Hew Strachan and the Sociology of War

Introduction

This article advances an unlikely, even preposterous, claim. It suggests that Hew Strachan’s work can be understood not simply as a history but as a genuine sociology of war and the armed forces. His work is not only always immediately relevant to sociology but contains important sociological implications and orientations which have often been hitherto overlooked. For much of his career, Strachan has been an accidental sociologist of war. Yet, his work is no less sociological simply because neither he nor most of his readers have noticed it up to this point.

Hew Strachan is plainly not a sociologist in any conventional sense. Indeed, until his recent appointment to a chair in international relations, every academic post which Strachan has held has been located in conventional history departments, culminating in his appointment to the Chichele Professorship of the History of Warfare at All Souls College in 2002. It is true that in his works, he has occasionally referenced the work of major sociological figures such as Emile Durkheim and Max Weber and has perceptively highlighted the influence which the emergent discipline of sociology exerted on the military in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. ¹ Thus, he describes how Gustave Le Bon’s famous analysis of the psychology of the crowd had a marked, influence on military thinkers at the fin de siècle. ² After the Franco–Prussian War, and in the light of conflicts from the American Civil War to the Boer War, French and indeed western military thinkers were concerned about the problems which the industrial battlefield presented for the offensive. French commentators drew upon Le Bon’s famous claims about the suggestibility of the crowd and its susceptibility to direction from a charismatic leader. The moral authority of the leader seemed to offer a solution to the problems posed by industrial firepower. ³ It is also true that some of Strachan’s writings have contributed immediately to debates on cohesion in sociology. ⁴

Nevertheless, despite his awareness of sociological texts and debates, it would seem improbable to claim that Strachan could be classified as a sociologist. Although Strachan is fully aware of the influence of sociology on others, his work is not obviously informed by sociological theory. He does not actively invoke either classical or more contemporary social theory to provide a conceptual framework in which to analyse European or British armies, the First World War or strategy. From his earliest works, his writing are resolutely in the tradition of military history. They are narrative histories aimed at providing histories of particular institutions, such as the British Army and its civil military relations or, of course, of major historical events, such as the First World War. They are brilliant attempts to understand and explain what happened, by situating events in the broadest global context. Nevertheless, despite the prima facie implausibility of the endeavour, this article will try to demonstrate that underlying all of Strachan’s work is a strand of thinking which might be usefully understood to be sociological.

History and Sociology

Clearly, in order to claim Strachan for sociology, it is necessary to provide some definition of sociology as an academic discipline. This is not easy. The disciplinary tensions and definitional debates between history and sociology are of long-standing. Moreover, there are, of course, numerous definitions of sociology and extensive internal disputes within the discipline about its fundamental role. Indeed, since the 1970s, with the rise of feminism, ethnic and racial studies, and the later influence of cultural studies, and finally animal-human studies, sociology has significantly fragmented as a discipline. It would be easy to exaggerate the unity of the discipline before the 1970s when competing approaches were plainly evident but the fundamental project of sociology is now a matter of intense contestation among sociologists. At the furthest extreme, sociologists interested in non-human animals increasingly disparage human social interaction as the prime focus of interest for sociologists. Nevertheless, notwithstanding these trends, it is still possible to identify a theoretical core which unifies sociology. Sociology is a discipline which is primarily interested in the problem of collective action; it is concerned with explaining how humans are able to cooperate with each other and, ipso facto, to form groups. It recognizes that, some of the higher primates notwithstanding, human cooperation has a distinctive, even unique, character, and that, therefore, collective dynamics operate when humans interact in ways which are irreducible either to individual psychologies or to physical facts.

