Description
This essay discusses the problems of military power and how it relates to society. It argues that military power has undergone a series of discontinuous and contested shifts in the course of European history, rather than following a pattern of progressive abstraction of violence from society. The author believes that this understanding of military power is important for understanding the past and the future.
Traces the relations between the organization of violence and social and political order from ancient Rome to early modern Europe. It studies the ways in which authority, obedience and forms of self-conduct were produced by the micro-techniques used to govern violence deployed in different forms of warfare. These issues comprise problematics of military power that are largely neglected by historical sociology and political history. The author shows that the constitution of military power and its relation to wider society has undergone a series of radical, discontinuous and contested shifts in the course of European history, rather than following a pattern of progressive abstraction of violence from society. The text argues that modern presumptions of an ahistorical dichotomy between military and civil society mat thus distort our understanding of the past and perhaps also of the future.
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