2015. vol. 14. No. 4

The aim of this paper is to understand the nature of Clausewitz’s philosophical thinking in On War and its two-fold relation to the catastrophic event of the Napoleonic Wars and to Clausewitz’s own reformation of a theory of war. In distinguishing between a philosophical and a military register of thinking—between a reflection on the nature of war and a theory of war—this paper examines Clausewitz’s critique of 18th century military thought, the dialectical progression of this thinking in On War, and the “grammar” of war in its linkage of different definitions of war into a systematic whole. Against Raymond Aron’s proposal to sever the connection between the three substantial definitions of war in the evolution of Clausewitz’s thinking, this paper examines the conceptual progression of these three definitions within On War’s opening reflection on the nature of war. A closer examination of Chapter 1, Book 1, demonstrates the originality of Clausewitz’s philosophical manner of thinking through the essence, or nature, of war from its apparently “straightforward” definition of war as a duel to the Platonic resonance of its concluding image of war as a “paradoxical trinity.” In this manner, Chapter 1 establishes a philosophical space for Clausewitz’s development of a theory of war in the subsequent books of On War.

When Carl von Clausewitz’s statement that “war is a mere continuation of policy by other means” was inverted by Michel Foucault into “power is war, the continuation of war by other means” during his course entitled Il faut défendre la société,the already-growing interest in von Clausewitz skyrocketed. However, the enormous interest in this particular dictum overshadowed many of the even more intriguing observations discovered and diagnoses made by the Prussian general. The present text aims to investigate one of the less-famous pronouncements made in von Clausewitz’s On War. This pronouncement regards the ‘law’ of the ‘escalation to extremes’ that is inherent to every war (a war becomes the war, becomes all or total war). This ‘law’ has received little interest, although it can be considered much more worrisome than von Clausewitz’s more famous dictum. However, it has been recently rediscovered and discussed by the late French philosopher René Girard, and, as will be argued in this text, can be considered as the spectral heritage of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s political philosophy. Although Agamben seldomly mentions the Prussian general (his main influences, Debord, Arendt, and Schmitt, however, often do), the discovery of the spectral kinship between Agamben and von Clausewitz allows us to consider Agamben’s philosophy of the state of exception and total/global civil war from a new and more provocative angle.

This study seeks to critically explore the link between sovereignty, violence and war in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. From a brief rereading of Leviathan’s main arguments that explicitly revolves around the Aristotelian distinction between actuality/ potentiality, it will conclude that Hobbesian pre-contractual violence is primarily based on what Hobbes terms “anticipatory reason” and the problem of future contingency. Relying on Foucauldian insights, it will be emphasized that the assumption of certain potentialities suffices in leading to Hobbes’s well-known conclusion that the state of nature is a “condition of Warre.” In a second step, this study considers some of Agamben’s arguments to account for how pre-contractual violence as envisioned by Hobbes cannot be rendered impotent through the integration of a sovereign. In specific, Agamben’s claims shed light on an irreducible, inextricable entwining between the state of nature and the state of law as “Siamese twins” (Virno). On a meta-level, Agamben thus implicitly shows how the “Hobbesian problem” cannot be merely reduced to a “problem of order” (Parsons). With regard to the current functioning of the stratagems of financial markets and the mechanisms of future-colonization underpinning global politics, this study finally argues that Hobbes ought to be reevaluated in particular regarding the problem of the future in his account. Partly responding to Agamben’s critical investigations, I suggest that a careful exploration of what will be coined “the prospects of an actualization of the potentiality not-to-be” might serve as a first theoretical step towards a productive form of criticism.

