London School of Economics

Notes on the Sociology of War

Author(s): Roger Scruton
Source: The British Journal of Sociology, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Sep., 1987), pp. 295-309
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The London School of Economics and Political Science
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Roger Scruton

Notes on the sociology of war

Sociologists have a vested interest in discovering social explanations,

and this interest can be seen at work in the sociology of war. In its
usual form war is a social phenomenon. Yet does it have a social
explanation? It is by no means obvious that it must. Consider a tribe
of people reduced to starvation by natural but unforeseeable
circumstances a crop failure, for example. Suppose the tribe
invades the lands of its neighbours, is resisted, and recognises that it
must triumph or starve. The ensuing war seems to be largely
explicable by reference to the non-social fact of starvation. Nevertheless,
the most influential theories of war-and especially of twentieth
century war have searched always for the social origins of war. The
classical example is the theory put forward by Hobson, and used to
such effect by Lenin and his successors, according to which war in the
modern world is largely the consequence of imperialism which is,
itself, the necessary result of capitalist expansion and the search for
markets.
More influential even than Hobson's theory is what one might call
(following President Eisenhower's famous remarkl ) the 'military-
industrial complex' theory of war. Members of the radical Left have
frequently subscribed to some version of this theory, according to
which the principal cause of war in the modern world is the
dominance of political decision-making by those with an interest in
the manufacture-and perhaps also in the use-of weapons.2 The
assumption is that wars are caused, directly or indirectly, by
armaments, and that armaments exist primarily because economic
power results from their sale and manufacture, and also because
political power accrues to those who have control of them. A social
system is then hypothesised, which generates the right structural
causality, so ensuring that the economic and political opportunities
offered by armaments are in fact realised. As a rule this 'social system'
is identified as 'capitalism'-specifically the 'monopoly capitalism'
described in somewhat mythopoeic terms by Baran and Sweezy.3 In
so far as the theory contains any truth, however, it applies more
accurately to totalitarian socialism-and in particular to the 'war

Tke Britisk Journal of Sociology Volume XXXVIII Number3

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 Roger Scruton
296

communism' introduced by Lenin. But, expressed in the terms

normally accorded to it, the theory is not sufficiently precise to explain
anything very much. And to its supporters its ideological yields are so
great that they have not, as a rule, stopped to provide the missing
details: witness Baran and Sweezy, and also their predecessor, C.
Wright Mills.4
Such theories are peculiar in two respects: first, in their neglect of
the natural causes of war i.e. in their non-Malthusian character-
and second, in their neglect of the political causes of war. Sharing, as
they do, the Marxian vision of politics as 'super-structural', they see
little or no causality flowing from the political realm, and trace
political decisions to the socio-economic forces which 'determine'
them. It is therefore ruled out from the start, that a war should have
resulted (as Homer describes) from a political decision consequent
upon a sexual affront; or from an expansionist ideology; or from a
desire for Lebensraum, or from sheer aggression. Thus the Clausewitzian
analysis of war, as an instrument of policy, is rejected (despite the fact
that it is universally employed by strategists and generals).
It is surely obvious, however, that both natural and political factors
are of independent causal significance. This does not mean that such
theories as that of Baran and Sweezy should be ignored. It could still
be that there are social structures which are inherently disposed to war,
even if something else is needed (a political decision, a perceived need,
or a natural calamity) in order for war to occur. It is an interesting
suggestion that the principal such structure in the modern world is
that of'monopoly capitalism'. The opposite view that 'capitalism'
(which is to say, the system of free markets and free trade) is
essentially peace-engendering was originally put forward by
Emeric Cruce in 1623, in what was one of the first modern attempts at
a sociology of war.5 Cruce's thesis was that the system offree markets
is founded on relations between people which are both consensual,
and free from the mediation of the state. The establishment of such
independent relations defuses the appetite for war upon which
sovereigns depend. Sovereigns are shown by the relations of commerce
to be essentially self-interested in their bellicosity; through trade,
therefore, the peoples of the world could unite so as to undermine the
desire for war.
If we are to assess such theories, we must first of all be clear what
we mean by 'war'. A large part of what follows is devoted to this
. . s

pre lmlnary lssue.

