Book Review: "War And The Rise Of The State" by Bruce D. Porter

(Source)

Book: War And The Rise Of The State by Bruce D. Porter (The Free Press: 1994), 400 pp.

      Porter's thesis is that organized warfare not only lead to the creation of the modern nation state, but as wars became more costly and complex, they forced the expansion of a centralized bureaucracy and, eventually, aided in the creation of the modern collectivist (welfare) state. Carried to an extreme, where war became the central tenant of the state, it led to the totalitarian states, such as Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, and China. The reason for this expansion, according to Porter, was the necessity of obtaining greater control over finances, industry, and the people in order to prepare for and prosecute wars.

     Porter's supports his thesis by examining the historical development of the state and its bureaucratic systems and how it surged (or sometimes waned) in response to the military needs of the nobles, kings, and, eventually, modern states. For instance, he traces the connection between the increasing costs of warfare due to the invention and adoption of firearms, with the loss of power of the local nobles to the central power--a king, in most cases. The increased costs of war not only put warfare beyond the means of a singular noble or aristocrat, but also required more efficient collection of taxes to fund wars, as well as placing certain aspects of the economy under central control.

     As most students of history would probably agree, Porter notes that there have been three general stages in state development (at least among the European or Western world), the first arising as a consequence of the Era of Religious Wars associated with the Protestant Reformation (e.g., the Thirty Years War) and culminating in the Peace of Westphalia. This gave rise to the first secular sovereign states and, particularly, to the dynastic states.

     The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars saw the next major development: that of the nation-state. Key to this stage was the introduction of mass conscription and the social force of nationalism.

    Finally, World Wars I and II saw the introduction of total war and the rise of the collectivist state, including the welfare states that are so common throughout most of the industrialized world. In these conflicts, the needs of warfare were so great that government power expanded into all industries and into the lives of all citizens as necessary to obtain the necessary labor and direct the industrial and agricultural production necessary to prosecute the respective wars. Porter terms this as an intrusion or usurpation of civil society, but Albert Jay Nock would have described it as the state confiscation of social power. Troops were drafted, but then had to be transported, trained, fed. Munitions and equipment has to be manufactured and procured. Public opinion had to be shaped by propaganda in order to accept the rationing of goods and regimentation of life.

     One of the key points to understand from Porter's work is that the centralization of power and size of the bureaucracy is a ratcheting process. That is, although the size of government (and its expenditures) may shrink following a war or period of wars, it never quite returns to its pre-war sizes. Rather, the bureaucracy or some portion of it achieves some sort of permanence.

     The flip side of the growth of the state bureaucracy and centralized power is that to obtain and keep the cooperation of the public, extensive warfare also generally resulted in political reforms. For instance, during the period of the dynastic states, kings had often had to cede some power to various factions in the form of parliaments or similar bodies. Wars also generally led to expanding welfare: pensions for soldiers and, later, actual general welfare programs and promises of job security to keep industrial workers from becoming to restive. Voting rights generally followed as well.

      Porter quotes favorably from Max Weber on this point:

The basis of democratization is everywhere purely military in character ... Military discipline meant the triumph of democracy because the community wished and was compelled to secure the cooperation of the non-aristocratic masses and hence put arms, and along with arms political power, into their hands.

Porter lists several examples, but looks to World War I as key, explaining:

World War I, perhaps better than any other conflict, starkly illustrates the moral and political paradoxes of war. In the midst of its unrelieved carnage, the governments of France and Great Britain implemented extensive social, labor, and welfare reforms. In Britain, these included vastly improved infant and child-care programs, better maternity care, regulations on safety and hygiene in the workplace, free elementary education, public housing programs, and a new Ministry of National Health. In France, the state introduced minimum wages, rent deferrals for disadvantaged workers, stricter safety regulations in factories, and expanded medical services for workers. In both countries, trade unions made rapid strides during the conflict. Ramsay MacDonald, leader of the British Labour Party, though a bitter opponent of the war, acknowledged that it was doing more for the social agenda of the left in Britain than half a century of efforts by progressive reformers. Leon Abensour, an early historian of French feminism, claimed that French women made more progress during World War I than in fifty previous years of struggle. The irony that the bloodiest war in European history had advanced social reforms found expression in the title of a book by historian Deborah Dwork, War is Good for Babies and Other Young Children, a study of child welfare in England between 1898 and 1918.

Porter seems to present these reforms as either necessary to obtain the fullest cooperation of the citizenry or labor organizations, or, where the reforms followed the war (such as the grant of women's suffrage in 1920 in the United States), as a type of gratitude, he seems to sidestep what is implied from Max Weber's quote above, that these rights could also be the result of fear: hundreds of thousands or millions of military veterans could be a significant revolutionary force. Of course, the expansion of suffrage and other reforms seems, in retrospect, a small consolation for the loss of social power.

     Porter considers two special cases in his book. One of the special cases was the United States, which presented the problem of so strongly resisting the centralization of power for the first half of its history, such that both the bureaucracy and military would shrink to mere shadows of their former selves. Even after the American Civil War, the military dramatically shrunk into almost nothing. Although Porter would not have phrased it this way, the United States only became more like Europe in accepting a powerful central government only after it imported sufficient numbers of Europeans after the Civil War and under the auspices of a growing industrial and financial elite that saw the advantages to a centralized state.

