Preface
1. Here we would like to express our gratitude to Nathalia Zlobinska and Arne Dreßler for procuring texts and for valuable comments and suggestions on the manuscript as well as Patrick Wöhrle and Daniel Stinsky for preparing the index.
Chapter 2
1. It was Hobbes’s theoretical conception that was of most interest to those engaged in the philosophical and sociological discussion on war and peace, even if they consciously opposed it. There is no need to belabor the point that the classical figures of sociology—from Tönnies (1896) to Parsons (1937)—engaged repeatedly with Hobbes’s ideas. But cf. the key role played by Hobbes in chapter 2 of our book Social Theory (2009 [2004], 27–32).
2. On the distinction between several variants of the possible modernization of European thought and European politics in this period, see the brilliant book by Toulmin (1990).
3. Hobbes was probably the first thinker to consciously introduce the “state of nature” as a thought experiment and to coin the term, though similar intellectual elements had already appeared in the work of Grotius. The “state of nature” became a key notion for all subsequent theories of law, regardless of whether it was conceived as a merely hypothetical condition or as one rooted in reality (Tuck 1999, 135).
4. In fact Hobbes’s implicit assumption of an anarchic state of affairs between states was and is a poor reflection of the reality of international politics. As Hedley Bull (1977, 47ff.) has brought out, the relations between states were not and are not as (legally) unregulated as Hobbes suggested, and it was and is always inadequate to judge the actions of politicians concerned with international affairs solely in light of efforts to maintain state power or security.
5. Representatives of the so-called Cambridge school have demonstrated this above all in the field of “intellectual history.” For a survey of the Cambridge school, see Hellmuth/von Ehrenstein 2001. It is important to grasp that the positions put forward by the Cambridge School have not gone uncontested. There continues to be major conflict, though it has become less intense in recent times, between historians such as Skinner or Pocock, who underline the outstanding importance in early modern Europe of a discourse of virtue informed by ancient templates, and those who point instead to the centrality of a transformed discourse of natural law (for a brief overview, see Geuna 2002, 178ff.). The most easily accessible text on the significance of the ancient discourse of virtue is by Skinner (1998), who refers to the “neo-Roman understanding of civil liberty.”
6. The idea of the civilizing and war-preventing effect of (international) trade can be found prior to Montesquieu. Such ideas extend further back, to at least the early seventeenth century, when French monk Eméric Crucé (1590–1640) introduced them to the contemporary debate on how best to establish peace (see Howard 1977, 19f.). But The Spirit of Laws was hugely influential. Twenty-two new editions had appeared just two years after its first publication, and translations were immediately begun into almost every European language, so that it seems quite legitimate to view Montesquieu’s work as the starting point for a liberal conception of peace.
7. It is also notable what a wealth of arguments Montesquieu musters to spell out the dangers of imperial endeavors. Only the power of the British, based on supremacy at sea, could combine freedom and imperium (Böhlke 2005; Montesquieu 2005 [1733/34]).
8. For a brief but precise overview of the economic, political, and religious backgrounds to the Scottish Enlightenment, see Emerson 2003. For a highly innovative interpretation of the Scottish Enlightenment, particularly from the perspective of discontinuities between the Calvinist tradition and new experiences, see Camic 1983.
9. While Millar engaged intensively with the topic of war, his statements on the revolutionary wars of the 1790s, which were informed by his great sympathy for the French revolutionaries, tended to revolve around current affairs rather than systematic issues (see esp. his Letters of Crito, on the Causes, Objects, and Consequences, of the Present War, 1796). His remarks on war, militias, and standing armies in The Origin of the Distinction of Ranks (1793; originally 1771) borrow heavily from passages in Wealth of Nations, which is unsurprising given that Millar was a student of Smith (see Millar 1793, 212ff.).
10. Armitage was one of the first to point out that issues of imperial power played a role in the debate on the virtuous republic. But he merely hints that the gradual ousting of ancient political ideals was not due only to the penetration of capitalist market relations, through which Hobbesian or property-based individualist notions of freedom increasingly rose to prominence. Rather, according to what we might call Armitage’s “world historical” argument, the almost total cessation of the tradition of “civic humanism” was probably due to world political and therefore contingent circumstances rather than an internal British or European developmental logic. Even Britain’s merely “maritime empire” entailed the very difficulties that the ideals of “civic humanism” wished to highlight. With his emphasis on these imperial influences, Armitage, who published this text in an anthology coedited by Quentin Skinner, differs from the dominant vision of the Cambridge school but is also in alignment with it in underlining the contingency of intellectual processes, as does Skinner in particular.
11. Jennifer Pitts points out that the awareness of the unintended effects of human action, so marked in Scottish Enlightenment philosophy, had significant consequences for the conceptualization of human history: “Smith did not regard Europe’s development as the result of a uniquely progressive culture. Rather, he believed, on the one hand, that the transition from hunting to commercial societies was natural and presumptively universal, and on the other that the fact Europe had advanced farthest was accidental and fortuitous. Moreover, on Smith’s view Europe’s history was in many respects not a model of pure natural development at all” (Pitts 2005, 32). For Smith, such things as the extension of political participation in the Roman empire, the abolition of slavery and bondage, and the decline of the Catholic Church in Europe (processes and phenomena that he assessed positively with respect to their peaceful effects) were not historical necessities but the unintended consequences of actions, leading to the further insight that commercial and civil society in Europe by no means gave this continent the right to expedite progress in other places (32f.). “Moreover, Smith reminds us, to live under a good system is not necessarily to understand how it evolved, or even exactly how it works: even if Europeans benefited from a fortunate set of circumstances to produce relatively free and effective governments, they might not be in a position to export those institutions” (33).