(a) War involves fighting and is a special case of a 'fight' (or, if we
follow Hobbes,6 of the 'known disposition thereto'). A fight is a social
circumstance, and, for the game theorist, it is to be analysed in terms
of the pay-offs and strategies of the parties. The study of strategy
abstracts from the particular circumstances of fighting, and sees war
as a special case of competition: the case in which the means of

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Notes on the sociology of war 297

prosecuting a purpose include every conceivable way in which the

opponent may be harmed. The optimal strategy in a zero-sum game
may be decided theoretically without raising the question whether
that game is also a fight. For this reason, little can be learned about
the sociology of war from the science of strategy, which passes over all
that is distinctive of war-all that especially needs explaining. (Thus
many people have the impression that Clausewitz is a peculiar kind of
realist, even a cynic: for he has abstracted from war the intellectual
structure which is strategy, and made that into his study.)
Of course, on the assumption that human beings are rational,
strategy conceived as the game-theorist conceives it-may be a
fundamental instrument in explaining the actual conduct of a war.
There is presumably a general theory of collective rationality-
which has economics, military strategy and peaceful contest as special
cases, and which is as much an explanato?:y theory as is von Neumann
and Morgenstern's theory of the market.7 Nevertheless, the main
concern of the sociologist is with fighting: how is it that this particular
activity should begin, and which social structures are most likely to
engender it?
(b) In a fight, one party attempts to impose his will on another by
coercive means. Hence Clausewitz's definition of war, as 'an act of
violence designed to constrain the adversary to execute our will'.8
Coercion is the deliberate threat or execution of harm to another, with
a view to influencing or (in the limiting case) controlling him.
Normally coercion is accompanied by an offer of terms and indeed
must be so accompanied if the enemy is to have a fully articulate
reason for yielding. The demand for unconditional surrender is often
regarded as a sinister new development of war, since it lifts war out of
the framework of rational intercourse, and disregards entirely the
existence of the enemy as an 'end in himselfn-i.e. as an agent with
rights, duties and overriding concerns. However, the demand is by no
means new, and was implicit in those ancient forms of conquest which
proceeded by a 'fight to the death'. And at the battle for Constantinople,
too, Sultan Mehmet I I demanded unconditional surrender
although in this case, the holy law of Islam provided certain implied
conditions, which it could be assumed would qualify the demand. In
the fight to the death, the will of one party is to impose a condition
that the other cannot rationally accept: it is therefore tantamount to a
demand for unconditional surrender. Wars conducted by totalitarian
powers also seem to involve a covert aim of unconditional surrender,
since, whatever terms are negotiated, the object is the permanent
destruction of opposing organisations, and hence opposing powers.
Any power which is identified as the 'enemy' is by its very nature
without the benefit of terms. (This explains the peculiar language of
'liquidation'.)
Fights involve the desire to fulfil one's purpose in the teeth of

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 Roger Scruton

298

opposition, by harming the opponent until his will is overcome. Harm

may or may not involve physical violence or the threat of it. (There
are economic wars, as well as the war between the Taits. ) A
distinction must therefore be made between those conflicts which
involve the disposition to physical violence and those which do not.
Violence marks an important threshold (both morally and prudentially)
which rational beings must learn to recognise if they are successfully
to conduct their affairs and to cooperate. (Hence the peculiar
perniciousness of sociological theories which attempt to abolish the
threshold, and to represent every order, however consensual, as
founded on 'structural violence'.9) Even after the threshold has been
passed, an indefinite sequence of new thresholds may be erected by
tacit agreement between the parties. 'Escalation' then becomes the
strategy most suited to the recognition of the rights of the enemy, and
most immediately expressive of a prudential attitude to violence. This
fact of great interest to Clausewitz has led Raymond Aron to
refer to a kind of collective reasoning in warfare, which he calls la
dialectique de la lutte.l°
(c) Fights are contrasted with those social endeavours in which two
people cooperate for their own ends. There is a temptation to see the
principal polarity here as that between hatred and love. However,
while fights do indeed emerge from hatred, and cooperation from love,
the motives are in each case wholly peculiar. Both love and hatred are
ends in themselves, and cannot be seen, by those party to them, as the
means to other ends. Everything that emerges from them is endowed
with a sense of intrinsic value, and it is almost impossible to see the
fighting or cooperation that they engender as means to some
independent goal. In the normal case of warfare, however, war is
undertaken as a means-as an 'instrument of policy' and this
dictates what it is rational for the participants to do.
Hence we should see fighting primarily by contrast to willing
cooperation on terms, in which each party, intent on a purpose of his
own, aims to enlist the other in the pursuit of it. The true polarity that
concerns us is that between fighting and contract. Contract no more
presupposes love than fighting presupposes hatred. In contract the
parties have purposes for which the compliance of the other is
necessary; and to obtain this compliance willingly they are prepared
to make a sacrifice. The party to a contract or a fight may not know
his opposite number personally. Nor need he have any attitude that
distinguishes the other in his eyes from the mass of mankind.
This is why terms are so important in fighting. The more nearly the
terms approach to what is already acceptable to the other, the more
nearly does the fight approach a contractual bargaining, and the more
easily can it be seen, by those party to it, as a way of creating new
conditions, under which agreement will at last be reached. A fight to
the death, or a fight to enslavement, are therefore of a very different

