General Images. The history of ideas about war and
militarism is largely one of combinations of prevailing
ideas in political, social, and moral philosophy. Modern
war is an armed conflict among states. But war predates
states and remains an expression of so pervasive and
traumatic a feature of mankind's evolution that ideas
about the origins of man's warlike tendencies are dis-
cussed in many philosophical systems. Classical and
neo-classical military literature thus includes philo-
sophical discourses which mention war along with
military histories and practical soldiers' handbooks and
manuals.
Ideas about war are peculiarly, though not uniquely,
affected by historical events and social problems. The
need to train large numbers of men to engage in po-
tentially self-destructive acts, for example, grew
greater after the French Revolution had shown the
military value of more popular armies and after the
Industrial and Agricultural Revolutions had increased
the material resources and manpower which could be
devoted to warfare. In what Herbert Spencer later saw
as a resulting metamorphosis of institutions, the time
required to train a soldier was cut from two years to
two months, while compulsory education for a peaceful
life in an industrialized society increased the citizen's
preparation for and his personal resentment of military
training.
A positivistic philosophy of war was developed dur-
ing the nineteenth century. This combined Carl von
Clausewitz' view of its nature, more explicit assump-
tions about its origins in human nature, society, or the
state system, and a set of ideas for its management.
These gave military “scientists” positive goals during
a century of peace in which the major European
military events were Prussia's scientifically managed
victories over both Austria and France in 1886 and
1870-71. The result was a clarification of what Waltz
(1959) sees as three images of the relations of man,
the state, and war, and of war's origins in human
nature, in social “containers,” in which, like water in
a boiler, men are “made to 'behave' in different ways.”
This latter view is inherent in Montesquieu's remark
that “As soon as man enters into society he loses the
sense of his weakness; equality ceases, and then com-
mences the state of war” (
Esprit des lois, Book I, Ch.
III).
“Militarism” is a nineteenth-century liberal pejora-
tive label for systems which overvalue the military
virtues, glorify war, or give inordinate power or re-
wards to soldiers. These evils became clearer as more
uniform states replaced the feudal orders and as na-
tional and democratic armies (in which noble officers
were still favored) replaced bands of mercenary mili-
tary artisans. But books on their art were still collec-
tions of maxims (from Sun Tsu's Art of War, 500 B.C.,
to Burnod's Military Maxims of Napoleon, 1827), hand-
books (Vegetius' Military Institutions of the Romans,
390, or Frederick the Great's Instructions for His Gen-
erals, 1747), or formal treatises of advice to princes
(Machiavelli's Art of War expands a paragraph in The
Prince).
Clausewitz' work On War (published posthumously,
1832-36) became the writ of a positivistic philosophy
of war after Prussia's victories in the mid-nineteenth
century. Like the Marxist, Social Darwinist, and other
social positivists of this era, Clausewitzians often used
On War for incantational purposes, but all of their
works reflected the events which had again freed “the
primitive violence of war... from all conventional
restrictions.... The cause was the participation of the
people in this great affair of state,... [arising] partly
from the effects of the French Revolution,... partly
from the threatening attitude of the French toward
all nations.” The acceptance of his view that war is
“not merely a political act but a political instrument”
shifted debate to the right means of managing a
“chameleon,... [which] in each concrete case...
changes somewhat its character... of the original
violence of its essence,... of the play of probabilities
and chance,... and of the subordinate character of
a political tool, through which it belongs to... pure
intelligence” (Book VIII, Ch. iii; Book I, Chs. xxiv,
xxviii; trans. Jollis).
Two world wars then shook this post-Napoleonic
science of war. Failures in the Great War of 1914-18
came from unscientific evaluation of weapons. The
more than Napoleonic victories in the Second World
War confirmed a new faith in scientific mechanization.
But “absolute” nuclear and biochemical weapons and
“assured” delivery systems revived doubts about war
as a political instrument, though analogies from ritu-
alized intraspecific and primitive conflict revived the
Garden of Eden for some observers.
