Michael Mann: On Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023.  Chapter 10-Conclusion

 

Although “most European writers since the Enlightenment have claimed that war was declining or was about to decline,” Mann considers this wishful thinking. By his reckoning warfare has waxed and waned from one region to another and from one time to another, with no discernible trend. Some modern writers expect peace to result from the adoption of a favored political regime—typically, republicanism or socialism—or a favored economic system—free trade, industrialism. Another candidate for peace has been imperialism, whether the liberal imperialism of John Stuart Mill and Max Weber (the English and German varieties of the doctrine eventually would clash on, well, the battlefield), or the mission civilisatrice of the French. In the nineteenth century, Social Darwinists added ‘race science’ to such claims, whether on the basis of Caucasian superiority or of the disappearance of races via “assimilation and miscegenation.” And, it should be noted, the tyrannical, then oligarchic form of socialism, once seen in the Soviet Union, engaged in imperialism without calling itself that. Today’s Communist China may have similar ambitions.

Nor have casualties declined. Death rates have declined only because the global population is bigger, major wars have become shorter, and medical treatment has improved. World War II saw the deaths of a smaller percentage of the world population than did the Mongol conquests, but the Mongol conquests went on for a hundred years, World War II less than a decade. The two world wars of the twentieth century caused higher annual rates of killing than any other wars in human history. Whether considered in terms of societies structured to make war or the fatalities caused by war, “history is not a divide between modern and pre-modern states and armies,” even if modern science and its technology does constitute such a divide.

What about the world since 1945? Although (or perhaps because of) nuclear and other weapons of mass destruction have threatened states, no major war has occurred, despite the sharp regime differences between commercial republics and their several enemies. Although “optimism is understandable within recent Western Europe,” the Russian invasion of Ukraine “blasted apart such European complacency.” As to smaller wars, Africa alone has seen ten of them, with over 700,000 battlefield deaths and millions more dead of slaughter, disease, and malnutrition. The United Nations “peacekeeping troops,” numbering 110,000 soldiers in fourteen countries, have kept the peace for more than a dozen years in about half of their interventions. “Unfortunately, peace achieved through negotiated settlement does not last as long as peace achieved by the victory of one side,” possibly (although Mann doesn’t claim this) because the loser’s regime may change into one more favorable to the winner. 

It is true that “internally the West has become fairly pacific.” Mann ascribes this outcome to the institution of the modern state, which wields the “infrastructural power” to “penetrate civil society and logistically implement its decisions through the realm”—quite unlike the much less efficient pre-modern states, whose rulers “relied on repression, including killing,” to maintain order. “Modern rulers have infrastructural power whose institutions routinely preserve order without inflicting lethal violence,” unless of course the regime itself intends to inflict violence, as in the modern tyrannies, wherein things can get very bloody, indeed. “Yet overall, there has been a decline in militarism in the principal institutions of society” in the West, despite the growth of military spending in “both liberal and illiberal countries.” However, such spending is a smaller percentage of the GDP of twenty-first century countries, never exceeding 4.1 percent in the West. Mann chastises the United States nonetheless; “never has a single country had such military overpreparedness, its bases spread over the globe, prepared for and launching military interventions across the world.” He prefers not to recognize that America’s international system of military bases was designed by the Theodore Roosevelt administration as an alternative to the imperialism then prevailing among European countries; as those empires collapsed between the years 1915 and 1990, the United States was left with the responsibility of keeping sea and air lanes open to international commerce—an expensive policy to which there may be no palatable alternatives for a commercial republic. Mann also complains that Western capitalists, especially American firms, sell arms to “the regimes and rebels of poorer countries; “addiction to militarism by southern warlords is fueled by northern arms lords in a symbolic relationship,” rather in the manner of the relations between slave-owning planters of the American South and textile mills of the North, and of Great Britain. This violence is compounded by the use of foreign regimes as proxy forces in great-power struggles. As a result, “many poor countries remain beset by wars, especially civil wars, which show little sign of decline.” Although Mann claims that “rich countries have exported militarism far from the attention span and the well-being of their citizens,” who pay little attention to wars that do not involve them directly, it is far from clear that the militarism has actually been exported, that it has not rather provided an indigenous market for the arms exports Mann deplores.

From these statistics-based arguments, Mann turns to an analysis of the effects of wars on the soldiers who fight them, beginning with the American Civil War, the first in which ordinary soldiers wrote down their experiences—that is, the first war in which one of the effects of democratic republicanism, widespread literacy, could be registered. Before that, scholars can only draw conclusions from the ways in which armies were organized to force soldiers to stand and fight instead of fleeing at their first experience of combat. An example of this was Wellington’s manner of deploying his troops at the Battle of Waterloo in squares or rectangles with each side consisting of two or more rows of infantry; “an enemy attack on the square then trapped the soldiers into fighting.” As modern technology improved the lethality of weapons and the distance from which they could be fired, rulers and often the higher-ranking military commanders removed themselves from the front lines, distancing themselves from the terror of warfighting. Meanwhile, soldiers were recruited by appeals to patriotism and the “sense of adventure,” obviously not by warnings of the dangers they would face. 

In the American Civil War, Union soldiers were motivated primarily by “duty backed by conscience,” Confederate soldiers by “honor backed by public reputation.” “This was a war between transcendent ideologies deriving from the key American contradiction, a country of white male democracy and mass slavery,” Mann contends, somewhat inaccurately. More precisely, the Civil War was indeed civil, a war fought by rival regimes: commercial and democratic republicanism in the North, slave-based oligarchy in the South (the latter regime a contradiction of Article IV, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution). It is in this sense, as Mann does write, that “no matter which side of the divide a Civil war soldier stood on, he knew that the heart of the threat, and the reason that the war came, was the other side’s stance on slavery,” as indeed Lincoln maintained in his Second Inaugural Address. Once in the war, soldiers fought because they were in it together, dependent upon one another for survival, self-respect, and victory. 

Mann denies that the war was worth tens of thousands dead and wounded, millions of traumatized survivors. “A better solution would have been two American countries,” sparing those lives. Mann claims that the slaves would have fled north, the North would never have needed to pay attention to “racist politicians” in the halls of Congress, and slavery “would have collapsed anyway near the end of the century, as soil erosion and boll-weevil infestation destroyed the cotton industry and the profitability of slavery.” While it is touching to see Professor Mann upholding the opinions of the Civil War era British political class, which also wanted the American Union to split, it must be observed that (a) most slaves could have been prevented from crossing the North-South border, once it had been militarized; (b) slaves could have been employed in tasks other than cotton harvesting, if cotton itself were no longer a viable crop; (c)the Confederates intended to expand southward, colonizing parts of Latin America; (d) a divided America might well have fought subsequent wars on that continent; (e) the two countries might well have taken opposite sides in both world wars of the next century, throwing Europe’s democratic-republican future into question. Lincoln’s primary intention, to save the Union, made sense for Americans and quite possibly for Europeans as well. In this, he followed the arguments of The Federalist and of George Washington.

In those world wars, soldiers’ motives for fighting differed. In the First World War, men signed up for duty supposing warfare to be an honorable, even heroic endeavor; both sides claimed self-defense; soldiers fought in units drawn from their home regions, which increased social pressure to enlist; and finally, many men liked the pay. Once in the war, continued social pressure, now felt within the unit, a sense of duty, absorption in daily tasks (very much including survival), drilling and training, punishment of the disobedient, and “a claim of self-defense” all contributed to steadfastness throughout the years of combat, although sheer physical and psychic exhaustion began to prevail in the end. Heedless of the lessons the American Civil War should have taught them about the devastating effects of modern military technology (what did Americans know about warfare?), commanders and civilian rulers alike grossly underestimated the casualties they would incur. Given the ruin, “this now seems a pointless war, fought neither for genuine national interests nor for high ideals, but for ‘reasons of state’ mediated by the survival interests of dynastic monarchies and the diplomatic incompetence and cult of ‘honor’ of upper-class leaders who did not themselves fight.” But does this criticism apply equally to the monarchs and the republicans? Is it clear that the republicans were not defending a better regime for the soldiers and their families? It would have been far better, had the Central Powers not started the war in the first place, or if they had sued for peace much earlier, once the kind of war they were fighting was obvious, but they didn’t do either of those things.

Mann judges the Second World War to have been “very different,” a war not “caused by confusion and miscalculation” but by “ideology,” a “war of aggression created by the militaristic ideologies of Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, and fascist Italy,” a war of self-defense by the Allies, whose soldiers “were not cannon fodder in the power ploys of rulers,” as Mann supposes the Allies to have been in World War I. He goes much too far in blaming British and French statesmen for “their ideological anti-Bolshevism,” which, he claims, “prevented them from allying with the Soviets to deter Hitler in 1938 and 1939.” In fact, Stalin, operating under his Marxist illusions that Nazis and republicans would exhaust one another in an inter-capitalist war, was already conniving with Hitler in a vain attempt to keep the Soviet Union out. “We can also blame the Roosevelt administration for its provocative sanctions against Japan”—equally nonsensical, given Japan’s imperial intentions in the Pacific. At most, one can blame FDR for failing to anticipate and prepare for the Pearl Harbor attack, but the geopolitical regime struggle was on, and had been on, for a long time before that. These considerations notwithstanding, Mann affirms that “Allied soldiers viewed this as a legitimate war, and it was.” The republican allies fought “a just war in defense of their way of life,” whereas the German, Japanese, and “above all the Red Army” soldiers fought on behalf of “transcendent ideologies” that ginned them up for self-sacrifice in a manner not unlike that of Muslim jihadis before and since. In the Red Army, such ideological commitment was reinforced by the presence of Communist Party agents in each unit, leading ideological instruction of the soldiers in between the battles. “The pervasiveness and effectiveness of political involvement in military units set the Red Army apart from other modern armies.” Mann tries to claim that the contrast between Communist and Nazi morale and the more low-key spirit of republican soldiers “makes a mockery” of the claim that democratic armies were more intensely motivated than the soldiers of tyranny. This ignores what would surely have been Tocqueville’s point: If by democracy one means social egalitarianism, not political republicanism, then modern tyrants can rule societies as democratic as societies ruled by representatives elected by the people. 

The non-transcendent “ideology” of the Allied soldiers enabled them to be “massaged into willingness to kill, although rarely with enthusiasm.” “Sadism was rare and few frontline soldiers were motivated by deep hatred for the enemy.” They were probably less capable warriors than their enemies, “being overly dependent on air and artillery superiority.” For the Americans, loyalty and solidarity centered not on “country, army, or regiment, but to the small group of comrades with whom they shared their life in and out of battle.” It might be suggested that the regime of democratic and commercial republicanism fostered all of these things: American soldiers thought of their enemies as fellow human beings; American politicians and military commanders were ‘economical’ in organizing their forces, preferring to spare the men unnecessary risks; soldiers thought of their buddies as fellow citizens, conscripts in a war against regimes that denied the citizenship rights that conscription itself limited in that war. “Of course, Islamist terrorists also experience this” sense of comradery,” as Mann cannot resist to add, proving only that one can feel solidarity with partners in any ’cause,’ good or evil. 

All of this “tells us little about human nature, except how malleable it is,” confirming rather what a sociologist is likely to think, “how mighty social power relations are, capable of disciplining men into behavior that would be unthinkable to them in peacetime,” namely, “repeatedly trying to kill others while exposing themselves to risk of death or mutilations” in “a socially induced hell.” Then again, what the mightiness of social relations may tell us about human nature is that human beings are naturally social, even political.