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Notes on the sociology of war 299

character from a fight to secure certain limited objectives which the

other side could, with a certain sacrifice, concede.
Here is another reason for setting aside the more general concerns
of the strategist and the theorist of games. The general theory of
strategy applies as well to contract as to fighting. The original motive
behind von Neumann and Morgenstern's development of game
theory was to give a normative account of collective rationality,
applicable to the open-ended game (the game with indefinitely many
self-interested players), and therefore to the market economy. The
theory of rationality in contract, and the theory of strategy in war,
employ the same root conceptions, and by-pass the distinctive
causality of either arrangement.
(d) Before proceeding, it is worth saying that the contrast just offiered,
between fighting and contract, gives a certain a priori implausibility to
the standard Marxist theories of war. What the Marxist knows as
capitalism is known by those less hostile to it as the system of'market
relations'-i.e. relations between people in which free and open
contract under a rule of law is the principal form of economic
association. Now it could be that such a system generates fights of
another kind that the constant attempt to agree on terms introduces a
new, and, as it were, structural disagreement that might at any
moment explode into conflict. Such is indeed implied by the standard
Marxian theory of the wage contract. But it is surely more plausible
given the failure of that particular theory to suppose that a
social system which takes contract for its fundamental principle of
association is inherently not war-like, and that it is in itself, and in the
human character that it engenders, disposed to resolve conflicts
without fighting if it can.
Obviously, the suggestion is no better than rhetorical. As is well
known, the Marxist emphasises the weak point in the famous
argument of Smith and Ferguson, accepting that an 'invisible hand'
generates from the self-interested transactions of contract a result that
was 'no part of the intention', but rejecting the assumption that this
result will also be to the common good. On the contrary, the Marxist
argues, the invisible hand is drenched in blood, precisely because the
visible handshake is so free from it.
(e) Since Rousseau, it has been a common assumption that war is a
relation between states, and depends upon the coercive apparatus of
government if it is to be undertaken. 1 l Rousseau went further,
suggesting that war is entirely the product of the coercive apparatus of
sovereignty. (The two ideas are, however, independent. We could
believe that sovereignty is necessary for war, while denying that it is
sufficient, arguing that some other element aggression, a market
economy, a coercive order-must also be present if there is to be a
disposition to war.)
The assumption is not plausible. Fights occur between groups,

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 Roger Scruton
300

tribes, and families, and these fights have many of the distinguishing
features of warfare, even in the absence of the political organisation
necessary to form a state. Indeed one of the justifications given for
sovereignty-a justification condoned by Shakespeare in Romeo and
Juliet, and Aeschylus in the Oresteia-is that it establishes the system
of authority whereby the potentially endless quarrels of the community
can be adjudicated and brought to an end. At least, the onus is on
Rousseau and his followers to show just how collective fighting is
peculiar to political systems, and how it results from the powers which
they contain.
Nevertheless, there is an important idea behind Rousseau's theory,
and one which is closely related to those that I have already discussed.
The idea is that 'left to themselves' men establish consensual
relations, in which contract is the principle, and from which peace
arises by an invisible hand. Through the formation of a sovereign
body, however, a non-consensual component enters human association.
The state is necessarily coercive, and therefore inevitably a destroyer
of consent. Only a pure democracy can create sovereignty out of the
consensual bond of civil society. Only democracy, therefore, preserves,
at the heart of the political order, the precious gift of peace. But, as
Rousseau recognised, democracy, construed as a device for translating
the individual will into a general will, is strictly unobtainable. The
best we can achieve is a procedure of partial accommodation between
citizen and state, in which democracy is only one delicate and
insecure component.
Here two important observations must be made:
(i) The state may indeed possess, in Weber's words, a 'monopoly of
coercion'; but this does not mean that it is coercive. Nor is it coercive
just because its actions are not the expressions of agveemtnts (or of
some comprehensive agreement or social contract). A state is coercive
only to the extent that it needs to exercise its coercive powers in order to
stay in being. The argument of many defenders of natural law is that
obedience to that law ensures voluntary acquiescence on the part of
the citizens. The order which upholds the natural law may therefore
dispense with the use of force against those who are subject to it, while
reserving its coercive powers for those few who clisobey.
(ii) There are many forms of acquiescence in the sovereign power of
the state, besides contract or consent. The habit of obedience, the
unquestioning acceptance of custom, tradition and things lawfully
established: such phenomena, as Hume and Burke remind us, are
more important and effective foundations of political order than the
contractual and elective procedures that are sustained by them. Are
should be careful not to argue, therefore, as though the distinction
between the contractual and the coercive is clear-cut. Many political
orders are founded in a habit of obedience, of which it could be said
neither that it is coerced, nor that it is freely engaged in.