As J.R. Searle has argued, social reality – the fact of human cooperation – is extraordinary. Uniquely, human social relations are constituted by the collective definitions which the participants put upon them. Merely by collectively understanding themselves to be in a social relation or a social group, humans thereby create that relationship or that group. Social relations are not just a matter of individual interpretation but, without a collective definition of what they involve, social relations do not exist: ‘Part of being at a cocktail party is being thought to be at a cocktail party; party of being at war is being thought to be at war. This is a remarkable feature of social facts; it has no analogue among physical facts.’ ⁵ In order to illustrate the difference between social and natural facts, Searle gives the example of the summit of Mount Everest, which exists and which continues to have snow and ice on it, no matter what anyone thinks or indeed, even whether anyone knows about the existence of this high point. In contrast to the natural world, social facts always depend upon what people think of them. Although it necessarily utilizes physical resources and involves actions which are not just ideational, social reality depends upon the way humans collectively define it; the way participants understand their relations to each other makes them what they are.

Crucially, in defining the significance of their interactions, participants simultaneously define their collective interests. Simply by agreeing to cooperate, humans identify that they now have collective interests and will assist each other to achieve them. In short, humans have an almost limitless ability to form groups of greater or lesser longevity on the basis of perceived and, therefore, actual collective interest. This argument has been rehearsed in different ways in sociology but it is most obvious in the discussions of Max Weber’s concept of the status group. Sociologists like Reinhardt Bendix, Randall Collins, and Barry Barnes ⁶ have all shown how Weber’s brief passages on the status group are replete with significance. They contain a profound theory of group formation and, which is the same thing, an explanation of how collective interests emerge. On this account, social interaction ‘which is not superservient to economic or any other purpose’, ⁷ but is prosecuted only for the intrinsic purpose of socializing, is required. During these moments, the members of a would-be group recognize their special relations to others and begin to exclude others from the benefits of these relations. They start to cooperate with each other and, in so doing, generate collective interests from which they all mutually benefit.

But these interests did not exist prior to the existence of the status group itself. Prior to the emergence of the group there would have been so many individuals with innumerable possibilities for association and group formation … Only as groups and group boundaries crystallize will the shared interests of individuals as members become visible and defined, and as group organization in the collective proceeds and changes so the interests of any given group therein will change. ⁸

Humans have an almost infinite capacity to generate new cooperative relations out of which new collective interests, emerge. Crucially, because it relies on an act of collective self-definition, group formation can never be reduced to external or prior factors. It cannot be reduced to material factors, even though this is a constant tendency across the social sciences. The environment, biology, economics, genetics, or psychology cannot finally explain society or social reality because the organization of humans into groups, its fundamental and constitutive process, relies upon the collective recognition of collective interests. In the face of any particular material conditions, humans might be able to form themselves into an almost infinite potential configuration of groups; prior conditions do not determine collective interests. Prior factors do not determine the formation of a ‘we’; only the would-be members of a group can do that together.

The external environment does not cause them to form these groups because in the face of any particular conditions, humans could form themselves into an array of possible groups. Participants in social interaction have to decide collectively which relations are to be invested with special significance and which are not. The environment does not do this for them. Sociology is concerned with explaining the way in which these groups, their cooperative practices and their associated collective interests, arise, as participants collectively define and redefine them. Groups necessarily generate collective interests, defined by the solidarity of the members, and these collective interests are one of the prime motivations for and drivers of social action. Individuals act, then, in the first instance as group members pursuing and advancing the collective interests of their groups. Sociologists have attempted to show how the formation of groups with distinctive collective interests has a decisive impact on every aspect of human existence.

For sociology, all human existence is collective and must be understood by reference to its constituent social groups. It seeks to explain how social groups in their internal and external interactions, competition, and cooperation generate patterns of individual and collective behaviour. Of course, in practice, explaining events by reference to the social group to which actors belong is inordinately complex. In any historical era, there are multiple groups, typically overlapping with blurred membership and identity, and internally each group is constituted by a complex dynamic. Nevertheless, at base, sociology is a clearly defined discipline and has a clear project and orientation. While economics explains human action by reference to market interaction politics by reference to political power and negotiation, sociology seeks to explain human behaviour by reference to the social group and its distinctively defined collective interests.