Mann next considers wars fought against Communist regimes. Both the United States and the Soviet Union intervened against one another and, in the Soviet case, to keep their eastern and central European allies in line. Many of these interventions consisted of aid to proxy warriors. The United States succeeded in nearly three-quarters of their direct interventions that lasted no more than six months, less than fifty percent in interventions lasting longer than that—Vietnam being the primary example of failure. “But attaining American or Soviet objectives did not necessarily benefit the peoples at the receiving end,” a comment that is obvious enough, although one might add that Soviet objectives were much less often beneficial. Mann’s analysis highlights the American wars in Korea and Vietnam, betraying an intention, increasingly evident in this second half of his book, to influence American readers more than any others. In Korea, he claims, “vital American interests were not at stake” but internal politics “obstructed rational thinking.” Although the American commander, General Matthew Ridgeway, wanted to retake the whole of the Korean peninsula, he knew he could only do that “with casualties acceptable to the American people,” a point that “has remained an American weakness,” albeit “a healthy sign of declining militarism in American society,” as might be expected in the American regime’s way of life. 

The Vietnamese jungles made fighting more difficult for the Americans than it had been in Korea, giving the advantage to the Communist guerrillas, despite copious use of defoliants and artillery. Crucially, the Vietcong saw reinforcements from North Vietnam, Communist China, and the Soviet Union along with support from much of the peasantry. The ‘People’s Liberation Front” “could replace their casualties from village militias and northern regiments and fight on indefinitely,” buoyed by the ideological fervor similar to that of the Soviets in World War II, similarly reinforced by Party members embedded in military units. As a result, “the soldiers of the democracies performed worse, not better,” winning only when “advanced technology and firepower” could get a fix on the enemy. This didn’t happen often enough to save America’s South Vietnamese allies. 

Mann concludes this set of chapters by calling soldiers, not proletarians, “the most truly exploited persons on the planet,” and their ruling exploiters “callous desk killers, inflicting fear, death, and mutilation from afar on those they define as the enemy, on their own soldiers, and on nearby civilians.” He considers this perhaps “the greatest inequality in life chances in the world today.” 

Evidently, many Muslims disagree that they are being exploited by their warlike rulers. Islamism—not simply Islam—is “popularly rooted in the everyday practices of the people.” Meanwhile, the bad Soviets and Americans, seeking “global grandeur and oil” while “claim[ing] their missions were defensive,” should never have fought the Muslims. This ignores what Mann himself had said about ideological motivation in the Soviet Union, but that was in earlier chapters. 

Muslims have fought four kinds of war: Muslim states against non-Muslim, non-imperial states; Islamic sects against one another; jihadists against “more secular Muslims”; and wars fought against “foreign imperialists initiating wars against both Islamic jihadists and unfriendly Muslim states.” In the first category, he places Muslim wars against Israel, in which he takes the side of the Palestinians, ignoring their irredentist claims not only to the ‘West Bank’ but to Israel and Jordan—to all of what was Palestine, claims based either on the supposition that Palestinian Arabs somehow descend from the ancient Philistines, predating Jews on the land, or on the Islamic claim that any territory once conquered by Muslims remains rightfully Muslim land forever after. The sectarian wars have pitted Sunni Muslims against Shi’a Muslims centered in Iran. Mann claims that these conflicts “reflected geopolitical more than religious motives,” although it is quite doubtful that the participants separated the two so neatly. He is more critical of the jihadis, saying that their reading of the Koran ignores its stipulation that jihad refers “only to wars of defense against unbelievers,” who must be given time to repent. This overlooks the jihadists’ insistence that heretics are unbelievers and the fact that wars that have broken out over many centuries have afforded both sides ample opportunity for repentance. 

As to the wars of defense against foreign imperialists, Mann zeroes in on the two Gulf Wars. He doesn’t mind the First Gulf War, which “had the UN seal of approval,” which “brought genuine global legitimacy” to the enterprise and was supported by Muslim state allies in the region, threatened by Saddam Hussein’s territorial ambitions. President George H. W. Bush wisely saw he “lacked the political power to form a stable alternative government in Iraq,” and so did not attempt to change its regime. Not so, his son, who equally lacked “substantial local allies on the ground,” except for the Kurds—who, Mann comes around to conceding, have shown the capacity to found a decent, self-governing state-within-the-state. After the jihadist ISIS movement was “crushed, for the moment,” Iraqi “ethnic-religious tensions are currently simmering rather than exploding,” making the war “only a minor disaster,” in his estimation. 

When it comes to fighting wars, Mann points to two “enduring domestic weaknesses” of the United States: squeamishness about the loss of life and “fragile popular support for wars.” Americans can’t stomach the long haul. Politicians continue to enter wars despite these weaknesses because they suffer from three “blind spots”: belief in “an imperial civilizing mission,” by which he means regime change, which he deems “unachievable” in “an age of rising nationalist and religion resistance”; ignorance of the long-lasting resentment of American intervention (“North Koreans hate America with good reason,” having suffered two million wartime deaths at its hands); and “conservatism,” by which he means retaining alliances (with Israel and Saudi Arabia, especially) and antagonisms (Iran) that are no longer in American interests. “The solution is not war. It is to moderate U.S. policies in the region.” To this it may be counter-argued, first, that regimes working at cross purposes may temporize, but they remain enemies until one or both principals change; rising nationalist and religious resistance may or may not make forced regime change unachievable, as seen in Iraq, in which the Americans did in fact change the regime, for better in one region, not necessarily for the worse in the others. Long-lasting resentment of American intervention can in fact be ameliorated, if the rulers want it to be, as seen in today’s Vietnam. And it is by no means clear that Israel and Saudi Arabia are no longer useful allies of the United States, or that Iran can be induced to “change tack on Israel,” which it currently has targeted for destruction, even as it has long chanted, “Death to America.” Mann urges America to act as “a neutral referee” among warring Middle East states, “helping settle these disputes through conciliation laced with incentives.” But there are no neutral referees when major ‘powers’ (now, the United States, China, and Russia) contend for superiority, as they will continue to do, given their regime differences and conflicting geopolitical objectives.

Looking to the future, Mann turns his attention to those three major powers. He deprecates both the NATO expansion that enraged Vladimir Putin and Putin’s overreaction to it. Identifying himself with the Russian state and people, Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine in a spirit of military overconfidence, expectation of increased popularity at home, fear that the republicanism of Ukraine might spread to Russia, contempt for the character of Ukrainians, and expectation that NATO would do nothing much to stop him. His fears were mostly groundless, his hopes disappointed thus far. 

Mann reckons China to have understood its clear military inferiority to the United States and to have responded by putting resources into developing cyber weapons designed to paralyze American weaponry and communications. It “plans expansion to restore the full extent of former Chinese empires,” which means rule over Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Tibet, and Taiwan, along with some small sections along its border with India. And it intends to secure “predominance in the South China Sea.” “Past imperial glory is important in modern Chinese nationalism,” an element maintaining the authority of the Communist oligarchy. The Chinese narrative features three stages: “Mao made China free” of imperial domination by foreign powers, “Deng made China wealthy, and Xi is giving China global strength.” Like the Russians, the Chinese rulers engage in a regime struggle against the democratic republics although, in Mann’s generous estimation, “the failings of American democracy pale beside the repression exercised by the CCP.” This notwithstanding, “other powers need not fear war with China unless they provoke it,” except when it comes to Chinese ambitions regarding Taiwan. He recommends that the United States “hold the existing level of defense over Taiwan and counter the Belt and Road program with its own aid and development program,” both of which policies are currently in place. Mann takes this sanguine view because, although trade between Germany and Britain (to say nothing of Germany and France) was robust in the years before 1914, proving that commercial relations do not prevent war, “today’s interdependence is orders of magnitude greater”; “autarky no longer exists for any country,” and “for Chinese or American rulers to ignore such an unprecedented level of mutual material interests would be stupidity of the highest order.” It would, but of course one might go to war for reasons that have nothing to do with material interests, and one devise a war strategy that would not ruin the economic assets of the enemy in any long-lasting way. In past centuries, the Chinese were quite good at that sort of thing. 

What to do about the world of today? Mann absurdly imagines that an international push to reverse climate change—a “far more serious crisis” than any other humanity faces, according to him—might unite the countries of the world in a peaceful struggle not to conquer nature but to protect and restore it. “Rulers should fully commit to international institutions to combat war and climate change, consider undertaking wars only in self-defense” as defined by—whom? (According to Mann, Americans carry out “self-defense” by “aggression to the whole world,” making their country into “a great white shark thrashing helplessly in the shallows.” Not promising.) Will the international institutions define defense? Who will rule them? And if no one does and deadlock ensues, how will that prevent wars?

If “war is neither genetically hardwired into humans, nor quite as important as it is often represented,” and if “fixed agrarian settlements generated states and social classes,” leading to war,” and if Mann’s version of William James’s “moral equivalent[s] of war” are likely to be as ineffectual as James’s have been, this would mean that we can prevent war only by going back to the nomadism of pre-agrarian communities or by acceding to the worldwide hegemony of an unprecedentedly great power. “The best antidote to war would be direct participation by citizens in popular assemblies to decide war or peace. Alas, this is also utopian.” It is also wrong. Did direct participation by citizens in popular assemblies prevent Athenians from embarking on empire? 

War began in border disputes between and among states; with their characteristic socioeconomic classes struggling for authority, warfare could unite peoples so ruled and augment their territories, serving the interests of the rulers. This induced neighboring peoples to found their own states. “The militaristic institutions and culture that had grown up on profitable little wars were then turned on bigger wars,” state against state. Losers seldom write histories (the American ex-Confederates being a notable exception), so interstate war was made to seem more practical and glorious than it is. Today, however, “the whole world is filled up with states whose legitimacy is supported by international institutions” and war between “the major states can no longer be rational.” This won’t stop wars from happening, since “the perennial intervention of emotions and ideological and political motives weakens the rationality of both means and ends.” With his distinguished sociological predecessor, Max Weber, Mann believes that ideological and political motives are non-rational—mere ‘values’ as distinguished from the ‘facts’ pragmatists attend to. One may doubt this.

In the end, in his final response to Raymond Aron’s claim that there can be no general theory of war causation, Mann admits that “human nature does matter, if indirectly.” “Part rational, part emotional, part ideological,” human nature’s “tripartite character” makes war “an intermittent outcome” in the course of human events. “Human nature does matter, and that is why when wars are fought, they are mostly fought for no good reason.”

Michael Mann: On Wars. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Introduction-Chapter 9.

 

Unlike many sociologists, Michael Mann does not reduce politics to sub-political ‘forces’—currently fashionable are ‘race, class, and gender’—instead regarding politics as an independent causative ‘variable,’ along with economics, ideology, and military power/organization, all of which ‘entwine’ to produce social effects. In his previous work, he added ‘leadership’ to those causes, allowing scope for both statesmanship and tyranny. Here, he introduces several refinements to this framework, distinguishing domestic political power from what has come to be called ‘soft’ power projected abroad—diplomatic, cultural exchange, and the like—while closely associating ideology with emotions, “since both surpass empirical knowledge,” and adding libido dominandi to the several purposes human beings aim at. Nietzsche wasn’t entirely wrong: “Those who command may get intrinsic enjoyment from dominating others, regardless of what other benefits they might experience.”

Mann wants to know three things: “what determines whether war or peace is chosen”; whether wars are “driven by human nature, the nature of human society, or other forces”; whether wars are rational as means or as ends (“Do they do any good at all?”). His invocation of the good shows that he is no ‘value-free’ social scientist but one, like Aristotle, who distinguishes good from bad regimes. Sociology as conventionally understood today cannot tell him what is good, but he does not let that stop him from thinking about what is good. He concludes that while “there is an element of rationality in wars,” it “gets entangled in varying degrees within the emotions and ideologies of human beings, especially their rulers, and within the social structures and cultures of human societies.” That is, wars aim at serving the regimes of the states that fight, although they often fail to serve those regimes well and, given the many regimes ruled by rulers who are not good, they often benefit “only a small proportion of human beings.” Fewer wars would be better for humanity as a whole—assuming, one might add, that the regimes that bring peace do not bring it in the form of unjust rule, itself a sort of war against the human beings subject to that rule. “The vast majority of people throughout history seem to have preferred peace to war, so far as we can judge,” and in this they are usually quite reasonable.