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Notes on the sociology of war
301

That said, it is undeniable that sovereignty makes a profound

diffierence to collective fighting, and therefore that war-which may
be defined as a fight between parties at least one of which is a
sovereign power-is a phenomenon sufficiently distinct to merit
independent study. War is continuous with other kinds of collective
fighting, but distinguished by the fact that the decision to fight
emanates at least on one side-from the very same process of
decision-making whereby the collective as a whole is governed. The
kinds of war that have most attracted attention have been those in
which both parties to the fight are sovereign bodies. Even when only
one is legally recognised as such, there is a natural tendency for a kind
of impromptu sovereignty to arise in the opposing camp such as the
sovereignty exercised until recently by Yasser Arafat over the PLO, or
that presently exercised by Jonas Savimbi over the anti-government
forces in Angola. It is an interesting idea with both historical and
philosophical embellishments that sovereignty emerged from the
chain of command necessary to collective fighting, and not the other
way round. At least, we cannot assume, given what we know of tribal
Africa and the ancient world, that there is any firm evidence for
Rousseau's idea, that collective fighting is the effiect, and not the
cause, of sovereignty. 12
The above sketch leads to the following description of our subject
matter (of the phenomenon that the sociology of war seeks to explain):
War is, centrally, a state of affiairs in which two or more corporate
entities, at least one of them politically organised, are disposed to fight
collectively, and where the decision to fight arises, on at least one side,
through the process of government, and not from some private faction
or feud.
So defined, war is a special case of fighting: the special case in
which corporate decision-making and political organisation are
fundamental to what is done. It should be noticed that, by
approaching the definition of war along the path that I have chosen,
beginning from the contrast between contract and fighting, I have
made agency into a central component in the causality of war. My
definition is a 'real definition' in the scholastic sense, and already
implies a certain theory about the thing to which it is applied. Of
course, it could be countered that there are no wars in my sense. But it
is far more plausible to recognise that the phenomenon that I have
defined is what the sociologist seeks to explain. It is precisely the
collective agency of war that strikes us as puzzling: what is it that
could lead people to make these decisions, and how?
If that simple observation is resisted, it is partly because the idea of
corporate agency is misunderstood. Many sociologists and many
political philosophers have still to awaken to the immense importance
of a distinction that has been for many centuries familiar to students
of European law. This distinction, which underlies that made so

