political economy and war

Insofar as any of the social sciences deserves to be considered on a par with the natural sciences, economics comes the closest to being a discrete discipline in which hypotheses may be formulated and tested (‘falsified’) in the quest for general applications, significantly known as ‘laws’. But whereas the laws of natural science are universal, those of social science are man-made, and there's the rub. The Moses of modern economics was Adam Smith, whose Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) aimed to set out ‘the general principles of law and government’ and was a work in which economics, as narrowly defined today, merged seamlessly with history, philosophy, and legal theory. In the same year, Jefferson managed to substitute the concept of ‘happiness’ for what everyone else thought was the more self-evidently natural pursuit of property in the US Declaration of Independence, a sentiment echoed in Jeremy Bentham's Defence of Usury (1787). Because of its undeservedly lasting influence, Thomas Malthus's crude Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Mankind (1798) must be mentioned, while the similarly bleak-minded David Ricardo put a name on the emerging philosophy in Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels considered themselves to be political economists, their philosophy consisting of an (unattributed) marriage of Malthus's theory of population with Smith's concept of surplus value. Their contemporary John Stuart Mill set out what events have proved to be the more valid historical interpretation in Principles of Political Economy (1848).

All of the above studied history in a diagnostic, not prescriptive, mode. Thus although they were not averse to hurrying the process along, Marx and Engels saw the triumph of socialism as evolutionary and inevitable, while redefining the Smith tradition of laissez-faire economics as ‘capitalism’. Somewhere in between developed the now-discredited theories compiled in The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936), written by John Maynard Keynes, who never claimed to be an economist, but which gained an enormous following among those anxious to preserve and extend the role of government after WW II. It has not been difficult for rulers to choose between a doctrine that concentrates ever-greater power in their hands and another that regards government as at best a light-handed arbiter in the interplay of natural forces. If one considers this to have been the central dynamic of modern history, then the importance of war becomes apparent.

It is a big ‘if’, but as a form of philosophical enquiry it provides an interpretative tool that permits a review of the actions of rulers through the ages from a new perspective. It also helps to explain the apparent contradiction of popularly based regimes being some of the most bellicose, because it simply is not true that democracy and war are antithetical, as many fondly believe. From Genghis Khan and earlier to some of our contemporary statesmen, hugely popular leaders have tended to be Messianic and to find the role of war leader both personally irresistible and politically rewarding.

Thus far the mise en scène, and a bridge to Clausewitz's generally misquoted dictum that ‘war is nothing but the continuation of politics with the admixture of other means’. It is indeed, and nothing shows it more clearly than the manner in which war has been persistently used to expand the share of the economy that governments control and reapportion, to the point that today a number of thinkers who might once have been considered of the ‘left’ and of the ‘right’ have come to agree that this was the real purpose of, for example, the Cold War. From Megiddo in 1485 bc to Kosovo in ad 1999, this argument runs, the only thing all wars have had in common has been to increase governments' powers of convocation and coercion. There is obvious merit in this point of view: as we have seen most dramatically in the last 60 years, war both centralizes power and facilitates the process whereby those exercising power can conflate their personal and sectional advantage with the ‘national interest’, be it in terms of economic advancement or the no less significant but murkier area of social and psychological compensation.

To deal summarily with the last item first, it is the only link that may be made between, for example, Hitler and Churchill, the former compensating for his humble origins and personal inadequacies, the latter reclaiming a leading role for his marginalized class and for himself as the direct descendant of Marlborough, arguably England's greatest general. Without war, neither would have been much more than a footnote in history, and both of them knew it. The degree to which that subconsciously made them relish war can be debated, but that they did is unarguable. Flawed personalities (in general, cherchez la mère) seek to impose their will on others to deaden the psychological ‘noise’ that envelops them, and the sycophants that power attracts like flies serve to massage their vulnerable egos. In his Psychology of Military Incompetence, Dixon has pointed out that the armed forces, on the face of it an arena that should be repulsive to individuals with a deep-seated fear of failure, can be perversely attractive to precisely such people for many reasons that actively militate against military effectiveness.

