias, answer these two questions negatively” (58/59). What applied then with respect to power politics, Aron believes, still applies now, especially against the background of the Soviet desire for expansion: Western European politics must take this into account and must not cherish false hopes. The state of nature described by Hobbes, Aron suggests, may no longer pertain between states, but it still exists between the blocs that have now been established. The old rules of power politics continue to apply in the Cold War (169ff.).
In 1962 Aron turned out a monumental work running to many hundreds of pages. The title itself reveals the author’s tremendous ambitions: Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations (1962; Paix et guerre entre les nations). Here, Aron aspired to provide nothing less than a general analysis of international power relations and lay the foundations for a sociology of the nuclear age. But with his unique conceptual apparatus, he not only examined—as the secondary title might imply—those aspects of relations between states of relevance to foreign policy; in fact, he aimed to formulate a general theory of power by systematically examining the interconnection between domestic and international conditions as well. As Aron declares in this book, once again in Hobbesian fashion, any theory of international relations must assume the risk of wars, which then requires us to take account of the means to be deployed in them.10 This also applies to international relations in the nuclear age. Aron does all he can to enter into the world of ideas characteristic of military strategists in the age of nuclear war, the theory of deterrence and mutually assured nuclear destruction, which he discusses almost in the manner of game theory, in a matter-of-fact and unemotional style, asking what “chance” there still is of a nuclear war despite the seemingly unsurpassable irrationality of such an event. He sees the waging of nuclear war as implausible but not inconceivable. So even in the age of nuclear weapons war is a tool of politics, at least as a threat.
In 1976, Aron produced another big book on war or on a theorist of war, Clausewitz: Philosopher of War (1983; Penser la guerre, Clausewitz), which once again clearly expresses Aron’s understanding of politics, state, and war. Aron claims here that his power-political realism is entirely compatible with Clausewitzian principles: even in the age of nuclear arms, strategy remains within the Clausewitzian framework (Aron 1983, 309). Borrowing from Clausewitz, Aron describes politics as the “intelligence of the personified state” (399) and accepts with some qualifications Anatol Rapoport’s description of him as a “neo-Clausewitzian” (315). Aron is well aware that the nature of statehood has changed since the time of Hobbes and Clausewitz, that transnational processes are now occurring on a far greater scale. Yet he still maintains the notion of the state’s unity (398). The nation-state has by no means become obsolete, despite the existence of supranational military blocs. In this sense, Aron believes, the instrumental rationality associated with the state, raison d’état, continues to be the guiding principle of international relations. The world’s political leaders should take account of this. Aron believes that there are good prospects of such rational action on the part of the world’s rulers. The very existence of nuclear weapons will make crusades for peace (or democracy) impossible, likely marking the beginning of the end for the Wilsonian illusion of pacification and democratization, which Aron believes to have been of no benefit (412f.). For Aron, abandoning the illusion of a world without weapons seems a prerequisite for any halfway effective curtailment of war, a form of violence that—he leaves us in no doubt—will continue to exist in future.
We want to briefly mention another important non-American sociologist who produced writings of great importance to the analysis of war in the 1950s. Polish-British Weberian and conflict theorist Stanislav Andreski (1919–2007) did more to study historical changes in the form taken by war than Aron, and particularly shed light on the shift in the population’s involvement in armed conflicts. As a Polish officer in the Second World War he himself had been taken prisoner by the Soviets, fled to Great Britain, and then fought the Germans on the British side. From a comparative historical perspective, his book Military Organization and Society from 1954 examines the question of the link between war and warfare on the one hand and social inequality on the other. It is clear to Andreski that war is a significant factor in the stratification of societies. But wars by no means produce uniform effects on inequality; the different forms of warfare make sure of that: “[T]he intensification of warfare may make it necessary to enlist the support of the masses by granting them various privileges, in which case a substantial leveling may take place. The necessity of such a course will depend mainly on whether mass armies are, in view of the state of tactics and armament, more or less efficient than professional armies” (Andreski 1968 [1954], 29). So wars have both reduced and increased social inequality, and no clear-cut relationships emerge here. But Andreski does not stop at this preliminary finding, instead going on to examine which kinds of warfare lead to which specific outcomes in which societies. Here he discovers the importance of what he calls the “Military Participation Ratio,” which is dependent on the “proportion of militarily utilized individuals in the total population” (33). For Andreski, mass wars have a different stratifying effect from the cabinet wars in the age of European absolutism, while total wars of the kind that became typical of the twentieth century in Europe have different effects from limited or small-scale armed conflicts. And this, Andreski believes, must be subjected to systematic study if we want to investigate the nature and transformation of social inequality, an issue of such importance to sociology, while also remembering that war is a far from rare occurrence in world history. Even today, Andreski’s empirically sensitive studies could be of great importance to the study of processes of stratification, democratization, and centralization in regions of endemic armed conflicts. But this potential has so far gone untapped.
