Problematics of Military Power

Government, Discipline and the Subject of Violence

Michael S. Drake

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136340710
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia militar y marítima

This book traces the relations between the organization of violence and social and political order from ancient Rome to early modern Europe. Following the work of Michel Foucault, the author studies the ways authority, obedience and forms of self-conduct were produced by the micro-techniques used to govern the bodies of violence deployed in different forms of warfare.

PART ONE: ANCIENT

1

Ancient Rome and Historical Sociology

Foundational mythology and the myths of modern sociology

Two foundational myths alternate throughout the history of Rome.¹ An older, Latin story recounts how the twins Romulus and Remus were cast out of their patrimony as heirs to the kingship of Alba Longa and founded a new city on the augural site of Rome, where Romulus murdered his brother and enclosed the city. An alternative, Greek story, attributes the foundation to Aeneas, a leader of refugees from the fallen city of Troy. A common cult among the Etruscan cities, the Greek myth declined during the first two centuries of the Roman republic’s struggle for local hegemony, but was reasserted from the time of the Second Punic War, when Rome had displaced the Etruscan Federation as the dominant power in the Latin peninsula, bringing it into conflict with both Carthage and the Greek cities. From this time, the republic entered a progressive cycle of crises culminating in the last century BC, when Cicero reworked the foundation yet again, eliminating Aeneas and the Trojan lineage from his account of the evolution of the republic, but rationalizing the older story into an explanation of Rome’s greatness in terms of its Latin identity, its strategic location, and above all the evolution of a mixed constitution, conditioned by the legislation of the early kings, constituted by the creation of a patrician republic and mediated by plebeian tribunician power. The mixed constitution sustained a unique balance as a platform for men to achieve the virtue of public recognition in service to the political community, glorifying their names beyond mortal death. Cicero’s foundational myth thus posited the res publica as the means by which the tension between fortuna and virtiù could be resolved in favour of the latter via the laws, institutions and customs of the republic, providing a vehicle for personal glorification.

After the civil wars which destroyed the republican political order, Caesar Augustus’ res publica restituta constituted his own claims to glory, but effectively monopolized to his own patronage the political offices by which others could achieve greatness. Under the principate, the foundational myth was reworked once again in a revision of the Greek story, exemplified in Virgil’s Aeneid, which attributed the foundation of Troy to Latin colonists, so that Aeneas’ foundation of Alba Longa is elaborated as the revival of the Latin historical destiny to become ‘lords of the world’, thereby recentring the Greek myth on a Latin Rome that is from the outset worldly, while contrasting Rome’s imperial destiny to the Greek policy of colonization. By contrast, Livy’s Histories, composed in the same era, present all versions as alternatives, but in reiterating many of Cicero’s theoretical embellishments throughout, privilege constitutional evolution over foundation. However, Livy was already writing an obituary, the story of the decline of the republic, a task he could only undertake as a depoliticized, professional historian in the conditions of the new imperial order.²

Modern accounts, which present social and economic foundations as the ‘real’ conditions of the Roman constitution, simply repeat the mode by which the Greek version was reasserted over the Latin, positing determinant prior conditions which were mediated by the political process, advancing their own myth of a modernity to which the underlying tragic fate of the past is transparent. In using Livy’s account of the origins of Rome, in contrast to modern philosophical anthropology, my intention is not to reassert a primordial significance of myth over rational sociological analysis, or to assert a hidden determinant structure in mythology, but merely to show how stories taken at face value can provide us with illuminating historical concepts.

Livy tells us that Romulus founded Rome by drawing up an enclosure, and killed his brother Remus for leaping over the half-completed wall in mock escape. The structure of enclosure and the terminal sanction of its transgression provide recurrent themes for the studies of this book. Similarly, the theme of predatory violence and its recruitment of dependants outside the law is prefigured in Livy’s account of how Romulus, himself a cattle-thief, populated the enclosure with vagabonds and outlaws from other dominions, to whom he offered protection, forming a city which reproduced itself primarily through seizure, in the abduction of the Sabine women and continued predation on the cattle-herds of other settlements. Livy also provides an originary account of the consequences of the creation of law by Romulus’ successor, Numa, which demanded that time be divided between war and peace, that law itself then be duplicated in laws for war, and that prison be created for the criminality consequent on the blurring of the line between right and wrong inherent in this artifice. The political constitution of society through its relation to forces of violence is also prefigured in the story of how the next king advanced as his successor Servius, the son of a slave woman, who instituted the census, ordering Rome on the basis of the capacity of subjects to volunteer themselves for public service in times of war, establishing the principle that, ‘every man’s contribution could be in proportion to his means’. The poorest were to be exempted from contributions, but not from the principle of service itself, and so retained their political privilege. Servius was overthrown by Tarquin the Proud, who instituted a programme of public works to occupy the idle poor, a burden upon the state, in utilitarian labour usually performed by slaves. The eventual overthrow of this last king of Rome was justified by citing his family’s transgressions against public law, sacred custom and social convention, mythologizing the natural justice of revolt, and also its effect, since Roman political liberty was asserted in this act of popular deposition and the republic instituted so that Romans would never again have to submit to kings. Thus, Livy tells us, were the Romans prepared for liberty by legislators and commanders.³

