A Sociologist Looks at Conscription

Abstract

IT IS proposed that the American Nation, as a means of preparedness for war, should establish a system of peacetime conscription requiring a year of military service and training of all young men somewhere around the ages of eighteen to twenty-one. In making up our minds concerning this proposal, we must strive to balance one consideration against another and to select the course of action which, all things considered, seems to offer the best prospect of national survival. The change proposed is drastic, almost revolutionary, in our American tradition. And yet perhaps that tradition needs to be changed. Precisely because of the revolutionary nature of peacetime conscription, we have little to go on in evaluating its probable effectiveness or its social results. We have no American experience to guide us, and it is by no means easy to discover what European experience teaches. In order to find the answer, we must weigh and balance against each other a number of uncertain possibilities and probabilities, finally deciding on the basis of the best available evidence just what we should do. If there were a reasonably wellworked-out science of society, it could be tremendously useful to us at this moment of decision. But in fact sociology is far from exact, and sociologists disagree on many of the fundamental tenets of their subject. Nevertheless, a sociological analysis of the entire question may have some value as a contribution to the discussion, and that is the spirit in which this paper is written. The reader is hereby put on notice that the writer speaks for himself alone and that many of his sociological colleagues will disagree. The method of our discussion will be