From Antagonism to Fusion: Military and Industrial Society Fused in Militarist Capitalism

ABSTRACT

This article reconsiders the classical duality between military and industrial society and the evolutionary scheme from the first to the second. It argues and theorizes the concept of military-capitalist society, or militarist capitalism, including its theocratic-militarist variant. It elaborates a substantive index of militarist capitalism that is composed of certain indicators and proxies of the latter as its components and describes data and data sources concerning the index components. It reports the substantive findings of an empirical analysis, namely numerical militarist capitalism indexes for Western and comparable societies such as Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries. The main results are that military capitalism is primarily a phenomenon of regions outside Western Europe; of unregulated, inegalitarian, and coercive capitalism; and of societies dominated by conservatism and religion-overdetermined cultures, such as the United States and other countries. It discusses these findings with reference to these countries. Lastly, it draws conclusions and theoretical implications.

KEYWORDS:

• Conservatism
• industrial society
• militarist capitalism
• military society

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Hirschman (1977:52) comments with reference to Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith that it “was expected that the expansion of domestic trade would create more cohesive communities while foreign trade would help avoid wars between them.” Hirschman (1977:66) adds that “capitalism is here hailed because it would activate some benign human proclivities at the expense of some malignant ones,” including by implication militarism and war. Hirschman (1977:110) infers that by “holding that ambition, the lust for power and the desire for respect can all be satisfied by economic improvement, Smith undercut the idea that passion can be pitted again passion, or the interests against the passions.”

² Hirschman (1977:62) remarks that the “persistent use of le doux commerce (by Montesquieu and others) strikes us as a strange aberration for an age when the slave trade was at its peak.”

³ Cairnes ([1875]1965:283) comments (disapprovingly) that for Comte and his followers, the “true ideal of industrial society—the goal toward which all reforming effort should be directed—is a more and more complete and definitive separation of the laboring and the capitalist classes. The proper model for our industrial organization according to them is an army in which the capitalists are as the captains, and the laborers as the rank and file (as) the discouragement of movements (that) offer to the laboring class the sole means of escape from a harsh and hopeless destiny.” For the present purpose, it is relevant that Cairnes understands Comte’s industrial society as equivalent to capitalism.

⁴ Comte ([1975]1983:144) identifies the “conservative course of theocratic government” as well as, relatedly, the “conservative office of the feudal regime.” More broadly, he points to the “primitive tendency of mankind to a military life and to its final issue in an industrial life (so) the repugnance of modern society to a military life,” hence the “natural affinity between the theological and the military spirit, and between the scientific and industrial” (Comte [1975]1983:295).

⁵ Schumpeter (1965:97) adds that “capitalism involves (militarism and nationalism) in its workings, and thereby keeps them alive, economically as well as politically. And, they in turn affect capitalism, cause it to deviate from the course.”

⁶ Fischer (2003:27) remarks that the “projects and politics of militarism and imperialism (etc.) which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of Keynes’ daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.”

⁷ (See Arrow 1974; Dixit, Grossman, and Faruk 2000; Fearon 2011; Fischer 2003; Phelps 2013; Rajan and Zingales 2004.)

⁸ (See Baliga and Sjöström 2008; Dell and Querubin 2018; Shaffer 1996; Galbraith and Parker 2017.)

⁹ (See Bauman 2001; Beck 2000; Boswell 1989; Boswell and Dixon 1990; Chase-Dunn 1992; Collins 1995; Habermas 1989; Kentor and Boswell 2003; Torfason and Ingram 2010; Slater and Rush Smith 2016; Somerville 2000; Steinmetz 2005, 2008; Wallerstein 1974; Wimmer and Feinstein 2010.)

¹⁰ Schmoller (1894:529) can be credited as being among the first to imply and illustrate such a combination by remarking that in Germany capitalism or liberalism “combined for reforms with the German bureaucratic and military monarchy, the like will occur with socialism,” adding that “in earlier times, and occasionally even now, foreign domination and military dictatorships are among the outcome of class conflicts.” In turn, Schumpeter (1965:97) explicitly states that militarism and nationalism fuse with imperialism and reluctantly admits that they “draw their best energies from capitalism” despite its opposite “inner logic,” and thus unwittingly implies that all of them may form a fusion with the latter.