The modern, centralized state typically combines Machiavellian political science with the modern, Baconian natural science. Lo Stato has changed war, as seen in the artillery of the early modern period, the steamships of the nineteenth century, the air power and nuclear weapons of the twentieth, and the cyber-weapons of the twenty-first. While modern medicine “has produced a major decline in those dying from their wounds, accompanied by greater consciousness of psychiatric ailments,” modern weapons “have increased the civilian casualty rate and it is now routine to define the total population of a country as the enemy.” Indeed, as he drily remarks, “the main problem of an infinite aspiration to conquest is the number of lives it destroys,” while self-defense from rulers who may be animated by that aspiration often proves “quite an elastic concept.” This bodes ill for the future, and in many passages, Mann proposes such peaceful substitutes for war as commerce and international peacekeeping organizations, only to acknowledge that to invest much hope in such phenomena is utopian. 

“Military power is the social organization of lethal violence,” the attempt, in Clausewitz’s words, to use force “to compel our enemy to do our will,” usually by killing people and breaking things, destroying lives and property. General William Tecumseh Sherman was right; “war is hell” and “militaries train soldiers for hell.” Military power should be distinguished, Mann writes, from militarism, which is an ethos animating a regime, typically one ruled by militaries exalting “military virtues above ideologies of peace,” and pursuing “extensive and aggressive military preparedness,” i.e., preparedness well beyond the need for self-defense (this, too, being an elastic concept). Following the necessarily somewhat arbitrary conventional measurement proposed by political scientists, Mann defines war as “an armed dispute that causes one thousand or more battle-related fatalities inflicted within a twelve-month period,” as distinguished from military incursions, which cause fewer than a thousand fatalities. 

If war is simply endemic to human life, then the claim that war inheres in human nature would be hard to deny. Mann doubts this, because “minimally organized warfare” seems to have begun after 8,000 BC, and “much later in some parts of the world”; it is associated with the development of “settled farming,” i.e., property (as Rousseau asserts). And even the early wars were unimpressive by later standards, consisted of raids by hunter-gatherer bands on others. “The likeliest conclusion is that pre-state communities”—what Aristotle calls extended families and tribes—featured “interpersonal violence but only rarely warfare.” Of course, Aristotle also maintains that families and tribes tend over time to develop political communities or ‘states,’ so in this sense war is the consequence of natural aggression as expressed in the natural, if only eventual, human society, the polis. Mann admits the teleological nature of human beings without necessarily admitting their political character, whereas Aristotle locates the origin of political rule in the natural family itself. 

None of this is to deny that for “more than 95 percent of the 150,000 years of humans living on earth had passed before the appearance of warring states.” Not our genes but our societies bring us to fight wars. Mann goes further: “there has been no natural bias toward aggressive behavior,” although even that claim allows for the naturalness, if not the predominance, of human aggression. It is fair to say that aggressive behavior is brought out by circumstances—as announced, Mann wants to know what those circumstances are—and aggression is part of the natural human repertoire. Rather than saying “violence is not primordial, and civilization does not tame it” inasmuch as “the opposite is nearer the truth,” it might be more accurate to say that violence is among the primordial kinds of action, although by no means as prevalent as (for example) Hobbes contends. (This may be what Mann means when he writes, “Indirectly, of course, human nature does matter, for that yields hot tempers and aggressive ideological commitments.”) To organize violence, rulers need to train their soldiers to “obey orders,” since soldiers “are always initially terrified” of war, “would often prefer to flee than fight,” but “do usually fight,” with few desertions.

Even civilized societies need not be violent. Evidence of the human propensity to peace may be found in the Indus Valley civilization, which enjoyed, water and sewerage systems, literacy, standard weights and measures, all without the trappings of military power—a “relatively egalitarian and highly cooperative society” that traded widely but fought no wars, not even civil wars, as far as archaeologists can determine. We don’t know enough about this civilization to say why it was so peaceful, although the conjecture about egalitarian communitarianism seems to Mann to be the best bet; the work of Pierre Clastres runs along these lines, as well. [1]

More usually, “war is the sport of rulers,” not the ruled, or more polemically, “a conspiracy among old rulers to kill the young.” In pre-modern societies, the ruling class of the state “makes the decision for war, and other classes die as a result,” decisions following from “pre-capitalist modes of production” extracted from “the direct producers” (mostly peasants) “in the form of unfree labor statuses, such as serfdom, corvée labor, and slavery, all supervised by military power.” So far, Marx, but Mann doubts that rulers usually decided for war in order to “deflect class conflict”; “it may be more common for rulers to go to war to demonstrate their political strength to rival elites,” ‘the many’ being usually disorganized, only potentially powerful. 

John Locke was right. “War began when human groups settled fixed natural environments that could support them and which they called their own,” lands “worth defending” and also “worth attacking,” if one group estimated that it could succeed in seizing the lands of another. “Mother Nature does not lead us into war, for war is a human choice, yet choices are affected by ecology’s effect on society.” Nor does history determine warfare, although “past wars” do “weigh on the brains of present decision makers,” often causing a cycle of warfare that makes war to seem “normal and even virtuous, making it more likely.” Mann is especially eager to refute the grander claims of foreign-policy ‘Realists,’ who claim that states “are the sole actors in an ‘anarchic’ international space,” with no lawgiver or judge above them to stop them from fighting; under such conditions, Realists say, “contagious feelings of insecurity make war more likely” as a “necessary self-defense against the uncertainty of geopolitics.” While admitting that this can be true, it is often false, since war costs blood and treasure and its outcome is seldom certain. War occurs not out of carefully reasoned calculation of advantage so much as ideology and emotion. 

Ideology itself comes in three forms: “transcendent, immanent, and institutionalized.” Transcendent ideologies seek “to remake the world” according to a higher standard; as such, their adherents regard their enemies as evildoers or even intrinsically evil, “which increases casualties and atrocities.” Immanent ideologies, ideologies vaunting the inherent goodness of a given human group—typically the rulers, or would-be rulers—reinforce “solidarity and morale” of that group, very much including the soldiers under their command. Neither of these ideologies is long-lasting, at least at peak, warlike level. They tend to become institutionalized, as in religions but not (especially in modernity) only religions, since (for example) adherence to a secular political regime is readily passed on by means of educational and other institutions by one generation to the next. If these institutions and the ideologies they purvey endure, succeed, and if the wars they fight are successful, then bellicosity can become, as Mann likes to put it, “baked into” the ethos of the regime. “People keep doing what seemed to work in the past—path dependency,” in sociological terminology. Military success, institutionalized and spurred by a regime, will result in an ethos of militarism, valorizing honor and physical courage at the expense of “self-interest” understood as material well-being. 

Such complex, interacting causes of war “provoked Raymond Aron into declaring that a general theory of war was impossible.” [2] But, Mann bravely writes, “I will have a shot at one.” He begins by gathering evidence from civilizations and regimes on three continents, four geographical regions: The Roman Empire and modern Europe, China (both ‘ancient’ and ‘imperial’ China), Japan, and Latin America. He includes the United States only in relation to wars on the other continents and their rival regimes and in a way, this is just as well, since he evidently understands the United States least of all the regimes he examines. 

He begins with Rome, an empire under both its republican and monarchic regimes. Rome built “a formidably enduring record of militarism that few states in history could match,” thanks to “its militaristic social structure and culture,” persisting across its two main regimes. In its early years, Romans were defending themselves, but the republican regime (really an aristocracy in which decisions for war were made in the patrician-controlled Senate) “attracted neighboring aristocracies because it defended their rights against the lower classes and granted them Roman citizenship,” an attraction that lasted for the first two centuries after the founding of the republic in 509 BC. Political ambition, greed for slaves and landed property, and love of glory spurred conquest; Rome “almost never conceived of a realm of economic power relations separate from other power realms.” Glory consisted not only in the thrill of victory but in the claim that Roman rule “brought peace and the rule of law to less civilized peoples, and so was blessed by the gods.” As a religious ‘ideology’ (Mann means the term simply as a system of ideas and sentiments), this was more (again in his terms) immanent than transcendent, the relation between success and the gods’ approval, failure and the gods’ disapproval, being very tight—a civil not a prophetic religion. Roman civilization was indeed highly civil-political, was generals “used the riches won from wars to strengthen their political power in Rome,” not for the indulgence of luxurious living. “The desire to achieve domination, honor, and reputation came to triumph over money.”

“This state was really run by its militaristic class structure, defined by nobility, wealth and military service, whose combination of collective solidarity and hierarchy of rank conferred considerable infrastructural power.” The few administrators or ‘bureaucrats’ were usually slaves of the military-political class, which understood itself as an aristocracy, ruling a republic in the sense that it was not-monarchic—not in the American sense of a democracy or rule of the many refined by the deliberations of elected representatives. “The poor, the conquered, and the enslaved” usually remained firmly among ‘the ruled,’ although there were opportunities for advancement into the ruling class. “Citizens were lightly taxed, for their main duty was onerous military service,” which could last six to fourteen years, depending on the military needs of the rulers. It was only the later monarchy, under Augustus, that professionalized the army, breaking “the tight links between citizenship and the army” that had for centuries deterred attempts at military coups. Even then, soldiers could hope for reward in the form of land after their enlistment. This regime featured perpetuated wars, since continued victories were needed in order to satisfy this expectation of landed property. “The crucial Roman advantage” over its rivals was both regimes’ refusal to identify citizenship with ethnicity or region. Rome was inclusive, although not at all in the pablum-like sense prevalent in contemporary democratic republics; it ‘included’ you by conquest, but (as André Malraux wrote) “welcomed into its Pantheon the gods of the defeated” and, at least as pertinently, welcomed foreigners into citizenship, if they subsequently fought on the side of the Romans.

“Roman militarism reached its apogee in overthrowing the very republic that had institutionalized it.” Aristocrats bought land with war spoils, cultivating it with slaves drawn from the peoples their troops had conquered. With such wealth came corruption, including “electoral bribery for high office” instead of electoral reward for the exhibition of military virtue. As a result, the farms owned by peasants “could not compete, and farmers were forced off their lands into a poverty-stricken existence in Rome, whose populations rose greatly.” The ‘ancient’ equivalent of a lumpenproletariat thus arose, and slaves, too, became restive. This forced the senators to appeal to the generals for protection, generals who “recruited armies more loyal to themselves than to the state by extending military service to the lower classes, offering them bounties and lands upon discharge”—in effect taking over what had been the prerogative of the republican regime. “The ensuing civil wars of the period involved much plundering in order to pay the troops and ensure their loyalty to their generals.” 

Factionalism finally ruined the monarchy that resulted, although the emperors did hold Rome together for centuries after Augustus. Although eventually weakened so much as to become prey to the barbarians of northern Europe, “for almost a millennium, Rome was perhaps the most successful example of militarism the world has ever seen.” Unlike the most impressive empire of the East, China, the Romans’ “secret was not a powerful bureaucratic state, but the embedding of dominant classes in political institutions.” Mann hardly equates Rome’s success with goodness, however. “The Roman upper classes were the main beneficiaries of war, followed by legionaries who survived intact, merchants trading with the legions and in conquered provinces, and foreign upper classes who switched allegiance when the perceive Rome would win.” Massacre, rape, pillage, and slavery were the fate of ‘the many’ among the peoples so conquered. Peaceful economic development might have achieved greater benefits for a greater number, although Mann concedes that this is “unknowable.” As for the advance of Roman civilization, such non-material benefits as law, literature, the arts generally, this did occur but “with great loss of life.” “Overall, these wars probably benefited few of the peoples around the Mediterranean. Rationality of ends was mostly confined to Roman elites and their dependents”—a critique, perhaps, not so much of war itself as of the regime that made war its way of life.

