War in Social Thought by Joas Hans; Knöbl Wolfgang; Knöbl Wolfgang

Author:Joas, Hans; Knöbl, Wolfgang; Knöbl, Wolfgang
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 2012-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

In Germany, after the end of the First World War, historians such as Hintze, economists like Sombart, and sociologists such as Lederer continued their scholarly studies of the links between war and modern society; but it is fair to say that after the death of Max Weber the German social sciences failed to maintain the once-high standard of macrosociological reflection. Though a new generation of scholars with significant theoretical potential emerged (such as Karl Mannheim or the authors of the early Frankfurt school), the sociology of the Weimar Republic era was afflicted by acute crisis, a predicament then aggravated by National Socialist rule and the forced emigration of many intellectuals during this period. The question of whether Weimar sociology as a whole in fact saw the start of something new and sustainable (and that there was therefore no crisis)—a new beginning that was all too quickly nipped in the bud by Nazism—can be left to one side here. All that matters for our purposes is that between 1918 and 1933 the problem of war and peace never really became an important topic of scholarship. War in general or the world war that had just ended failed to inspire sociology or the other disciplines in the social sciences and humanities in any appreciable way. The few authors who were exceptions to this rule linked the topic of war directly with that of the German state, which was either rejected on political grounds or credited with little stability following the end of the Reich. It was in this context that the first major analyses to at least touch on the topic of war appeared in the mid-1920s.

Friedrich Meinecke’s Machiavellism: The Doctrine of Raison d’État and Its Place in Modern History (originally 1924), for example, was an attempt to interpret the modern state against the background of the experiences of the First World War. The historian Meinecke (1862–1954), who accepted the departure of the monarchy and nailed his colors to the Weimar constitution as a “republican by reason,” interpreted the history of the modern state essentially as one of conflict between empiricism and rationalism, between the actual state with its often brutal power politics on the one hand and the reason-based state of the kind envisaged by Enlightenment thinkers on the other. According to Meinecke, the control of state power politics from below imagined in the Enlightenment did not occur; even worse, the triumph of the Enlightenment in the wake of the French Revolution had in fact unleashed armed violence on an unprecedented scale, because in modern democracies power politics and raison d’état could develop a virtually inexorable momentum (Meinecke 1957 [1924], 347). Tremendous forces were mobilized in the wake of conscription, introduced in the painful aftermath of 1789, forces that thwarted Kant’s hopes of peace. As a result of the republicanization of political life, of the nation-state itself, war had become a “daemonic force which scorned the rein of raison d’état and threw its rider in the abyss” (422). Through its interplay

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