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302 Roger Scruton

ambiguously by Rousseau, between the will of all and the general will,
is between the following two things:
(i) an association which produces effects as a result of its social
behaviour, but which intends and is liable for nothing;
(ii) an association with corporate agency, and a will and liability of its
own.
Associations of the first kind exemplify Smith's 'invisible hand'; and
liberal theorists like Nozick, who wish everyone to be caressed by that
hand, would like all associations to have this character. The minimal
state is the state devoid of corporate agency: the state in which all
persons are natural. Such a state, Hegelians argue, is impossible,
since the first kind of association both tends towards the second, and
also ultimately depends on it for the institutions that bring continuity
and protection.
War involves the action of a sovereign state, issuing from the very
same process of corporate decision-making whereby the state itself is
governed. (That is the thought behind Clausewitz's celebrated
description of war, as politics by other means.) To understand the
nature and causes of war one must also understand the kind of
corporate agency that is exercised by the body politic: what
considerations influence the political process and how? By what chain
of representation, and what chain of command, are the citizens
subjected to, and implicated in, the decisions made in their name?
Those are the fundamental questions that we should ask, I believe, if
we seek to understand which political systems are naturally bellicose,
and which naturally pacific. It was a sense that people, when governed
by tyrants, are not implicated in the decisions of their masters which
led the French revolutionaries to believe that it is never people, but
only their masters who wage war, and to transform Chamfort's
famous cry ' Guerre aux chateaux, paix aux chaumieres! ' to ' Guerre aux tyrans,
paix aux peuples!'l3 The revolutionaries believed that true collective
agency, and therefore true collective liability, lay only with popular
republican states, and not with monarchies. They then imagined
(following Rousseau) that the incorporation of the whole of society
would lead to the end of war. The historical refutation of this belief
has been well documented by Michael Howard.l4 The belief arises,
once again, through a confusion over the notion of corporate agency.
The revolutionaries did not appreciate that sovereignty is necessary to
the body politic. Sovereignty brings with it a new and artificial
person, the state, whose decisions need not reflect the spontaneous
wishes of the citizens. Of course, the revolutionaries were right in
supposing the bellicosity of a social order to be determined by its
political, rather than its economic, character. But they were profoundly
wrong-as history was to show in their assumption that their own
kind of order would be less of a threat to peace, both at home and
abroad, than the order of the European monarchs.

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Notes on the sociology of war 303

The normal circumstance of war is that of conflict when the

parties want incompatible things, and cannot come to terms. War
follows a breakdown in the possibilities of negotiation. Not every
conflict is resolved by fighting, however, even when negotiation has
broken down. Sometimes the conflict is submitted to judgment
through law, arbitration or mediation. In this case, while the parties
cannot agree between themselves, they do agree to be influenced or
even controlled by another's decision in the matter.
Law is the most important of the procedures whereby conflicts that
cannot be resolved by negotiation may yet be resolved without
violence. In submitting to law the parties are in effect putting
themselves in a position where another's judgment will be binding.
Hence, in the very submission to law, the conflict is at an end. Of
course, it is only in certain special cases that law is voluntarily
invoked by both parties. But even when it is imposed on one or the
other of them, it is, in the normal case, sufficiently backed by coercion
to give a compelling reason in favour of submitting to its judgment.
Let us first consider the case of conflict between individuals. One
can see the role of law in such conflicts in two ways: first, as a means of
securing agreement where agreement would not otherwise be possible
(in other words, as a continuation of contract by other means);
second, as a means of non-violent coercion which, by adding the
power of the state to the judgment given, makes fighting irrational.
Those two descriptions of the role of law are not incompatible,
although it sometimes takes an effort of imagination to hold them
simultaneously before the mind. Taken together, they show law as a
device for securing agreement on terms in every kind of conflict.
Despite the coercive backing upon which the law depends, it is not
normally a form of coercion. The law provided it is impartial,
objective, knowable and disinterested enters the conflict in
predictable and responsible ways; and assuming its general conformity
to a received idea of 'natural justice', it is possible for any citizen so to
adapt his life as to remain generally 'on the right side of the law'. For
the citizen who is on the right side of it, the law is a perduring and
knowable social reality, an obstacle whose contours are familiar and
predictable. He is no more coerced by it than he is coerced by the
weather, or by the walls of his house. The 'law-abiding' citizen can
therefore avoid conflict with his law-abiding neighbour, precisely
through his habit of obedience to this instrument whose major
purpose is the avoidance and resolution of dispute. The law, in other
words, prevents conflicts by the very procedure whereby it promises
to resolve them.
In the police state, what passes for law is not true law being
vague, partial, unknowable, and profoundly interested. In such
circumstances the law is not to be trusted to resolve conflicts, and the
policy of'law-abiding' is not a certain means to social harmony. In

