Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

War and Militarism in the Thought of Herbert Spencer

War and Militarism in the Thought of Herbert Spencer War and Militarism in the Thought of Herbert Spencer With an Unpublished Letter on the Anglo-Boer War* FABRIZIO BATTISTELLI** ABSTRACT This article re-examines Herbert Spencer's position concerning war and militarism, using as a backdrop the ideas of the thinkers that preceded him. Both Smith and Ferguson had already forwarded their idea that a civil society may be distinguished from a primitive society by the specialization of a small part of the former for specific defence activity. Saint Simon and Comte then introduced the military society/industrial society dichotomy. While the French positivists, however, based this dichotomy on an observation of history, Spencer used the observation of nature as his basis. The law of evolution applies and it is this that differentiates the various active sections that go to make up the social organism; those destined to carry out the function of "sustentation" from those destined for "defence or offence." The levels of development that these functions reach determines whether they can be classed in the "militant" or "industrial" category. The general evolutionary tendency of progression from the former type to the latter does not necessarily eliminate the occurrence of processes of involution. This is indeed what occured in Great http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png International Journal of Comparative Sociology (in 2002 continued as Comparative Sociology) Brill

War and Militarism in the Thought of Herbert Spencer

Download PDF
18 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/brill/war-and-militarism-in-the-thought-of-herbert-spencer-ED20aH4vrh

References

References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 1993 Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
0020-7152
eISSN
1745-2554
DOI
10.1163/002071593X00021
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

War and Militarism in the Thought of Herbert Spencer With an Unpublished Letter on the Anglo-Boer War* FABRIZIO BATTISTELLI** ABSTRACT This article re-examines Herbert Spencer's position concerning war and militarism, using as a backdrop the ideas of the thinkers that preceded him. Both Smith and Ferguson had already forwarded their idea that a civil society may be distinguished from a primitive society by the specialization of a small part of the former for specific defence activity. Saint Simon and Comte then introduced the military society/industrial society dichotomy. While the French positivists, however, based this dichotomy on an observation of history, Spencer used the observation of nature as his basis. The law of evolution applies and it is this that differentiates the various active sections that go to make up the social organism; those destined to carry out the function of "sustentation" from those destined for "defence or offence." The levels of development that these functions reach determines whether they can be classed in the "militant" or "industrial" category. The general evolutionary tendency of progression from the former type to the latter does not necessarily eliminate the occurrence of processes of involution. This is indeed what occured in Great

Journal

International Journal of Comparative Sociology (in 2002 continued as Comparative Sociology) – Brill

Published: Jan 1, 1993

There are no references for this article.