¹¹ I thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

¹² Ricardo ([1888]2011:488) finds in England “those who are in full possession of power, namely, the King, and the Oligarchy, who are bribed to support his government.”

¹³ Habermas (1989:145) observes that in laissez-faire or early capitalism, “large industry took (interest) in an expansion of the military apparatus for the sake of the conquest and protection of privileged markets abroad.” Edward (1996:643) remarks, “many of the past threats which exploded into military confrontations were nurtured by the marketing efforts of rent-seekers (so) aspects of market behavior could promote conflict.” See also Bowles and Carlin (2020); Fershtman, Murphy, and Weis (1996); Galbraith and Parker (2017); and Hirschman (1977).

¹⁴ (See Acemoglu and Yared 2010; Acemoglu, Egorov, and Sonin 2012; Aksoy and Billari 2018; Bénabou, Ticchi, and Vindigni 2015; Brundage 2018; Kentor and Boswell 2003; Steinmetz 2005; Wimmer and Feinstein 2010.)

¹⁵ (See Brundage 2018; Cable, Shriver, and Mix 2008; Hooks and McQueen 2010; Steinmetz 2005; Sutton 2000.)

¹⁶ (See Berezin 2019; Caren, Andrews, and Lu 2020; Colantone and Stanig 2019; Edwards 2019; Enke 2020; Hahl, Kim, and Zuckerman Sivan 2018; Lamont 2018; Margalit 2019; Romero 2020.)

¹⁷ (See Dell and Querubin 2018; Münch 2001; Savelsberg and King 2005; Steinmetz 2005; Sutton 2000; see also Autor et al. 2020; Fajgelbaum et al. 2020.)

¹⁸ I thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

¹⁹ Relatedly, NATO condones or ignores the oppression of ethnic (Russian) minorities in some of its members, like the Baltic states, and even genocide or massacre, as that of Kurds in Turkey whose state commits such and other atrocities, especially under Islamic rule since the early 2000s, with impunity apparently just because it is a NATO member and American “ally,” which evidently gives it the literal “license to kill” on a large scale.

²⁰ I credit an anonymous reviewer for this statement.

²¹ I thank an anonymous reviewer for this remark.

²² I thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.

²³ Comte ([1975]1983:135-37) writes that the “American revolution was as purely Protestant as the others (i.e.) in its origin, it was a reproduction of the Dutch revolution, and in its final realization it carried out the English which it realizes as far as Protestantism will allow.” He adds that Protestantism shows the “exclusive predilection for the primitive church and (even) its more injurious enthusiasm for the Hebrew theocracy (and) dreamed about (its) restoration” Comte [1975]1983:151).

²⁴ Comte ([1975]1983:135-37) states that the “forcible repression of religious liberty was in Catholicism simply a consequence of its modern disorganization, whereas it is inherent in the very nature of Protestantism (and) could not but manifest itself as soon as it had the power.,” and especially that “Protestantism has nowhere, and least of all in England shown itself averse to the spirit of caste, which it has even attempted to restore (by) violent repression.”

²⁵ Comte ([1975]1983:274-76 adds that as the “various functions of the social economy are naturally implicated in relations of greater generality, all must be subject to the direction of the most general function of all, which is characterized by the constant action of the whole upon the parts.”

²⁶ I thank an anonymous reviewer for this statement.

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Milan Zafirovski

Milan Zafirovski is Professor in the Department of Sociology at University of North Texas. He holds doctoral degrees in economics and sociology. His research interests are interdisciplinary, encompassing sociology and economics and focusing on economic sociology and sociological economics. He has published widely, including recent books—such as It Did Happen Here: The Rise of Fascism in Contemporary Society (2023) and Capitalist Dictatorship: A Study of Its Social Systems, Dimensions, Forms and Indicators (2021)—and solely edited texts—such as A Modern Guide to Economic Sociology (2021) and of the Routledge International Handbook of Economic Sociology (2023).