12. “Among the more remarkable features of such writings [of the Enlightenment] … is that an increasingly acute awareness of the irreducible plurality and partial incommensurability of social forms, moral values, and political institutions engendered a historically uncommon, inclusive moral universalism” (Muthu 2003, 282; emphasis in original).
13. On the significance of the militia issue to the discourse of virtue or the “neo-Roman understanding of liberty,” see Skinner 1998, 73f.
14. When originally published in 1752, this essay bore the title “Of Luxury,” but was renamed in 1760 and is known today under the title in the text.
15. In the next clause, however, Hume makes it clear that this luxury must remain within reasonable bounds if it is to have a positive effect.
16. Elsewhere he states, “Peace and unanimity are commonly considered as the principal foundations of public felicity; yet the rivalship of separate communities, and the agitations of a free people, are the principles of political life, and the school of men” (Ferguson 2006, 73).
17. With his arguments for a militia, Ferguson could draw not only on ancient traditions but also on Scottish nationalist thought in the period immediately before the parliamentary union between England and Scotland (1707). Andrew Fletcher’s “A Discourse of Government with relation to Militias” (1997 [1698]) caused a furor within the heated discursive landscape of the time. In a fairly systematic way, this treatise develops the idea of the standing (mercenary) army as a threat to freedom and highlights the unique military and constitutional development of the British Isles (“And ’tis as evident, that standing forces are the fittest instruments to make a tyrant”; Fletcher 1997 [1698], 18/19). In an instructive essay, Matthias Bohlender has advocated the thesis that Ferguson transformed Fletcher’s constitutional focus into a general sociomoral issue. But this contrast between Fletcher and Ferguson with respect to their arguments on the militia is probably too sharp, and Bohlender seems to be going too far in asserting that Ferguson’s insistence on the institution of the militia implies the “birth of society” out of the “practices of war” (see Bohlender 1999, 25).
18. On this nexus, see also Robertson 1985, 200–232.
19. “War is … a species of procedure by which one nation endeavours to enforce its rights at the expense of another nation. It is the only method to which recourse can be had, when no other method of obtaining satisfaction can be found by complainants, who have no arbitrator between them sufficiently strong, absolutely to take from them all hope of resistance” (Bentham 1843b, 538/39).
20. “It is … the quantity of capital which determines the quantity of trade, and not the extent of the market, as has been generally believed. Open a new market,—the quantity of trade will not, unless by some accidental circumstance, be increased: shut up an old market,—the quantity of trade will not be diminished, unless by accident, and only for a moment” (Bentham 1843c, 54).
21. “The monopoly, indeed, raises the rate of mercantile profit and thereby augments somewhat the gain of our merchants. But as it obstructs the natural increase of capital, it tends rather to diminish than increase the sum total of the revenue which the inhabitants of the country derive from the profits of stock” (Smith 2007, 396; on Smith’s stance on colonialism, see the persuasive account by Pitts 2005, esp. 53ff.).
22. “In this respect, the study of anti-imperialist political thought shows quite clearly that the idea of an Enlightenment project that celebrated universal values at the expense of cultural difference has obscured what was, in fact, a genuine and contentious struggle among eighteenth-century thinkers about how to conceptualize humanity, cultural difference, and the political relationships among European and non-European peoples” (Muthu 2003, 264; see also Richter 1997).
23. For an excellent collection of studies on “civilizing missions,” see Barth/Osterhammel (2005).
24. The most user-friendly compilation of the relevant texts (though in abridged form) is Hoffmann/Fidler (eds.), Rousseau on International Relations (1991a).
25. Rousseau underlines that wars always have negative repercussions for the sociopolitical structure of the countries waging them (1997a; see also Hoffmann 1963, 323). It should be noted here that Rousseau, influenced strongly, like Montesquieu and Ferguson, by the ancient (republican) ideal of the citizen, was never willing to defend martial virtues: “That the art of war is pernicious seems indeed to be one of Rousseau’s most settled convictions” (Hassner 1997, 212).
26. It is, however, doubtful that Rousseau can consistently maintain this separation between state and population. Particularly in the case of wars between “well-governed” republics, in which the general will “rules,” the distinction between state and population would be done away with. In this case one would in fact legitimately annihilate the enemy population in order to win the war. The humanization of war to which Rousseau aspires would no longer be possible in the case of warring republics: “But this means that the citizens’ patriotic identification with the state, as demanded by Rousseau, makes virtually every single citizen a combatant almost by definition. As a result, the distinction between innocent citizens, who according to the laws of war must remain unharmed, and the defenders of the fatherland, who it is quite legal to kill, threatens to break down” (Asbach 2002, 255). Asbach underlines that this problem was acknowledged by Rousseau himself in Émile, where he states that wars between republican states are more awful than those between monarchies—precisely because of the citizens’ strong patriotic identification (ibid.).
27. Here again it is apparent that Rousseau placed his hopes not in international law but in deterrence between republics (with a basically defensive orientation), which is why representatives of power-political realism within the theory of international relations are quite able to cite Rousseau (for a critical analysis, see Williams 1989).
28. “It is apparent … what should be thought of those supposed Cosmopolites who, justifying their love of the fatherland by means of their love of the human race, boast of loving everyone in order to have the right to love no one” (Rousseau 1994, 81).
29. Voltaire, like Kant later on, presumably knew nothing of the major differences between Saint-Pierre and Rousseau, straightforwardly identifying Saint-Pierre’s conception of how to attain peace with that of Rousseau because the second part of the “Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe,” and thus Rousseau’s own position, was published at a later date.
30. On Voltaire’s assessment of Saint-Pierre’s writings, which was by no means always negative, see Perkins (1960).
31. In what follows, we rely in particular on Hassner’s 1961 essay, which is still well worth reading and a rich source of ideas.
