The Army in the Nation: a Contribution to the Theory of Power

Abstract

Today, the demand is for social and political ‘indicators’; the demand for precise, objective knowledge — for knowledge itself, in fact, has pushed aside the face-saving rhetoric which in many a metropolitan centre once took the place of a world view, if not of theory itself. The process of unification (of globalisation) of the world which is the result of the central crisis of the Western capitalist system between the great economic crisis of 1929-32 and the 1939-45 war, the collapse of the classical colonial empires, the emergence of a renascent and revolutionary Orient, the powerful wave of national liberation movements and social revolutions with a socialist orientation, the establishment within diversity of a system of socialist states — all these factors have both allowed us to envisage and to realise that unity and revealed the obstacles and differences that impede it. Since it is a dialectical process, this globalisation process works through a deepening of specificities. That is the backcloth against which we must place the thirst for precision, the epoch of quantitative calculation, of models, of neo-exactitude, of structuralism and its expression within the social sciences, functionalism — all of them concomitant components of the dominant ideology at the very heart of contemporary culture and the movement of ideas in our day.