To make the leap from individuals to whole classes or sections is a bold one, but let us make it and see where it takes us. The bridge, quite possibly too far, is the pursuit of power as an act of social and psychological compensation, as opposed to being a natural extension of the restless expression of a winning attitude that drove mothers' favourites and (highly) sexually functional individuals like Alexander ‘the Great’, Napoleon, and Wellington. The approach to the bridge is built on the likes of the chauvinist schoolteacher in Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, but the main span emerges from the apparent contradiction between the spread of mass democracy and the growth of government power. Tocqueville feared that freedom could not survive once the majority discovered it could vote itself money from the public purse; but even he did not foresee the manner by which the process could be extended almost indefinitely. Milton Friedman's analogy is taking a cent from each of a hundred people, giving a dollar to one, and repeating the process as many times as necessary. The loss of each cent is barely felt, the ‘gift’ of a dollar much appreciated. Even if none of the money were kept, to increase the amount collected is to increase the transactional power of the collector/distributor, hence it is to be assumed that rulers and the bureaucrats who serve them, regardless of ideology, will strive constantly to do precisely that. And so they have, particularly during wars.

Until comparatively recently, expenditure on what we now prefer to call ‘defence’ was virtually the sole justification for taxation, wonderfully illustrated by the French aristocracy's self-exemption from taxation on the grounds that they paid an impôt de sang in war, a delicate consideration not extended to the politically powerless peasantry, obliged to pay by far the greater part of both forms of tax. A study of war finance shows that once the cost of war exceeded any likely financial gain from conquest, proto-Keynesian considerations about the stimulus that war gave to a nation's economy began to emerge, along with a bureaucracy dedicated to harvesting some (at times most) of the surplus thus generated for ‘affairs of state’. But the slow emergence of what we now call liberal democracy was based on a very early illustration of the principle that it is more difficult to turn power into money than vice versa. The introduction of scutage in place of feudal service amounted to a tax, one furthermore that King John, following the profligate Richard ‘the Lionheart’ who had sold the royal patrimony at a discount, could use to hire mercenaries and thus recover some of the power lost to the nobles—hence the Magna Charta, the foundation stone of a parliamentary tradition that would have appalled all at Runnymede had they foreseen where it would lead.

The process is symbiotic; while it is easy to see that a civil war is about who rules, it is perhaps less easy to perceive that when Caesar and Pompey created the Roman empire, their primary intention was to increase their own power. The Roman republic recognized and institutionalized the process in the office of dictator and Caesar was, in fact, the last person to be so designated. His successors had no need of it because between an army that was no longer an expression of citizenship and the vastly increased power of patronage they controlled, it was relatively easy to brush aside the corrupt remnants of republicanism and rule as emperors.

Although Freud persuasively argued that Akhenaton and his priest Moses were the first to perceive the political advantage of monotheism, ideology might be said to have become a permanent part of the equation with the conversion of Constantine to Christianity. Constantine's genius lay in seeing that a single religion with a single god could be a powerful unifying factor in an empire of disparate cultures, and in realizing that he could co-opt what was until then a pacifist and subversive doctrine into an instrument of state power. The prophet Muhammad had the same clarity of vision 300 years later, with explosive consequences among what had been until then a disunited and fractious people. The frontier between these two Messianic creeds became for hundreds of years the preferred arena for rulers on both sides to increase their power through crusade and jihad. From the popes who convoked Christendom to retake the Holy Land as part of their temporal struggle with the Holy Roman Empire, through Charles V who used the Ottoman threat to consolidate the Habsburg empire, to Imam Khomeini calling for a jihad to reunite the Muslim world under his Shi'a leadership, monotheism and war have gone hand in hand to extend and to sanctify the centralization of power. Charles I's ‘divine right of kings’ was a late and rather silly confusion of cause and effect, promptly corrected by the realpolitik of such as Cromwell.

When Philip IV of France expropriated the military monastic order of the Templars in 1307, it was as much to eliminate an alternative source of power as to lay hands on the Order's wealth. This was seen even more clearly when Henry VIII, a great centralizer, dissolved the monasteries in what has been called the ‘Tudor revolution in government’. The appearance of ‘pure’ mercenaries as major actors in warfare coincides precisely with the emergence of the Italian city states, able to generate great wealth without the agricultural lands and populations that previously defined military and hence political power. It has been argued that the main reason for the decline of the Habsburg empire was that the silver pouring in from the Americas was the equivalent of a modern state printing unlimited amounts of currency, in that it unleashed an inflation that destroyed commerce and strangled manufacturing, above all in Spain. Certainly, nobody doubts that by persecuting the Moorish and Jewish conversos who constituted their commercial and financial class, the Habsburgs attacked their own ability to finance their wars. Conversely, in the Netherlands revolt, the House of Orange was discovering the power of protracted war to assemble a new kingdom from the dozens of disparate sources of economic power represented by the great trading cities of the region. The successive immigrations of groups persecuted for their religion as a means of expropriating their wealth in the Netherlands and Spain, as well as the French Huguenots, laid the foundation for the astounding commercial success of England, then Britain, and finally the USA.