Mann divides Chinese history into its “ancient” and “imperial” periods, devoting one chapter to each. “Ancient” China means China between 710 and 221 BC, when the Qin dynasty consolidated much of the region under its rule. China saw some 866 military conflicts during this time, but most of them “probably” were skirmishes, not wars by Mann’s definition of the term. Between 710 and the mid-400s BC, the number of Chinese states declined from over seventy to about twenty, as the stronger consumed the weaker. The final century before the Qin victory saw a substantial increase in wars per annum, as the Qin made their geopolitical push. Little wonder that the famed sixth-century military strategist, Sun Tzu, called warfare “the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Way to survival or extinction.” The Way: warfare was built into many of the Chinese regimes, early, no doubt in part because they waged so many skirmishes, early. 

Before 771, the Zhou dynasty had expanded by conquering “mostly stateless agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers.” The Zhou were the only ones who could be said to have had a ‘state,’ and their success demonstrates the vulnerability of stateless persons, once some group among them conceives of politics written larger than households, clans, and tribes. After 771, “rulers shifted from being mere heads of clans and lineages and stabilized their conquered realms by ‘enfeoffing’ kin and allies in small walled towns and military colonies, in which these became lesser replicas of the king, while their own hereditary ‘ministers’ became lesser replicas of themselves.” That is, absent a bureaucratic apparatus or Roman-style warrior-citizenship, a regime ruling a large territory necessarily devolves political authority to local aristocrats/oligarchs. Given the monarchism that pervaded all levels of government, the eldest son of the ruler’s “principal wife or concubine” inherited rule, leaving the younger sons either as rulers of towns on the outskirts of the feudal realm or as soldiers eager for more conquest. Well-armed, the rulers extracted surplus from the peasants to finance such wars, although rulers needed to be sufficiently prudent not to kill the geese that laid those golden eggs, not to take too much from the peasants or too many peasants as soldiers or slaves, who built those impressive city walls unearthed by modern archaeologists. “Warfare remained key for aristocrats, their culture bellicose,” with wounded honor often triggering wars among them. The Zhou declined “in a typical feudal way as power shifted downward through this hierarchy of lineages,” lacking “the infrastructure to control their vassals or stop their feuding.” Foreign invaders from the north and west eventually toppled them and the Zhou fled eastward, conquering weaker peoples along the way. “Militarism continued,” but China had now split into at least seventy, and possibly twice as many, sovereign “lordships.” War remained “normal, baked into culture and institutions.” Post-771, the larger monarchies swallowed the smaller ones while alternatively fighting and negotiating with one another over less-populated spaces. “There were always more winners than losers, as the declining number of states confirms,” substantiating Mann’s thesis that rulers often miscalculate their chances in war. 

Unlike northern Europe, later on, warriors fought no religious/ideological wars. Chinese aristocrats fought for “lineage, patriarchy, blood, war, oaths, and covenants of fealty,” all for the sake of honor, as is at least partly true of aristocrats in all places and times. No impersonal ‘states’ existed, as “polities were identified by the name of the ruling dynasty, a ducal house, not a state.” As in Rome, the material incentive was spoil, translated into political power. “The expected utility of war was high,” being “the only avenue for advancement.”  It was “initially bad for the conquered,” obviously, “many of whom were enslaved, but it might eventually bring economic and other civilizational benefits—provided the conquered did not rebel, for then they would be slaughtered.” War intensified in the two-and-a-half centuries before the Qin prevailed. In this “Warring States Period,” bureaucracy, fortifications, walls, armies, and wartime deaths all increased, although years of peace solemnized by treaties still outnumbered years of war. The set of ideational doctrines now known as Legalism recommended that states harness their economic resources more systematically for the purpose of warfare; such militarism “now affected the people more intensely.” “Deference to the Zhou monarch collapsed” in a period “probably more ruthless than it was in medieval Europe, where Christendom and kinship networks meant that a petty prince conquered by a major kingdom might be treated mildly.” Not so, at this time in China, were “defeated aristocracies and soldiers were put to death or enslaved en masse.” 

Aristocide weakened aristocrats vis-à-vis monarchs, and not only the Legalists but the more peaceable Confucians yearned for an idealized form of monarchy, a sort of nostalgie de la Zhou, with an added claim that such a unifying regime would be consonant with the order of the cosmos. The Confucians ‘moralized’ such rule, asserting that China was “the universal state, of greater moral authority than any rival,” justified in fighting wars if they were fought to restore China’s unity. They claimed that virtuous rulers would win wars over the unvirtuous, having won the minds and hearts of their soldiers, and even Sun Tzu concurred, writing that the ruler who obeys the “moral law” will win the consent of the people, who “will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger,” whereas an immoral ruler will always be at a disadvantage, even if skilled in the art of war, a man of virtù in the sense Machiavelli would formulate, centuries later. Mann takes the occasion to lament, “If only that were true.” By contrast, the Legalists, led by Han Fei, “saw the state as the only source of order and morality, so all should be subordinated to it.” None of these ideational factions was militarist, however, preferring the (to coin a phrase) peaceful rise of a dynasty as the better way, either because it was more moral (Confucians) or often more sensible (Legalists). Religiously, they adhered to cults of the ancestors, not a transcendental God associated with Church and Ummah in the Europe of several centuries later.

Geopolitics strengthened the states on the northern and western peripheries of China. They confronted the barbarians, nomads and semi-nomads who augmented their horses and camels with saddles and stirrups, enabling war by horse archers with iron-tipped arrows. Fortunately for the Chinese, nomads don’t institutionalize political power, so their formidable cavalry could do little more than launch raids. This gave the frontier Chinese time to develop their own cavalry and to build defensive walls. Eventually, this gave the western and northern dynasties a substantial advantage over the Chinese of the south and east. By the sixth century BC, China saw four dominant states, with the Qin eventually defeating the others. Balance-of-power strategies are fragile, Mann observes. 

The Qin won because they were advantageously situated to the north and west of the other warring states. Having fought barbarian cavalries, they had experience in wars of rapid maneuver and also enjoyed relative security thanks to mountains that protected them on two sides. They lived “outside the main line of fire of most wars,” and so could wait “for most of their rivals to weaken each other before they attacked,” a process speeded by exercising divide-and-rule tactics—a strategy the Chinese Communist Party evidently has understood. As “their territorial gains were piecemeal and opportunist, they did not unduly alarm rivals,” another lesson taken by the CCP; the Qin “had not seemed an existential threat” to its rivals “until too late.” By the last third of the third century BC, the Qin shifted to more blatant expansionism, “wag[ing] war against one’s neighbor in alliance with more distant powers that could force the neighbor into a two-front war.” (The CCP did this initially, allying with the United States against the Soviet Union, its former sponsor, but then shifting to alliances with the nearer powers of Russia and Iran against the United States, in what is now a three-front war in Europe, the Middle East, eastern Asia with the United States.) The Qin also practiced what we would now call economic statism, making sure that they controlled the most powerful civil-social groups. “Surpluses must be consumed by war, for settling into enjoyment of the surplus would lead to self-interested squabbling and idleness,” as indeed it has often done in the West. In summing up the results in terms of morality, Mann judges that “Qin unification was seen as likely to bring order to China, but it is finally impossible to say whether the millions of casualties and the devastation produced by hundreds of wars were justified by the much later creation of a somewhat more peaceful and very long-lasting realm.” It is safe to say, however, that the ruling Qin had no qualms on that score.

“For most of its over two-thousand-year history, the Chinese Empire,” under a succession of dynasties, “was the leading edge of human civilization.” For much of that time, it waged war at a rate similar to that of Europe, a parity that only changed in the middle of the eighteenth century, as Europeans more fully deployed the military technologies generated by modern science. Chinese wars were fought mostly against the northern and western “pastoralists,” whose dependence on ever-moving herds of livestock instead of stable plots of farmland made them elusive prey and, sometimes, formidable enemies. The Qins were displaced by the Han dynasty, which ruled from 206 BC to 8 A.D., a regime that vindicated, during that time, Confucian mildness and bureaucratic rule over Legalist harshness and militarism. The bureaucracy under the Han and the subsequent Tang dynasties increased to 153,000 officials, ten times larger than the Roman bureaucracy, although puny compared to the bureaucracies of modern states, which “pursue many functions unknown to early states.” Bureaucrats acquired their offices through competitive examinations, causing “a national gentry-bureaucrat class with a common Confucian culture” to emerge, linking the central government to local ruling classes and thereby avoiding feudalism, unlike post-Roman Europe. Confucians controlled the education system, teaching emperors and the ruling families. As for Legalism, in accordance with its name it provided “the law and punishment, Confucianism the morality.” All of this ensured that emperors could still make war but not without the limits commended by Confucianists, limits substantiated by their alliance with local aristocrats, who esteemed Confucianism’s “advocacy of low taxes” and what Mann somewhat anachronistically calls “laissez-faire” economics. Then as before, these ideational systems “lacked a transcendent divinity,” preferring order “above any ultimate notion of truth.” An emperor who failed to keep order “was perceived as having lost the mandate of heaven and could be overthrown,” but the moderation inculcated by a Confucian education made such failures uncommon. 

Internationally, the Chinese emperors practiced “tributary diplomacy” over Japan, Korea, and Vietnam, and indeed ruled Vietnam for a thousand years. So long as the neighboring states paid tribute in the forms of material support and deference to the emperor, they could rule themselves. (Taiwan wasn’t occupied until 1662.) The emperors fought only approximately a dozen land wars over six hundred years—evidence of “a defensive, diplomatic imperialism, mostly at peace, especially under Han Chinese dynasties.” “Here was a satiated power.” By what Europeans now call the late medieval and early modern period, the Chinese were calling their imperial rule “all under heaven” or “harmonious world.” After all, “once a state did homage” to the emperor, “it could participate more in the world’s biggest trading network” and could “deploy their forces elsewhere” than their border with China. “For China the main reward was peace,” and they had no fear of the European barbarians whose refusal to kowtow to the emperor merely meant their exclusion from the Chinese market.  Mediating conflicts between other Asian countries, “never submitting to mediation themselves,” the emperors “said they were bringing civilization to Asia, and neighbors sometimes appeared to accept this.” Mann approves: “The answer here to ‘who benefited?’ was almost everyone.” 

The main threat came from those barbarian peoples to the north and west, the “marcher lords.” “Ethnic stereotypes sometimes intensified hostility,” leading one official of the Song dynasty, which ruled from 960 to 1279 AD, to call the Khitan people “insects, reptiles, snakes, and lizards,” and Ming officials to call the Mongols a people with “faces of humans but the hearts of wild beasts,” “dogs and sheep whose insatiable appetites and wild natures made them unenculturable.” For their part, barbarian rulers or ‘khans’ “regarded the Chinese as herds of sheep to be pushed around at will.” Such “racism made calculative decisions more difficult,” as each side loathed and underestimated the other. But above all, “China was too big to be stably ruled by a single monarchical state.” Not only barbarian incursions but provincial rebellions periodically sundered the empire, although for centuries the dynasties would strike back, recovering lost lands. 

The Song were overthrown in the north by the Mongols under the ruthless Chinggis (more usually “Genghis”) Khan. “Steppe and field came under a single yoke, as “fewer than one million Mongols with an army of just over 100,000 ruled half of Asia,” albeit “precariously.” In his regime, “aristocratic status was achieved through performance in war.” Rather like the Romans, Chinggis did not hesitate to integrate Chinese military men into his own force. “Mongol civilization left many positive legacies for Eurasia even after its empires collapsed,” although “whether these benefits were worth the death of around 10 million people is another matter.” Chinggis’s grandson, Kublai Khan, completed the conquest of the Song in 1271, supplementing his inherited khanate with a successful claim to the Chinese throne, founding the Yuan dynasty. This dynasty itself foundered in the jungles of southeast Asia and the seas off Japan, falling to the Ming dynasty, which ruled from 1368 to the 1650s, and which fell in its turn to another set of khanate rulers who named themselves the Qing dynasty. The Qing rulers were no Confucians, valorizing martial virtues which they instantiated in “their rituals, artworks, and monuments.” “As usual among the Mongols,” rule after the initial conquest “was not cruel if a people did not rebel, as the Qing drew together agriculturalists and pastoralists” with a Rome-like recognition of “the conquered peoples’ ethnic cultures, descent myths, and lineage histories.” They fought a war in Myanmar/Burma in the 1760s but wisely concluded a peace before getting too much entangled. The emperor complained, “Human beings cannot compete with Nature….So [I am] determined never to have a war again” in that place.

