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War and the Rise of the State
...What war causes, Porter argues, is an inexorable growth of powerful centralized government and bureaucracy, often at the expense of individual rights and liberties. However, war can sometimes also have the effect of fostering democratization in cases where governments are compelled to call on the less privileged members of society to bear arms and are frequently obliged to grant them new rights and opportunities in return.

Porter appears to regard all this as an important new discovery, despite earlier work along the same lines by authors ranging from Tocqueville and Max Weber to Theodore Rabb, Charles Tilly, David Kaiser and William McNeil, some of whom are cited in Porter's own copious footnotes. Perhaps he was moved to restate their conclusions by the belief that contemporary Europeans and Americans nonetheless still "resist acknowledging, much less squarely confronting, the pervasive role of war in our history and politics." He believes part of this may be due to ideological bias on the part of both liberals and conservatives. Conservatives admire military values and are sympathetic to the military outlook but refuse to acknowledge that "big government" has often been the direct outgrowth of war and preparations for war. Liberals "likewise cannot accept that the welfare institutions which they regard as hallmarks of human progress could possibly have derived in part from anything so horrendous as war."

Professor Porter is determined to disabuse both liberals and conservatives of such illusions, and he makes an impressive attempt, ranging over five centuries of European and American history, discussing such diverse subjects as public finance in the sixteenth Century Dutch Republic, the relationship between trench warfare and the rise of Fascism, government control of industry in France during World War I, and the impact of World War II on politics and social legislation in Sweden and Switzerland.

Having identified war as "a powerful catalyst of change," Porter has some difficulty in describing the nature of the change. His careful research keeps getting in the way of his social scientist's urge to generalize and categorize. Thus, "large states were better equipped than smaller ones to endure the violence of the Renaissance age"--except when they weren't; as in the case of Spain which "unravelled under the centrifugal stress of large scale violence." Then again, some small states, like the Dutch and the Swiss, didn't do too badly either. Further on we learn about "the democratizing penchant of modern armies" like Cromwell's round-heads and the soldiers of the First French Republic. Except this doesn't seem to apply to Prussia or Russia. War, Porter concludes, often stimulates national unity and political consolidation--except when it doesn't, as in the cases of Italy and Poland.

Although Porter disavows any attempt to "postulate a military dialectic of history," he ends up doing something very close to it, concluding his study with a call to "discard evolutionary and progressive models of change and humbly acknowledge this tragic and fundamental thread in Western Civilization." In his zeal to sustain this line of argument Porter is sometimes driven to questionable extremes. He defines "war," for example, to include not only international conflict and civil war but arms races and international rivalries, as well as all of the phenomenon associated with late nineteenth century imperialism. Even the use of "war" as a metaphor by FDR during the Great Depression qualifies for inclusion by the author, who sees the success of the New Deal as due to Roosevelt's success in "imparting a warlike urgency to the economic crisis." Having defined almost everything in modern political and economic history as somehow war-related, Porter has little difficulty in proving that war is "the fundamental thread in Western Civilization."

PORTER'S BOOK attempts to show how "war made the state and the state made war," in the words of historian Charles Tilly. ...