This article deals with the critique of Just War Theory (JWT) which appeared in the works of Carl Schmitt. JWT was revived in the middle of 1900s and was treated as an absolutely secular direction for military ethics. However, being Christian in its origin JWT retained a certain religious reasoning. This call for political morality could be compared to an appeal to divine law, but outside of the Christian context it loses its validity and weight. These features of JWT were noticed by Schmitt who offered the concept of bracketed warfare instead. The bracketing of war was an essential component of jus publicum Europaeum and it presupposed the recognition of an enemy as equal. Bracketed war was defined in political and legal terms and did not presuppose moral or religious evaluation of armed conflicts. In the 20^th century bracketing of war was replaced with discrimination of war as morally and legally unacceptable act. JWT served as a theoretical foundation for this change. Though it is the prerogative of JWT to prove itself as an attempt at humanism, the invasion of morality into politics, from Schmitt’s perspective dehumanizes the enemy and increases the totality of a conflict. Schmitt insisted on purifying the political sphere from all moral constituents in order to make it more balanced. A mere political approach to war made Schmitt’s theory of bracketed war more humane and reasonable than JWT.

The first thing worth noting about “war and capitalism” are the important intellectual traditions referring to the relations between these two terms, which operate in radically opposing ways. However, the main intellectual currents since the Enlightenment have posited an essential antipathy between these two concepts. Economic links were supposed to inhibit social conflicts and promote reciprocal dependencies, thus civilizing customs and promoting peace, both internally and among different sovereign entities. These ideas are coherent with world-visions with many ramifications, but often expressed under the form of an “ought-to-be”, not regarding real facts. An example is the work of Adam Smith, who argued that colonial trade was potentially a peaceful activity, good for all parties involved, whereas he simultaneously recognized that economic reality strayed considerably from such a rosy picture. The exact reasons for that remained somewhat vague, although Smith tended to blame monopolies and the mingling of trade with the exercise of sovereignty, as opposed to a peace-inducing model of open competition. This cluster of issues is treated here via the revision of the correspondent ideas by a number of important social theorists, including Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Werner Sombart, Thorstein Veblen, Joseph Schumpeter, Alexander Gerschenkron, Karl Polanyi, Fernand Braudel, Giovanni Arrighi and Michael Mann. The theories advanced by these authors are also contrasted with various important historical facts and trends, mentioned in the works of other relevant researchers, mostly historians, suggesting the convenience of keeping an open mind vis-à-vis the complexities, ambivalences and indeterminacies of social realities.

The last decades of world history have been described as an epoch of deep and rapid changes, compelling researchers to think of a new paradigm for the security environment, based on a refinement of principles, classification systems, and models of conflicts. The development of a new paradigm needs to be correctly formulated. It is necessary to understand clearly that new ideas and principles need to be connected with the collective experience of a society and its narratives, and to be related to practice. The modern meanings of notions and ideas are formed through immersion in history; analogies are developed as part of the process of interpretation and the creation of narrative. As a consequence, the politician and the researcher are on the edge of possible meanings, focusing the attention of society on the ideas society will be able comprehend and include in its narrative. The development of a paradigm is a difficult theoretical problem requiring both objectivity and subjectivity. The objective aspects are constant for historical epochs and cultures, which allows the use of the world’s treasury of experience and knowledge. Subjective aspects depend on the specifics of the society, leading to an intellectual phenomenon. The developoment of a new paradigm for the security environment of the post-soviet space, in virtue of its complexity, should be considered more art than science.

At the beginning of the article, the author explains its idea—to explicate the conceptual approach to war as the most important structural element and mechanism for maintaining social order. The author claims the existence of a stable tradition of theorizing based on the argument about the social functionality of the structural violence, which allows interpreting war as a special type of sociality. The representatives of this conventional line of argumentation mentioned in the article are such key figures in the history of ideas, as Thomas Hobbes, Carl von Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault. The author formulates ten theses, which problematize the heuristic aspects of war in relation to the theory of social order and are accompanied by short comments explaining the ambivalent status of war topics in the philosophical tradition and sociological classics, because neither of them developed a complete theory of war relevant from the social theory perspective. The key theses state that war experience is constitutive for human societies, and reconstruct the line of argumentation that emphasizes the constitutive function of war for social institutions and political order and the role of war as a major factor of social transformations in the modernity for this role is often underestimated in sociological theory. In conclusion, the author states the need for analytical explication of the organized violence functionality in relation to the structures of social action typical for the modern era. He also claims that within the proposed social-theoretical perspective the war can become a heuristic key to understanding the nature of the social, because this approach allows not only to consider war as a cultural-universal phenomenon, but to analyze more realistically the structural role of violence in the processes of production, reproduction and transformation of social orders.