32. It is worth mentioning in this context that it was by grappling with the Abbé’s plan for peace that both Rousseau and Kant “shifted away from their initial emphasis on reforming international (legal) conditions and began to underline the crucial importance of changing the internal structures of society and political rule” (Asbach 2002, 303).
33. This is probably also the reason why power-political realists have repeatedly attempted to interpret Kant in such a way as to make him fit their own theoretical frameworks (see Waltz 1962; for an overview of such interpretive efforts, see Hurrell 1990).
34. At one point in the Critique of Judgement (2007 [1790]) it emerges that Kant does not in fact want peace at any price. In a kind of existential interpretation of war, as expressed far more sharply later by Hegel, Kant writes: “War itself, provided it is conducted with order and a sacred respect for the rights of civilians, has something sublime about it, and gives nations that carry it on in such a manner a stamp of mind only the more sublime the more numerous the dangers to which they are exposed, and which they are able to meet with fortitude. On the other hand, a prolonged peace favours the predominance of a mere commercial spirit, and with it a debasing self-interest, cowardice, and weakness, and tends to degrade the character of the people” (93; emphasis in original).
35. Kant’s rejection of the customary idea of a balance of power is unequivocal: “For a permanent universal peace by means of a so-called European balance of power is a pure illusion, like Swift’s story of the house which the builder had constructed in such perfect harmony with all the laws of equilibrium that it collapsed as soon as a sparrow alighted on it” (1991c [1793], 92).
36. Volker Gerhardt (1995, 17ff.) points out that Kant’s shift away from the thesis of the productive effects of war is closely bound up with his interpretation of the French Revolution. “But with the internal development of state structures, the world historical events in Paris being a case in point, securing freedom and equality has itself become an explicit institutional goal of politics. So there is no longer any need for an automatic mechanism rooted in nature” (23; emphasis in original).
37. In reality, in other words in the thought of individual liberal philosophers, economists, and sociologists, the utilitarian and “democratic-universalist” conceptions have not always been kept clearly apart. Nonetheless, it makes sense to refer to them as separate conceptions, as each gives rise to quite different prognoses and evaluations.
38. It should be noted here that Kant’s reference to the republic by no means implied a desire to overthrow monarchies. His aim was the constitutionalization and legalization of monarchical power. But Gerhardt (1995, 90) points out that “republics” in the Kantian sense can certainly be equated with “constitutionally based parliamentary democracies.” And this allows us to refer to a “democraticuniversalist” conception of peace with respect to Kant and his successors.
39. While Kant speaks of a worldwide “federation of free states,” a “federation of peoples” in “Perpetual Peace” (1991d [1795], 102f.), in the “Metaphysics of Morals” he refers to a “permanent congress of states,” though it is unlikely to include all states, which is why he then adds that “perpetual peace, the ultimate end of all international right, is an idea incapable of realisation” (1991e [1797], 171; see also Hurrell 1990, 193). It is these passages that made it quite possible to interpret Kant as a thinker close to power-political realism (again, see Waltz 1962, 339f.).
40. Pierre Hassner (1961, 670) is right to state that in his writings of the 1780s and 1790s Kant had in fact raised the long-standing and very broad debate on peace to a completely new level, to that of the philosophy of history and—we might add—that of political sociology.
41. In contrast to the other two authors, Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832), writing in 1800, doubts that there can ever be perpetual peace; thinking along the same lines as power-political realists, he believed that war between states is the price that must be paid for leaving the state of nature: “We must view wars between states as conduits in which the build-up of human hostility—which would cause devastation and obstruct all legal relations, even among individuals, if left to its own devices—is concentrated at certain points and is, as it were, expelled into certain channels. For all its horrors, war is the guarantee of the only legal framework possible among human beings, and as paradoxical as it may sound, it is undeniably true: without war there would be no peace on Earth” (Gentz 1989 [1800], 389; see also Dülffer 1990, 56ff.).
42. Carl Schmitt has provided the most compelling analysis of this problem with his remarks on the “discriminatory concept of war.” In his opinion, the universalist proscription of war that this concept entails empowers certain parties to conflict to take action against the real or supposed aggressor in the name of humanity. In this way, a conflict between two orders becomes a conflict between order and disorder, between preservers and disturbers of order. The turn towards the “discriminatory concept of war” (2003b [1938] meant not only that one’s enemy was no longer viewed as legitimate but also that one need no longer harbor any moral scruples toward the enemy. As a result, the potential for limiting conflict was lost. Wars returned to the status of crusades, their aim no longer victory but the total destruction of the other side in this “global civil war.” Hence, Schmitt tells us, whether intentionally or not, attempts to institutionalize the republican-liberal conception of peace resulted in the ideological downgrading of the enemy, which itself represented a danger to peace (see chapter 5). This assertion, which lacks solid empirical corroboration, was intended to justify a Europe united under the Nazis. But indisputable democrats have frequently expressed similar concerns as well, as evident, for example, in the debate between universalists and traditionalists in the United States between the world wars with respect to international law (see Krakau 1967).
43. Paine’s work also exhibits the intertwining of “utilitarian” and “democratic-universalist” motifs: in the fifth chapter of part two of The Rights of Man Paine delivers a stirring plea for the peace-promoting effects of trade: “In all my publications, where the matter would admit, I have been an advocate for commerce, because I am a friend to its effects. It is a pacific system, operating to cordialize mankind, by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other…. If commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable, it would extirpate the system of war, and produce a revolution in the uncivilized state of governments” (Paine 1992 [1791/92], 172).
