For a Socio-Historical Approach to the Study of Western Military Culture

Wars have preoccupied historians from Thucydides to Hans Delbrück ¹ and A. J. P. Taylor. But, as Alfred Vagts commented already in 1937, modern scholarly interest has concentrated on “the causes and consequences of wars,” ² leaving the narrative history of campaigns largely to nonacademic specialists, catering for what seems to be a popular demand. ³ Since Vagts wrote his pioneering work, there have been various developments in the area of military history. Traditional concerns have been maintained but have tended to be relegated from the level of research to that of undergraduate courses and of writing for the “general reader.” Theoretically, rather than empirically oriented war studies or peace studies have been elaborated in conjunction with military planning or in an effort to meet the threat of total nuclear war. ⁴ The armed forces themselves have been studied as political institutions ⁵ by both sociologists and historians who have focused attention particularly on the problem of military-civilian relations and the limiting case of the military takeover of power. ⁶ The wealth consumed above all in the form of armaments has been of similar concern to economists and to economic and political historians, some of whom have argued that military expenditure has become the “motor” of Western economies. ⁷ With a few exceptions, such as historical studies of officer corps ⁸ and contemporary studies such as that of Janowitz on the American military, the social or socio-historical element has been absent from such developments. This is regrettable from two points of view. First, the growing discipline of social history, which aims to be a total history, cannot continue to ignore or to underplay the role of the military and of war, particularly when it deals with modern societies in which both have been so obviously important. Secondly, while filling a gap in social history, the socio-historical study of wars and of the military might provide explanations that have been missing in the latter field. For despite the developments which we have outlined, to which so much scholarly effort has been devoted, it is still difficult to explain why the military should have absorbed and why it continues to absorb so much of the resources, human and material, of past and present societies; or why warfare, so universally hated and deplored, ⁹ should have been so prevalent in history. This may sound naive, but it is no more naive than the evocations of brute state power or of innate human aggressiveness with which such remarks are usually countered. Besides making a general plea for a socio-historical approach in this sphere, this paper aims to explore the suggestion that what is most obviously missing in the investigation of the military and its belligerant occupations is a study of the military value system: that is, the value system of the armed forces themselves, and then of military values in society at large. It seems that it is the existence of the latter, in particular, which is the necessary condition at least of the preparation for, and the practice of, mass warfare. And the existence of such values is not, as is sometimes presumed, a natural, but a cultural and historical, phenomenon. It should be stressed at the outset that the emphasis of the paper is to present hypotheses and problems rather than substantiated findings or conclusions and that attention is concentrated, though not exclusively, on Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.