The USA provides one of the clearest illustrations of the tight link between war and statism. The four great centralizers in her history were Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, not coincidentally associated with the four greatest wars the nation has fought. Theodore Roosevelt was of a similar persuasion, but all he could manage was the imperial adventure in the Philippines (see Philippines insurrection), so we cannot know what he might have done given the chance. There is no chance here of confusing cause and effect—all were firmly committed to the growth of federal government control over the economy before getting involved in war. More controversially, all can also be said to have conspired to bring war about as a means of achieving their objective. To this day, among those who admire their legacy, there remains a marked tendency to declare unwinnable ‘wars’, such as those on poverty and narcotics, to justify previously unthinkable intrusions into the pockets and the private lives of citizens.

To the idea that socialism is intrinsically pacifist, one has only to examine the intellectual trajectory of the French socialist Jean Jaurès, whose examinations of the French Revolutionary and Franco-Prussian wars led him to develop the appalling doctrine of ‘the nation in arms’. The idea that the individual is enhanced rather than diminished by marching in step with millions of others is the common thread linking socialism with militarism. It is worth remembering that Bismarck, to many the epitome of ‘blood and iron’, was also the architect of the beginnings of a welfare state far more comprehensive than anything France or Britain had in 1914. Extending government favour to the industrial working class, like his short, sharp limited wars, was a means to an end, namely the unification of Germany under a strong central government. Moltke ‘the Elder’, a far less radical individual, towards the end of his life came to deplore the social and political consequences of the mass mobilizations that had put such effective weapons in his hands. Juárez and many other socialists before and since have welcomed it for precisely that reason.

The politicization of private life, foretold by Orwell in 1984 and Vonnegut in the prophetic stories of Welcome to the Monkey House, is not the least of the entirely intentional results of rallying peoples to great national causes. For as long as people continue to rejoice in the dollar they receive from on high and do not appreciate that it is simply their own money, recycled, then as Sowell gloomily observes there is no logical stopping point on the road to consensual tyranny, what he calls ‘totalitarianism from within’.

If by ‘totalitarian’ we understand a philosophy that claims to have the answers to all the questions of existence and which will seek to impose that philosophy through indoctrination and coercion, the three great totalitarian systems of our time have been Soviet Marxism-Leninism, German-Italian National Socialism-Fascism, and Anglo-American Progressivism. Of these the last and least overtly offensive has proved the most durable. All three have depended on not so much a class as a type of person for whom a world without clear direction from above is unendurable. All three have fought to the death among themselves, but have been united in their hostility towards traditional economic liberalism. This is not surprising, for laissez-faire means leaving people alone, and if you do that they may not think and act in the approved manner. The power of Messianic creeds lies not in their lip-service to a better afterlife, but in their promise to improve things in the here and now, and Adam Smith's ‘invisible hand’ of the market not only works too slowly, but also gives more importance to those who produce wealth than to those who merely collect, spend, and distribute it. Seen in that light, war is the antithesis of progress not just because it destroys and kills, but because whatever the high-flown reasons given for fighting (‘a world fit for democracy’ springs to mind), its political legacy is oppression.

Bibliography

• Dixon, Norman, On the Psychology of Military Incompetence (London, 1976).
• Friedman, Milton, Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago, 1962).
• Hayek, Friedrich, The Road to Serfdom (London, 1944).
• Higgs, Robert, Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (New York, 1987).
• Jones, E. L., The European Miracle (Cambridge, 1981).
• Porter, Bruce, War and the Rise of the State (New York, 1994).
• Sampson, Geoffrey, An End to Allegiance (London, 1984).
• Sowell, Thomas, The Vision of the Anointed (New York, 1995)

— Hugh Bicheno