By the nineteenth century, the Europeans began encroaching. China may have invented guns, but the Europeans had improved them, and they had established modern, centralized states that extracted men and materiel much more efficiently than the Chinese emperors could do. “Over two millennia this was the most technologically inventive, educated, and culturally creative civilization on earth, one that almost broke through to an industrial society six to seven hundred years before Europe did.” But “almost” doesn’t count in international politics; Confucian bureaucrats and law-enforcement Legalists did not conceive of the experimental science aimed at conquering nature for the relief of man’s estate, an ambition that the Qing emperor had judged irrational. 

In Asia, Japan is to the continent what the British Isles are to mainland Europe. Mann turns there, for his third ‘case history’ of warfare and regimes. For centuries, its geographic isolation shielded it from foreign wars but it fought many civil wars between the eighth and twelfth centuries AD. By the twelfth century, the military class, the samurai “dominated the aristocracy.” The Chinese Yuan dynasty’s navy attacked at the end of the thirteenth century, only to be defeated by storms which wrecked their ships and cut off the troops who had gone ashore. The ensuing massacre persuaded Chinese rulers to leave the Japanese alone for the next three centuries. The Japanese wouldn’t leave one another alone, however; prolonged internecine wars “prevented economic growth” well into the 1600s. 

“Warfare in Japan was more ferocious than in medieval Europe because of distinctive features of Japanese feudalism.” The state owned the land but clans ruled each parcel, collecting taxes from it. If one clan “wiped out an enemy clan, it could claim possession of its lands, which the central authorities then ratified”—ensuring frequent efforts at mass slaughter. No one religion predominated, and so none could restrain the warfare; the state, its tax revenues so limited, also lacked the power to stop the fighting. Eventually, one clan leader, Oda Nobunaga, amassed sufficient military power to seize the capital and eventually to extend his rule to nearly half of Japan’s provinces. “Ruthless, intemperate, impetuous, and unpredictable,” Nobunaga “preferr[ed] terrorizing over negotiations,” saying, after killing everyone in a temple fortress, “You cannot imagine my happiness that I have slain them all, for I hated them deeply.” Although he was himself killed in a coup attempt in 1583, Nobunaga took the first step in unifying Japan; his successor, Toyotami Hideyoshi, ruled with mildness, conciliating the defeated and reconciling them to imperial rule, while Hideyoshi’s successor, Tokugawa Ieyasu prudently refrained from invading Korea while his main rivals forged ahead and exhausted their strength. “Unification produced a spectacular reversal of history: almost no wars over 250 years.” The many peasant uprisings, usually over taxes, were easily crushed. Peace enabled commerce and agriculture to flourish, cities to thrive. The samurai could switch from military action to policing.

This ended with the arrival of British and U.S. naval forces in the nineteenth centuries, forcing the emperor to sign treaties opening the trading ports to foreigners. The treaties stipulated that resident aliens were subject to the laws of their own countries, not the laws of Japan, and that the foreigners could adjust their own tariffs at any time while Japanese tariffs for imported and exported goods were fixed by the treaties. Unlike their policy in China and India, however, the foreign powers did not rule, did not add Japan to their empires. This gave the Japanese the opportunity to learn modern science and then to apply the new technologies to military revival. They were exceptionally able students. By the 1890s, they had settled on an imperial policy of their own, directed at China, Korea, and Taiwan. In 1905, when they saw Russia planning to extend its railroads and fortify its ports in the far east, they launched a preemptive strike in Siberia and Manchuria, wiping out the Russian fleet in the region and defeating Russian land forces in “the first victory inflicted by non-Europeans over a major European power” in modern times. (“Many oppressed peoples celebrated.”) Japan followed this triumph with the annexation of Korea, five years later, and “wisely chose the Allied side” in the Great War. “By the 1920s Japan had a colonial empire in Taiwan and Korea; an informal empire in Manchuria and parts of north China; and substantially free trade with the rest of Asia, the British Empire, and the United States.” Postwar treaties limiting the size of navies, worldwide, “end[ed] British dominance in Asia and allow[ed] Japan to play the United States against Britain.” 

Within the country itself, Japanese liberals reduced the military budget in order to lower taxes and reduce the sway of the military. This led to a regime struggle between Japan’s ‘Anglo-Saxons,’ who admired parliamentarism and advocated an “informal empire” of commercial hegemony, and its ‘Germans’ (oligarchs, army officers, bureaucrats) who admired hierarchical government and advocated an empire based on military strength. The more extreme ‘Germans’ endorsed the recommendations of Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, who preached “total war” against the West in Asia, envisioning a series of short but decisive battles culminating in “a final war” between Japan and the United States. ‘German,’ indeed—more specifically, Hegelian: “The last war in human history is approaching,” he wrote, a “titanic world conflict, unprecedented in human history” will serve as “the gateway to a golden age of human culture, a synthesis of East and West, the last and highest stage of human civilization.” By taking more territory on the Asian mainland and establishing an industrial base there, Japan could “harmoniously join” Japanese financial power and industrial management with Chinese natural resources and labor. Koreans could “do the farming.” 

Although under different circumstances the liberals might have enjoyed the advantage of popular support, the Japanese people were impressed by the military’s string of victories and offended by racism in the West, whether in the form of the white-man’s-burden imperialism of Europe or of the harsh immigration restrictions in America. Liberalism in theory was contradicted in practice. The Great Depression completed their disillusionment with Western economics. Between 1936 and the end of the Second World War, the de facto rule of military elites subordinated labor and capital to war, seizing Manchuria in 1931 and attacking China, then ruled by the nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-Shek, in 1937. “The war proved costlier and more difficult than anticipated,” as Japanese forces were in the grips of delusory notions of racial superiority, committing “atrocities alienating many Chines who might otherwise have joined them.” Japan’s rise to world-power status had been carefully calculated and successful, “but ideology-infused emotions were beginning to cloud material interest and rational strategy.” As the United States shipped military supplies to China and Britain designed a railroad from Burma to ship supplies there, Japan saw their war in China beginning to stalemate. They responded by invading Vietnam in 1940 and, after the Roosevelt administration embargoed exports to Japan—crucially, oil—the Japanese regime chose to wipe out the American fleet at Pearl Harbor, cutting the remaining civilian officials out of their deliberations. This would give Japan a free hand with which to seize control of oil fields in Dutch East Asia/Indonesia.  Mann stages this as a war prompted by the rivalry of “different forms of imperialism”—military in Japan, commercial/financial in the United States.  “Both were only exaggerating the reality the other posed,” but for the Japanese military rulers compromise would lead to dishonor, violation of the moral core of their regime. They also felt contempt for what they took to be the softness, the decadence, of the liberal democratic regimes. Their military difficulty was simple: Japan could not invade the American mainland, but the Americans could attack Japan. When trapped on the Pacific islands they had conquered, Japanese soldiers fought to the death and embraced it: “On ten islands the average death rate was an astonishing 97 percent,” a rate “unparalleled in any other war discussed in this book.” Notoriously, it took the atomic bombing of Japanese cities to extract surrender. “The mayhem of the Asia-Pacific War was a far cry from the calm calculation of Realism or the beneficence of liberalism,” Mann concludes.

Europe, eventually the home of the ur-Realist, Machiavelli, and of such liberals as Locke and Montesquieu, “may have had more interstate wars than any other region of the world” in the thousand years stretching from the tenth century to the twentieth. That is, neither realism nor liberalism had as much influence as their theorizers and practitioners hoped—very much including those would-be Realists, Machiavelli and Hobbes. 

After the fall of the Roman empire, Western Europe saw the rise of “large ex-barbarian kingdoms built on Roman foundations,” kingdoms weakened by succession crises and conquered by a succession of warlords, each of whom met ruin in turn. “The Franks came the closest to reestablishing political unity within Europe, but the division of their realm into three parts undercut this.” The conquests of Spain and the Balkans by Muslims, and subsequent European resistance, “added to continental militarism.” 

European feudalism prevailed because there were no stable empires and as yet no modern states. Kings financed their wars from resources derived from their personal estates, paying mercenaries and conscripting their vassals. “Thus, kings had an incentive to make war in order to acquire new lands, which they could distribute as rewards to existing and new vassals, who in return would provide more soldiers,” a “circular process” which “made war more likely” while keeping European military power “highly decentralized.” Christian piety entwined with aristocratic honor, yielding “consciousness of the duties of rank, courtoisie toward ladies, and protection of the poor”—a culture “more religious than that of medieval China or Japan” but no less warlike, as young men of noble families, “especially younger sons and bastards” who sought war as the means of satisfying “greed for land, wealth, and serfs,” “glory and honor.” 

Mann identifies three “phases” of war in Europe. In the Hundred Years’ War, beginning in 1340, Edward III of England attempted to recover English domains in France lost by his father. He fought Philip of Valois, who claimed the French throne after Charles IV died without a direct male heir. Since both men asserted a legal claim to the throne, both sought alliance with French aristocrats. There being no modern state, loyalty attached to persons, not country. The people had no ‘say’ at all. The war ended when the Duke of Burgundy defected to the French in 1435, tipping the scales. Despite being started on ‘aristocratic’ terms, the war saw a ‘democratization’ of war, as infantry-archers replaced knights on horseback and cannons made castles less imposing. The aristocratic ethos ensured that “righteousness outweighed prudence,” as “war was what you declared when your honor had been affronted or when you saw an opportunity to claim long-nurtured rights.” Accordingly, Mann finds it “difficult to separate greed and glory” in feudal wars. He does find self-imposed limitations, however, rules of war consistent with the fact that “this was a struggle over who was the rightful king of France, divinely anointed.” Knights captured one another but held their captives for ransom and did not kill prisoners. Also unlike the Chinese, European aristocrats lacked efficiency; drilling and logistics were minimal. 

The second phase consisted of the religious wars fought in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. “For over 150 years after Luther’s defiance, Europe saw major conflict between the Catholic Church and Protestant sects, all possessing rival transcendent ideologies claiming divinely inspired truth and seeking to impose it on others.” That is, Christianity ceased to be a curb on war and became a spur to it and more, causing war to intensify. “Forcible regime change” was the aim of regimes and their armies. The Thirty Years’ War centered in the German states, pitting Protestant German princes against the Catholic Hapsburgs, rulers of the Holy Roman Empire. Benefiting from new agricultural techniques that increased the productivity of heavy, wetter soils of the north and from their seizure of Catholic monastic estates, the Germans shifted geopolitical power from the Mediterranean to the northwest. Offshore, the English Protestant Tudors worked to prevent alliance between the Habsburgs and France, the two main Catholic countries. But French monarchs “prioritized geopolitics over religion” after they reached a settlement with their native Protestants, the Huguenots; France first financed, then fought alongside the Protestant armies, preventing the Hapsburg empire from dominating the continent. The 1648 Peace of Westphalia limited war to border disputes and dynastic matters, forbidding wars to change the religious regime of any country. As a result, wars in the next century “were usually fought for clear and limited goals and ended with negotiated treaties,” thus instancing Realist theories of international politics more fully than perhaps any others, before or since. 