In attempting to side-step social and political foundations, historical sociology supplants these ancient myths with its own, presenting us with a tragic narrative of the occlusion of political possibility by economic determination. The subject of this tragedy is universally divested of symbolic values, either disembodied as a bearer of interests, or reduced to a biological body as the source of essential needs or drives. Sociology thus projects its myth of modernity back upon history in rigorous narration, with ideology to fill in the interstices of the story, enabling increasingly sophisticated modulations of emphasis and combinations of elements. ‘The state’ and sovereign power are favoured supporting actors, which can always be guaranteed to provide a spectacle that never fails to bring in the crowds, while the structural parameters of the historical stage are given independently of the cast in economic determinations delineating the range of action.

Rome in Marxist and Weberian historical sociology

Since the 1960s, Marxist historical analysis has sought to reinstate the political and the cultural against tendencies toward economism. This effected a bifurcation of Marxist historiography into, on the one hand, micro-histories which tend to concern themselves with cultural aspects of class formation, as in the work of Christopher Hill and E. P. Thompson, and, on the other, structuralist macro-histories, which focus upon state formation, as exemplified in the work of Perry Anderson.⁴ The Roman republic and empire provide Anderson’s case-studies on the interrelation of economic and political relations in ‘the slave mode of production’. Since military service permeated the elements of Roman society engaged in the political forms of class struggle, Anderson includes an account of military organization and the fortunes of war as another aspect of the superstructure, though he does not accord it any formal conceptual autonomy.

By combining juridical analysis and sociological reasoning, Weber was able to specify the interrelation between military and economic organization and between political struggle and military tactics.⁵ However, Weber seeks to assimilate the Roman republic to a ‘feudal’ model to show how its configuration of legal property relations and political-military forms ultimately succumbed to economic limitations on viable extensive colonial settlement by a peasantry competitively disadvantaged by slave production. Weber’s focus on peasant smallholdings, and the subjectivity effected by independent production as opposed to proletarianization, as the source of compulsory military service to the state, transposes onto ancient Rome the concerns of the German state in the late nineteenth century with the erosion of the conditions of the Prussian military-political constitution, which Weber had earlier investigated himself.⁶ Thus, the (virtuous) republic could be characterized as primarily a political formation and the (decadent) empire as economic, though it was still dependent upon the military form of the legions that had originated under the republic but that were now deprived both of their sociological basis in the ‘yeomanry’ and of their dynamic in the peasants’ desire for land against the competitive incorporation of their farms by the estates operating slave production. The contemporary concerns reflected in Weber’s structural model are usually overlooked by its axiomatic deployment in historical sociology, providing, for instance, the hidden hand which connects the lines and fills in the spaces left by the stencil of Anderson’s historical materialism.

Weber and Anderson both read in their own histories of the republic the occlusion of politics, of human possibility, by economics. This is history as tragedy, a salutary and repetitive story which we assume, if we tell often enough, with sufficient precision, we might eventually be able to overcome. However, other approaches, which begin not from centring our attention upon apparently fundamental, essential properties but in decentring our attention by directing it to the margins, might suggest that this historical tragedy is a perspectival effect, a myth, perhaps the favoured myth of modern social and political critique. Side-stepping foundation and entering after the act of enclosure, Weber and Anderson seek the key to the tragedy of history in a ‘Rome’ already structured by the order of their analyses. Against the division of Roman time between peace and war, each with its own laws, divisions and cycles, their structural narratives posit Rome within a continuous, economic time of production. In contrast, the time of early republican Rome in Livy’s history is repetitive, distinguished by the named persons holding annual consular office. It is also a time in which peace and legislative reform were repeatedly deferred by war and mobilization. Only when the people refuse military service, step outside the civil order and encamp outside the walls, effectively suspending the cycle of time and its return, does change break into this cyclical repetition.

For both Weber and Anderson, Roman military service was primarily an economic negative, its effects operating through the neglect of economic function, through the absence of ‘peasants’ (Anderson) or ‘yeomen’ (Weber) as economic agents on their land, and only secondarily a political negative, since while they were away they were unable to participate in the political community. However, every enclosure also constitutes an outside, an exteriority, which Weber and Anderson neglect — the space beyond the walls, the excluded terms, the banished social categories. Absence from the land and from the city was equally a presence elsewhere, in different social relations, in a different space and a different time, in which the citizen–soldiers were not merely passive material for a military machine operating independently of them. Rather, the security of enclosure produced a marginal condition of absence in military subjection which mutated and returned to the centre in the fall of the republic.

However, prior to conceptualization, both Karl Marx and Weber also engaged in their own foundationalism, from which we can sketch two philosophical anthropologies of primitive European military forms. Firstly (after a Nietzschean Weber), a predatory form, in which a cattle-owning aristocracy of castle lords organized into rival familial clans, engaged in raids of seizure against other communities and lords. Since raiding precluded dependence upon extensive economic property, the warrior-caste provided protection to peasants on an arable domain around their strongholds as law-givers rather than as owners, and came to exercise political functions of authority and justice in exchange for these political-military services. Their ho...