As the nuclear age dawned, American sociology produced Aron’s key antagonist within the sociology of war in the shape of C. Wright Mills (1916–62). Whereas Aron entered into the conceptual world of the armed forces, C. Wright Mills pointedly did not, and for programmatic reasons. He was unable to believe that the means of mass destruction were politically controllable. Mills had risen to prominence within American sociology through his translations of Max Weber’s work and above all through important studies on the analysis of social structure (White Collar, 1951). But he also played a major role in the broader public sphere as a staunchly left-wing intellectual and was to become one of the heroes of the so-called “New Left” after his early death. Mills consciously refused to adopt the perspective of the military strategists, a refusal based mainly on his view of the power structures of American society. His work was informed by an analysis of his age in which the nation-state’s institutions of violence played a central role. In most other writings in this genre, in contrast, the armed forces played (and play) no role. It was just this suppression of the existence of the state’s institutions of violence in which Mills was unwilling to partake, which is why his book The Power Elite (1956),11 which caused a major stir, took a particularly close look at the armed forces.
Mills’s innovative thesis, which was anything but self-evident within sociology at the time, is that elites in contemporary American society are undergoing a fundamental shift, one that is not only changing the position of the armed forces within this society but has turned the basically antimilitaristic culture of the United States on its head. Mills shows that the United States was originally founded as a nonmilitary, if not antimilitary polity; the state, after all, emerged from a revolution against the British and their mercenaries (Mills 1956, 175). Though the first presidents of the United States of America were often generals, the U.S. Constitution expresses distrust of the armed forces (176). What is more, in the entire nineteenth century the military elites (not least because of the stationing of the armed forces on the Western frontier) never really succeeded in linking up with the other social and political elites (ibid.).12 During this period the armed forces thus had to forgo political power almost entirely. The civilians retained control, and this was possible because in a United States that faced few external threats, the armed forces had never managed to truly convince society of its importance. And in connection with this, it was all the easier for a military code of honor to be formulated and accepted that enshrined the renunciation of politics: “This renunciation has gone quite far: it has been incorporated in the military code of honor. Inside their often trim bureaucracy, where everything seems under neat control, army officers have felt that ‘politics’ is a dirty, uncertain, and ungentlemanly kind of game” (174).
But according to Mills it is precisely this that has changed dramatically in the twentieth century, because of a number of crucial factors. First, Mills points to the failure of civilian politicians; increasingly, they have turned to the armed forces in search of expertise to advance their global political ambitions, allowing these armed forces to get their foot in the door of power for the first time. This military knowledge is also increasingly in demand as a result of the development of military technology, scarcely comprehensible by laypeople, and this has resulted in the politicization of the armed forces (199/200), which have now defined quite specific political tasks for themselves. Even worse, a worldview has begun to take hold within American politics in which military criteria are increasingly decisive. This has happened in part because America’s massive military build-up in the Second World War led to the merging of economic monopoly and military bureaucracy, making it all the easier to bring the military view of the world into politics—with incalculable consequences, according to Mills. A military-industrial complex and a “military definition of reality” predominate so utterly within contemporary American society (185) that much of the American elite can now see domestic politics only from a foreign policy perspective, viewing the former as “ways of retaining power at home in order to exert abroad the power of the national establishment” (186); war or military options now seem the only remaining means of achieving their aims. All in all, this means that American capitalism has developed into a “permanent war economy” because of this shift in the character of the elite (215), which shows the liberal idea of a Herbert Spencer to be quite untrue: “[T]he classic liberal expectation of men like Herbert Spencer has proved quite mistaken. What the main drift of the twentieth century has revealed is that as the economy has become concentrated and incorporated into great hierarchies, the military has become enlarged and decisive to the shape of the entire economic structure” (215).