Once sociology is defined as the study of social groups and their collective interests, it becomes possible to see how Strachan’s work on war and the armed forces might be understood to be not just relevant to sociology but as actually sociological. Strachan’s work is animated by a central concern. He is interested in showing that warfare in all its manifestations is always a political phenomenon, defined and constituted by the military forces, belligerent states, peoples, and their interests. Strachan’s work does not typically use the language of sociology to discuss this process. He is not primarily concerned with the problem of cooperation and collective action and, therefore, the definition of collective interests in a sociological sense. However, politics plays an equivalent role in his writing. For Strachan, strategy and war are not predetermined by external factors but are the outgrowth of the complex balance of competing interests, themselves open to definition and redefinition. In Strachan’s work on war, politics operates all the way down, as the ‘social’ does in sociology. In order to demonstrate the sociological relevance of Strachan’s work, this article will explore two areas of his writing which accord broadly with the strategic, operational, and tactical levels. The aim is to show that at each level, Strachan’s analysis decisively relies upon an appeal to collective interest and to group formation to explain strategy, wars, and the armed forces.

Strategy: War as Politics by Other Means

In the last decade, since he held the Chichele Chair at Oxford, Strachan has increasingly published on strategy, policy, and civil–military relations rather than on military history per se. This turn to strategy and policy is an outgrowth of his long-standing interest in and close reading of Clausewitz’s work. The more recent work on strategy is closely informed by his interpretation of Clausewitz and arises, in fact, directly from it. It might be claimed in fact that Strachan’s strategic writings represent an application of his reading of Clausewitz to contemporary strategic issues. The debates in which he has been involved are a good starting point for understanding the sociological element in his work.

Strachan’s strategic writings are animated by his opposition to Michael Howard and Peter Paret’s translation of Clausewitz’s On War (and its followers) and Samuel Huntington and, especially his 1957 work, The Soldier and the State. Strachan’s opposition to Michael Howard, of course, requires considerable qualification since they have enjoyed a long friendship and professional relationship for many years and share similar approaches to military history, including the requirement for global, non-Anglocentric research. Yet, the divide between them over Clausewitz cannot be ignored and has indeed become more explicit recently as Strachan has elaborated on his reading of Clausewitz in English. The criticism of Samuel Huntington has always been obvious and overt.

In 1976, Michael Howard and Peter Paret published the first complete translation of Clausewitz’s On War. ⁹ It was a major achievement and the translation, which is lucid and compelling throughout, has become the major reference work in the Anglophone world. However, as with all translations, there are a number controversies which surround the text. Strachan focuses in particular on the famous passages which deal with the relationship between war and policy/politics. For Strachan, some of the infelicities which follow from Howard and Paret’s translation are a product of the period in which they produced the work. The prime strategic consideration for the US States and indeed for, all western powers was at that time nuclear deterrence, while the US Army was trying to rebuild itself after Vietnam by professionalization which included the discovery of operational art. Both nuclear deterrence and the salvation sought in renewed operational art reconfigured the relationship between war, strategy, and policy. Specifically, state policy and the execution of war were increasingly collapsed into each other, even as military professionals became more independent from their civilian masters. While political leaders set policy, increasingly skilled and professionalized military commanders prosecuted war either through push-button nuclear war or through refined operational art. Strategy, the skill of coherently aligning political aims with military means and ways to the immediate and shifting context of the conflict, was, in effect, diminished. The relationship between policy and war was presumed to be unmediated, direct, and unilateral.

Howard and Paret’s translation did not, of course, cause this impoverishment of strategy but it reflected and affirmed civil–military relations in the late Cold War. For Strachan, the central mistake in the Howard and Paret’s translation relates to the famous sentence ‘War is a continuation of policy/politics by other means’ and the surrounding discussion especially in chapter 2. For Strachan, Howard and Paret’s translation affirmed a misleading interpretation of Clausewitz which was emergent at that point:

The ‘liberal’ Clausewitz was the construct of two of the most distinguished scholars of modern war, Michael Howard and Peter Paret, whose readable translation of On War appeared in 1976 … the text has acquired a fluency which early nineteenth century German, with its predilection for passive constructions, does not have. Its English version also possesses a greater coherence than is immediately relevant in the German. However, Howard and Paret gave it consistency by their choice of English words and, occasionally, by their glosses of the text itself. ¹⁰