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304 Roger Scruton

modern Poland, for example, the civil law is rarely consulted by those
who seek to avoid conflict with their neighbours. It is my own belief
that the rule of law emerges most naturally in those social orders
where free association and contract are the norm, and that orders in
which coercion and policing play a major part in securing stability are
precisely threatened by the rule of law, which vests too much power in
the citizen, and provides too firm an obstacle to the agents of the state.
We need not accept that thesis, however, in order to recognise the
importance of law in the 'circumstance of conflict', and its value as a
way of inducing agreement between self-interested strangers. The law
provides a paradigm of how rational beings with conflicting interests
may yet stay free from conflict. It is an interesting sociological
hypothesis, that the peaceful citizen is precisely engendered by the
'internalisation of law'. The peaceful citizen is the one who seeks
always to refer his conflicts to an impartial judge, before believing
himself to be justified in fighting. (That sociological hypothesis is an
empirical correlate of the a priori theory of morality developed by
Kant, and elaborated by Hegel: the theory which sees the moral sense
as a kind of internal legislation.) The peaceful citizen may be driven to
fight, for his opponent may give him no option. But even then, he will
wish the fight to be conducted lawfully, so as to avoid 'foul play'. In
other words, he will seek for a jus in bello, in addition to the jus ad bellum
which justifies his cause.
What is true of the individual citizen may also be true of the
corporate person, and in particular of the state. In the life of
individuals, law is not a chthonic force, which modifies behaviour in
defiance of the understanding: it is an integral component of individual
decision-making, like the terms of a contract. Likewise, if law affects
the conducts of states, bending them in a peaceable direction, and
adjudicating conflicts, then this is because it conditions the decision-
making upon which their actions depend.
Of course, international law is not backed by a 'monopoly of
coercion, and its precepts issue from a peculiar philosophical
tradition, in which the formulation of law has preceded the
institutions that might enforce it. Nevertheless, law may determine
the decision-making of a body politic in at least two separate contexts:
in the dealings between states, and in the dealings between the state
and its citizens. The deficiencies of international law may not be a
decisive obstacle to the generation of a 'law-abiding state'. For the
pressure to internalise the procedures of law exists far more openly
and obviously at the domestic level. A state which upholds the rule of
law is also subject to its own domestic laws. The law so internalised
may cast its limiting shadow over foreign policy and international
dealings and indeed, manifestly does so.
Here we find another reason for rejecting the sociological theories of
war which ignore or downgrade the political dimension. Just as we

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Notes on the sociology of war 30s

cannot understand fighting without seeing it as an intentional act,

expressive of a decision, so too we cannot see law and law-abidingness
as pacific influences, if we do not also recognise that law influences
and is internalised by the political process, and is not concealed in the
social infrastructure. States are corporate persons, and like other
persons are disposed to obey and to violate laws. Their actions, like
the actions of individuals, may be subject to a rule of law, and to the
limiting influence of an internalised legality.
This leads us to an important observation. I defined the central
case of war as a state of affairs in which two corporate entities,
normally politically organised, are disposed to fight collectively, the
decision to fight arising not from private faction but from the process of
government. Law will limit the aggression of states, therefore, only to the
extent that it affects the political process. The internalising of law by
the political process occurs primarily at the domestic level: in the
dealings between state and citizen. It is therefore plausible to assume
that states subject to a rule of law will be more pacific than states
which do not acknowledge, in their decision-making process, the
independent force of legality.
That provides us with a second a priori reason for believing that
states governed according to principles of free association, market
economy and a rule of law are inherently more peaceful members of
the community of nations than those based on coercion, conspiratorial
government, a command economy, and extra-legal systems of control.
Of course, this a priori speculation is no more decisive than the
previous one: it is just as vulnerable as its predecessor to any proof
that the invisible hand operates in a demonic direction, generating
from successive agreements, and successive judgments, a new,
unintentional, and therefore politically uncontrollable belligerence.
However, since the theories which try to establish this as a truth about
modern 'capitalism' are equally a priori, and since they all proceed by
ignoring or downgrading the political dimension, I see no reason to
subscribe to them. At least, the onus of proof lies not with the
defenders of'capitalism', but with its critics.
The most important component in my definition of war is the idea
of corporate agency, and the theory of the political process as an
exercise of corporate agency. Fear of German metaphysics has led
British political theorists to steer nervously away from such ideas.
Unfortunately they are necessary for a cogent description of social
conduct, and to neglect them is to give in too easily to those who wish
to find the causes of social change elsewhere than in the decisions
which produce it. Corporate agency is closely parallel to individual
agency, although it is very difficult to provide a normative theory of
corporate reasoning. A corporate agent makes decisions, is morally
liable for them, and ought also to be legally answerable. Such an
agent may act wisely or unwisely, justifiably or unjustifiably, rightly