In this article, we are interested in the philosophical foundations of the Russian sociology of war. The philosophical foundations of science and humanities belong to the meta-theoretical level of knowledge and leave their imprint on the theoretical and empirical levels of research. The philosophical foundations involve ontological, epistemological, axiological, and methodological underpinnings. The study of these aspects reveals the following features of the sociology of war: general ideas about the nature of the phenomenon of war; criteria of veracity of knowledge in the sociology of war; rules for forming the source and derived concepts and assertions; and methods of discovery and development of new and true knowledge. The sociology of war as a new direction of social and humanities studies appeared in Russia at the end of the 19th century. It was the result of two processes taking place in philosophy. On the one hand, the appearance of the sociology and psychology of war was a logical step in the development of Russian military thought. The evolution of this branch of knowledge in Russia of the 19th century made researchers treat war as a social phenomenon. Also, the rapid development of the doctrine of positivism and the birth of sociology in the middle of the 19th century attracted the attention of many military and civil professors and academics.

This article was initially intended to be a review of War, a book by Arkady Babchenko published in 2015, but turned out to be more of an essay. On one hand, the purpose in publishing a book in 2015 about the two Chechen military campaigns may be questioned especially since Babchenko had previously published numerous texts about his recent experiences as a war journalist. On the other hand, War is full of sociological issues, which eliminates any doubt about the possibility of writing a review of this definitely non-sociological book for a sociological journal. In fact, such books revive a new round of debates on two topics important for the sociological discourse. The first considers the status of the “stories” of ordinary witnesses of the events, and their logic of narration has obtained the same legitimate status as scientific narratives; that is why sociologists are interested in the everyday “testimonies” within the “micro-” approach to the study of war. The question that underlines the second topic of the debates is central for contemporary society in general, that is, who has the right to write about war and to suggest linguistic, thematic, discursive, and implicit ideological formats to speak and to think about it? Certainly, there are adequate, institutionalized methodological models to study and to write about war. However, the macro-optical perspective inevitably misses the substantial meanings and emotions that turn wars into the most epiphanic moments of our lives expressed in biographical narratives. To overcome this limitation, we turn to the narratives of those who happened to witness wars from “within”, either to fictional narratives (represented by The Kindly Ones, authored by Jonathan Littell), or to non-fictional stories (represented by Pathologies, written by Zakhar Prilepin). The latter are more typical for contemporary Russian tradition and, thus, are considered on the example of War. However, both fiction and non-fiction narratives allow us see the “human dimension of war”; they differ, perhaps, only in the power of conviction, and the level of trust.

Kaldor M. (2015) Novye i Starye Vojny: Organizovannoe Nasilie v Global’nuju Jepohu [New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era] (Transl. A. Appolonov, M. Dondukovsky), Moscow: Delo. 416 p. ISBN 978-5-93255-417-3 (In Russian)

Boëne B. (2014) Les sciences sociales et l’armée: objets, approches, perspectives, Paris: Presses Universitaires Paris Sorbonne. 277 p. ISBN 978-2-84050-956-1

Negro Pavón D. (2014). Il Dio Mortale: Il Mito dello Stato Tra Crisi Europea e Crisi della Politica. Roma: Il Foglio. 109 p. ISBN 978-88-7606-532-3

Ivanova Y., Sokolov P. (2014) Krome Makiavelli: Problema Metoda v Politicheskih Naukah Rannego Novogo Vremeni [Besides Machiavelli: The Problem of Method in the Political Sciences of Early Modern Period], Moscow: Kvadriga. 320 p. ISBN 978-5-91791-171-7