GDG- Military history

[Norman Levitt]

>From the "New Republic":

-----------------------------------------------

Military history bites the dust.
Casualty of War
by David A. Bell
Post date 05.09.07 | Issue date 05.07.07


sk most Americans about important subjects in history, and it's a good bet 
that "war" will rank near the top of the list. Certainly, it holds a 
commanding position in the history marketed to the general public. Among the 
"hot books" currently listed on the website of the History Book Club, fully 
one-third--ranging from straightforward, popular titles like Battles of the 
Dark Ages to a new collection of essays by the esteemed Civil War historian 
James McPherson--fall into the category of military history. Viewers tuning 
in to the History Channel on a recent weekend could choose from at least 
seven hours of military history programming, including an hour devoted 
solely to cannons. Popular taste, in other words, bears out the judgment of 
Edmund Burke, who quipped--long before the horrors of modern mechanized 
warfare--that the annals of good deeds would "not afford matter enough to 
fill ten pages. ... War is the matter which fills all History."

Yet the discipline of history, as it exists in major U.S. universities, 
seems to have forgotten Burke's lesson. At Harvard this spring, for 
instance, only two of 85 history courses focus mainly on war. This is not 
surprising, because Harvard does not have a single specialist in military 
history among the 58 members of its history department. Neither does my own 
history department at Johns Hopkins; just two of our 61 spring courses are 
principally concerned with war. And so it goes across the country. The 
current issue of the American Historical Review, the flagship journal of the 
profession, includes reviews of no less than 194 new history books, only 15 
of which, by my count, qualify as military history.

The subject does remain entrenched in some small corners of the university 
world--notably at the service academies and in publications like the Journal 
of Military History. At major research universities, a few specialists, such 
as Omer Bartov of Brown or Geoffrey Parker of Ohio State, have continued to 
do marvelous work integrating the study of armies and military operations 
with such topics as the Holocaust or the "world crisis" of the seventeenth 
century.

Yet most historians pay scant attention to military history, particularly 
the part that concerns actual military operations. And so, even in the midst 
of the Iraq war--the fifth major U.S. deployment since 1990--professors are 
teaching undergraduates surprisingly little about this historical subject of 
rather obvious relevance. To take just one example, the problem of how 
societies have historically evaluated their adversaries' intentions and 
capabilities remains understudied and rarely taught at a university level.

How can we explain the academy's odd neglect? One frequently mentioned 
reason is that few contemporary historians have any personal experience of 
the military. Today, a historian has to be in his mid-fifties (and male) 
ever to have faced the possibility of the draft, and most American 
historians come from the privileged strata of society that managed to avoid 
military service during Vietnam. But this answer doesn't really work. 
Historians routinely teach and write about a great many subjects absent from 
their own experience: slavery, plague, feudalism, industrial labor, human 
sacrifice. Why should war be different?

Another frequently given reason is that historians tend heavily toward 
pacifism, and this is probably true to some extent. For one thing, repeated 
surveys have shown that historians' political beliefs skew considerably to 
the left of the general electorate's. And, just this winter, the membership 
of the American Historical Association passed, by a three-to-one margin, a 
resolution urging historians "to do whatever they can to bring the Iraq war 
to a speedy conclusion." But this explanation, too, is unsatisfactory, since 
historians routinely write and teach about many phenomena they detest.

A more important reason, I would argue, can be found in the development of 
the modern social sciences. As sociologists like Hans Joas and Michael Mann 
have observed, the origins of these sciences lie in liberal, 
Enlightenment-era thinking that dismissed war as primitive, irrational, and 
alien to modern civilization. Canonical thinkers of the eighteenth and early 
nineteenth centuries, such as Montesquieu and Benjamin Constant, believed 
fervently that, as human societies grew more rational, and as commerce bound 
nations closer together, war would disappear. "We have reached the age of 
commerce, which must necessarily replace the age of war," Constant wrote in 
1813.