44. The question of whether citizens’ democratic participation, the rule of law within a country, or the interlinking of states through trade relations increases the probability of a peaceful foreign policy is in fact open to empirical verification, which is one of the reasons why it is still of contemporary interest. The results of the many studies on this topic are contentious in the detail. All in all, though, they by no means leave liberal conceptions of peace looking groundless, and point quite unanimously to the existence of a kind of special peace between the liberal states. In the 1990s a furious debate flared up among social scientists over Kant’s idea of a “democratic peace,” something we shall be looking at in more detail in chapter 7.
45. We should mention at this point that alongside the critique of Kant’s conception of peace expounded by Fichte, Görres, and Schlegel, which we might classify as a radicalization of republican ideas, it was also possible to argue on the basis of a quite different position, one espoused by the likes of Novalis. In Christianity, or Europe, Novalis cast doubt on the likelihood that “the secular powers can put themselves in equilibrium” (1844 [1799], 26), a comment aimed at more than just the representatives of power-political realism. He also went beyond this, attacking all constructions of world peace in a general sense, including the Kantian variant, as he took the view that war “will [never] cease until the palm-branch be taken up, which a spiritual power alone can offer us…. Religion alone can again awake all Europe; she alone can give security to the people; can invest Christendom with higher glory, and visibly reinstate her on earth in her ancient peace-making office” (27). Novalis’s hopes stand in stark contrast to one of the most commonly espoused viewpoints of the eighteenth century. Rousseau for one—though he was scarcely interested in the reform of Christianity—could find nothing at all in the Christianity of his time of value to the politics of peace. With a view to the power politics of the day, Rousseau had argued in his essay on Poland that the Christian powers and states in particular were anything but trustworthy, and could not be less suited to stable alliances (1997c [1772], 257).
46. According to the influential interpretation of Clausewitz expounded by Raymond Aron (1983, 231), the author belonged “to the eighteenth, and not to the nineteenth, century,” which is why it seems justified to us to deal with him here in the context of the Enlightenment debate on war and peace.
47. “[W]ar is an act of violence pushed to its utmost bounds; as one side dictates the law to the other, there arises a sort of reciprocal action, which logically must lead to an extreme. This is the first reciprocal action, and the first extreme with which we meet” (Clausewitz 1968, 29; emphasis in original).
48. “As long as the enemy is not defeated, he may defeat me; then I shall be no longer my own master; he will dictate the law to me as I did to him. This is the second reciprocal action, and leads to a second extreme” (Clausewitz 1968, 30; emphasis in original).
49. “If we desire to defeat the enemy, we must proportion our efforts to his powers of resistance. This is expressed by the product of two factors which cannot be separated, namely, the sum of available means and the strength of the will…. But the adversary does the same; therefore, there is a new mutual enhancement, which, in pure conception, must create a fresh effort towards an extreme. This is the third case of reciprocal action, and a third extreme with which we meet” (Clausewitz 1968, 30; emphasis in original).
1. Sankar Muthu underlines that these differences between the thought of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may have reflected disparate political sensitivities. As eighteenth-century thinkers, Kant, Diderot, and Herder (as well as Enlightenment thinkers in other nations) were deeply critical of the European countries, “for they viewed them as violent, absolutist, war-seeking, aggressive, and corrupt” (Muthu 2003, 280). But in the nineteenth century—Muthu argues—the social and economic changes triggered by the French Revolution had led to a change in mentality: “The myriad social and political changes that the French Revolution ushered in eventually seemed to yield a political sensibility among many nineteenth-century European political thinkers that made them far more sanguine about the achievements of ‘European civilization’ than their eighteenth-century forebears. They were thus more amenable to the view that Europe had genuinely advanced beyond the non-European world and, hence, they were more open to the idea that it should forcibly lead non-European peoples toward a higher form of political rule, economic rationality, and social development” (280). And this even applied to the social critics of the nineteenth century—not least Marx.
2. Albert O. Hirschman’s (1986, 117ff.) influential argument must be mentioned in this connection. He claims that the thesis of “doux commerce” so common in the eighteenth century was pushed into the background chiefly because of the negative social consequences of industrialization. While there is no doubt much to be said for this assertion, we should also be clear—and we return to this point in the next chapter in our analysis of Max Weber’s inaugural lecture at Freiburg—that the positive effects attributed to trade also began to appear increasingly implausible because of the growing number of apparent trade conflicts and the rivalry between nations associated with them.
3. On the debate over whether the world order envisaged by European international law was bifurcated from the outset (one version for the civilized nations and one for the uncivilized regions, where a quite different order prevailed, or at least where European standards did not apply), see Keene 2002. Keene’s intention here is to critique by getting at concealed truths, but other authors made the same point with self-assurance and no normative scruples. The best-known example is probably the view expressed by Carl Schmitt. In 1950, in Nomos of the Earth, he referred self-evidently to the fact that the Jus Publicum Europaeum, with its “limitation of war,” only worked because it was restricted to Europe, while beyond the “amity lines,” namely in the non-European world, unrestricted violence could prevail: “[T]he essential presupposition and foundation of this spatial order and its concept of balance lay in the fact that from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century the great European powers could expand virtually unhindered across the world in colonies outside Europe” (Schmitt 2003a [1950], 161, translation corrected). The limitation of war did not apply to colonial wars (309). On the ambivalence of the concept of civilization in the history of “international law,” see Mazower 2006.
4. So the idea of free trade was not one that might be interpreted in isolation from power-political considerations. The sharp rupture between mercantilist and (their own) free-trade ideas, which the representatives of political economy repeatedly asserted, was not so sharp after all, given that the free traders also tried to increase the nation’s power, though the means—determined by a novel understanding of economic processes—were different (see Etges 1999, 34).
5. List himself had been in the United States and was crucially influenced by his stay there. On the “American School of Political Economy,” which produced polemics against free trade from the 1840s, see Etges 1999, 191–99; see also Earle 1952.
