Abstract
The process of political development in Prussia-Germany from 1640 to 1970 provides the soundest test of the proposition that military organization is a determining factor in the development of state-level political institutions. The transformation of this once minor principality from an unbalanced aristocracy into a model of modern liberal democracy has included intervals of absolutist despotism, constitutional monarchy, a radically progressive democratic republic, fascist dictatorship, and modern liberal democracy. Since all these governing types are evident in a distinct society over a historically short period, this case study has the advantage of holding several potentially important cultural and sociopolitical alternative intervening variables constant, thereby enhancing the focus on military factors.
Don’t forget your great guns, which are the most respectable argument for the divine right of kings.
Frederick the Great (1785)
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Notes
Brian Downing, The Military Revolution and Political Change (Princeton: University Press, 1992), 84.
See Ferdinand Schevill, The Great Elector (Chicago: University Press, 1947).
Gordon Craig, The Politics of the Prussian Army (New York: Oxford, 1955), 2–3.
Robert Ergang, Europe (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1954), 490–92
See also Walter Goerlitz, History of the German General Staff 1657–1945, translated by Brian Battershaw (New York: Praeger, 1953), 5.
Hans Delbrück, History of the Art ofWar, volume IV (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985), 242–45.
Walter Simon, The Failure of the Prussian Reform Movement, 1807–1819 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1955), 147.
Andre Corvisier, Armies and Societies in Europe, 1494–1789, translated by Abigail Siddall (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1979), 113.
Hans Rosenberg, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy and Autocracy (Boston: Beacon, 1958), 64–65.
Otto Hintze, The Historical Essays, translated and edited by Felix Gilbert (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 159–81.
See Catherine Behrens, Society, Government, and the Enlightenment (New York: Harper, 1985), 123–25
Trevor Dupuy, Curt Johnson, and David Bongard, The Harper Encyclopedia of Military Biography (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 261–62.
Alfred Vagts, A History of Militarism (New York: W.W. Norton, 1937), 32–35.
Valentin Veit, German People (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1946), 254.
Robert Ergang, The Potsdam Führer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 63.
Craig, Prussian Army, 23; William Shanahan, Prussian Military Reforms 1780–1813 (New York: AMS, 1966), 56.
Francis Carsten, The Origins of Prussia (Oxford: Clarendon, 1964), 258.
Robert Palmer, “Frederick the Great, Guibert, Bülow: From Dynastic to National War,” in Edward Earle (ed.), The Makers of Modern Strategy (Princeton: University Press, 1971), 54.
Christopher Duffy, Frederick the Greats Army (London: Routledge, 1974)
Christopher Duffy, Frederick the Great (London: Routledge, 1988).
Edward Gulick, Europe’s Classical Balance of Power (New York: Norton, 1955), 4.
Eckart Kehr, Economic Interest, Militarism, and Foreign Policy, translated by Grete Heinz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 3.
Richard Preston, Sydney Wise, and Herman Werner, Men in Arms, revised edition (New York: Praeger, 1962), 176–92.
Michael Howard, War in European History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 75–93.
See Rene Albrecht-Carrie, A Diplomatic History of Europe Since the Congress of Vienna (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), 25 and 28.
Ibid., 388–93; Also Alan Taylor, Bismarck (New York: Vintage Paperback, 1967), 23.
Veit, German People, 425.; Ernest Dupuy and Trevor Dupuy, Harper Encyclopedia of Military History, fourth edition (New York: Harper, 1993), 842 and 844.
Martin Kitchen, A Military History of Germany (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 69.
Heinrich von Treitschke, Politics, translated by Hans Kohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1963), 74.
Helmuth von Moltke, On the Art of War: Selected Writings, Daniel Hughes (ed.), translated by Harry Bell (Novato, CA: Presidio, 1993), 35–36 and 39–40.
Gordon Craig, Germany 1866–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 44.
Karl Demeter, The German Officer Corps in Society and State, 1650–1945 (New York: Praeger, 1965), 21–22.
Gerhard Ritter, The Sword and the Scepter (Miami: University of Miami Press, 1970), VII: 287.
Martin Kitchen, German Officer Corps, 1890–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 38.
Treitschke, Politics.; Craig, Germany, 48–49; Emilio Willems, A Way ofLife and Death (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1986), 79.
Roger Chickering, “Patriotic Societies and German Foreign Policy, 1890–1914,” International History Review 1 (1979), 470–89.
On the Colonial Society see Woodruff Smith, The German Colonial Empire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978).
For membership figures, see Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 366
and Marilyn Coatzee, The German Army League (New York: Oxford Press, 1990), 4.
On the Navy League, see Geoff Eley, “Reshaping the Right: Radical Nationalism and the German Navy League, 1898–1908,” Historical Journal 21 (1978), 327–54; and on the Army League see Coatzee, German Army League.
Volker Berghan, Germany and the Approach ofWar in 1914 (London: Thames, 1973), 76.
Holger Herwig, The German Naval Officer Corps (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 15.
Alfred Rapp, “The Untrue Myth,” in Walter Stahl (ed.), The Politics of Postwar Germany (Hamburg: Hafen-Druckerei, 1963), 146.
Goerlitz, General Staff, 130–34.; See also Barbara Tuchman’s, The Guns of August (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1962).
Fritz Fischer, War of Illusions: German Policies from 1911–1914, translated by Marian Jackson (London: Chatto, 1975), 511–12.
Stephen Van Evera, “The Cult of the Offensive and the Origins of the First World War,” International Security 9 (1984), 58–105.
R.H. Lutz, The Fall of the German Empire, volume I (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1932), 261.
Harold Gordon, The Reichswehr and the German Republic, 1919–26 (Princeton: University Press, 1957), 174.
Francis Carsten, The Reichswehr in Politics, 1918 to 1919 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1966), 216.
Article 160. Cited in Albert Seaton, The German Army, 1933–45 (New York: St. Martin’s, 1982), 4.
Herbert Rosinski, The German Army (New York: Praeger, 1944), 158–60.
John Wheeler-Bennett, The Nemesis of Power (London: MacMillan, 1953), 89.
Craig, Prussian Army, 404–45. See also William Jordan, Great Britain, France and the German Problem, 1918–1939 (London: Unwin & Allen, 1943), 143–44.
Craig, Prussian Army, 479–80; See also Robert O’Neil, The German Army and the Nazi Party 1933–39 (London: Cassell, 1966), 54–55.
See Robert Strausz-Hupe, Geopolitics (New York: Putnam, 1942).
William Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1960), 48.
Figures from John Ellis, World War II: A Statistical Survey (New York: Facts on File, 1993).
Thomas Schwartz, “The ‘Skeleton-Key’ — American Foreign Policy, European Unity and German Rearmament, 1949–1954,” Central European History 19 (1986), 370–71.
Karl Deutsch and Lewis Edinger, Germany Rejoins the Powers (Stanford: University Press, 1959)
Hans Spier, German Rearmament and Atomic War (Evanston, IL: Row & Peterson, 1957)
and Gordon Craig, NATO and the New German Army (Princeton: University Press, 1955).
Donald Abenheim, “The Citizen in Uniform: Reform and its Critics in the Bundeswehr,” in Stephen Szabo (ed.), The Bundeswehr and Western Security (New York: St Martin’s, 1990), 31.
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© 2004 Everett Carl Dolman
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Dolman, E.C. (2004). Military Organization and the Prusso-German State. In: The Warrior State. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403978264_5
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