Of course, Strachan identifies Clausewitz’s word Politik as one of the most important of these translations: ‘which they tend to translate as “policy” rather than use the equally acceptable alternative of “politics”’. ¹¹ For Strachan, this is significant: ‘This is not just a matter of semantics. “Policy” conveys an impression of direction and clear intent; politics, like war, is an adversarial business, whose implementation is, like war, messy and confused.’ ¹² For Strachan, this reduces and simplifies Clausewitz whose fundamental premise is not the necessary subordination of war to policy, as a neutral instrument, but the fact that war is an adversarial struggle in which an opponent is made to bend to the will of an opposing state; it is a battle of wills. Accordingly, ‘On War presents us with two different ways of examining the relationship between war and policy. The first is that of Book I, where policy permeates war and moderates it. This is the view favoured by Howard and Paret.’ ¹³ Yet, this ignores other dimensions of On War and specifically Book VIII which ‘says different things about the relationship between war and policy’. ¹⁴ There Clausewitz discusses absolute war and it is on the basis of these remarks that Strachan claims an alternative reading of Clausewitz in which war cannot always be so neatly subordinated to policy.

Book VIII therefore matters not least because it highlights the reciprocal nature of the relationship between war and policy more than Book I. War is not simply the continuation of policy or politics by other means. Of course in theory war should be used, as it is frequently used, as an instrument of policy. But in reality that is a statement about causation more than its conduct, and about intent more than practice. Once war has broken out, two sides clash, and their policies conflict: that reciprocity generates its own dynamic, feeding on hatred, on chance and on the play of military probabilities. War has its own nature, and can have consequences very different from the policies that are meant to be guiding it. In other words war itself shapes and changes policy. ¹⁵

War is no passive instrument of policy, as Howard and Paret’s translation implied. War is inherently and intrinsically political in itself, even at the level of its strategies and tactics:

The bulk of the work, Book II to VII, is focused on the relationship between strategy and tactics, and their reciprocal effects. Most modern readers skip these chapters, convinced that they are no more than a description of late Napoleonic War, and bored (understandably) by advice on the conduct of river crossings and the defensive value of mountain ranges. But they are the bedrock from which Clausewitz’s ideas about war’s true nature, about its’ inherent ‘friction’, about the role of chance and probability, and about the function of military genius are derived. ¹⁶

Strachan here perhaps attaches too much significance to Clausewitz’s descriptive chapters whose purpose seemed to be primarily to function as a military manual for the early nineteenth-century commander. Yet, the wider point is crucial. Tactical and, above all, strategic issues were inherently political; they involved questions which necessarily involved the interrelationship of reason, passion, and chance. Apparently technical military decisions always in fact had implications for the government, for the people, and, of course, for the armed forces; they were inherently political. Moreover, of course, as a war continues and develops, the struggle inevitably raises new political questions which typically demand a change in policy as the adversaries’ ends change. War in and of itself alters policy. Yet, a political leader or a scholar who ignored this internal, reciprocal effect and sought merely to subordinate war to preconceived and unified policy was inevitably condemned to failure and misunderstanding.

Strachan provides historical examples of the sanitized and simplified Howard and Paret interpretation in action:

The notion of war’s subordination to policy is congruent with democratic norms of civil–military relations. It implies, as did both the Weinberger doctrine of 1984 (in whose formulation Powell is assumed to have played a leading role) and the Powell doctrine of 1992, that all that is required for success is the establishment of clear aims and the provision of overwhelming force to achieve those aims … In 2003, the operational virtuosity of the American army was not linked to policy by strategy: the separation was not only the fault of Donald Rumsfeld, it was also the baleful consequence of the Powell Doctrine. ¹⁷

The problem continues to this day: ‘The ‘war on terror’, embraced in September 2001, was profoundly a strategic. Directed not towards a political goal, but against a means of fighting.’ ¹⁸ ‘The tragedy for the armed forces of the United States and for their allies is that greater attention to rather more of the text would have provided the intellectual underpinnings for greater self-awareness and strategic sensitivity than has been evident over the last decade.’ ¹⁹

