Quincy Wright and his colleagues at the University of Chicago undertook their study
of war in response to the shock of World War I. Though the Great War had its most
profound and lasting impact in Europe, where most of the casualties were suffered,
it nonetheless stunned thoughtful observers around the world. Its duration and cost were
largely unexpected; the casualties in less than five years of fighting exceeded those
of the entire nineteenth century. And it called into question the optimism and hubris nurtured by the Pax Britannica.
War Deaths per Century, 1500-1995
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These in turn had been fueled by increasing mastery
of the forces of nature, by the sheer power of modern technology and industry.
Scholars of every persuasion asked themselves how a disaster such as World War I could
have come upon the modern world unbidden. Books offered answers from the biology
of war, the psychology of war, the sociology of war, the economics of war, and still
other explanatory categories and agents of causation. Some of these studies focused
on the conduct of war, a few on the consequences of war, but most on the causes of
war. Their authors wanted to understand how World War I could have happened. The
answer for some lay in human nature; they challenged the Enlightenment faith in the perfectibility
of man. Others sought the explanation in human institutions.
War Deaths per Century, 1500-1995, as Percentage of Population
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The interdisciplinary nature of this scholarly assault on the puzzle of World War
I naturally resonated with the social sciences faculty at the University of Chicago.
Barely a quarter of a century old when World War I broke out, Chicago was already
famous for intellectual rigor, innovative scholarship, and interdisciplinary study in the
social sciences. Beginning in 1929, it would become more famous still for the educational
reforms instituted by its young president, Robert Maynard Hutchins.
In this environment, Quincy Wright proposed a study of war to his department chairman,
political scientist Charles E. Merriam.3 Wright, himself a political scientist and a pacifist with a PhD in international
law, had joined the Chicago faculty in 1923. His proposal to Merriam three years
later led to meeting of Chicago colleagues from the departments of political science,
economics, history, sociology, anthropology, geography, psychology, and philosophy. Out
of this meeting grew a five year plan for an interdisciplinary study of war relying
mostly on University of Chicago
faculty and graduate students. In the end, sixty six studies were completed. Forty five
of these were accepted as theses for Master's or Doctor's degrees at Chicago. Ten
were published as books, seven as the substantive basis of journal articles. Wright himself wrote the synthetic A Study of War
, gathering in its appendices much of the other work.
Wright advanced a four tier model of the evolution of war. Each tier he associated
with a stage in human evolution, with a primary driving force behind war, and with
a scholarly discipline. The relationships are represented by the matrix in the following table:
Wright's Evolutionary Stages of Warfare
| STAGE |
CAUSATION
AGENT |
EXPLANATORY
DISCIPLINE |
| Animal Warfare |
Indistinct |
Psychology |
| Primitive Warfare |
Society |
Sociology |
| Civilized Warfare |
Int'l System |
Int'l Law |
| Modern Warfare |
Technology |
Science |
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The transitions from one stage to the next, Wright believed, were caused by changes
in communication: speech, writing, and printing respectively.
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The model served several purposes for Wright:
- It first of all allowed him to place
in periods all of human experience, lending historical perspective to the trauma
of World War I by placing it in an evolutionary epoch the modern which he dated
from 1500.
- Secondly, it characterized warfare in each period, allowing a contrast between
modern war and the kinds of war that had preceded it.
- Finally, the model emphasized
the need for interdisciplinary study, to which he was committed.
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Wright's assertion that changes in communication drove the transitions from one stage
to the next seems to have been based more on conceptual neatness than solid evidence.
It works reasonably well in the transition from primitive to civilized eras; writing is often linked to the emergence of civilization. Similarly, the introduction
of movable type in the West in the fifteenth century corresponds closely to Wright's
periods scheme of the modern. There is less evidence, however, that the transition
in human evolution from "animal" to "primitive" correlated with speech.
Furthermore, the
model now raises the question of whether the so-called "communications revolution"
of the late twentieth century marks another transition in Wright's scheme, perhaps
to the post modern. If so, then Wright's model supports the claim that there is a "revolution
in military affairs" under way, driven by an "information revolution."
However flawed
Wright's periods may be, his model nonetheless provides a powerful framework for evaluating current claims about the transformation of war effected by technology in the
second half of the twentieth century. Those claims, it will be seen, turn on the
same question of disjunctures or discontinuities in history that Wright sought to
identify in his model.
Wright argued that it was possible to trace the origins of war to any one of his four
stages. It was perfectly appropriate, he felt, to speak only of modern war and to
see it beginning around 1500. But it was also appropriate to view war as an artifact
of civilization, and thus trace its roots to the Mesopotamian Valley in the fourth
millennium BCE.