Mills explored this “military definition of reality” in another book that was at least as much political pamphlet as scholarly study (Hess 1995, 151) and that bore the sensational and apocalyptic title The Causes of World War Three (1958). Mills deals mainly with the politics of deterrence here, which had also been Aron’s key concern. But his objective is quite different. For him, in the age of the nuclear deterrent, the insanity of the military mindset, one that is no longer influenced or curbed by any civilian or political considerations, is quite plain. In the United States (Mills’s primary point of reference, though he has no wish to play down or justify the totalitarian regime of the USSR), a largely depoliticized public has lost all control over events; according to him, as the USSR and United States compete in an insane arms race, the power over life and death is in the hands of a bureaucratic power apparatus consisting of military chiefs and a small number of politicians. What this small, powerful grouping views as the rational balancing out of potential threats, Mills sees as nothing more than a “military metaphysics” that is entirely divorced from reality. This grouping is incapable of thinking in anything other than military terms, with consequences that are far from rational and therefore risk triggering a new world war, which would be the final such war: “Just now, the chance of a deliberately planned war is perhaps not as great as is the ‘accidental’ precipitation of war. But the prime conditions of the ‘accident’ are not themselves accidental; they are planned and deliberate. The war mechanism of U.S. men and machines is all set up and triggered to go. It stands opposite a similar mechanism of Soviet design and maintenance. The first cause of World War Three is, obviously, the existence of these bureaucratic and lethal machineries. Without them there could be no war” (Mills 1959 [1958]), 52).
Mills’s text on the “causes of the Third World War,” which again sold very well, was in significant part a moral or ethical manifesto. Against a foreign policy that was accepted without question and, in an age of nuclear weapons, was in fact often guided by game theory, he wished to put forward a different model of politics, and especially to reinject morality into (international) politics (Hess 1995, 150). Inevitably, this sometimes led him to take his polemics too far, overstating, for example, the autonomy of military institutions and their influence (Domhoff 2006, 548; Wolfe 1999, 93ff.). Nonetheless, with plenty of help from Weberian categories, Mills managed to break through the “orthodox consensus” (Atkinson 1971) at a fairly early stage in the history of American sociology, a consensus that painted an overly harmonious picture of American society, while forgetting not only the nuclear threat but also, often, the violent conflicts of the time. Despite all the overstatements, his focus on how changes in elite structures in the United States had led to the rise of the armed forces remains one of the few approaches within the field of social theory to take (potential) war seriously.
With his political sociology in the tradition of Speier or Lasswell, Mills was a lonely figure in the 1950s. But a new interest in military matters was fueled by another source. We are referring to the problematic processes of development in the Third World, which had failed to comply with theoretical models. Development policies guided by modernization theory were initially formulated on the assumption that military institutions would play no significant role in developmental processes. But this proved a fatal mistake: in most regions of what was later called the Third World, hopes of rapid democratization went unfulfilled and even the “civilizing” of politics failed to occur. Instead it was the armed forces that often took center stage as they increasingly shaped the destinies of the underdeveloped countries. This forced revisions of modernization theory and threw up new questions.
British political scientist Samuel E. Finer (1915–93) was the key figure to explore issues of military rule in the Third World. In the early 1960s—within a modernization theory framework—he examined at least aspects of this topic in depth. His study The Man on Horseback (1962) was prompted by the observation that in the “new” states and nations that emerged after 1945 the armed forces often levered out the civilian governments and took power themselves through coups. Finer concluded that we must treat military coups as the rule rather than the exception. But this requires us to analyze which (infrequently occurring) conditions facilitate or have facilitated the civilian (rather than military) control and leadership of the national polity so typical in the history of Western countries. Ultimately, as a hierarchically organized, cohesive organization often endowed with great prestige and the capacity to use force, at first sight the armed forces seem always and everywhere predestined to take over the political leadership roles in a society as well. So why have military governments appeared far less often in the West than in the so-called “new” states and nations?