In fact, Strachan recognizes that the Petraeus counter-insurgency revolution revised many of the errors of US strategic thinking in the 1980s and 1990s. Strachan notes that another

quotation from Clausewitz has begun to supplant that on the relationship between war and policy in military doctrine circles: ‘The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment that the statesman and commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither masking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something that is alien to its nature.’ ²⁰

This is a role for the military professional but it has ‘profound political implications’. ²¹ Crucially, ‘because wars should be thought of as acts of policy, not as something autonomous, they must “vary with the nature of their motives and of the situations which give rise to them”’. ²²

Strachan certainly does not describe his reading of Clausewitz as sociological, although he cites Raymond Aron’s two-volume study. However, if sociology is understood to be a discipline which is concerned with social group formation, interaction, and competition – the pursuit of collective interests – then there is a sociological element to Strachan’s interpretations. He too denies all mechanistic accounts of war which reduce an adversarial dynamic to the unidirectional implementation of a pre-assigned policy. War is not determined from the outside; it is not a natural phenomenon subject to Newtonian physics and causality. It is not determined by biological, genetic, economic, or environmental factors. War itself does not demand certain automatic reactions from states. Rather, war is constituted by the mutual interactions of the parties, by reference to their own developing interests.

The Clausewitzean trinity becomes deeply significant here. Of course, in the first instance, the Clausewitzean trinity refers not to three identifiable parties – or groups – but rather to three elements of war itself: ‘primordial violence, hatred, and enmity’, ‘the play of chance and probability’, and, finally, ‘policy, which makes it subject to reason alone’. ²³ However, Clausewitz quickly associates these three elements with identifiable agents, the people, the armed forces or the generals, and the government or political leader:

The first of these three aspects mainly concerns the people; the second the commander and his army; the third the government. The passions that are to be kindled in war must already be inherent in the people; the scope which the play of courage and talent will enjoy in the realm of probability and chance depends on the particular character of the commander and the army; but the political aims are the business of government alone. ²⁴

The implication is that sometimes political leaders or generals might be motivated by hatred, the people by reason. Nevertheless, even if hatred, chance, and reason do not always align with the people, the generals, or the government, Clausewitz identifies these three actors as critical to the prosecution of war. This is important in understanding Strachan’s analysis.

According to Strachan, war does not determine the interests of a belligerent state, setting self-evident objectives. In any war, the government, the people, and the generals of a belligerent state have to define their interests and, therefore, their goals in fighting. These interests and, therefore, the ways, ends, and means which are selected are a matter of collective debate and decision. They have to be defined by each constituency and by the polity as a whole. They are necessarily reconfigured as a result of the dynamics of conflict. The interests of each party – and the state as a whole – evolve in a process of mutual social interaction and competition.

In fact, since war involves a struggle between two antagonists, the Clausewitzean trinity is always minimally doubled so that the government, army, and people of both belligerent states form part of the dynamic. There are six sub-actors in any war; the government, army, and people of both sides. In this situation, there are three internal relations on each side as well as the violent interaction between warring polities: seven relations in all. In fact, Clausewitz’s trinity implies an even more complex political ecology. Theoretically, each element of each trinity could interact with and affect the elements in the trinity of the opposing state. The people, the government, and the generals of polity A might each interact with the people, government, and generals of Polity B and vice versa. In the Second World War, for instance, Winston Churchill exerted an influence on Adolf Hitler, German high command, and the German people. Obviously, the relationship was not immediate and was of a quite different order to Churchill’s internal relations with his commanders and citizens; it was typically conducted through the press. In most cases, it was an imaginary relationship; but no less real for that. Similarly, the persona of Adolf Hitler influenced Churchill, British high command, and the British people. Consequently, in any war, there are potentially 16 interrelations here in Clausewitz’s trinity. The more states which are involved in war, the more complex the political ecology becomes.

