Some Historical Notes

Abstract

Even if the sociology of the military became firmly established and, especially, demonstrated its applicability to concrete cases starting with the vast research of The American Soldier (see “The American School” below), sociological investigation of the military and of the phenomenon of war preceded it by nearly a century, and was contemporaneous with the first studies commonly considered sociological. Seeking out these roots is not merely an operation of historical interest: Those starting out on the study of this special sociology need to know the paths that have already been trod, of which some came to an end and others produced studies and researches of what we consider contemporary sociology of the military (from The American Soldier onward). Our discipline did not develop in some sort of cosmic vacuum, emerging from nothing, but embraced previous contributions to thought and research and very often carried them further. To give just a pair of examples, Samuel Huntington and Morris Janowitz (see below) offered their own solutions to the convergence/divergence dichotomy between the armed forces and civil society already evidenced by Alexis de Tocqueville in the 19th century, while Charles Wright Mills’s model of the “power elite” is clearly indebted to the studies of Gaetano Mosca at the end of the 19th century. Some knowledge of the thought of those I call the “forerunners” here is important, therefore, especially for the novice, in order to build a more complete and broad mental framework of the discipline than would result from study of contemporary sociology of the military only.