6. Boesche 1987; for an interpretation of Tocqueville that places him close to “civic humanism,” see Smith 1985.
7. “The best part of the nation shuns the military profession because that profession is not honoured, and the profession is not honoured because the best part of the nation has ceased to follow it…. Moreover, as among democratic nations … the wealthiest, the best educated, and the most able men seldom adopt the military profession, the army, taken collectively, eventually forms a small nation by itself, where the mind is less enlarged, and habits are more rude than in the nation at large. Now, this small uncivilized nation has arms in its possession, and alone knows how to use them” (Tocqueville 2007 [1835/40], 565).
8. This applies even to the great monograph on Tocqueville by Sheldon S. Wolin (2001); German scholar Michael Hereth (1986, 145ff.) takes a different approach and deserves credit for making Tocqueville’s writings on Algeria a central topic in his interpretation of Tocqueville’s oeuvre. Among recent publications in Germany, Harald Bluhm (2006) and Matthias Bohlender (2005) in particular have drawn attention to the significance of the “Algeria question” to Tocqueville’s thought.
9. For Tocqueville, anyone who has been in Africa knows that “unfortunately Muslim society and Christian society do not have a single tie, that they form two bodies that are juxtaposed but completely separate. They know that this state of things seems to become more so every day, and that nothing can be done against it. The Arab element is becoming more and more isolated, and little by little it is dissolving. The Muslim population always seems to be shrinking, while the Christian population is always growing. The fusion of these two populations is a chimera that people dream of only when they have not been to these places” (Tocqueville 2001c [1841], 111).
10. “As soon as it is admitted that the whites and the emancipated blacks are placed upon the same territory in the situation of two alien communities, it will readily be understood that there are but two alternatives for the future; the negroes and the whites must either wholly part or wholly mingle. I have already expressed the conviction which I entertain as to the latter event. I do not imagine that the white and the black races will ever live in any country upon an equal footing. But I believe the difficulty to be still greater in the United States than elsewhere” (Tocqueville 2007 [1835/40], 301).
11. It should be noted that Comte’s thought also influenced the views of other “social theorists of war and peace” already dealt with in this chapter. John Stuart Mill, who greatly admired Comte’s early writings, contacted him after publication of his famous magnum opus Cours de philosophie positive, written between 1830 and 1842 and published in 1843 (for an introductory survey, see Pickering 1997).
12. As Mary Pickering (1993, 37) highlights, even in his earliest essays Comte expressed the view that a correct interpretation of history was the key to appropriate action, making historical reconstruction the basis of his sociology, the new science of social consensus.
13. This is also what Pickering has in mind when she states that Condorcet’s thought differed from that of Comte mainly in the sense that the former had a good deal more faith in the possibility of conscious and active control of the future (Pickering 1993, 153).
14. Constant’s “The Spirit of Conquest” is also an attempt to come to terms with Napoleon’s policy of conquest. The anticolonial pathos of the Enlightenment, which was to be lost in the work of Tocqueville, is still in evidence here (Pitts 2005, 173ff.).
15. The concept of the “positive” means the “real as opposed to imaginary.” It refers to the contrast between the “useful and unprofitable,” that between “certainty and indecision,” and between the “precise [and] vague” (Comte 1903 [1844], 66ff.).
16. Few could match William James’s parody of this supposed law: “Evolution is a change from a non-howish, untalkaboutable, all-alikeness to a somehowish and in general talkaboutable not-all-alikeness by continuous stick-to-getherations and something-elsifications” (James in Myers 1986, 43).
17. It is often pointed out in the secondary literature that the dichotomy between bellicose and industrial society was deeply anchored in Enlightenment-era traditions of British-American radicalism. This sharp dichotomy was based on that between government and society, as expressed so pointedly by Thomas Paine right at the start of his pamphlet Common Sense from 1776: “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness” (Paine 1976 [1776], 65; on these roots, see Peel 1971, 58, Taylor 1992, 173). So M. W. Taylor (1992) is right to underline that the individualist ideas so fundamental to Herbert Spencer’s work can be understood as a kind of (conservative) transformation of English radicalism in light of their embedding in an evolutionist theory and their specific political expression.
18. The distinction between the social structures of industrial and militant societies is, however, rather unconvincing. As J.D.Y. Peel (1971, 209ff.) and others have always rightly emphasized, those who present this dichotomy in this way replace differences in rank (militant type) with functional roles (industrial type), without going on to ask whether these functionally differentiated roles involve significant power differentials—which would cast great doubt on the typical view that industrial societies are distinguished by an egalitarian structure.
19. Incidentally, Marx deploys a similar argumentational device in his treatment of colonialism. As is well known, Marx constructed his stage model of history in a highly Eurocentric manner and then struggled to fit non-European economic structures into what he had claimed to be the necessary succession of modes of production (on the following, see Avineri 1968). It is no coincidence that he then coined and adopted the term “Asiatic mode of production,” which was defined purely in geographic terms. He defined this mode of production in terms of the lack of private property while conceptualizing it in a peculiarly ahistorical way. This left it unclear how it could change at all—and here lie the roots of his arguments on the colonial question. If Marx postulated the worldwide victory of socialism while at the same time assuming that the necessary precursor of socialism is developed capitalism, then he could only conclude that the colonization of “Asiatic” regions is the prerequisite for speeding up their history and a sine qua non for any conceivable transition to socialism. As Avineri (1968, 12) puts it: “Just as the horrors of industrialization are dialectically necessary for the triumph of communism, so the horrors of colonialism are dialectically necessary for the world revolution of the proletariat since without them the countries of Asia (and presumably also Africa) will not be able to emancipate themselves from their stagnant backwardness.” So Marx was quite aware of Britain’s crimes in India and identified them as such, but was at the same time uninterested in, or even opposed, the Indian revolts of the late 1850s. The crimes of colonialism and the violence they implied might well be terrible. But for Marx—his self-confidence due to his supposed knowledge of the historical process—they are merely a necessary step on the path toward a future socialist society in Asia as elsewhere.