All of these elements may interact with each other, responding to the unpredictable dynamics of conflict, to produce a bewildering and unstable equilibrium. War is not so much a trinity but a multidimensional complex on this account. This complex is also dialectically self-referential because the interaction between the three elements in each state immanently transforms the character of the conflict itself. Crucially, war itself is political as a result; its course is always already determined by the balance of collective interests and intentions of belligerents and their constituent elements. At every points, governments, army, and people on both sides – as well as the belligerent states as unified actors – have to define and redefine their collective interests in order to determine what kind of war they are fighting. War is an irretrievably political event, therefore. As a true Clausewitzean, Strachan always employs the word political but, in fact on his account, war is always a social fact, constituted by the mutual antagonisms and alliances of the adversaries which are party to it and arising out of their collective interests, as they define them. War is a collective, social phenomenon. Strachan objects to Howard and Paret’s translation of Clausewitz and the dominant American interpretation of Clausewitz because they are not political enough. It may be possible to rephrase this claim; they are not sociological enough. Misinterpreting Clausewitz, they confuse the monocausality of the physical world for the multiple, self-referential dynamics of social reality.

Professionalism and the Army

Since its publication in 1957, Samuel Huntington’s The Soldier and the State ²⁵ has been the prime reference point for debates about civil–military relations. It was and remains the seminal work in the field. Famously, in that work, Huntington tries to address a paradox which confronted the United States after the Second World War when it had, for the first time in its history, a very large standing army, navy, and air force and had become a superpower. The emergence of the US military power presented a very serious challenge to conventional US politics and especially to civil–military (i.e. state–military) relations. In particular, the USA had somehow to retain its global military primacy while still retaining political control over a vastly empowered force. It seemed difficult, even contradictory, to reconcile the two requirements. Famously, through a brilliant historical survey, Huntington proposed a means not only by which the USA could institutionalize stable civil–military relations but which were already coming into being in the 1950s. He proposed the concept of objective military control. Objective control referred to the separation of civilian and military powers and the complete subordination of the armed forces to civil powers. Political leaders commanded the armed forces.

However, in order that the armed forces could actually execute their commands, Huntington supported the emergence of professionalism in the officer corps. This professionalism would turn the officer corps inwards so that it focused on and became experts in the application of organized violence. Although warriors, officers were professional technocrats, interested only in the application of military power, not in dictating why it should be used. They were interested only in how military power could be most effectively applied in the pursuit of American interests. In this way, generals could wield the most powerful war machine ever created and yet be divorced from civilian politics, over which they had no interest. They became Spartans in Babylon. It was a profound and ingenious argument and has influenced scholars since that time, including most obviously Eliot Cohen, ²⁶ whose concept of supreme command reiterates Huntington’s essential argument for the primacy of the civil powers and the exclusion of military professionals from politics.

Drawing on his reading of Clausewitz, and as has already been implied above, Strachan utterly rejected this account of civil–military relations, not only as unrealistic but actually dangerous. In Strachan’s recent writings on strategy, his objections to this position are clear. However, Strachan’s analysis of civil–military relations and his rejection of the Huntingtonian position is most developed in his early work, The Politics of the British Army. There, in a history of the British Army from its origins in the seventeenth century to the present, he tries to show how the army and its generals are always already necessarily implicated in the political process. It is simply impossible and misguided to suggest or request that the army be excluded or exclude itself from politics. Crucially, for Strachan, professionalism has not depoliticized the army. On the contrary, the professionalism of the army, as a major public institution, has ensured that it is necessarily implicated in politics; professionalism gives rise to a distinctive kind of military politics which has to be recognized.

