The Paradoxes of War teaches us to understand that war is not only a normal part of human existence, but is arguably one of the most important factors in making us who we are. Through this course, I hope that you will come to appreciate that war is both a natural expression of common human emotions and interactions and a constitutive part of how we cohere as groups. That is, war is paradoxically an expression of our basest animal nature and the exemplar of our most vaunted and valued civilized virtues. You will learn some basic military history and sociology in this course as a lens for the more important purpose of seeing the broader social themes and issues related to war. I want you to both learn about war, but more importantly, use it as way of understanding your everyday social world. So, for example, the discussion of war and gender will serve to start you thinking about how expectations of masculinity are created and our discussion of nationalism will make clear how easy “us-them” dichotomies can be established and (ab)used. I will suggest some readings for you to complement the class and assign some activities through which you will be able to apply the theoretical insights from the course to your observations of everyday life. At the end of the course, you will start to see war everywhere and come to appreciate how much it defines our life. All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Structure of Armies- State-commission, Popular Conscript, and Volunteer-technical
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Del curso dictado por Princeton University
Paradoxes of War
573 calificaciones
De la lección
The War of Armies
Wars are about organized violence and this part of the
course traces the managerial and technological
developments necessary to culminate in total wars.
Conoce a los instructores
Miguel A. CentenoMusgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Sociology
Now the next stage, and again I want to emphasize that
these are very large sort of categories and, and generalities.
We're going to see exceptions throughout.
I want to just get you a sense of how the basic
organization, the structure of these institutions,
of these forms of violence changes.
And the next stage is state-commission armies.
These are the beginning in the 70th through the 80th century.
These are forces that are raised solely among the subjects of irrelevant power.
That is, increasingly you have less and less dependence on mercenary forces.
They're still going to play a role even
well into the 18th century, the British army,
for example, had a mercenary regiments within
it when they were fighting the American colonials.
But increasingly what we see is that participation in the
armed force is restricted to the subjects of the relevant power.
Officers in these case have a
personal institutional loyalty to the commanding authority.
That is they're not simply contractors, they
often are members of the aristocracy and this
is a way, in a sense, of establishing
their position within the state power.
You get a different kind of organization.
Probably the most important is the regiment.
This, this indicates a new level of aggregation a new level of organization.
And the technologies available may be the most important.
They are the musket and the bayonet.
And for these you, as we're going to see in a little bit, it requires a completely
different kid of organization not just in battle, but also preparing for battle.
As this technologies changes as the structures change, what the societies have
to do in order to produce these kinds of armies is transform.
We get changes in the state.
The next, perhaps most radical stage is
what we might call a popular conscript army.
This is the model for the 19th and the 20th Century.
These of armies of citizens, so we have retained this idea that
from the earlier stage that one has to be a
subject or a citizen, increasingly that difference will become relevant as we
will talk about later of the particular state for what one is fighting.
This is based on the legion moss.
The mass conscription which is born in the French Revolution and it's
need to protect itself from counter
attacks of traditional powers in Europe.
The French Revolution, because of the destruction of the
Bourbon Army partly through the revolution, partly through exiles, et
cetera, they have to recreate their armed force, and
what they do is they go to the citizenship itself.
They ask citizens to participate in this army, not as
slaves, not as professionals, but as members of this single community.
Rank and privileges are linked to service.
So we have a step away from the kind of slave armies and in a sense
a step away from these commission armies or
these mercenary armies, we're now increasingly rank is going to
depend, rank becomes more meritocratic one of the
great revolutions in this sense of the Napoleonic army,
is this sense of military
service, and military rank, being rewarded on the
basis of merit, not birth.
You get a professionalization, if you will, of the military.
You get a rationalization of this military as, it is growing.
You also get the creation of a new kind
of loyalty, and that is loyalty to the larger unit.
It is no longer about loyalty to the lord, it is no longer about loyalty
to the specific aristocrat, it is no longer loyalty to even to a regiment.
It becomes an emotional loyalty, one that's
very much linked to the newly created nation-state.
You get armies of patriots.
And again, this also begins with the French Revolution.
The technology remains relatively stable, although we will see
that you get increases in the efficiency of firearms.
You, the pike of course, disappears.
The bayonet becomes less and less important.
And you get what we're going to call, and
we're going to see this later on, a gunpowder revolution.
That we're, the, the central weapon becomes this
delivery of a shot,
and as we get into the 19th Century
with rifling, et cetera, you get ever more accuracy.
What you see is an increase in ferocity.
What you see is a much larger killing ratio throughout the 19th Century.
So not only do you have many more people doing it,
but their capacity to inflict death on each other also increases.
Now, this model basically continues through the world wars.
Again, with exceptions.
Britain has a very different system except during the wars.
The United States follows closer to the British
model rather than the German or the French one.
But the senses of these armies representing their
nations and these and these large conglomerations and aggregations.
Over the last 30 or 40 years we've seen
a final shift to what, what I call the Volunteer-technical.
Actually John Lyn calls the Volunteer-technical.
This does not involve the mass population, but it requires more from
individual practitioners and relies in a sense more on a contractual relationship.
That is we, we go back in some ways to previous patterns.
No longer do you have this mass participation.
No longer do you need to involve the entire nation in this process.
No longer do you have
relatively unprofessionalized people participating in it.
Now what you have is the creation of yes within your own nation they're not purely
mercenary but they're professionals who might have somewhat
of a contractual relationship with the military.
This means it's a privatization of a public duty.
Where before everyone was supposed to participate now
only this small group is supposed to participate.
Where before you had generalists who
required training, because they didn't have
the tools and the skills necessary when they arrived in the Army.
Now what you have is professionals, who have privatized in a sense
this service and are being compensated by the state for their role.
As we will see, this change towards the volunteer
or towards the professional army signifies a
very critical shift in the kind of relationship
between the military and the society, and
we'll be coming back to that in a minute.
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