Wright's model is layered and cumulative; therefore, the earlier one begins, the richer
one's understanding. Animal war was shaped by biological and psychological drives
for food, sex, territory, dominance, and activity.4 When communities arose, these drives did not disappear. Rather, they were submerged
beneath the more dominant drive to maintain the "social solidarity" of the group.
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The resulting tension between these biological and social drives is not trivial.
Wright concluded that the
artificial drives [of society] developed by education and habit may be in conflict
with natural drives existing from heredity. The effort at reconciliation leads to
the psychological and sociological peculiarities which constitute culture.5
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The model grows more complicated still when primitive societies shifted to civilization.
Now the dominant drive behind warfare is the international state system, i.e., the
anarchic relationship between autonomous societies. In this equation the influences of biology and sociology do not disappear. They simply attenuate. Biology remains
a force, but it has the least power. Social drives are more important than biological,
but less important than international politics. The nature of the interstate system has more explanatory power than either of the other two.
Finally, in the fourth stage, technology dominates. Or at least Wright would say
that technology became the most important category of analysis. For him, the inventions
of the late Middle Ages marked the transition to the modern. Gunpowder was, of course, the most important for warfare. In its wake came other technologies that applied
chemical energy to military purposes. The side-gunned sailing ship gave way to the
steamship. Land transport was transformed by railroads and then by the internal
combustion engine in trucks and tanks; the same engine made possible submarines and airplanes.
Weaponry increased in range, accuracy, and lethality. The "utilization of sources
of power other than those of man and beast in hostile operations has transformed
the character of such operations," said Wright, "and made them war in the modern sense."6 It was not so much that technology defines or even drives modern war. Rather, the
global implications of technology lent new significance to war.
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Releasing power stored by other than human or animal muscle . . . has made war more
destructive, more likely to spread, and consequently of more general interest. Resort
to war anywhere has tended to become a matter of concern to all governments. . .
. Animals have fought from inherited drives, primitive men have fought from group custom,
people of historical civilization have fought for group interests, but people of
contemporary world civilization fight for a better world order.
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This conceptualization of war appears to have been shaped by Wright's own predilections
for international politics and by his deeply held belief that salvation lay in world
government.
- It treated technology not only as a category of analysis but also as
a catalyst of modernity.
- It was not only the instrument by which modern war became
more deadly, but the vehicle as well for spreading that warfare around the globe.
- It did not cause or define war in the sense that psychological drives caused and
shaped animal war, but it nonetheless provided a necessary precondition for modern war.
- And it lent urgency to the study of war, for even local wars had the potential for world wide
impact.
Wright qualified his characterization of the modern to escape the crude determinism
implied by his formula. He believed that drives could be most readily identified
in animal and primitive war; "among civilized people. . . there is seldom an immediate
causal relationship between any one drive and a war."7 Still, he identified food, sex, territory, adventure, self preservation, domination,
independence, and society (i.e., subordination of the individual to the state) as
drives toward war in historic societies.8
While animal war is a function of instinct and primitive war of the mores, civilized
war is primarily a function of state politics. It seldom springs spontaneously from
the behavior patterns of the masses but from the calculations of the leaders. The
drives of the masses as organized into behavior patterns at a given time are significant
because they may be worked upon to create an army and war spirit in the civilization.9
Similarly, though "modern" was defined for Wright by technology, he nonetheless associated
it with decidedly non-technical characteristics: humanism, liberalism, pragmatism,
and relativism.10 The modern world, he believed, was increasingly shaped by these Western values.
By incorporating them in his analysis, he avoided espousal of a mere technological
determinism. Indeed, he identified the "drives of modern war" as political, economic,
"cultural," and religious.
These characteristics might well be compared with present notions of modernity and
the causes of war. Recent scholarship still dates modernity from 1500, but associates
it with secularism, capitalism, rationalism, and social fluidity. Science and technology often appear in this literature as off-shoots of rationalism or capitalism or
both; war and militarism are off-shoots of capitalism. In this literature, technology
and modern war are seldom construed as causally related. Rather, they are both second-order consequences of modernity.
"Modernity," however, is a slippery term. Its definition is constantly changing.11
- Scholars such as Charles Tilly, Michael Mann, and Marek Thee see war and militarism
as central to an understanding of the modern world.12
- James Rosenau views technology as a global force, just as Wright did.13
- And historian Leo Marx has gone so far as to suggest that "technology may be the
truly distinctive feature of modernity."14 This comes remarkably close to Wright's position, though the recent scholarship fails
to take the final step. Technology often plays a prominent role in these models,
but seldom as an independent variable.15
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Wright's conceptual model displays an internal contradiction that he was never able
to overcome. The four-tier framework suggested that technology played the same role
in modern war that instinct played in animal war, i.e., that it drove and defined
war in its time. This was tantamount to saying that it caused war, that it was deterministic.
