The real sociology of war: a reply to Roger
Roger Scruton's 'Notes on the sociology of war' (BJS, XXXVIII, 3, September 1987: 295-309) are an argument in principle against the discipline, rather than an argument against a sociology of war which actually exists. The only recent sociological work to which Scruton refers is polemic by Marsland,l which as Mann's review in the same issue of the BJS notes, itself refers to only one collection of substantive work (edited by the present writer).2 Since there is no reason to believe that Scruton has gone back even to Marsland's solitary source, this is a remarkably flimsy basis for a critique. And yet Scruton raises issues on which contemporary sociological work could have given him considerable assistance. He writes as if the sociology of war is in thrall to a simple Marxist viewpoint. The reality is that sociologists have developed far more cogent critiques of Marxism than Scruton's, and without indulging in wishful thinking about the pacific tendencies of the 'free world' which is every bit as superficial as the simplified Marxist view which he attacks. Sociological writers have rarely supposed that one can offer narrowly social explanations for war. Mann, for example, has polemicized against both 'the theory of militaristic capitalism' and 'the optimistic theory of pacific capitalism', and has argued instead for a modified version of 'the theory of geopolitical militarism'.3 This locates the causes of war not in domestic social or political structures but in the manifestly central context of international relations between states. Giddens has devoted a major volume of his Contemporary Critique of Historical Materialism to The Nation-State and Violence, arguing that it is the changing relations of internal surveillance and external military power, together with the industrialization of war, that explain the escalating violence of war. He does not, however, claim that these factors provide the causes of particular wars.4 Skocpol, in a slightly earlier work, provided an even more radical inversion of traditional Marxist views, by demonstrating how international relations and war, rather than social contradictions, were essential to explaining revolutions such as the Russian and Chinese.5 These are major social theorists, arguably radical sociologists in