Abstract
Though long a subject of consideration by historians, philosophers, and political scientists, the topic of war has only recently become of theoretical concern to sociological analysis. Treating war as a complex interaction process, this essay analyzes three dimensions of war and its bearing to modernity.
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- 1.
Hans Joas, “The Modernity of War,” International Sociology,14,4 (1999:457–472). This was later expanded into a book, War and Modernity. Cambridge (UK): Polity and Malden, MA: Blackwell. 2003.
- 2.
Philip Smith has recently (2005) applied a cultural sociology inspired by Durkheim to the study of modern war.
- 3.
George W. Bush, Declaration of War, address to the Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 2001, http://www.britannica.com/presidents/article-9398253. The symmetry of this post-modern war is that for its alleged major architect, Osama bin Laden, there is no boundary to the war, in time or space.
- 4.
http://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Wilson’s_War_Message_to_Congress.
- 5.
So for example, a 2005 report indicated that three years into the Iraq War, the bill for the United States was already over 204 billion dollars, a rate of spending of 5.6 billions monthly, excluding long-term costs of health care and disability payments to Iraq War veterans, and certainly exclusive of costs to the Iraqi civilians and their shattered economy (Jim Lobe, “Iraq War Costs Now Exceed Vietnam’s,” Inter Press Service, September 1, 2005 (http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/0901-02.htm). Even that figure probably underreports considerably the true costs of the Iraq War. See the more recent analysis of Nobel prize winner Joseph Stiglitz pointing to the Iraq War having total expenses (especially if care for the psychologically and physiologically wounded veterans are included) of three trillion dollars (Stiglitz and Bilmes 2008), or three times the amount which figure in the acrimonious debates over the government costs of health care reforms. It should be borne in mind that their detailed analysis did not foresee the new (2009) military engagement in Afghanistan under taken by the United States and its allies.
- 6.
Collins applies this concept in dealing with violence to collective breakdown in normal social controls. I will return to his usage in a later section, but here I think it is also apt to cover breakdown of fiscal restraints.
- 7.
Even Marx and his followers did not espouse war as the use of force. From that radical perspective, war was devalorized as the pitting of one capitalistic system against another, or one capitalistic system plundering a pre-capitalistic one for its resources. And later in the twentieth century with the proliferation of communist regimes holding different allegiances, the derided political observation that “democracies don’t fight each other” could be equally applied to including “communist regimes don’t fight each other.”
- 8.
Edward Tiryakian, “Der Kosovo-Krieg und die Rolle der Vereingten Staaten,“ Berliner Journal für Soziologie, 11, 2 (2001): 201–216.
- 9.
“Mobilization” in the rich sociological literature around it, particularly under the influence of Charles Tilly’s historical studies (From Mobilization to Revolution, 1978), has tended to be viewed as a popular collective movement against the state. Here I treat it as a popular movement for the state (and perhaps overtly if not covertly organized by the state).
- 10.
Visits by Japanese Prime ministers to this shrine have raised controversy by both liberal Japanese and by those outside of Japan who recall the wartime conduct of the Japanese in China and elsewhere. What a military burial place signifies to whom has much collective emotional significance, which merits a separate treatment.
- 11.
For a general listing of sites, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomb_of_the_Unknown_Soldier
- 12.
This is perhaps duplicated in quotidian life by groups charged with public safety, like some police units and firefighters (Desmond 2007).
- 13.
Durkheim amplified the discussion of his associates Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964 (1899).
- 14.
Wilson’s War Message to Congress, ibid.
- 15.
- 16.
“Obama, Afghanistan, and the ‘just war’,”Crosscut, December 14,2009. http://crosscut.com/2009/12/14/rights-ethics/19440.
- 17.
To be sure, the defense industry also seeks a complementary endeavor: to develop systems that avoid our side getting killed.
- 18.
Casualty estimates vary greatly and civilian deaths due to war related causes are often underreported or omitted. For reasonable estimates of World War I and World War II in the aggregate and by countries, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_casualties and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
- 19.
From the sack of Orthodox Constantinople by Christian crusaders in 1203 AD to the Protestant-Catholic wars of the 16th Century, to the Yugoslav Civil War in the 1990s pitting Orthodox Serbs against Catholic Croats, and to the internal deadly contemporary violence in Iraq between Shia and Sunni, general adherence in a common faith has not stood up as a restraint to killing.
- 20.
“Individualism and the Intellectuals,” pp. 43–57 in Robert N. Bellah, ed., Emile Durkheim on Morality and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973 (1898).
- 21.
I use “system” here following the usage of Lankford (2009) in his comparative analysis of four settings of extreme violence which turned ordinary beings into “killing machines”.
- 22.
Being a member of a bureaucratic system that sanctions doing extreme violence to “the other” is a two-edged sword. If that system loses a war, occupants of positions in the bureaucracy, high or low, are subject to dire punishment for violence the system has committed, witness Adolf Eichmann at one end of the Nazi bureaucracy and John Demjanjuk at the other end.
- 23.
Much of the ritual process involved in institutional isolation is discussed in Goffman’s insightful, Asylums (1962).
- 24.
If we put the accent on the past 100 years, dehumanization has a much older history, going back no further than the British setting up concentration camps in the Boer War and Sherman’s “scorched earth” policy in the Civil War.
- 25.
The “classical” torture experiments of Milgram at Yale (1974) and Zimbardo at Stanford (2007), aside from their ethical ambiguity, do not discuss short-term and long-term guilt effects on subjects.
- 26.
“The Wider Shame of Walter Reed,” New York Times editorial, March 7, 2007.
- 27.
In January 2010 the Veterans Affairs Department released figures showing in the two-year period 2005–2007 a 26% increase in the suicide rate of 18–29-year-old men who have left the military, along with a record increase in suicide in the military. The army suicide rate is now higher than that of the general American population for the first time since the highpoint of the Vietnam War.
- 28.
“Just War,” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_War.
- 29.
- 30.
Michael Bothe, Karl Josef Partsch, Waldemar A. Solf, with the collaboration of Martin Eaton. New Rules for Victims of Armed Conflicts: commentary on the two 1977 protocols additional to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 (The Hague, Boston: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), p. 280. Cited in James A. Stroble, 1996, The Ethics of War and the Uses of War, http://www.aloha.net/~stroble/Noncombatant.html.
- 31.
“When war fever takes its grip, people’s instincts are to de-humanize the enemy and distance them from all moral norms,” Slim (op.cit:277).
- 32.
For a readily available discussion of background materials, see “Osama bin Laden”, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Osama_bin_Laden, last modified January 5, 2010.
- 33.
As Major General Taguba placed in charge of investigating the Abu Ghraib reported afterwards, he only had access to lowly MPs, not those above: “I was legally prevented from further investigation into higher authority,” (Mayer 2008:334).
- 34.
For example, how does one quantify the world wide loss of trust in the government of the United States and its British ally in the last decade? How does one quantify civilians and military exposed for the rest of their lives to PTSD?
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Tiryakian, E.A. (2010). The (Im)morality of War. In: Hitlin, S., Vaisey, S. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Morality. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-6896-8_5
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