      The other special case is the rise of totalitarian states. As an initial matter, Porter notes some of the distinguishing features of a totalitarian state:

--the existence, parallel to the state bureaucracy, of a hierarchically organized mass political party led by a charismatic figure and imbued with person commitment to him; 

--the adherence to a Utopian ideology that claimed an absolute monopoly on truth and that provided the raison d'etre of the state; 

--the atomization of civil society and the destruction of all organized opposition by the calculated use of terror; 

--the fostering of ceaseless political activity and deliberate instability, what Trotsky called "permanent revolution"; 

--the total politicization of all spheres of human life by means of mass-mobilization techniques that effectively removed all possibility of political neutrality; 

--the multiplication of bureaucratic hierarchies so as to achieve maximum control over society, coupled with deliberately overlapping jurisdictions and a lack of procedural formality so as to prevent the coalescence of any subcentral concentration of power. 

        These six features derived in part from the pervasive sense of struggle, sacrifice, and threat that characterized totalitarianism in all its forms. Indeed, totalitarian leaders have always conceived of themselves as more than simply state leaders, their parties as more than mere political organizations, the states under their control as far more than ordinary states. The leaders were prophets, warriors, demigods. The parties were causes, campaigns, world movements. The states were bastians for waging crusades on ideological infidels and for propagating the New Utopia abroad. Militant, militaristic, and militarized, the totalitarian states were eternally at war.

But not just war against a foreign enemy, but internal enemies. Porter sums up the latter point by noting that "[t]he totalitarian movements were similarly obsessed with civil war--the enemy at home--because every failing of their ideology and state could only be explained by sinister attribution to 'enemies of the people'...." The twin "threat" of foreign enemies and a domestic fifth column were desirable because it assisted in the accumulation of power in a central authority and justified the high expenditures for both the military and internal security apparatus. In fact, he acknowledges that an internal enemy is so important that a government would have to invent an internal enemy if one did not actually exist.

      As to how totalitarian states arose, he explains:

As a historical phenomenon, totalitarianism marked the apotheosis of all that was perverse in the modern linkage between war and the state. All the most negative tendencies of warfare to enhance state power--to centralize, bureaucratize, and foster repression--reached their logical culmination in states organized for the near-total penetration and domination of civil society. Yet the totalitarian states were not simply garrison states, marshalled to the teeth for war, though they sometimes have been portrayed as such. It was not the organizing impetus of war alone that forged them, but its destructive and degenerative effects as well--and the key event was World War I, which devastated the traditional pillars of civil society in both Russia and Germany, and brutalized their cultures, thereby making possible a catastrophic and unchecked assertion of central power.

Porter also notes that there was a philosophical root, namely, "[b]oth Nazism and Marxism-Leninism concurred in one of the fundamental tenets of nineteenth-century Social Darwinism, namely, that struggle and conflict are driving forces of historical progress."

The Bolsheviks also extolled violence as a means of progress, with Lenin insisting that "not a single problem of the class struggle has been solved in history except by violence," and to achieve the final victory of socialism, a violent, cataclysmic revolution must smash and destroy the bourgeois state.

    It is apparent based on Porter's study that war brings about a certain imperative, whether moral (patriotic) or based on survival, where the citizenry and certain of the elite are willing to give up social power to the state in order to persecute the war.  I believe, however, that Porter missed an opportunity to explore how a similar imperative can fuel the centralization of power in the absence of actual war.

      Even a cursory review of American history exhibits numerous instances of manufactured crises and warlike imperatives have led to rapid and sustained expansions of the Federal government. One of the earliest examples of this was Prohibition, which not only was in essence a war on alcohol, but also essentially created an internal enemy: the rise of organized criminal gangs (generally based around ethnicities such as Italian, Irish, or black) and smugglers that justified the expansion of government and concomitant shrinking of rights such as shrinking the 4th Amendment protections against search and seizure, but also the first significant limitation on the rights to possess arms.

       We also have many instances where the "war analogy" has been applied more directly in order to foment the sense of urgency or crises allowing for the accretion of state power; e.g., the War on Poverty, the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, etc. (I recognize that 9/11 was a significant attack, but the resulting growth and intrusiveness of government in response to that incident far exceeded what was justified in response to the attack. Certainly, we didn't see similar restrictions in response to the bombings and assassinations that accompanied the Anarchist movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, nor the political violence in the 1960s and 1970s, yet we survived as a Republic).

      The over-arching lesson from this book is that war and warfare is not only a drain on the state fisc, but justifies robbing the citizenry of their rights. It is not lost on me that the left has created a sense or urgency or crises around "diversity," LGBT issues, and migration to justify the final push to intrude into (atomize) the family and religion; that the left has defined "white men," "the patriarchy," gun owners, and "Conservatives" as the new bogeyman and internal enemy; or that they use terror-like tactics (doxing, threats of job loss, red-flag laws, etc.) to pursue their aims. We now live in an era in which we experience "the total politicization of all spheres of human life by means of mass-mobilization techniques that effectively removed all possibility of political neutrality." We are constantly bombarded by a mass media extolling "a Utopian ideology" and which claim an absolute monopoly on truth (e.g., the use of "fake news" to denigrate any Conservative reporting; social media companies deleting or censoring conservative opinions or reporting).

     We are dangerously close to entering a full-on totalitarian state, ratcheted up not by war but by various "moral crises".