But Wright recoiled from such reductionism. He insisted first of all that it was
only the most important feature of modern war, that all the other drives present
in previous ages still played a role as well. Furthermore, Wright argued that other
characteristics of the modern era--humanism, liberalism, pragmatism, and relativism--"drove"
modern war. But categories such as these were not continuous throughout his modern period. They have more explanatory power for the early twentieth century than
they do for the seventeenth century or the late twentieth century. So his claim
for the explanatory power of technology when applied to modern war dissolves in his
own appreciation of the complexity of modern war, of its imperviousness to single cause explanations.
His model suggests a kind of technological determinism which his own analysis cannot support.
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There are, furthermore, other faults to find with Wright's study.
The collective
enterprise behind A Study of War
and the huge mass of data it collected are symptomatic of an early
twentieth century faith, warmly embraced at the University of Chicago, that problems
could be resolved by simply gathering a mass of information.16
Wright imposed upon the final report a legalistic framework that severely compromised
the usefulness of the book.
Wright also indulged a penchant for enumeration and
classification that often lent a rigidity and artificiality to his analyses.
And
of course he was hard pressed to advance his own analysis beyond the state of the art in
the various disciplines he used.17
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These failings notwithstanding, A Study of War
was an impressive achievement, arguably the most thorough and the most informed analysis
of war ever conducted.
It is more genuinely interdisciplinary than anything in the
field before or since.
Its fundamental period structure, summarized above, is essentially the same as that in Kenneth Waltz's classic Man, the State and War
.18
The data and analysis in the appendices are still useful after half a century.
And much wisdom and insight inhabit these pages.
After fifty years, the book is
more remarkable for its continuing strengths than for its obsolescence. Nowhere
is this more true than in its appreciation of the significance of technology.
In addition, Wright and his colleagues foreshadowed subsequent developments in recognizing
that no discipline speaks for technology. Engineering, of course, works on technology,
but seldom studies it as a social phenomenon. Technology assessment is most often a subset of engineering, concentrating on the impact or results of technology.
The study of technology has spawned identifiable fields within traditional disciplines
such as history, sociology, and even philosophy. And new fields, such as the social study of science and technology have appeared. But there remains no scholarly
discipline devoted exclusively to technology.
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To understand the relationship between
technology and war it is necessary, therefore, to draw eclectically on other disciplines. Wright and his colleagues did so in the 1920s and 1930s. This paper will do the
same.
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Continue to next section, "The Transformation of Conventional War"
Return to American
Diplomacy Front Page
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END NOTES
1. Alex Roland, "Keep the Bomb," Technology Review (August/September 1995): 67-69
2. Quincy Wright, A Study of War,
2 vols., (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1942] rev. ed. 1965).
3. Wright generously attributed the initiative behind the project to Merriam. Ibid.,
p. 409. But archival research at the University of Chicago reveals that Wright himself
began the process with an undated, five page memorandum to Merriam, written sometime before 8 May 1926. See John Hepp, "the Birth of Interdisciplinary History: Cooperative
Research in the Social Science at the University of Chicago in the Jazz Age," 9 January
1994, unpublished paper in possession of the author. The following account relies on this paper and on Wright's reporting of events, pp. 409 13.
4. Wright, A Study of War,
p. 43.
5. Ibid. p. 79.
6. P. 40.
7. P. 132.
8. Pp. 133 43.
9. P. 144.
10. Pp. 169 92.
11. Pauline Marie Rosenau, Post Modernism and the Social Sciences: Insights, Inroads, and Intrusions
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), p. 5; Peter Osborne, "Modernity is
a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category," New Left Review
192 (March/April 1992): 65 84.
12. Charles Tilly, Coercion, Capital and European States, AD 990 1992
(Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, 1992); Michael Mann, States, War and Capitalism
(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Marek Thee, Military Technology, Military Strategy and the Arms Race
(London: Croom Helm, 1987).
13. James Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics
(Brighton, England: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990).
14. Leo Marx, "Communications," Technology and Culture
33 (April 1992): 407.
15. Jack Levy, "The Causes of War: A Review of Theories and Evidence," in Behavior, Society, and Nuclear War,
ed. by Philip E. Tetlock, Jo L. Husbands, Robert Jervis, Paul C. Stern, and Charles
Tilley (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989, pp. 209 333.
16. Personal conversation with the author, Cambridge, MA, 3 April 1995.
17. For example, the book was correct in 1942 when it stated that "most writers are clear
that race refers to a biological rather than to a cultural classification of human
beings." Since then, however, the evidence has pointed overwhelmingly in the opposite direction.
18. Kenneth N. Waltz, Man, the State and War: A Theoretical Analysis
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1959).
