Jefferson’s Revolutionary Theory and the Reconstruction of Educational Purpose by Kerry T. Burch

Author:Kerry T. Burch
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030457631
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Snowden’s contention that the “battlefield is everywhere” tacitly recognizes that the traditional boundaries of military authority and power are far too limited to capture the ubiquitous, “full-spectrum dominance” of America’s military power today. And even if we fully appreciate the chasm in historical time that separates the eighteenth from the twenty-first centuries, it shouldn’t be too difficult for us to recognize the ideological similitude between the absolute power that Jefferson intended to protect against in relation to standing armies, and the absolute power that Snowden intended to protect against in relation to the militarization of the intelligence security establishment.

No doubt, the present-day institutional structure of the National Security State is far more capacious, physically, than the eighteenth-century model of a standing army. However, despite this variation of physical or institutional breadth, when these two historical formations are examined from an ideological or cultural standpoint, that is, from the standpoint of the moral and political purposes they embody, striking parallels emerge.

Each historical formation, for example, manifests a form of absolute power and each tends to advance elite-aristocratic purposes, political characteristics, and aims that must be viewed as threats to any viable notion of republican self-government. It is notoriously difficult for critical commentators to theorize the fluid and expansive boundaries of what we’re calling the military–industrial complex. Among other difficulties, today’s military–industrial complex is so ubiquitous it’s hard to wrap one’s conceptual arms around the whole thing. Perhaps what critics of militarism struggle to name today could be described as a globalized cyber-verse model of a standing army, where the “battlefield is everywhere,” forming a vast network of unaccountable, disciplinary power that amplifies a thousand-fold the potentially abusive powers of the eighteenth-century model of the standing army.20

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