20. See the remarks on Hans Freyer in this volume (p. 163). This is not to dispute that contemporaries of Hegel wished to take this step to a certain extent. Fichte and Clausewitz—at least during certain phases of their work—had an existential conception of war and called for the removal of all limits on war. On Fichte, see Münkler 1999.
21. This explains why a number of interpreters regard application of the label “Social Darwinist” to Sumner as problematic at the very least (see Bannister 1987, 88).
22. Even pacifists were not blind to the obvious appeal of war and violence. In 1910, not long before the outbreak of the First World War and contemporaneously with Sumner, the highly sensitive William James (1842–1910) tried to find a morally acceptable alternative to war, which he greatly feared, in order to avoid it. James highlights the timeless fascination of war, which pacifism—so far—has been unable to counter, robbing it of its persuasive force: “Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect on him [modern man]. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis” (James 1971 [1910], 350; emphasis in original). So James is keen to channel emotions hitherto centered on war in a new direction, to set in motion a kind of civil disciplining and self-disciplining of the population with respect to peace, a humanistic-democratic mobilization of society, intended to arouse the same kind of enthusiasm as the noise of battle in the age of imperialism. In institutional terms, compulsory service to the community seems to him an appropriate means of achieving such goals. Numerous practical schemes have undoubtedly been implemented in response to this idea, but it is quite unable to resolve the problem of war in analytical and normative terms. In any event, this text is central to understanding the significance of heroism in a nonmilitary sense to the philosophy of American pragmatism (see Cotkin 1994).
23. And in general it is by no means the case that all Social Darwinists were militarists and imperialists. Some of them believed that war eliminated the biologically superior and was a source of degeneration, as demonstrated by Pitirim Sorokin (1928) (see Joas 2003, 146ff.).
Chapter 4
1. Schäffle had in fact tackled the subject of war in some detail before the turn of the century in his multivolume magnum opus Bau und Leben des socialen Körpers (Construction and Life of the Social Body) from 1878. Passages in the second volume, some of them detailed, show that he had long since begun to formulate the views he articulated around 1900 (see Schäffle 1878, 250ff.).
2. In line with this, Schäffle takes issue with the idea that armament is unproductive, an idea he believes to have originated in Britain (1878, 233ff.).
3. Again, we underline that the methods of the historical school of economics did not inevitably lead to these nationalistic conclusions. The historical school also had adherents outside of Germany, who came to quite different conclusions (see Silberner 1946, 193f.).
4. That Weber cannot really be described as a “Social Darwinist” is apparent in the fact that he does not positively assess, or pay attention solely to, the results of the struggle for survival among “species” in his inaugural lecture. With his appeal for economic policy measures, he wishes to stop the “selection” taking place to the disadvantage of the German population in West Prussia and prevent the victory of the “less economically developed nationality” (Weber 1999, 126; Beetham 1974, 43; see also Radkau 2009, 132).
5. Since the 1980s, Wilhelm Hennis has advanced a highly original and in many ways persuasive interpretation of Weber’s work, asserting that Weber was interested primarily in the anthropological-characterological issue of the quality of humanity and that his view of the German nation was derived from this. For Weber, according to Hennis (2000b, 75f.), the nation-state did represent an important value, but not the ideal of the nation-state as such, but only the formative consequences of this “life order” on human beings. This is not the right place to investigate the veritable interpretive industry that has grown up around Weber’s oeuvre. We merely note that there should be no doubt that the idea of the nation state played a major role in his work, even if it was in second place in Weber’s scale of values. (On these issues, see esp. the recent work by Radkau 2005 [abridged English version 2009] and the related review essay by Joas 2007).
6. Durkheim’s reserve toward this nationalism was presumably bound up in part with the fact that the frequent blending of nationalist and anti-Semitic sentiment, also found in France, must have been deeply repugnant to him as a secular Jew.
7. This does not mean that Durkheim does entirely without definitions. But his efforts here (“[T]he state is a special organ whose responsibility is to work out certain representations which hold good for the collectivity. These representations are distinguished from the other collective representations by their higher degree of consciousness and reflection,” Durkheim 1957, 50) can scarcely be regarded as a guide to the construction of theoretical tools for analyzing the state.
8. Hintze’s impact on the school of German history known as “historical social science” is surely beyond dispute. It is from this grouping, namely from Jürgen Kocka, that we have the most accurate appreciation of Hintze as the “most methodologically advanced, if not in fact … the most important German historian of the late German empire and inter-war period” (Kocka 1973, 41). For other important interpretations of Hintze’s life’s work, see Oestreich 1964, Gilbert 1975, Gerhard 1970, Büsch/Erbe 1983, and Hübinger 1988.
9. For a similar argument, see also the essay “The Formation of States and Constitutional Development” written four years earlier.
10. It is in Hintze’s writings on war, in which he straightforwardly and uncritically defends Germany’s geopolitically determined militarism (see Hintze 1914) that this apologetic tendency is most clearly apparent.
11. See the first few sentences of a manifesto in the journal Blast from June 1914—surely written without reference to the war that broke out so soon afterward: “1. Beyond Action and Reaction we would establish ourselves. 2. We start from opposite statements of a chosen world. Set up violent structure of adolescent clearness between two extremes. 3. We discharge ourselves on both sides. 4. We fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the same cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours. 5. Mercenaries were always the best troops. 6. We are Primitive Mercenaries in the Modern World. 7. Our cause is No-Man’s” (quoted in Hynes 1990, 9).
