The Sociology of War, by Dan Sanchez

Two nearly universals of the human experience: we’re all members of groups, and our group is better than any other group. From Dan Sanchez at antiwar.com:

The breakout of World War I upended many lives, including those of two great thinkers: the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises and the American journalist Randolph Bourne.

The young Mises had just revolutionized the economics of money and the business cycle. And he was on the verge still more breakthroughs when his career was interrupted by the Great War. Other economists in Austria were given cushy assignments in war planning offices. But Mises, who was radically out of step with prevailing politics, was sent to the front lines as an artillery officer.

Bourne had been pursuing independent study in Europe under Columbia University’s prestigious Gilder Fellowship for travel abroad. The continent-wide hostilities drove him back to the States where he resumed his previous career as a magazine writer. But Bourne was radically out of step with the militarism then sweeping America. His anti-war writing got him censored and shunned, both professionally and socially.

Both men deplored the Great War for upending, not only their own lives, but Western civilization itself. For Mises, it represented the end of an era. Mises called the century prior the “Age of Liberalism,” a time of rising economic freedom and integration, relative peace, and skyrocketing living standards. In 1914 that was all thrown away in favor of war, collectivism, and central planning.

Bourne saw the War as “a vast complex of life-destroying and life-crippling forces” that “devotes to waste or to actual destruction as much as it can of the vitality of the nation.”

Both subsequently worked to explain how such a calamity could come about. What is the fatal flaw in the soul of man that could yield such madness? What are the sociological factors that can drive a nation over the precipice of war and tyranny?

Ludwig von Mises and Warfare Sociology

Mises managed to survive the Russian shells and the frigid cold of the eastern front. Immediately after the war, he set to work on a book explaining the Great War’s origins, his 1919 Nation, State, and Economy. Among other factors, he noted that the nationalists who drove their countries into war held a conviction that “between peoples irreconcilable oppositions” existed. He noted that socialists held a similar faith, but concerning classes instead of nations. Mises wrote that, “Marxism and Social Democracy see an irreconcilable opposition of conflicting class interests everywhere…” In his 1922 treatise Socialism, Mises wrote that “Nationalist ideology divides society vertically; the socialist ideology divides society horizontally.”

Mises developed this theme further in his 1929 work A Critique of Interventionism, in which he wrote that Karl Marx,

“…denies that a solidarity of interest exists or has ever existed in society. A solidarity of interest, according to Marx, can exist only within each class. But a conflict of interest exists between the classes, which explains why the history of all societies has been a history of class wars.

Conflict is the moving force of social development to yet another group of social doctrines. For those doctrines the war of races and nations constitute the basic law of society.”

He then characterized both doctrines as variants of “warfare sociology.”

To continue reading: The Sociology of War