ABSTRACT
Moods are more difficult to describe than motives. Psychologists have not yet established a recognized vocabulary for them, let alone a standard classification, and they say that the experimental material on which to base such a classification is still lacking. In a narrow range of cases, the military's behaviour seems almost to follow the lines of a psychology text-book on 'Frustration'. In this narrow range of cases it seems permissible to recognize a single basic mood which sparks off the revolt of the military and which may be summed up as a morbidly acute feeling of injured self-respect. The self-esteem may be a sense of self-importance, as in Turkey, or, say, old Serbia, where the army had really built up the state, or it may be a quite morbid sentiment of superiority to the whole genus of civilians. The disposition to intervene, then, is a skein of motives and mood.