12. Hermann Lübbe expressed the relatively moderate stance of Simmel and Scheler in the following terms. In the work of Simmel, war is “mediatized with a view to the existential, rather than existence with a view to war. This is why the national emphasis of his discourse seems toned down and the solidarity with the Fatherland which this emphasis expresses less immediate” (Lübbe 1963, 220/21). Simmel’s “celebration of war as freeing us to attain existential authenticity,” Lübbe states, “has [found] its psychological-anthropological counterpart in Max Scheler’s philosophy of war” (ibid.).
13. Hermann Lübbe (1963, 212) commented on Sombart’s Händler und Helden in the following apposite terms: “Beyond their laughable aspects, his ideas seem more bizarre than dangerous. If his ideas could stand up to allegedly scientific examination, one wonders what other views might also be presented as validated by science.”
14. “The modern state is variously described by Veblen as democratic, peaceable, cosmopolitan, individualist, and characterized by representative government and a propensity to insubordination (which he juxtaposes to servility). The modern state is guided both domestically and, especially, internationally by the rule of ‘live-and-let-live.’ Its institutions are free and popular. It has features of democratic equity and noninterference, self-help and local autonomy” (Biddle/Samuels 1993, 104).
15. In Der moderne Kapitalismus, Sombart draws a sharp contrast between a mostly British-style social economics, on the one hand, and national economics (Volkswirtschaftslehre or Nationalökonomie), based ultimately on mercantilist ideas, on the other (Sombart 1987, vol. II/2: 913ff.).
16. Again, the exception here was Max Weber, who repeatedly investigated the probable sociostructural and political consequences of the war in his wartime writings on (contemporary) politics.
Chapter 5
1. Georges Bataille, incidentally, also tackles the relationship between the sacred and war in his writings, but considers the analogies between war and transgression drawn by Caillois (see below) implausible.
2. It should however be noted that theoretical elements of Caillois’s approach were applied by historians, with much success, to the experiences of soldiers in the First World War. See the brilliant study by Leed 1979.
3. Bataille (1989, 65f.), for example, had little time for the notion that war and religious experience are closely related. In his view, the emergence of military discipline and order left no space for the originally spectacular and potentially transgressive battle; as a result, instrumentally rational considerations had made greater inroads into warfare.
4. In his analyses of fascism and the concept of sovereignty, generally of a very dark hue, Bataille (1997, 28ff., 70) too tried to establish to what extent the armed forces and armed violence have shaped the political and religious thought of modernity.
5. For a critique of Schmitt’s “political existentialism,” which we will not repeat here, see Joas (2003, 152–57, and Großheim 1999; of the contemporary literature, see Kuhn 1933, Marcuse 1968 [1934], and Strauss 2007 [1932].
6. In his 1932 text Der Begriff des Politischen, Schmitt was to state that, while it is true that the friend-enemy distinction entails the idea of the life-and-death struggle, the concept of the enemy does not necessarily imply personal hatred (Schmitt 2007a [1927/32], 28). This point is important, as it has consequences for Schmitt’s view of how “traditional” European international law operates.
7. What commentators have described with respect to Schmitt’s arguments on domestic politics, namely that his ultimate aim is to eliminate value rationality as such through the motif of the state of emergency, conceived solely in decisionist terms (Hofmann 2002, 68), also applies to his arguments on international politics: every attempt to initiate a normative discussion is nipped in the bud through reference to the existential character of war.
8. Though Speier always underlined that his typological distinctions are never to be taken literally (1940, 453), he must have been secretly aware that in the era of totalitarian ideologies reality was catching up all too quickly with conceptual imagination in the case of absolute war.
9. See, for example, the essay by N. N. Alexeiev, which was fairly representative of the journal, “Modern Culture and the New European War” (1940).
10. However, as Aron was later to state self-critically in his memoirs (1990, 303ff.), in Peace and War he underestimated the transnational dimension (e.g., economic processes, ideologies, religions) while relying too heavily in his analysis on the fiction of rational actors; in other words, he failed to pay adequate attention to diplomats’ dependency on the ruling political and social classes and the irrationalities that enter into international politics as a result.
11. “The book caused a firestorm in academic and political circles, leading to innumerable reviews in scholarly journals and the popular press, most of them negative” (Domhoff 2006, 547).
12. Mills, however, does not forget to underline that “violence as a means and even as a value is just a little bit ambiguous in American life and culture”: in the nineteenth century, it mostly emanated from the people, because at this time military force was “decentralized in state militia almost to a feudal point” (Mills 1956, 177/78).
13. This was reflected in the journal Armed Forces and Society, whose foundation in 1976 he was largely responsible for; the title itself indicates that the aim was to move away from any narrowly conceived version of military sociology.
Chapter 6
1. For a critique of Mann’s interpretation of the British public finances, see Braddick 2000, 12ff.
1. This does not mean that Parsons never addressed the issue of international tensions. At the end of his book The System of Modern Societies (1971), he states: “Certainly, the history of modern societal systems” has been “one of frequent, if not continual, warfare,” but he does not consider this “incompatible with what seems a secular trend toward reduction of violence both internally and internationally” (Parsons 1971, 141). Genov 1989 provides an overview of his contributions on this topic. Nonetheless, Parsons too fits the picture of widespread suppression of war, which is remarkable given his involvement in American postwar planning for Germany and Japan.
2. In terms of quantitative research on war, there were in fact a number of major studies, such as those by R. J. Rummel (see his Understanding Conflict and War, 1975–81), which contain similar ideas; at the time, however, in view of their lack of practical relevance, they could be safely ignored—no one, after all, believed that the Soviet empire was going to implode. For a brief survey, see Rummel 1983.
