War: The Covered Side of Modernity

Abstract

Although its presence is manifest in all modern societies - in politics, economics and popular culture as well as collective memory - was has indeed been a neglected topic of sociological research, though no discussion of modernity can be complete without it. This article first addresses the question of factors in both the liberal and the socialist traditions that have led to this neglect. Attention is then given to functions of war in the modernization process and beyond this, to the imputed moralism of modern warfare, from the 19th century to the present decade. Since modern war represents the epitome of mobilization, war may be viewed sociologically as a powerful social movement on behalf of a moral cause. A final consideration is the complex relation of war to violence.