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.
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Paradoxes of War
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Social Aspects of War: Nation State and Nationalism
Wars help build states and nationalism
Conoce a los instructores
Miguel A. CentenoMusgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Sociology
And I want to argue that taxation is really
the measure of this new kind of power.
Taxation is the best measure in the sense
of the effective political authority and institutional development.
Taxation is a reflection both of the legitimacy of the state
and its capacity to impose that.
Oliver Wendell Holmes said it very nicely, taxes
are the price that we pay for civilization.
That is taxes are the cost that we have for engaging in a public life,
for living in a collective where everyone pays something for the benefit of all.
Taxes both represent and augment the strength of the state as measured
by the capacity to enforce centralized rule on a territory in its population.
That is, taxes are a reflection of the state's capacity to
demand of all members of this collective that they pay their part.
And, of course, they augment the strength of the state because that
very capacity to tax makes the
state ever-stronger, and perhaps more legitimacy.
Now, assuming that most people will not freely part with their resources
in exchange for a set of public goods, which they could maybe
get without paying, and with no guarantee of delivery, and great possibilities of
free-riding, the ability to extract such resources reflects a state's strength.
Not just its organizational and coercive strength,
but its, if you will, its spiritual strength.
Its legitimacy.
Taxes can even be seen as an expression of citizenship.
They are, in the words of Ewan Stein, the
economic expression of the individual's cohesion with the nation.
That is, taxes represent the nation's entire civic sense on the economic plane.
Taxes represent our civic responsibility as
expressed by these payments to this organization.
The history of taxation is therefore the history of the state.
How a state taxes may hate to, may help define how it fights and vice versa.
How it fights may help define how it is
able to tax and what manner it chooses to tax.
Now in case, except in the case of kleptocracies, states will need to,
will try to get as much resources as they need to survive and prosper.
Again in the cases of kleptocracy, for example, Mobutu, Zaire, states only
wish to tax and extract from the population for the benefit of a few.
At least in theory, for non-kleptocracies, what states do is they try
to extract the very resources that they need in order to survive.
So in one extreme, again Mobutu, Zaire, we can envision
a state providing absolutely no services, and with no perceptions of danger.
On the other hand, we can envision a revolutionary regime that might
seek to restructure the entire society and feel threatened by every side.
And those kinds of regimes are going to be the ones that
are going to construct new taxation systems
in order to assure their survival.
So, taxes are in a sense, a concrete
expression of the ideological orientation of the state.
Show me how much is taxed, who is taxed, how are they taxed, and I will
get a very good sense of what the
orientation is of that state to the society.
Now, the cost of taxation can be measured economically and politically.
In order to extract resources, the state must pay for these in a variety of ways.
It must produce some kinds of services and it
must, in a sense, pay the price of collecting taxes.
In fact the big part of revenue can actually
just go to the creation of that same revenue.
So states have often to increase the efficiency of their fiscal
capture, in order to assure the best return on their taxing investment.
Taxation does not occur free, so we want to make sure that
it is as efficient as possible in any organizational way.
The political costs are a little bit more
difficult to measure, but we can appreciate them.
Based on a population's estimate, a preference for services,
the quality expected, the perceived
availability of alternatives, the willingness
to pay a premium for the state for delivery in
views of the fairness, if you will, of this whole bargain.
Those are all going to influence the capacity of the state to be able to tax.
So it's not just an organizational issue, but in
a sense, if you will, it's a marketing issue.
How this capacity to tax is sold to a population.
For each relevant social sector involved, these estimates must be multiplied by
their respective actors' political capacity to
protest or enforce a bargain.
Think about this.
The state not only faces this broad audience.
Each one of those audience members, their capacity to be taxed.
Their capacity to resist the tax, their taxation, how they feel
about that taxation, must be measured and must be taken into account.
So, we must take into account these
kinds of conflicts between and amongst these actors.
The bottom line is taxing is difficult.
what, but what helps taxing helps the state.
This is important.
I want you to imagine again, if we need taxation in order to have states and wars
can help contribute to taxation, then wars that way can contribute towards the state.
I want to argue that wars generate greater needs for resources,
while also providing a temporary decline in the state's social constraints.
That is, wars both require this need for
obvious resources, but they also legitimize that need
by saying, if we do not do this, we will not survive as a society.
Moreover, war also provide an organizational focus
around which the state's organizational capacity may improve.
War is, in a sense, conserved as the organizational germ for that larger
institutional growth from which a state is going to arise.
Finally armies raised for war might also serve
as a means with which to collect resources.
That is the very army that you have created
in order to protect yourself from external threats, can
also represent a way of reassuring your own, or
the state's own, monopoly of the means of violence.
And therefore, monopoly over the means of taxation in a particular territory.
Now, the positive link between war and the rise of taxes in early
modern Europe is exhaustive, and we have lots of historical studies about this.
For example, in a whole variety of cases analyzed
by lots of scholars, tax systems are seen
as the product of negotiations between royal houses and
their respective societies during times of war or preparation thereof.
The history of taxation, in a sense, is a
history of these bargains between the state, or the representative
of the state, and the various members of the society,
about their ability to provide these kinds of resources.
The birth of modern tax systems in western Europe is
tied to the military transition beginning with the Hundred Years' War.
And the link between war and the rise of taxes
in the Unites States is incredibly obvious, and all so obvious.
There is a parallel history of American wars and American government revenues.
As we track, as we track the role of the government
inside this society, we see that follows very much its bellic history.
Wars promote expenditure, which requires some form of taxation.
Again, that is the beautiful logic of this link between war and state development.
The alternative is to default on
war-related debt, which works for short periods
of time, but cannot serve as the basis for any long-term military power.
That is, in a temporary emergency, you might be able to
default, but then again, realize that your reputation is going to
be damaged, and your ability to raise those kinds of resources,
the next time, and is going to be very, very difficult.
The rise of Britain in the 18th century has been partially attributed to the
systematic nature of both its debt structure,
and its capacity to pay back those loans.
Unlike the French, unlike certainly the Hapsburgs for example,
the British Crown was seen as good for its debts.
And that not only made those debts less onerous, because
they would have to pay less of a premium, but it
assured that more and more customers for that debt would
be available, because they realized they would get their money back.
Now, after a war is over, state
expenditure does not decline to the original level.
That is, we do not see this jump in,
in expenditure and then goes back to the pre-bellic levels.
After every war, in a sense, the state gets bigger and the type of taxes change.
Let me give you an example.
Custom taxes are often the easiest and
least politically and organizationally demanding to extract.
All you need, in a sense is a few soldiers or a few policemen at
ports able to extract from ship captains or
whatever it might be, their due for those, those goods.
At a certain point, however, the demands of war
so escalate, that the state must penetrate inside that society.
It can no longer simply rely on these custom tolls, if you will.
But it's gotta develop its bureaucratic reach and extract
directly from the population via property and income taxes.
This again, makes the state more powerful, more able to practice
war, more able to tax, and on, and on, and on.
Wars led to both the creation of the British state
in the 18th century, and the American state in the 19th.
You cannot understand the histories of
these societies without understanding the role that war played.
War both allow, allowed these states to
increase the amount of revenue, which again, never
returned to pre-bellic levels, and to increase
their relative importance of domestic and direct taxes.
Military conflicts, therefore, allow and enforce the state to
depend less on administratively simple, but very inelastic custom taxes,
and to rely on the much more politically challenging, but
potentially much more lucrative, domestic sources of revenue.
The greater bureaucratic complexity required this process
is at the very heart of the institutional legacy for war.
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