Abstract
The relationship between war and society is full of contradictions and complexities. On one hand, as an important dynamic mechanism, war has profoundly shaped historical change and social development, leaving its mark on many social institutions. On the other hand, with social change and technological innovation, war has undergone significant changes in terms of weapons, scale and form. Although war has played an indispensable role in the process of human society, it has never become a central issue in mainstream sociology, and there is even a tendency toward the ‘suppression of war’ in the deeper thought of sociology (Joas and Knöbl, 2013). Especially after the two world wars, not only were people eager to forget this dark experience and actively embrace the liberal idea of peace, but social scientists were happy to revel in the dream of modernity based on functionalist assumptions. They were unanimously silent about war and collective violence. The collective absence of war studies did not improve until European and American sociology turned to history, the state, revolution and violence in the 1970s and 1980s. As one of the few sociologists interested in war and collective violence, Michael Mann not only explicitly recognizes that military power and war have played important and differentiated roles at different times in human history, but also meticulously analyzes violence-related themes such as fascism, ethnic cleansing, empire, revolution, and the world wars. He has made outstanding contributions to historical sociology and the sociology of war. However, the systematic study of war, the main mechanism of military power, was not finally completed until the publication of On Wars.
Most wars are pointless and irrational in terms of both means and ends, but why are there nonetheless so many of them? To answer this challenging question, Mann provides a comparative analysis of war sequences in different regions or periods of history. The book focuses on six well-documented cases of varying war frequency, including ancient Rome, where wars were always frequent; ancient China and medieval and modern Europe, where wars began frequent but then became fewer; late medieval to modern Japan, where the frequency of wars fluctuated widely; precolonial and postcolonial Latin America, where interstate wars were initially abundant and then became rare; and the United States, which has fought the most recent and most global wars.
Compared to the IEMP model of power theory proposed in The Sources of Social Power, Mann’s new book makes three adjustments: (1) it distinguishes political power exercised within rulers’ domestic domains and ‘diplomatic’, peaceful geopolitical power exercised abroad; (2) it introduces emotions and combines them with ideologies, since powerful ideologies lead to strong emotions; (3) in addition to seeing the four power sources as means to achieve whatever goals people have, power can be seen as an end in itself, especially in the case of rulers (p. 4). As far as the research object is concerned, the book does not discuss war as a single case but sequences of wars over different regions and periods of history. Because wars come in sequences, each one influencing the next, it is necessary to focus on the effect of the inertia of history. There is also path dependency in wars.
Why do humans choose war rather than other peaceful means to achieve desired ends? Marxists and realists see wars as mainly aimed at economic gain or geopolitical survival. They typically use the ‘cost-benefit’ model to calculate the costs and benefits of war and to measure the economic and military strength of both sides, which constitutes instrumental rationality. However, material goals alone cannot adequately explain why wars are waged because ‘Calculation can make evident to princes that the cost of the war will in any case be superior to the profits of victory’ (Aron, 2003: 45). Therefore, in addition to rational calculations at the economic-military level, political and ideological-emotional power must be combined to explain irrational decisions in war. The decision-making process of whether or not to go to war is mostly related to political power, since most decisions for war are made by rulers and their advisors. As for the public, lacking much knowledge of foreign affairs and alternative sources of information, it is difficult not to believe the one-sided words of the rulers and the deliberate announcements of the manipulated mass media. War has always been a private game for the rulers and there is hardly any democracy in this foreign policy. Rulers take the initiative in making decisions for war, and whether to go to war or not is closely related to their character and values. In a sense, rulers are like gamblers who gamble with people’s lives in the game of war. They make decisions to go to war in a context of risk-induced anxiety, hope, and unexpected interactions in which, of course, not much rationality can be expected (p. 486). The motives for war are complex and varied. Mann particularly emphasizes the intertwined role of the three main motives – greed, status-honor-glory, and domination (p. 499). In short, the economic, military, political, ideological, and emotional motives are usually found in combination in the drive to war.
Based on the distinction between transcendent ideology, which seeks to transform the world, and immanent ideology, which strengthens the morale and solidarity (Mann, 1986: 23–24), Mann also proposes institutionalized ideology, to emphasize that militarism, induced by successive military victories, has gradually been integrated into institutions and cultures over the course of history, thereby fostering a militaristic culture and an atmosphere in which war is regarded as a normal means. Emotional overconfidence or fear fuels war. Most rulers throughout history have been confined to their local societies, constrained by self-confidence in their own ethnic groups and prejudice against unfamiliar ethnic groups, while differences in types of polity and forms of state have made mutual understanding difficult, leading to over-optimism about the strength of their own countries. Fear is the dominant emotion on the battlefields. Faced with the danger of death or disability in actual combat, most soldiers will involuntarily develop a sense of fear. Even if they survive, they will often suffer from emotional exhaustion and post-traumatic stress disorder.
There is no shortage of contingencies on the battlefield. Although commanders make rational calculations about material elements such as forces, armaments, and logistics in preparing for war, well-formulated war plans may not work due to unforeseen circumstances such as unexpected enemy behavior, battlefield terrain, and changes in the weather, which expose commanders, generals, and soldiers to the fickle fortunes of battle. As Carl von Clausewitz (1976) said, ‘War is the realm of uncertainty; three-quarters of the factors on which action in war is based are wrapped in a fog of greater or lesser uncertainty’ (p. 101). Given motives, emotions, ideologies, as well as ecological, geopolitical, historical contexts, and contingencies, erratic processes of escalation, and unintended consequences of interactions (p. 515), the perennial intervention of these constraints weakens the rationality of both means and ends, war is the least rational of human projects. In short, only by combining all the power sources, taking into account social and natural factors such as social structure and the inertia of history, geographical location and ecological environment, and balancing rational and irrational elements, is it possible to develop a more comprehensive understanding of war.
In addition, the book discusses themes such as whether war is universal, whether it is increasing or decreasing, and the different types of war. From the perspective of evolutionary theory, Azar Gat (2006) argues that in the state of nature, humans will compete and fight for scarce resources to achieve survival and reproduction goals and that evolutionary logic still guides human behavior today. But Mann rejects the biological explanation that war is rooted in human genetics, arguing that the vast differences in propensities for war and peace among earliest human societies suggest that war is not built into human nature. Only ‘when fixed agrarian settlements generated states and social classes, organized war became ubiquitous’. In other words, ‘Societies, not universal human nature, cause wars’ (p. 482). The debate over whether wars are increasing or decreasing has a long history, especially with the return of liberal optimism, and the idea that war and violence are in decline has become increasingly attractive. By examining data from relevant studies and analyzing collected historical material, Mann finds that there are no discernible universal trends in war but rather that it varies from region to region and from one period of history to another.
Mann has mastered not only the core theories of war but also the history of the world war in this great work of over 600 pages and eight years. Anyone interested in war should read this remarkable book. In On Wars, Mann uses a pluralistic view of power to reveal the multiple causes of war and its mostly irrational nature. This not only reminds us to avoid reducing history or social science to single-factor explanations or general laws but also demonstrates the unique advantages of historical sociology as an analytical perspective for identifying the interactions of different causal chains and their triggering of unintended consequences. Examining the vibrant subfield of the sociology of war from the perspective of historical sociology can help us understand the complex relationship between war and modernity, and thereby produce richer and more comprehensive intellectual results.