That didn’t last. “Ideology as a driver of war shifted from religion to race,” even as the Enlightenment shifted intellectual authority from religion and churchmen to materialist science and scientists. “Racist beliefs were not new among imperialists—as we saw in China,” but ‘scientific’ racism, wedded to the power of the technologies generated by modern science, was. Although (pseudo-) scientific racism justified ever expanding imperial conquest, made possible by technology and by the organizational capacities of modern states, it also “prevent[ed] the assimilation of natives that the Roman and Chinese empires had achieved,” ultimately shortening the time of European world domination. In Europe itself, the peripheral states, England and Russia, prevented any continental empire from establishing itself, the most spectacular attempt being that of Napoleon. Although the Congress of Vienna settlement of 1815 secured European monarchies, the democratization of militaries accelerated by both the French Revolution and Napoleon induced those monarchs to develop “top-down versions of mass mobilization armies.” Peace in Europe (only one major war, in Crimea, between 1815 and 1914) and imperialism overseas set Europe up for the even more cataclysmic wars of the following centuries.

The World Wars were “the two deadliest and least rational wars in history,” culminating “in the suicide of imperialism.” The First World War saw the unbalancing of the apparently stable balance of power between the Central Powers, Germany (unified during the nineteenth century by the Hohenzollern dynasty) and Austria-Hungary, and the Triple Entente, consisting of Britain, France, and Russia. The regimes of the Central Powers saw a split between militarists and civilians in which the militarists, as they would do in Japan, won the struggle. They miscalculated the character of the war itself; although they had the sobering example of industrial warfare before them, in the example of the American Civil War, militarists assumed that the high casualties there only showed how incompetent Americans were when it came to fighting. “None made plans for the massive industrial and military mobilization that proved necessary.” And when the Germans, banking on that supposed incompetence, declared unlimited submarine attacks on American shipping, the entry of the United States into the war ruined them.

World War II “differed,” as it began with “naked aggression encountering survival defense” and “was primarily an ideological war” resembling the European wars of religion. Inspired by his “transcendent ideological vision of a Thousand-Year Reich,” Hitler “consistently declared that he sought world conquest,” a major justification for which he found in rescuing the world from the “Jewish capitalism” supposedly “dominating U.S. governments.” ‘Race science’ told him that he was being supremely realistic in believing so, but reality begged to differ. 

If there was anything like a Thousand-Year Reich, it was in Europe’s immediate past, not Germany’s future—a ‘reich’ of warfare, as “militarism was so baked in to culture and institutions that war became what rulers did when they felt insulted, wronged, entitled, or self-righteous in seizing the opportunities provided by succession crises,” whether monarchic or democratic. “Through all these wars, few people benefited,” Mann concludes, although it must be said that political and economic liberty finally resulted, as the many attempted tyrannies were defeated. 

Mann’s final case study is South and Central America. He begins with the two major indigenous empires, ruled by the Aztecs in Mexico and the Inca in Peru. Having long served as mercenaries for other states, the Aztecs founded the city of Tenochtitlán in 1325. A century later, they allied with the city-states of Texcoco, and Tlacopan, establishing an empire that survived until the Spanish conquistadors imposed an empire of their own, beginning in 1519. The fertile, well-populated Basin of Mexico, with internal communication assured by its system of lakes, formed the geographic basis of an empire that “defeated many city-states, replacing their rulers, raping their women, capturing their men, and distributing estates and their workers to their own noble and warriors,” thereby “achiev[ing] their two main aims, to seize lands and labor and to worship the gods by sacrificing captives.” “Numerical superiority was always their main military weapon,” but Aztec core military units were “well drilled, and all young men received military training.” “War was rational for them and highly calculative,” if of no benefit to their victims. The empire grew to encompass more than four hundred cities, whose rulers swore allegiance to their conquerors, paid tribute and corvée labor, and provided soldiers when so instructed. The conquered were never brought into the Aztec way of life, which was highly ritualized. (“Spanish soldiers had never before seen enemies doing ritual dances as they advanced into battle, decked out in bright colors, covered with paint, jewelry, feathers, elaborate headdresses and hair styles, some resembling jaguars, eagles, or other creatures with religious significance.”) One important benefit of victory in war, the Aztecs believed, was to provide the means of the survival of life itself. “The sun god needed to drink human blood to survive”; “if he died, darkness would envelop the earth and all life would end.” Since the sacrifice of war prisoners was “the only reliable source” of the “quantities of blood” needed by such a deity, prisoners taken by the Aztecs were “delivered to the gods by having their beating hearts ripped out, their blood spilling out over the temple steps in the presence of the people,” who were grateful and well reassured at the sight. Each new ruler “had to deliver large numbers” of prisoners for sacrifice “to show he was approved by the gods.” Spaniards, outnumbered but fortified by superior military technology and the diseases they introduced unintentionally, defeated the Aztecs by promising neighboring peoples a share of the booty if they joined the fight. They did, although the Spanish then betrayed their allies and conquered them, too. 

The Spanish went on to conquer the Inca, rulers of an older empire centered in Peru. Inca monarchs proved their fitness for rule by conquest, the continuation of which was fortified by the custom whereby royal successors inherited offices, titles, and an army but not wealth, which they could only take by victories in war. If a conquered enemy agreed to pay homage, he could continue to rule. The army officers were taken exclusively from the royal family, but excess political ambition was discouraged by the practice of “executing overly successful generals.” With no lakes, as in Mexico, the Inca oversaw the construction of “a magnificent road system covering the long spine of their empire,” using corvée labor. Those among their conquerors who survived sometimes received land upon their return home, but the main beneficiary was the king of Spain, entitled to one-fifth of the spoils. 

It is the post-colonial period in the region that has been in many respects unique—unique for its relative peaceableness. Looking to the “new liberal republican ideology” animating the United States’ regime (President Jefferson gave a copy of the Declaration of Independence to a visiting Brazilian medical student to take back to his country, so the Americans were not slow to encourage this interest), the colonists saw their chance when Napoleon invaded Spain and deposed its king, who was a Bourbon and therefore Napoleon’s enemy. The restoration of the Bourbons in 1815 and Ferdinand VII’s claim of absolute rule over the colonists only provoked them further. By 1833, ten newly independent states had their sovereignty recognized by the United States, Great Britain, and the pope. 

These new republics—in fact ruled by wealthy landowners—lacked the organizational capacity to wage war, precisely because those landowners preferred “a weak state unable to interfere with [their] power and wealth.” Only two South American states, Chile and Paraguay, achieved ‘stateliness’ in the modern sense. No ideology of militarism developed. They shared a culture of Iberian Catholicism, and the landowners “had much more in common with each other than they did with their populace.” That precluded the more dangerous forms of nationalism. Moreover, there was little land over which states could dispute, and the largest state, Brazil, was isolated from the others by mountains and the Amazonian Forest. Mexico, to the north, was also “a giant, but Britain and the United Sates would not permit it to swallow up the minnow states to its south.” The longest, bloodiest war was the War of the Triple Alliance, which pitted Uruguay, Argentina, and Brazil against Paraguay, whose president, Francisco Solano López, became too ambitious for his, and his country’s, own good. The result of his defeat was the halving of Paraguay’s national output, the cession of one-third of its territory, and its reduction to a buffer state alongside its rivals, who didn’t trust one another sufficiently to extend their warfare any further. The weak tax base of Latin American states made wars few and short. Worse still in the eyes of ambitieux, every regime that began a war was “overthrown either during or immediately after the war,” “a salutary lesson.” “Latin American history does reassure liberal theory that in the right circumstances human beings can calculate that war is bad and to be avoided.”

In general, then, Mann finds evidence that to initiate war is to court ruin, and such a war often exacts an extremely high toll in blood and treasure on the winners. Since the overwhelming majority of regimes have been ruled by one or a few, they are the principal material beneficiaries of victory, even if their peoples may satisfy a rooting interest in the outcome. In the second half of his book, he analyzes the results of his case studies more thoroughly.

 

Note

1. See Pierre Clastres: Society Against the State. Robert Hurley and Abe Stein translation. New York: Zone Books, 1987. See review, “Where Does Political Life Come From?” on this website under “Philosophy.”
2. Raymond Aron: Peace and War: A Theory of International Relations. Richard Howard and Annette Baker translation. New York: Routledge, 2003. This later edition of the English translation includes an excellent forward by Daniel J. Mahoney and Brian C. Anderson.

Raymond Aron: The Opium of the Intellectuals. Terence Kilmartin translation. New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2001 [1955].

 

In his introduction to this “great polemic,” Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr. sets its political context. In 1955, when the book was first published, Paris was “the central battlefield” in the “Cold War of words” between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Second World War had left Germany, home of many of the defining ideas that sparked the war, politically divided and morally discredited. Not intellectually discredited, however; arguably, Americans, Russians, and the peoples who aligned or refused to align with either of them had been decisively influenced by German philosophy. Jean-Paul Sartre was the most famous intellectual luminary in the City of Light, combining Germany’s Marxism with his own doctrine of Existentialism, which he had forged from shards of Nietzsche, Husserl, and Heidegger. Then as now, it took civic courage to go against the prevailing fashions, and it was a good thing Aron had it, since “however minor the consequences may seem to be of what intellectuals in Paris happen to believe,” “the good sense of non-philosophers needs to be protected against bad philosophy even when it goes over their heads, for there are many, especially among the young, who will be impressed with such high-sounding doctrines as existentialism and phenomenology, especially when combined with the moral content and fueled by the passionate hatred characteristic of Marxism”—hatred of the way of life the Soviet Union intended to ruin and replace with its own. The book was still timely when reissued, more than three decades later, and remains timely today because although no one but historians and students of French literature read Sartre, anymore, American intellectual life has become increasingly Frenchified. Marxian ‘consciousness’ has been replaced with ‘wokeness,’ which sounds a lot less clunky to citizens of the great democracy, but the dogmatism of egalitarian grievance remains, and Aron’s devastating critique of it remains, as the American Left once liked to say, relevant. As Mansfield notes, “In this book Raymond Aron revealed the nature of the thinker in this century and, probably, the next one, too.”

In his foreword, Aron explains that he writes “not so much against the Communists as against the communisants, those who do not belong to the party but whose sympathies are with the Soviet world.” Given the postwar economic recovery, “why has Marxism come back into fashion?”—as it has, in altered form, in the United States of the twenty-first century. Then and there, just as here and now, this fashion “is due more to the unhappy state of the Western conscience than to reasoning about the concepts of class and dialectic” found in Marx. Persuading one’s opponents to feel guilty has always been an effective way of disarming them morally, and thus politically, since political rule stands and falls on moral authority as much as on force. Egalitarianism, mutual ‘recognition,’ ‘intersubjectivity’—much of the jargon remains the same, arguably not despite but because of the ruin of the Soviet empire. What Aron calls “the myth of the Left” remains: “the illusion of the orientation of history in a constant direction, of evolution toward a state of affairs in harmony with an ideal.” Sartre “continues to see no other road to salvation” for humankind “but that of Socialism,” even when confronted with the mass murders committed by Lenin and Stalin. Similarly, a decade later, the American New Left would idolize Mao, Fidel, Che. Today, having learned from those mistakes on the rhetorical level, Leftists lift up no foreign heroes, preferring to be admired themselves.

Since the last quarter of the eighteenth century, French politics had been regime politics, that is, a series of struggles not simply over what policies a given regime might pursue but over what regime should rule France, beginning with the overthrow of the Bourbon monarchy by the French republicans. The United States has seen such struggles, too: Tories against Patriots, Confederates against Unionists and, less violently, conservatives against progressives. But the French struggles were more frequent, indeed chronic. Indeed, “France is generally considered to be the ancestral home of the antagonism between Right and Left,” an antagonism centered for a long time over religion (the Left being anti-clerical and indeed animated by an atheist form of rationalism) and over the social order (the Left being anti-aristocratic and urban, anti-rural). “The one invokes family, authority, religion, the other equality, reason, liberty.” Nor was the Left itself united. Just when the Third Republic had ended the “internal quarrels of the bourgeois Left” by firmly replacing both liberal monarchism and Bonapartism with a regime of liberal republicanism, it faced a challenge from “the anti-capitalist Left,” the proletariat and its putative spokesmen. Now, in 1955, the Left drinks “a kind of watered-down Marxism,” the effects of which makes them believe that the “disparity between the capabilities of constitutional regimes and the problems they have to face in governing industrial mass societies” can only be met by “sacrific[ing] political liberties for the sake of vigorous action.” In this, Aron observes, Communism and fascism “meet one another in totalitarianism.” Although the communisants themselves shrink from such violence, they hope that the Soviets “will draw nearer to democratic socialism in proportion as ideological skepticism and bourgeois values develop inside it”—what later became known as ‘convergence theory.’ 