Even Karl Marx did not fundamentally depart from these assumptions. He saw 
class conflict, not international conflict, as the motor of historical 
change, and he treated the latter as an artificial distraction. Nor did he 
ever exalt violence as cleansing and redemptive, the way some of his 
twentieth-century followers would do. In short, to most social scientists, 
conflict between societies simply has not been as worthy of theoretical 
interest as conflict within societies. True, one strain of 
nineteenth-century social scientists did take war more seriously, arguing 
that, without it, societies would weaken and wither. But they primarily 
lived in Germany, mostly grounded their thinking in starkly racialist views 
of human nature, and largely disappeared from the scene after World War I. 
There have been other significant exceptions--Carl Schmitt and Raymond Aron, 
to name just two--but the fact remains that the social sciences have mostly 
avoided giving war the attention it deserves.

Historians did not always fall into this pattern. In the nineteenth century, 
history was still predominantly a literary, narrative art, and the past 
offered no more dramatic or compelling subject than military conflict. 
Masters like Ranke, Macaulay, Michelet, and Parkman all took military 
science seriously and put climactic battles at the heart of their stories. 
In the twentieth century, however, history moved away from this tradition 
and toward the social sciences. The leaders of the influential "Annales 
school" of history, which developed in France in the early twentieth 
century, explicitly downplayed "event history"--by which they particularly 
meant military history--in favor of "deeper" geological, social, and 
economic factors. The most important annaliste, Fernand Braudel, held to 
this principle so strongly that he drafted much of his masterpiece, The 
Mediterranean, while in a World War II POW camp in Germany! Historians of 
the twentieth century resisted these tendencies better than others (not 
surprisingly, given the cataclysmic impact of the world wars). So did 
historians of Civil Warera America. But, in accounts of most other periods, 
war lost its formerly commanding position.

In a narrow sense, neglect of military history is easy enough to justify. 
Surely scholars should have the freedom to pursue those subjects they find 
most intellectually compelling, and I myself, as a paid-up member of the 
guild, would look askance at any outside authority trying to tell me what 
sorts of courses I should teach or what books I should write.

But then, in the real world, nonintellectual concerns constantly impinge 
upon what professors teach and write, while the question of the university's 
civic--as opposed to intellectual--obligations is not easily put aside. 
During the cold war, the government and private institutions like the Ford 
Foundation provided impressive funding for various sorts of "area studies," 
so as to increase American understanding of the regions in which we might 
find ourselves confronting the Soviets. It was not a question of forcing 
existing professors to teach or write on new subjects, but of encouraging 
movement into the desired areas. The years after September 11 have seen a 
welcome surge in the number of faculty positions and courses devoted to 
Islam and the Middle East, without producing any charges of a distorted 
intellectual agenda. Members of wealthy ethnic groups routinely endow 
professorships to spur research and teaching on their own particular 
history.

It seems to me that, at the very least, the study of military history could 
use more encouragement of this sort. With the United States facing a 
long-term terrorist threat--not to mention numerous rogue regimes, and the 
likelihood of having to send our Armed Forces to end genocide or protect 
vital interests in locations yet to be determined--our nation is almost 
certain to remain in the shadow of war for a long time to come. Given this 
fact, surely a broader, more rigorous intellectual knowledge of war itself 
is a matter of some civic interest.

Of course, promoting such historical knowledge does not mean subsidizing 
more books on subjects like cavalry tactics at the Battle of Antietam--which 
the public itself already subsidizes quite nicely. Nor does it mean--despite 
the knee-jerk fears of some of my colleagues-- promoting politically 
conservative forms of history, as if only conservatives are driven to the 
study of war. It simply means studying and teaching about war in ways that 
historians find intellectually persuasive and important. But it also means 
asking historians to do something that scholars all too often shudder away 
from: putting some trust in the instincts of the general public. On this 
subject, at least, those instincts are quite correct.

David A. Bell is a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of 
The First Total War: Napoleon's Europe and the Birth of Warfare As We Know 
It.

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