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306 Roger Scruton

or wrongly. It may suffer, strive and die: it has thoughts and beliefs, as
well as intentions and desires. It may also have a conscience.
The conscience of a corporate person is that which leads it to
subject its actions to judgment. As in the individual soul, conscience is
the faculty of looking upon one's own aims and decisions as though
they were the aims and decisions of another. It is the faculty of seeing
oneself as part of a rational community, with a need to justify one's
actions to those affected by them, and to secure, where possible, their
acquiescence in what one does. Conscience is the internal device,
which steers the rational being back from the brink of confrontation,
towards the realm of contract in which he is at home.
It is obvious that conscience can exist in the corporate agent only if
criticism of, and opposition to, its decisions are permitted. A state
without legal opposition is strictly unconscionable, and lacks one of
the mechanisms which keeps us on the path of peace. Only threat and
fear can maintain the unconscionable body politic on that path, when
its interest points in another direction.
The tentative conclusion must be, therefore, that the internal
political character of a state has great importance in explaining its
martial posture. In the absence of any persuasive theory to the
contrary, we should always regard a state that has neither free
association, nor a market economy, nor a rule of law, nor legal
opposition, as posing a special threat to peace. If the defenders of the
great socialist experiment think otherwise, this is because they have
fallen under the spell of theories which deny the importance of
politics, and which deny, therefore, that political distinctions can ever
be decisive.
War is historical in precisely the way that government is historical:
it changes with changes in technology, and with changes in the political
process. The greatest transformations in the history of warfare are
two: first the change in weaponry, which has so increased the cost of
warfare as to make war frequently an irrational way of resolving a
conflict. Secondly the change in the 'chain of command', whereby
citizen and sovereign are bound together. The leve'e en masse of the
French Revolution constituted a most profound social transformation:
the change from war conducted on behalf of the people by a military
caste, to war conducted by the people as a whole.
It was this change which made possible the conduct of the First
World War, with its decisive and irreversible impact on the European
conscience.l5 In the wake of that experience, it was possible to
maintain a society indefinitely in a state of'total mobilisation'. I have
referred to various features of the modern totalitarian states-the
command economy, the abrogation of free association, the denial of
law and of legal opposition. But these should be seen as specific
aspects, I believe, of a more important phenomenon-that of a
society mobilised for war, in the absence of an occasion for fighting.

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Notes on the sociology of war 307

Having no legitimacy, a totalitarian state must conduct itself as it

would during a war. It needs an enemy, whereby to sustain a constant
state of emergency, and a path ahead of 'victories', 'trillmphs',
'struggles', whereby endless sacrifice can be justified and sustained.
A great change has therefore occurred in the conduct both of war
and of peace as a result of the existence of totalitarian governments.
To understand this change we should refer again to the idea of the
corporate person. A pacific individual acts towards his neighbours in
the manner prescribed by Kant's second formulation of the categorical
imperative: so as to treat them, not as means only, but also as ends.
Very roughly, this means that he does not seek to impose his ends
upon them, regardless of what they themselves esteem, desire or
value. He does not approach them with non-negotiable demands, or
fight with them to an unconditional surrender. Even in fighting, he
seeks their acquiescence in his purposes, so that they have reason to
accept what he has a reason to do. This means that his purposes for
them are negotiable: his opponents may provide better reasons to
desist than he can provide for continuing. To treat another as an end
is therefore to have no fixed purpose in his regard: it is to be open to his
influence, able to revise one's conduct in the light of his own
reasoned opposition. Friendship and contract emerge, therefore, as
the norms of rational intercourse. By contrast, to enslave the other, to
coerce or murder him in the pursuit of non-negotiable demands, is to
treat him not as an end but as a means-as something whose value
and utility are to be judged entirely in terms of his ability to further or
impede one's pre-established purpose.
A state likewise may treat its subjects, and be treated by them,
either as end or as means. In the first case, like any other fully moral
person, the state allows its aims to be determined and amended in the
course of its political conduct-through representation, opposition,
influence and law. Legitimacy arises, as in any human relation,
through the developing habit of respect. In the second case, by
contrast, the state has far-reaching and non-negotiable purposes for
those subject to its power. It seeks to impose upon them a particular
social order, a particular economy, a particular outlook, or a
particular way of life, whether or not they can perceive any reason to
accept those things, or feel any promptings of desire for them. If this
ruling purpose is not accepted, then conflict ensues. Such a state can
survive only by transforming its ruling purpose into an absolute
command, and by mobilising the population in obedience to it. It
must 'conscript' its subjects, and maintain them in a condition of
* * * m

quasl-ml ltary reac lness.