What this means in practice is easy to understand but hard to see when one’s mind is intoxicated by ideology and wishful thinking. In the countries where democratic socialism triumphed, it brought “not liberty against authority or the people against the privileged few, but one power against another, one privileged class against another”; while nationalization or socialization of capitalist industries “eliminates the political which the industrial bosses were alleged to have exercised sub rosa” over czars and elected representatives alike, “the powers which they have been forced to surrender revert to the rulers of the State.” A new ruling class, a new oligarchy, takes over, unrestrained by the supposedly feeble apparatus of ‘bourgeois democracy,’ in those nations where it existed. More, “the reforms of the Left end up by achieving a redistribution of power without either raising up the poor and the humble or casting down the rich and the powerful.” If extended to the Western democracies of the mid-1950s, “the extension of the techno-bureaucratic hierarchy would mean the liquidation” of the complex structures of modern civil societies and their replacement with a state apparatus controlled by the new oligarchs. “The day when society as a whole becomes comparable to a single gigantic enterprise must surely bring an irresistible temptation for the men at the top to be totally indifferent to the approval or disapproval of the masses below.” This has been less so in Great Britain, where the Left is moderate, “born of a secularized Christianity”; “discussion is still possible between Right and Left in Britain.” Not so in France, where Left and Right both indulge in the illusion that something called ‘History’ is ‘on their side.’ Increasingly not so in the United States of this century, although the American Right is far less optimistic, and more closely associated with Christianity, than the mid-twentieth century French Right had become.

The myth of the Left includes the idea of progress, of ‘History’ defined as the course of events which, like a stream, heads somewhere. In its more radical forms, the idea of progress takes on the violence of rapids and waterfalls, “foster[ing] the expectation of a break with the normal trend of human affairs.” Progress then means revolution, regime change. In fact, “regimes which fall victim to popular uprisings or coups d’état have proved themselves guilty not of moral vices (they are often more humane than their conquerors) but of political errors”; by contrast, “regimes such as those of Great Britain or the United Staes which have survived the onrush of historical change have given proof of the supreme virtue, which is a mixture of steadfastness and flexibility.” As for the socialist revolutions, “like all the revolutions of the past,” they “merely entail the violent replacement of one elite by another,” presenting “no special characteristic which would justify their being hailed as ‘the end of history.'” This hasn’t much damaged the myth of the revolution, partly because it “benefited from the prestige of aesthetic modernism,” which runs on a similar contempt for bourgeois sensibilities. But once again, the appearance is deceptive; the Soviets in reality demand of their artists ‘socialist realism,’ not modernism, whatever Picasso may have wished. Indeed, “there are obvious similarities between the bad taste of the Victorian bourgeoisie and that of the Soviet bourgeoisie of today, equally proud of their material success.” 

It is true that “the opposition to conventional morality served as a link between the political and the literary avant-garde,” but “there again, I think, the Revolution has been accorded an undeserved prestige: it is wrongly considered to be the inevitable offspring of humanism.” Marx typified the atheism of many nineteenth-century intellectuals, claiming that “Man ‘alienates’ himself by projecting on to God the perfections to which he aspires,” that disillusioned, scientific men “must seek to attain on this earth the perfection which their imaginations have conceived but which still eludes them.” But atheism itself need not revolutionize; it might as easily keep to itself. What leads to revolution is progressivist historicism, Marx’s particular claim about the “dialectic of history.” Sartre retains some of this, but no longer on a rationalist basis. He takes from the writings of ‘the young Marx,’ the Marx who had not yet conceived of Das Kapital, “the criticism of formal democracy, the analysis of ‘alienation,’ and the affirmation of the urgency of destroying the capitalist order.” This non-rationalist neo-Marxism appeals to the France of the dreary Fourth Republic, wherein “a stagnant society and an ideologically-minded intelligentsia” play off one another, inasmuch as “the less attractive the reality, the more the intellectual dreams of revolution” will appeal none-too-prudent minds. “The myth of the Revolution serves as a refuge for utopian intellectuals,” becoming “the mysterious, unpredictable intercessor between the real and the ideal.” 

To this myth of the Revolution, the Left adds the myth of the proletariat, which it “cast[s] in the role of collective savior” in its imitation-Bible eschatology of the chosen people “elected through suffering for the redemption of humanity.” “The resurrection, in seemingly scientific form, of age-old beliefs has a natural appeal for minds weaned on faith.” Aron respects the origin of the myth without endorsing its novel iteration, asking, “How can the millions of factory workers, dispersed among thousands of enterprises, be the instruments of such an undertaking?” According to the young Marx, it is the severe repression of the workers, their alienation from bourgeois society, that makes their sufferings universal, “makes them men pure and simple,” stripped of the accoutrements, including the illusions, of the bourgeoisie. The problem is obvious: whatever the workers may have suffered in Marx’s time, their mid-twentieth century counterparts now enjoy middle-class wages and ways of life. Today’s worker “is not at all like a universal man but like a citizen of one nation or the member of one party,” and not usually a revolutionary party, at that. To remedy this embarrassment, Sartre follows Lenin. Revolution will require a revolutionary political party to enact it. From this, however, the dilemma of oligarchy once more arises. “The level of salaries in the West depends, one knows, on productivity, on the division of the national income between investments, military expenditure, and consumption, and the distribution of incomes among the various classes. This distribution is no more egalitarian in a regime such as that of Soviet Russia than in a capitalist or semi-capitalist regime.” Worse still, in the Soviet bloc “economic expansion has contributed to the growth of [political] power rather than to raising the standard of living” for the workers, “since the new ruling classes probably do not consume any less of the national wealth than the old.” And the proletariat “has not been freed from the risk of deportation, or from the tyranny of the labor permit” (workers in the Communist regimes could not work at a particular job without State permission), “or from the authority of the managers.” “It is through a kind of intellectual sleight-of-hand that the regime whose authority derives from Marxist ideology has been baptized proletarian.”

“Finally, in the last resort, the philosophy of the existentialists is morally inspired. Sartre is obsessed by the desire for authenticity, for communication, for freedom.” His is a “verbal revolutionism,” a revolutionism of the head and the tongue, not of the hand. One might say that he has fallen into an atheist version of Machiavelli’s caricature of Christianity, supposedly a religion that distracts the mind from material reality, rendering its followers helpless before any realist. Marx’s denigration of religion as the opium of the people actually applies to the Marxo-existentialism of the French intellectuals. There is even a segment of the French Catholic Church that hopes for a return to Christianity by socialist proletarians; they range their own Church against the intellectuals’ churchiness, one set of priests against another, in the race down the course of events toward socialism. What has actually happened, intolerable to souls in search of drama, is “the dullness of real emancipation,” the rise in living standards produced by ‘bourgeois’ social reformers, whereby “the workers of the West have merely swelled the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie” under the mild if stultifying rule of the administrative state which has swelled thanks to progress, all right: the progress of technology. “The manual worker remains at the foot of the social ladder, not through the fault of capitalism or socialism but through the determinism of science applied to industry.” After Aron and Sartre’s time, it only remained for technical knowledge itself to become a sort of industry, at which point the new ‘post-industrial’ civil society emerged, with its ever more sophisticated techniques of rule. In any event, considering both rulers and ruled, Aron takes a leaf from the book of James Madison: “At the risk of being accused of cynicism, I refuse to believe that any social order can be based on the virtue and disinterestedness of citizens,” whether or not they style themselves as ‘experts.’ While “planning and collective ownership eliminate certain forms of profit,” they do not eliminate “the greed for the thins of this world, in short the desire for money.” This more than suggests that “human nature is not very amenable to the wishes of the ideologists.” And again, as Madison would say: “the division of powers is the prerequisite of liberty,” an instance of ‘formal’ or ‘bourgeois’ democracy the Soviets deprecate. “The suppression of a hereditary aristocracy or a capitalist oligarch still does not change the social order,” fails to bring civil-social equality, “because it does not change the essence of homo politicus.“

If suffering is the criterion for qualifying for a noble revolutionary destiny, why are “victims of racial, ideological, and religious persecution” not “the chosen of today,” instead of the proletarians? An excellent question, and a generation or two later, the Left would tap some of those grievances, although the races, ideologies, and religions to be liberated, and those to be repressed, needed to be carefully selected for the purposes of socialist strategy. Now as when Aron was writing, “the free societies of the West, where powers are divided, where the State is undenominational, are the real oddities of history. Revolutionaries who dream of a total liberation are heralding the return to the outworn ideas of despotism.” The myth of progressivist historicism stands refuted by its own success and will continue to be refuted whenever and wherever a regime in its thrall gets organized.

Refutation suggests reason, logic. Unfortunately, the supposed logic or dialectic of history, although demonstrably illogical, appeals less to reason than to sentiment—a quasi-religious sentiment spurring a secularist eschatology which is “more attractive than logical.” As with so many eschatologies, failure is no bar to optimism; indeed, in the minds of the faithful, “catastrophes are transfigured into means of salvation” and the priests of the new religion are deemed infallible, especially by themselves. If capitalism refuses to self-destruct, why, then, the Party will lead the proletarians to victory. “The history of the Party is the sacred history which will lead to the redemption of humanity”; “it cannot and must not make a mistake, since it is the mouthpiece and the instrument of historical truth”; dissenters are heretics, apostates, deviants from the “secular theology.” In Paris, where the Party’s grip extends only so far, Sartre can appeal to the young Marx, who “speculated on the possibility of eliminating the distinction between subject and object, existence and essence, Nature and Man.” But in this he “leaves the realm of rational thought and simply translates into philosophical language the dreams of the millennium or the religious yearning for the end of the world.” In answer to this apocalypticism without God, Aron asks, “Why should not the ‘humanization’ of society be the common aim and task, never fully achieved, of a humanity incapable of eliminating the gap between the real and the ideal, but also incapable of resigning itself to it?” He answers himself: “In vain will logicians remind” the communisants “that a theory which eludes refutation is outside the category of truth.” They have descended into what “I propose to call historicist doctrinairism.” Strictly speaking, one cannot even ‘have faith’ in a self-contradictory claim. I may tell you that I am now holding a round square in my closed hand; you may believe that I am holding something in my hand that I sincerely believe to be a round square, but unless you fail to see that nothing that is logically impossible can be true, you cannot share my belief. Hence the need for the French intellectuals to eschew rationalism, even as they embrace ‘the young Marx.’

