Customer Reviews

War and the Rise of the State

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I started reading this book solely to learn about the eighteenth century, but I found it to be so profound and well written that I had to read it al. Everyone who cares about freedom should read this book. Among the first sentences Porter says that like many people, when he first started to study history he found wars to be an annoying interruption of progress, but that he grew to appreciate that after each war the world was somehow different. The how and why are the subject of the book. Porter shows how war and the need to pay for war has led to increasing state power and larger government. Porter shows that in most European states kings used war to quash representative government, but he also shows the exceptions - Switzerland, Sweden, the Netherlands, Britain, and America. Porter shows how different circumstances in these countries helped lead to representative government of some kind. The 20th century tyrannies of fascism and communism and the rise of the welfare state are also convincing explained.

Porter's work is remarkable in both content and readibility. It is an upbeat reply to those who bemoan the general irrelevancy of the Beltway players during these times of peace and prosperity. Furthermore, it clearly documents how much the federal government undergoes growth spurts both during and immediately following the nation's wars. (Clinton himself [as unbelievably egotistical and scary as this may seem] has been quoted lamenting the fact that he is not a wartime President.) This is a book that ought to be read by every public policy wonk who values truth in the slightest... and it's one to be enjoyed by almost anyone who has an interest in America's past and future.

I read this book for a class called "War, Technology, and the Rise of the State", taught by Dr. Walter Opello, coauthor of The Nation-State and Global Order. Dr. Opello took Porter's word as gold although I remained highly skeptical at first, but Porter and Opello became more convincing as they presented their evidence. Porter did an excellent job of demonstrating the connection between warfare and the rise of nationalism, modernity, and subsequently the nation-state. Perhaps more interesting was the connection between modern warfare and the rise of Western social-welfare politics.

However, before war-hawks take too great a feeling of vindication from Porter's research, it should be noted the type of warfare fought post-WWII has had far less productive side-effects. A-symmetrical war, or warfare fought between uniformed soldiers and "terrorists, guerrillas, pirates, bandits, cartels, insurgents, etc" produces very little in the way of progressive social policy; post-modern wars don't end, they slowly burn indefinitely. In the end the book serves as both a valuable history lesson and staunch warning for the present.

As someone with a degree in Political Science with emphasis in Political theory and International Relations, I found this book to be a "mixed bag" of superficiality and intriguing ideas.

The superficiality, I think, is due to the author's tackling of a HUGE subject in a book of readable length. The subject matter simply deserves more depth than the 380 pages of this book allows. A book of perhaps three or four times that length would be needed to really get into the "meat" of this subject. And it would be read, and comprehended, by few.

What Porter has done has been to skim the surface of the subject: in effect outlining his thesis while giving examples - many examples - to support his conclusions. And those conclusions are intriguing.

This book is NOT for the professional political scientist. But it is an excellent "primer" that anyone else can, and should, read to profitably understand many of the forces at work in the world today.

Extensively annotated and referenced, one should think of this book as an introductory buffet of delicious samples, rather than a 5 course formal banquet.

Porter provides a nice correlation between warfare and the rise of the nation state. However many of the ideas that he presents do not really come together well. He provides plenty of evidence but does a poor job of pulling it all into a coherent theme. It definitely gets you thinking about the role war played in increasing the power of the state. It does leave many questions. Its worth a shot for the politically astute.

This book is rather schematic and develops a number of rules that it then tries to use to explain the development of nation states. Generally the feel of the book is that it is a rave based on secondary sources. The absurdity of the book can be seen in its discussion of totalitarianism. It suggests that the way totalitarianism comes about is through five steps. These are:

1 An all out industrial war which enlarges the size and authority of the administrative apparatus of the state.( This happened in Germany but it didn't in Imperial Russia. Russia had been an autocracy prior to the war. If anything the mechanisms it had set up to control the state weakened and collapsed. This led to the revolution of 1917. ) 2 Military defeat causes the collapse of the traditional regime.( You would have to agree with that.) 3 The disintegrative effects of way destroy or substantially weaken civil society.( Russia never had "civil society". It was a large rural country with a small elite living in cities. Germany was a more complex society. However it emerged from the war a democracy. It took 15 years for that to collapse. One would think that the depression and the fear of communism might be relevant to the support of Nazism rather than the collapse of civil society.) 4 In the resulting power vacuum mass movements capture the enlarged bureaucratic center and form a new regime using an organizational structure and approach to politics modeled on an army at war.( In Russia the communist had to create the Red Army the Checka and other means of repression. In Germany the instruments of repression were initially the SA and the SS. This is thus wrong) 5 After capturing the state, the new regime centralizes power and atomizes all opposition society for war.(Yes in Russia no in Germany.)

Anyone who is familiar with the history of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany will be aware that both countries had a very different character and history and neither will fit into this model.

The Soviet Union initially tried to run a command economy but faced with the collapse of the country introduced the New Economic Policy in the 20's. This meant in practice private ownership of land but the state ownership of industrial enterprise. The state at this time could if anything be described as reasonably fragmented. It was not dissimilar to the old Czarist regime, which as an autocracy had controlled the development of secondary industry to provide armaments. In the late 20's the Soviet Union did a complete U-turn on this policy and decided to Nationalize all land and to set up collective farms. The reason for this policy was so that the state could export the agricultural surplus and use the income to industrialize. This policy meant a huge decrease in the standard of living of farm workers. Such a policy was met with fierce resistance. The resistance led to repression and the deaths of millions of farm workers especially in the Ukraine. It was at this point that the Soviet Union became a strong centralized authoritarian state. Prior to that it had been an authoritarian state but not a strong and centralized one. In addition to building up a strong base of secondary industry the state also built up a large modern army.

The development of central structures meant that during the Second World War, even despite the loss of huge amounts of territory the Soviet Union was able to out produce the Axis countries in war production.

Germany unlike the Soviet Union was a wealthy country with a large industrial sector. After the First World War its constitution was that of a Federal Republic. Following the passing of power to the Nazi Party something which was accepted by the traditional elite's of the country there was little marked change to the country. An authoritarian political structure was set up and dissidents imprisoned but power was decentralized into a number of Gauls. Nothing at all happened to the industrial structure of the country. Prior to the war the only real economic policy was some government spending on roads which led to the achievement of full employment. In the late 30's the country engaged on a limited armaments program which was similar to that of Great Britain.

One of the problems faced by Nazi Germany was its inability to harness its own economy and also that of its allies to the war effort. Thus in 1941 German industry was only working 9 to 5. Private motor vehicles and Refrigerators were still being produced. The output of aircraft was so low that Germany's total of 3,000 aircraft in service was never exceeded despite the fact that both the United States and the Soviet Union had by 1944 20,000 aircraft available for service in Europe. In Germany, there were simply no strong central organs except those of state repression.

The book is highly artificial in the way that it tries to fit complex reality into simple schema. Give it a miss.

The book, War and the Rise of the State, is very informative and should be a best seller.