With a few obvious exceptions such as Martin Shaw, Stansilaw Andreski, Tony Ashworth, or Christopher Dandeker, ²⁷ British sociologists have historically not been especially interested in the armed forces as an institution or with war itself. The armed forces have never been a central concern to sociology as a discipline. Moreover, when sociologists have analysed the armed forces, they have typically been interested not so much in what the armed forces distinctively do but rather in using the armed forces to demonstrate a wider thesis about class reproduction in the United Kingdom. In particular, sociologists have been recurrently interested in exploring the way in which the officer corps reproduces itself as a social elite. The officer corps is taken as a prime example of wider social elite reproduction in the United Kingdom. Keith Macdonald has been an important figure here. In 1980, he first explored the connection between a British social elite, educated at public school, and the officer corps which he reaffirmed in 2004. In that later article, Macdonald sought to show the way in which an aristocratic habitus inculcated at school public assisted army officers especially in favoured regiments in the combat arms to advance their careers. His work is supported by work making similar arguments by Von Zugbach, and others. ²⁸

According to this ‘sociological’ argument, the prior class allegiances of individual officers determined the formation of a class-bound officer corps. Macdonald is concerned primarily with the implications of elitism for military meritocracy, professionalism, and competence but in fact his argument is equally applicable to the question of army politics and to civil–military relations. Since the British Army remains, even in the twenty-first century, a class-bound organization linked to the British aristocracy, gentry, and higher professions, its political orientation is, on this account, traditional, right-wing, and actively Conservative.

There is little doubt that the officer corps, even in the twenty-first century, is overwhelmingly populated by the sons and daughters of the professional middle classes and there is a proportional overrepresentation of public school students in its ranks. Nevertheless, Strachan rejects the claim that there is any automatic and direct connection between the social backgrounds of British officers and the ethos and politics of the officer corps as a professional group. For Strachan, professionalism is a sui generis collective phenomenon which must be analysed in its own terms. As a result of its professionalism, the officer corps has emergent social and political properties which are constituted through its formation as a distinctive status group and which transcend the individual backgrounds of its members.

Thus, in Wellington’s Legacy, when Strachan analyses the apparently sclerotic post-Napoleonic army, he claims that even here the professionalism of the officer corps generated innovation and change (even alongside stagnation). He dismisses any easy assumption that the aristocratic backgrounds of the officers automatically dictated army policy and were responsible for the disasters in the Crimea: ‘It was not birth that dictated the grant of commissions, so much as the wealth to purchase and to provide a private income … Bernal Osborne, a self-avowed liberal, pointed out in 1850 that the vast majority of officers in the heavy dragoons were the “sons of capitalists and gentlemen” who had made their money fairly and honestly in their different occupations.’ ²⁹ Strachan stresses, ‘All these quotations stress that the characteristics of a gentleman were bestowed by education rather than by birth.’ ³⁰ The trend is a long-term one: ‘The names of these army dynasties – Churchill, Lascelles, Howard, Campbell – can carry aristocratic connotations but often the title was gained through outstanding service in the army.’ ³¹ Accordingly, army officers from 1815 to 1854 were military professionals who were often dedicated to their professional advancement. Indeed, in 1899 almost a quarter of colonels and generals came from service backgrounds and about half were from the middle class. ³² The problem in the Crimea was not that the profession was amateurish and socially elitist but that, due to colonial service, the battalion remained the preferred administrative unit, so that a general staff had not developed to unify the functions of the Adjutant General, Quartermaster General, and General Staffs. ³³ No staff had developed to support individual commanders or to correct their failings. Moreover, communications between units, used to operating independently, was very poor. ³⁴

Any inadequacies which the British Army demonstrated in the Crimea were not then the unmediated result of prior class commitments but rather were the product of more immediate organizational and operational factors. Even in the Georgian and Victorian eras, when it was heavily imprinted by the landed aristocracy and gentry, the British Army could not be reduced to the prior and unmediated social and political affiliations of its individual officers. The organizational culture and orientation – the professional culture – of the force generated distinctive allegiances, interests, and competences. The post-Wellingtonian developments as well as the disasters in the Crimea must be explained by reference to more proximate and immediate organizational factors.