The “idolatry of History” rests on two errors, logically contradictory but psychologically seductive: absolutism and relativism. Absolutism prevails in the faith in “an imaginary moment” in the future in which the ‘classless society,’ and/or the mutual recognition of every person of and by every other person has given “a meaning to the whole” of the course of events. That is, all persons and events now and in the past are relativized to the imagined absolute, the ‘end of History.’  Real history “brings into conflict individuals, groups and nations for the defense of incompatible interests or ideas,” and no one really knows what the outcome will be—only that “every historical cause carries its shares of iniquities.” No one can “discover the meaning of the whole.” To understand history as it is, one first needs to look at the what the persons at the time knew and the regime[s] in which they acted. (“Even if power were the sole aim in politics, it would still be necessary to ascertain the kind of power to which the ambitious politician aspires”: does he want to be the Sun King or the Speaker of the House? One also needs to understand that human conduct “is never strictly utilitarian” but always defined by “a conception of the good life,” a way of life that reflects “an attitude towards the cosmos, the commonwealth or God.” “No society has ever reduced values to a common denominator—wealth or power.” It is rather that enemies of a given conception of the good life find it tactically useful to ascribe venal motives to their opponents. Finally, genuine realism requires some consideration not only of ignorance, injustice, and human motivation, but also of circumstances, of the “education and environment” human beings act within. “The interdependence of the social sectors of or human activities is incontrovertible,” whatever economic or social determinists may contend. “How can it be affirmed a priori or a posteriori that a man’s view of the world is determined by the form of his labor, but that the latter is not affected by the idea of the world which man has formed for himself?” Yet that is what Marx tried to do. This is why “philosophies of history,” whether Hegelian, Marxist, or some other kind, “are secularized theologies.” They assume the eventual ‘rationalization’ of societies at the end of History, but “societies are never rational in the sense in which technology, deduced from science, is rational,” and as long as human beings remain human, they never will be. “Unfortunately, the growth of collective resources and the reduction of inequalities do not change the nature of men and societies: the former remain unstable, the latter hierarchical.” It might be added that even a ‘transhuman’ society would be founded by persons, who conceived of the beings they invented to supersede the mere humans.

Such an enterprise can succeed only by the implementation of a vision blind to reality itself. We engage in disagreement, in dialogue, argumentation because we sometimes find, sometimes only ascribe a “plurality of meanings” to the same act. This “reveals not our incapacity but the limits of our knowledge and the complexity of reality.” The world itself is “essentially equivocal”; “our understanding is not incomplete because we lack omniscience,” although we surely do, “but because the plurality of meanings is implicit in the object of our understanding.” A duck is a mother of ducklings, an example of a biological species, a main course in a Paris restaurant, and any number of other things. Even if realized, would the “universal State” of Hegel or Marx “solve the riddle of history”? “Yes, in the eyes of those who see no other end but the rationale exploitation of the planet. No, in the eyes of those who decline to confuse existence in society with the salvation of the soul.”

Does historical success prove what historical determinists say it proves? Not even that. A thriving empire might suffer defeat, a “flourishing civilization” might succumb to foreign invasion. To claim otherwise is to claim the authority of the retrospective view. By what intellectual warrant do I “think up after the event a predestination which the living know nothing of?” Marxian ‘science’ has thus far proven to have known not nearly enough to pronounce such judgments, much less to prophecy so confidently. By 1955, it was obvious that European imperialism was nearly finished, but “does the death of capitalism necessarily follow from this?” In fact, Adam Smith himself regarded imperialism not as the last stage of capitalism but as a departure from it. How is it that “the British working class has a higher standard of living than before the war, in spite of the fact that Britain’s Indian Empire no longer exists”? And was not the Soviet Union one of the last of the European empires? “No one but a crystal-gazer could possibly claim to be able to decipher the riddle of the future.” Insofar as the Western republics themselves subscribe to historicism, they “give some credit to the idea of the inevitable advent of socialism and thus…allow the enemy the conviction that he is somehow in collusion with destiny.” To this day, one hears the Leftist clerisy warn skeptics not to put themselves on ‘the wrong side of History.’ But “on the plane of events, there is no automatic selection which conforms with our moral requirements.” Christians have the sense to expect salvation from God; atheists expect themselves to deliver it. Fanatical in their own kind of religiosity, “the revolutionaries continue to ratiocinate about an inevitable future—a future that they are incapable of describing but which they claim to be able to foretell.” Some of them remain sure enough in their faith to suppose that “the liquidation of the kulaks or the deportation of minorities become mere episodes, painful but unimportant, in a policy aimed at the realization of Reason in History.” “Reason teaches us precisely the opposite—that politics will always remain the art of the irrevocable choice by fallible men in unforeseen circumstances and semi-ignorance. Every impulse towards global planning is doomed to end in tyranny.”

This being so, Aron concludes by considering the intellectuals themselves, with their much-bruited alienation. Ancient regimes had scribes, artists, and experts—usually jurists or “scientists” or would-be decipherers of nature. In Christendom, artists and experts were often part of, or ruled by, the Church. ‘Intellectuals’ derive from the experts, but they now wield the powers of modern science. “The term intelligentsia seems to have been used for the first time in Russia during the nineteenth century” as a term for university-educated young men who had “acquired a culture which was for the most part of Western origin,” as intended by the reformist eighteenth-century czar, Peter the Great. Their ‘Westernization’ and ‘modernization’ detached them, alienated them, from traditional Russia. At the same time, “they felt themselves united b the knowledge they shared and by the attitude they adopted towards the established order,” making some of them incline toward revolution. The modern intellectual, “the man of ideas and the man of science,” asserts his belief “in Man and in Reason.” As such, he might make “technical” criticisms—recommending reformist policies or new laws—criticisms that can jar against human nature and “the intractable necessities of communal life.” He might make “moral criticisms,” denouncing injustices—criticisms that challenge not only “present society” but “any conceivable society.” And he might make “ideological or historical criticism, which attacks the present society in the name of a society to come” and “sketches out the blueprint of a radically different order,” a stance that tempts him to see no evil in his allies and no good in his enemies, for whom “repression is never too excessive.” In all of this, the modern intellectual can become a rationalist without doing enough reasoning, conforming instead to “the logic of human passions.” As in Russia, so in modern societies generally, “revolutionary situations will always crop up wherever there are frustrated unemployed ex-students.”

So it is in France, where bright young men proliferate, find themselves the objects of “uncritical admiration,” but are never allowed to wield real power, whether political or economic. The United States goes to the opposite extreme, with the “militant anti-intellectualism” of “American pragmatism.” (“The Soviet Union purges and subjugates the intellectuals, but at least it takes them seriously.”) “Of all Western countries, Great Britain is probably the one which has treated its intellectuals in the most sensible way”—neither valorizing them like the French, despising them like the Americans, or persecuting them like the Soviets. In Asian countries, breaking free from European imperialism, intellectuals nonetheless lean toward Marxism, since Asian capitalists had yet to accede to the humanizing workplace reforms seen in the West and where Western capitalists themselves acted more like the ones Marx saw than they had come to do in their home countries. They often dislike the Soviet Union as much as they dislike America, but ideologically their sympathies lean Left. Insofar as French influence is felt in Asia and in the rest of the ‘Third World,’ it “breeds revolutionaries,” “encourag[ing] the impatience born of the contrast between what is and what should be” to which high-minded, somewhat pampered yet deracinated men so easily succumb. By the mid-1950s, India was attempting to combine the regime of democratic and parliamentary republicanism, which requires patience, with the forward-march mentality seen in Soviet-style ‘five-year plans’ for economic development. China, by contrast, has “reconstituted a hierarchy at the summit of which scholars sit enthroned,” but Marxist-Leninist scholars, “warriors as well as scholars”—again, vocations that evince patience and impatience, under a regime of tyranny. Modern Western intellectualism destabilizes old regimes without the capacity to stabilize the new ones.

The churches now mirror this political instability. So long as they maintained a strict separation from modernity, they could hold their vocation on earth as holy, as transcending the things of this world. “The ideologies of the Right and the Left, Fascism as well as Communism, are inspired by the modern philosophy of immanence”—of Hegel’s ‘absolute’ rather than holy Spirit. “They are atheist even when they do not deny the existence of God, to the extent that they conceive the human world without reference to the transcendental.” In that spirit, Marxism combines prophetism with its materialism. It has “show[n] us the Party/Church stiffening doctrine into dogma and elaborating an interpretative scholasticism.” Faith has been transferred from the holy God to the supposedly infallible Party; hope inheres no longer in divine intervention but human violence; charity for all sinful humanity has metamorphosed into “indifference towards classes or individuals condemned by the dialectic” (and very often towards much worse than indifference). “Can a durable religion be based on affirmations which are contrary to the facts and to common sense?” As of 1955, Aron could only answer that “the answer to such a question, I fear, is far from being established.” 

France had already seen a home-grown secular religion, devised by Auguste Comte. Claiming that “theology and metaphysics are incompatible with positive knowledge” and that “the religions of the past [were] losing their vitality because science no longer permits one to believe what the Church teaches,” Comte saw that “the death of God leaves a void in the human soul,” as “the needs of the heart remain and must be satisfied by a new Christianity,” one that “only the intellectuals are capable of inventing, and possibly preaching.” In the gospel according to Auguste, “laws established by science reflect a cosmic order, a permanent order of human societies and an order of historical development.” Within this religion, men will not love the God they no longer accept but the future society that will “open the road to Progress without revolution” and “accomplish Humanity.” Comte thus echoed Rousseau’s call for a new civil religion, aped by the Jacobins’ worship of the ‘Goddess of Reason’—and with little more success, at least in Europe. One might suspect that a similar doctrine got more traction in America, through the influence of John Dewey on public education.

In Europe, where the triumph of Marxism-Leninism impressed intellectuals more than it did their American counterparts, Communism’s “political attempt to find a substitute for religion in an ideology erected into a State orthodoxy” has enjoyed substantial prestige. Unlike Catholicism, which could adjust to modern scientific discoveries without abandoning its adherence to “unprovable affirmations relating to subjects which are beyond the grasp of human reason”—i.e., divine revelation—the “Communist faith” has not so readily adjusted itself to such discoveries that contradict its dogmas, precisely because its dogmas are said to be scientific. That is, the authority that any political rule entails, but especially modern-tyrannical or ‘totalitarian’ rule, cannot withstand discoveries that contradict the supposed truths upon which that authority is founded. “If the Russian Communist Party sticks to its claim to represent and embody the cause of the world proletariat, it must plunge ever deeper into the mysteries of the esoteric scholasticism,” but “if it renounces this claim, it abdicates completely,” making itself as “bourgeois and boring as the British Labour Party.” This was already beginning to happen in the wake of Stalin’s death, and it turns intellectuals, “sophists rather than philosophers,” into Khruschevs, Brezhnevs—educated men ruling decisively in the name of the incoherent. In Christendom, the Church may have served as an opiate for the people, “help[ing] men to support and to forget their ills instead of curing them,” but being holy, separating itself in principle from the rulers, it “has never given the rulers a free hand.” Scientistic immanence permits so such separation under Communism; the opium of the intellectuals pervades everyone. 

What should intellectuals not content to be sophists do? Aron recommends taking a stand on the side of the regimes in the Cold War which appear “to offer humanity the best chance—a historical choice which involves the risk of error which is inseparable from the historical condition,” while “try[ing] never to forge the arguments of the adversary, or the uncertainty of the future, or the faults of his own side, or the underlying fraternity of ordinary men everywhere.” Otherwise, “the part of Europe which is still free” might “continue to feel alienated to the point of welcoming its own enslavement.” Most immediately, that enslavement would come at the hands of the Soviets. But in the longer run, “the victory of Communism in China is probably the most significant fact of the twentieth century; the destruction of the family, the building of a heavy industry and a powerful army and a strong State market the beginning of a new era in the history of Asia.” Although Maoism hardly provides a plausible regime model for France, “the climate of the Western universities has rendered students from all over the world susceptible to the Marxist-Leninist doctrine which is not the logical fulfilment but the dogmatic hardening of the progressivist philosophy.” 

How long will progressivist philosophy remain ascendant? “Perhaps the intellectual will lose interest in politics as soon as he discovers its limitations,” but perhaps not, inasmuch as “men, unfortunately, have not yet reached the point where they have no further occasion or motive for killing one another.” Let us then “prey for the advent of the skeptics.” Skepticism among recovering fanatics might bring them not to nihilism or to its weak sister, moral relativism, but to prudence. ‘Humanism,’ yes, but a humanism that recognizes both the grandeur and the misery of humanness. For Aron, then, ni Marx, ni Jesus, ni Sartre, mais Montesquieu.

An American who read The Opium of the Intellectuals when first published would have seen the future, and that it didn’t work.