Such a state, I believe, does not know peace, but only truce. It
realises, in permanent form, that terrible transformation of society
that was first envisaged as a consequence of war: the conscription of
every citizen to a cause which he is asked neither to believe in nor to

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308 Roger Scruton

justify, but only to pursue. It is surely one of the strangest legacies of

Marxian sociology, that it invites us to see the personal states of the
free world as inherently belligerent, and the conscript states of
totalitarianism as the innocent victims of'capitalist encirclement'.
Perhaps indeed, it is one of the miracles of the twentieth century, that
students of sociology have been able to believe something that is
justified neither by the facts of history, not by the a priori likelihoods of
political science.
Roger Scruton
Department of Philosophy
Birkbeck College
University of London

NOTES

1. Although President Eisenhower Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1909, 1, 13.

made the phrase famous, its invention 7. John von Neumann and Oskar
should be attributed to C. Wright Mills, Morgenstern, TheoCy of Games and Economic
The Power Elite, New York, Oxford Uni- Behaviour, London, Wiley, 1967.
versity Press, 1956. 8. Carl von Clausewitz, On War (edited
2. Examples of those who have recently and translated by Michael Howard and
put forward versions of the theory include Peter Paret), Princeton, Princeton Uni-
Immanuel Wallerstein, tfistoncal Capitulism, versity Press, 1976, 1, i. The invocation
London, Verso Editions, 1983; Paul A. of violence at this point of Clausewitz's
Baran and Paul M. Sweezy, Monopoly argument iS premature.
Capital, London, Penguin Books, 1977; 9. The concept of'structural violence'
Noam Chomsky, American Power and the of violence contained within, and
New Mandarins, London, Chatto and exercised by, the structures of a society
Windus, 1969; and Gabriel Kolko, The is due to Georges Sorel, ReMlections on
Politics of War: Allied Diplomacy and the Violence (translated by T. E. Hulme and
World Crisis of 1943-45, London, Weiden- J. Roth, with an introduction by Edward
feld and Nicolson, 1969. When sociologists A. Shils), London, Collier-Macmillan,
have not espoused this, or some similar 1961. It has played a large part in recent
anti-capitalist explanation, it is often sociological theories of peace and war, in
because they have simply neglected the particular those of Johan Galtung. For
topic of war altogether: see David Mars- an extreme instance, see Johan Galtung,
land, Neglect and Betrayal: War and Violence 'Violence, Peace and Peace Research',
in Modern Sociology, London, Institute for Journal of Peace Research, vol. VI, 1969.
European Defence and Strategic Studies, 10. Raymond Aron, Paix et Guerre entre
1985. les Nations, Paris, Gallimard, 1962, p. 33f.
3. Baran and Sweezy, op cit, ch. 7. (Peace and War: A Theory of lnternational
4. C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World Relations, translated by Richard Howard
War Three, London, Secker and Warburg, and Annette Baker Fox, London, Weiden-
1960. feld and Nicolson, 1966.)
5. Emeric Cruce, Nouveau Cynee, 1623, 11. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat
( The New Cyneas, edited and translated by Social, (edited with an introduction and
T. W. Balch, Philadelphia, Allen, Lane notes by Ronald Grimsley), Oxford,
and Scott, 1909). Clarendon Press, 1972.
6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 12. One major problem which arises
. .. . . . . .

(reprinted from the edition of 1851 with ln dlscusslng t nls lssue, is that lt 1S
an essay by W. G. Pogson Smith), difficult to identify a genuine society in

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Notes on the sociology of war 309

which there is not sovereignty, of a kind: Warfare, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
i.e. a society which is wholly without a 1980, p. 82.
chain of command issuing from a single 14. Michael Howard, War and the Liberal
course. See the examples of tribal forms Conscience: The George Trevelyan Lectures in
of sovereignty, given in Meyer Fortes the University of Cambridge 1977, London,
and E. E. Evans-Pritchard (eds), African Oxford University Press, 1981.
Political Systems, London, Oxford Univer- 15. See Paul Fussell, The Great War and
sity Press, 1940. Modern Memoy, London, Oxford Univers-
13. See Geoffrey Best, Alumanity in ity Press, 1975.

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