Abstract
The sociology of the military starts with sociology tout court, not as a specific scientific sector, but by the treatment of subjects that would later be the characteristic of a special sociology. Since the forerunners such as Comte and Spencer the sociological classic thought took the military and the phenomenon of war among the first studies commonly considered as “sociological”. Later on, in the twentieth century, sociology applied to the military demonstrated its applicability to concrete cases, as in the famous and pillar works published in 1948 in the six volumes of The American Soldier, the first great empirical investigation of the military. After that, the American School of military sociology can be considered to be established, following and innovating the “European” sociological tradition, and offering also the first great theoretical systematisation of this special sociology. This occurs with Huntington’s The Soldier and the State, where the scientific field of “civil-military relations” is identified and taken as an aspect of national security policy. Then, this chapter covers the development of theoretical underpinning and empirical research in the domain of military sociology, with its main contributors such as Janowitz (unanimously considered as the father of military sociology), Moskos and Van Doorn, until current times when a world-wide and often comparative and cross-national sociology of the military is strongly established. As a proof of this global development, a special section is devoted to Middle-Eastern and East Asian studies over the military organisation, armed forces and conflict resolution in a global asymmetric conflict context.
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- 1.
Comte’s fundamental work was published in six volumes between 1830 and 1842. The edition we refer to is the one published by UTET, Turin, 1967, edited by Franco Ferrarotti.
- 2.
Understood as “history without the names of individuals and even without those of peoples” (Comte 1967, p. 123).
- 3.
De la démocratie en Amérique, was published in two volumes in 1835 and 1840. The edition we refer to is the one by Gallimard, Paris, 1951.
- 4.
Later, Lasswell (1941) explains such phenomenon with the concept of the garrison state.
- 5.
Principles of Sociology, published in three volumes from 1877 to 1896. The edition we refer to here is Principi di sociologia, published by UTET, Turin, 1967, edited by Franco Ferrarotti.
- 6.
Mosca (1965) treats the military especially in Chap. 9 of vol. 1 of The Ruling Class, titled “Standing Armies”
- 7.
The first edition of The Human Problems of an Industrial Civilization was published by Routledge in 1933
- 8.
This is true for other Western nations as well.
- 9.
Theorising what had already been done concretely by the team of The American Soldier, which had borrowed models elaborated in the area of industrial sociology in order to apply them to the military.
- 10.
It would come to full development in Europe as well nearly twenty years later, in the 1990s.
- 11.
One of Van Doorn’s fundamental works, The Soldier and Social Change (1975), receives a warm introduction by Morris Janowitz.
- 12.
One can cite, by way of example, the German Sozialwissenschaftliches Institut der Bundeswehr, the French Centre d’Etudes en Sciences Sociales de la Défense, the Italian Centro di Studi Strategici e Militari, and the Polish Military Institute for Sociological Research.
- 13.
For this paragraph we thank the invaluable collaboration of Uzi Ben-Shalom.
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Caforio, G., Hong, DS. (2018). Some Historical Notes. In: Caforio, G., Nuciari, M. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of the Military. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71602-2_2
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