Finer’s explanation for the regionally variable frequency of military interventions in civil affairs was based essentially on the rather nebulous modernization theory concept of “political culture.” He claimed that the political cultures of Great Britain and the United States, which are most developed from a comparative international perspective, made and still make a military putsch least likely to occur, whereas the generally undemocratic political cultures of the Third World countries have failed (and will continue to fail) to prevent intervention by the armed forces. Although this explanation seems rather unconvincing and even slightly tautological, Finer at least managed to provide a historical overview that reveals the factors and conditions that made the military putsch—an extremely unusual and almost unthinkable occurrence within the European state system before 1789—possible in the first place. “Contemporary military intervention is the fruit of the five factors which emerged from the paroxysm of the French revolution, between 1789 and 1810: the doctrine of nationality, the doctrine of popular sovereignty, the insurgence of popular armies, the professionalization of the armed forces, and, finally, the emancipation of imperial dependencies” (Finer 1962, 219/20). Only the idea of nationality and popular sovereignty, Finer tells us, made it possible for military leaders, in the name of the people, to replace the civilian authorities in order to save the nation. Because of its stable democratic political culture, however, this has rarely been the case in the West, in contrast to the developing countries, where military leaders’ desire for power, supported by an emotionally charged nationalism, has gone unchecked by civilian norms.
As important as Finer’s arguments were, it is telling that they did not inspire further reflections, precisely because of their modernization theory premises. Neither Finer nor other authors close to modernization theory investigated the “normal” activity of the armed forces or of military leaders, namely waging war. This is particularly striking given that a comparative study of warfare in the Third World and, for example, Europe could have shed light on specific developments in different regions. But no such studies appeared: war and macrosocial violence were anything but a major topic of social scientific analysis in the 1950s and 1960s (on the highly specialized debate on civilian-military relations in the Third World, see Berghahn 1981, 67–84).
It is fair to say that modernization theory was particularly neglectful of the topic of violence. Like perhaps no other theoretical school of sociology, other than its great rival of Marxism, it clung to the Enlightenment faith in progress; within this framework, it assumed the meaningfulness and continuity of the historical process. For this reason alone it was scarcely capable of appreciating the historical and sociological significance of war and violence. But it would be unfair to limit such criticisms to modernization theory. It had no monopoly on progressive optimism (see Tiryakian 1999, 474ff.), as apparent in the fact that analyses of the armed forces that were highly critical of modernization theory were also unwilling to draw the requisite theoretical conclusions. The liberal legacy of sociology, whose roots lay in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, made its presence felt beyond modernization theory.
In his landmark book The Military in the Political Development of New Nations from 1964 (which in a sense provided an alternative to Finer’s study), sociologist Morris Janowitz, who was theoretically indebted to the Chicago school and did much to develop its legacy (see chapter 5), also did without the modernization theory concept of “political culture.” He explained the significantly greater frequency of intervention by non-Western armies in civilian affairs with reference to quite different factors—namely, the very different class structures in Europe and the “Third World,” historically determined differences in the social position of the armed forces, and completely different methods of military recruitment. At least in this study, however, he too thought it unnecessary to make a detailed analysis of the armed forces’ characteristic activities, the use of force or waging of wars. Sociology as a whole, with few exceptions, had adopted a linear understanding of history that smoothed out ruptures and caesuras and maintained a firm faith in progress, so that wars and violence seemed no more than disturbances; as such, there was clearly no need to grant them analytical priority (see Joas 2003). Janowitz, however, with a background in military sociology but never narrowly limited to it,13 did tackle the question of war and its consequences more directly. He was especially concerned with the link between war and democracy, which had also been a key concern for Andreski. To what extent, he asked, have military conflicts and institutions opened up opportunities for political participation and helped extend civil rights? And what are the preconditions that ensured that in some countries the armed forces were democratically embedded and thus “tamed” but not in others? His essay “Military Institutions and Citizenship in Western Societies” (1976) provided an answer to this question and made it clear just how much we must view civil rights and their development in the age of nation-states against the background of military institutions. Janowitz’s ideas did not go uncontested (see Berg 2000; Berg 1994 is the partially overlapping English version), but, in much the same way as Andreski’s arguments, they continue to be the starting point for any theoretically substantial discussion of democratization.
The period following the Second World War has left modern-day sociology a quite meager intellectual legacy in terms of the politics of peace and understanding of war. Until the 1970s, far too few sociologists and social scientists seriously attempted to get to grips with the topic of “war,” a topic of such universal importance. The question for us now is whether, and if so how, this has changed in recent times.