Sociology and the Military

Abstract

Sociologists have been reluctant to study the military. It is peripheral to core concerns of sociology. This absence is routinely explained by going back to the discipline’s conception. H. Saint-Simon and A. Comte conjured sociology after the close of the Napoleonic War which ushered in a century of relative European peace. C. Wright Mills (1956) argued that this cessation of hostilities created the classic liberal worldview: industrialism would replace militarism. Bizarrely, two World Wars and the Holocaust hardly altered sociology’s focus. While Mills’ disciplinary influence is indisputable, his call for a sociology of war has largely been ignored (his Causes of World War Three swiftly went out of print). To this day scholars repeatedly stress the military’s invisibility in the social sciences (e.g Ender, Gibson, 2005). Yet having exited the most murderous century in all of human history and entered a new one with a War on Terror that was defined as global and perpetual, this task is surely pressing. A question, however, arises why the powerful must remain sociologically invisible. This article presents challenges to sociology’s pedagogy and practice, which is to say sociology-as-taught and sociology-as-researched. It argues for study of the military, but in so doing it distinguishes itself from two existing literatures, those emanating from the sub-discipline of military sociology, and those emerging post-11-September that stress the ways in which society is now becoming militarised (Giroux 2008). At its worst this military sociology is embedded sociology, which is to say it is scholarship in the service of the powerful, and at best it stops at the garrison gates, treating the military as its own society. While H. Giroux’s approach is much more profitable it appears to miss an essential point: society is always already militarised. The entire project of sociology is geared towards making sense of modernity. When modern state formation, administration and governance, citizenship, economic production and organisation, behaviour and discipline are considered it becomes clear that the military has had a decisive influence.