Reply to Martin Shaw

Abstract

Martin Shaw maintains that my argument, in 'Notes on the Sociology of War', is entirely a priori, and culpably neglectful of the facts. I admit the first charge, but not the second. My principal purpose was to make a contribution to clarity. I suggested that certain concepts are needed notably that of corporate agency if war is to be described; and I suggested that other concepts notably those of strategy play no part in explaining the origin of war. Nothing that Shaw says, and nothing that I have been able to glean from the works to which he refers, suggests that the distinctions sketched in my snotes' are as valueless as he implies. The inadequacy of existing explanations of war, I maintain, proceeds in part from the inadequacy of existing descriptions. My subsidiary argument was directed against theories of war which, in the interest of sstructural' explanation, overlook the political dimension. Shaw rightly says that I refer to no recent sociologists, other than David Marsland. Nevertheless, C. Wright Mills, Paul A. Baran and Paul M. Sweezey, are not so widely discredited as to merit no further discussion. (Would that they were.) As Shaw acknowledges, the theories of Mills survive (in somewhat putrescent form) in the writings of E. P. Thompson. So why not read my arguments as a criticism of Thompson? I also believe that they tell, not only against Thompson, but also against Michael Mann (who, among those cited by Shavv, is the only sociologist to have offered an explanation of war). 'War' I argued, 'involves the action of a sovereign state, issuing from the very same process of corporate decision-making whereby the state itself is governed'.t I emphasized action for the reason that agency changes the sense of explanations. The 'causes' of war are the causes of something done. In the neutral scientific sense, a cause is an insufficient but necessary part of an unnecessary but suflicient condition.2 In this sense the peaceful body politic is as much a cause of war as its aggressive invader, and, by existing, the Jews were as much the cause of their extermination as the Nazis. Such a conception obliterates the real distinctions that interest us, and leaves action not less mysterious, but more.