ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with military behaviours or events, such as wars or preparations for war, nor shall be primarily concerned with military institutions, such as armies or military colleges. It focuses on military attitudes which presumably make people ready to go to a military college, to join an army, to go to war, or to support such activities and institutions financially and morally. Militarism as an attitude, then, is the readiness or willingness to engage in behaviours which have been authorised and institutionalised by a government for the purpose of using or threatening to use destructive weapons against the people and property of another nation, or even against the people of one’s own nation. The honesty of responses seems to depend almost entirely on how much the respondents believe that their responses will not be used against them. Militarism scales have been around for at least fifty years in the social science literature.