In The Politics of the British Army, Strachan affirms the point: ‘It is a fundamental proposition of this book that the social composition of the army is largely irrelevant to its growth as a professional body.’ ³⁵ Yet, this professionalism has not depoliticized the army. On the contrary, ‘The British Army has been impelled into politics not least by the very fact of its professionalism.’ ³⁶ The central aim of The Politics of the British Army is to prove this thesis and to show how, in different eras, issues of apparently purely military concern necessarily drew the Army and its generals into politics. Here Strachan illustrates his reading of Clausewitz empirically. War – and the army – is inherently, intrinsically, and irremediably political. Strachan plots how throughout the Victorian era, Wellington, Roberts, and Wolseley employed political means in order to influence defence and Army policy. In particular, a favoured method was to exploit the ambiguities of dual parliamentary and sovereign control to forward their definition of the Army’s interests. When confronted with parliamentary legislation which they opposed, a typical strategy was to appeal to their duty to the Sovereign and to the defence of national interests. Yet, it was not simply that the Army employed political interests to defend itself from external civil interference. Rather, Army reforms, which had very significant civilian and political repercussions, were themselves controversial. The Cardwell reforms in the 1870s and the abolition of the purchase of commissions and the Haldane reforms of the Edwardian era were factional political issues within the Army as well as within civil society; ‘The Curragh incident of 1914 stands as the logical conclusion to a century of continuous influences.’ ³⁷ Strachan continues:

What is extraordinary about the behaviour of Roberts and Wilson in the Curragh crisis is that they were willing to split the army in their pursuit of Unionism – that they were prepared to give political objectives the priority over their sense of professional solidarity … Therefore for both divisions in the army – those who did support Gough as well as those who did not – the empire and its maintenance were crucial factors in determining their political activity. ³⁸

For over a century, the Army had been dedicated to the defence of the empire so that its institutional interests had become bound up in its security. When civilian political decisions, especially by the Liberal Party, potentially jeopardized those interests, generals were necessarily drawn into the political sphere in order to protect their professional corporate interests.

However, even more interestingly, especially in the face of major questions such as commissions, the reform of Army structures, or the suppression of loyal subjects, there was no single obvious institutional interest. At this point, the Army broke into self-promotional professional factions, each of which competed for political primacy. It is important to stress that the collective interests of these factions were not predetermined but were an act of collective definition by their leaders and members, reflecting their operational experiences, regimental allegiances, and personal ties. The point for Strachan is that political engagement was inevitable for both external and internal reasons. Professionalism did not depoliticize the Army. On the contrary, it generated and accentuated particular corporate interests which generals were forced to define and to defend.

Conclusion

There is no doubt that Hew Strachan is a leading military historian and that his work will endure as a major contribution to the discipline of history more generally. However, while it would be an exaggeration to claim that he is a conventional sociologist, his work has a hitherto unrecognized relevance for sociology. Indeed, there is a sociological strand running through his work. Strachan resolutely refuses to reduce the explanation of war and the armed forces to prior, external factors – to economy, class, technology, geography, or climate. His work explores the complex dynamics of proximate, political, and institutional causality. Above all, he shows how war is always a political phenomenon in which the interactions of adversaries, their internal elements, and their institutions ultimately constitute conflict. War is not a pure causally predetermined event but an organic, emergent social fact. This strand is most clearly visible in his discussion of professionalism, one of the central motifs uniting all his work in both military history and strategy. Against simplistic Huntingtonian accounts of objective control, Strachan demonstrates that as a result of its professionalism, an army will always develop its own (contested) corporate interests. These corporate interests impel generals into the political sphere, especially since these interests are not predetermined but have to be defined recurrently by military leaders in the face of changing situations and new threats. If military leaders do not define and defend these interests, civilian politicians – with their own institutional and electoral interests – will impose them on the army. In either situation, the army has always already become politicized – simply because it is a large and powerful organization. Strachan’s work is a testimony to complexity and irreducibility. An institution like war or the army cannot be understood by mechanistic causal models. At every level and in every era, specific interactional dynamics intervene to generate inherently political, collective and institutional interests. Precisely because Strachan’s work is an exemplification of these complex dynamics in action, it is unwittingly, implicitly but also very clearly sociological. Hew Strachan might be claimed not only as an eminent historian of war but also a leading military sociologist.