3. Representatives of historical sociology were mostly skeptical about the ideas put forward by Kant or Doyle. This was partly because—as indicated above—the former often based their own analyses on rational choice premises, so their view of international relations was generally informed by power-political realism. But it was also bound up with their skepticism about the tendency to view the democratic political system in isolation, a tendency typical of the debate on a democratic peace, which often drew on quantitative social research.
4. Exceptions include the above-mentioned Rummel and Ray 1997, 59.
5. Another point of agreement is that the debate on a “democratic peace” has confirmed Kant’s thesis of the political and military strength of democracies—a thesis vehemently disputed by Samuel Huntington (1967 [1957]) and others. Liberal democracies are said to have a substantial capacity to defend themselves; despite the fact that they are often attacked because of their attractive system of values (and the resulting magnetism so threatening to authoritarian states), such systems have proved amazingly robust (Lake 1992). At the very least, on this view, the defensive capacity of popular regimes in the past proved great enough that there is little need to worry about democracies’ survival (van Evera 1998, 70; see also Reiter/Stam 2002, 10–83).
6. These examples are from Chan 1997, 70.
7. On the thesis of the belligerence of new democracies, see Mansfield/Snyder 1998.
8. “Maximizing information is of particular importance in the creation of security regimes, where the risks of error and deception can be catastrophic…. Transparency allows a democratic dyad to embrace concessions at a much lower risk of the other side defecting, because of the public nature of the process involved in reversing policies. Thus, states sharing an open political system develop high levels of mutual formal and informal communication which, in turn, lowers the cost of forming a regime…. Openness allows the transgovernmental networks of democratic dyads to share information on their respective domestic conditions, thus facilitating transnational logrolling of support for regime” (Solingen 1996, 82).
9. Weart (1998, 21) presents similar arguments, stating that the key to explaining peace lies in the political culture of governmental decision makers.
10. The debate has certainly gone through some peculiar twists and turns. Initially, the supporters of the thesis of a “democratic peace” thought that their position placed them securely within the framework of Kant’s arguments. Over time, however, it became clear that a closer reading of Kant would have helped avoid some of the debate’s dead ends. In the 1980s and early 1990s, some scholars still argued that when Kant spoke of republics’ great capacity for peace he actually meant democracies. But others gradually began to reflect on why Kant referred quite explicitly to republics and not to democracies (Gates/Knutsen/Moses 1996, 6; see also Chan 1997, 64).
11. Jürgen Habermas has provided us with some interesting studies over the past few years, in which he applies to the field of international relations his general attempt to transform Kant’s work in light of communication theory. These studies are mainly normative in orientation, though they do not preclude an “empirical accommodation,” in other words identification of favorable conditions for the realization of a normative ideal (see esp. Habermas 2008). His theory of communication as a whole, and especially the studies highlighted here, have made a major impact on the theory of international relations (see Niesen/Herborth 2007).
12. Generally, the implication here is that violence is a result of state collapse. From an empirical perspective, however, it is probably equally plausible to assume that, in many regions of the world, the state building that began after decolonization has itself contributed substantially to violent processes and their inexorable momentum.
13. This prompted Edward Luttwak’s (1999) undoubtedly cynical call to allow such wars to play themselves out without humanitarian aid or constant peace efforts from outside. This, he suggested, is ultimately the only way to break the vicious circle of violence.
14. Peter Waldmann is one of the few sociologists in Germany to engage seriously with the topic of violence within states on the basis of his own empirical studies; he too doubts that instrumentally rational interpretations of violence are of much use in analyzing conflicts in many parts of the world (2003, 14ff., 146). In his studies, Waldmann has always quite rightly placed great emphasis on the complex interactions characteristic of civil war (see, e.g., Waldmann 1999). In his studies of Latin America, he has also brought out how, as a result of the particular form taken by state building, violence may also be interpreted as a component of social order—as in the case of Colombia (see Waldmann 2003, 136–65; Waldmann 2007). If this is correct, then the notion of “new wars” and its implicit thesis of an epochal rupture is untenable.
15. For a more fruitful approach to the interplay of religious and political-economic circumstances, see Kippenberg 2011.
16. The debate on empires must of course be seen in connection with postcolonial debates among historians and historical sociologists, who among other things have asked to what extent colonies and colonialism have impacted on the colonizing countries or empires, ultimately on a structural level (see Cooper 2005; Steinmetz 2005; Calhoun/Cooper/Moore 2006).
17. “When the European mob discovered what a ‘lovely virtue’ a white skin could be in Africa, when the English conqueror in India became an administrator who no longer believed in the universal validity of law, but was convinced of his own innate capacity to rule and dominate …, the stage seemed to be set for all possible horrors. Lying under anybody’s nose were many of the elements which gathered together could create a totalitarian government on the basis of racism. ‘Administrative massacres’ were proposed by Indian bureaucrats while African officials declared that ‘no ethical considerations such as the rights of man will be allowed to stand in the way’ of white rule” (Arendt 1973, 221).
18. Robinson’s interpretation requires modification because he views imperialism primarily as a means of capital valorization, leading him to deny other motives for imperial projects (for a critique, see Bayly 1989, 9f.).
19. At the end of the George W. Bush presidency, the mood in the United States had in any case changed utterly. The confident sense—as the only remaining superpower—of being the center of a new imperium has given way to serious economic and political anxieties about the future. The main anxiety is that America stands helpless in the face of an epochal shift in power toward Asia, and may also fall behind Europe. So far, it is unclear what strategic conclusions will be reached in light of such reassessments. It is just as unclear where the debate on peace will now go—how it will respond to the challenge of new global political upheavals.