Problematics of Military Power: Government, Discipline and the Subject of Violence

Traces the relations between the organization of violence and social and political order from ancient Rome to early modern Europe. It studies the ways in which authority, obedience and forms of self-conduct were produced by the micro-techniques used to govern violence deployed in different forms of warfare. These issues comprise problematics of military power that are largely neglected by historical sociology and political history. The author shows that the constitution of military power and its relation to wider society has undergone a series of radical, discontinuous and contested shifts in the course of European history, rather than following a pattern of progressive abstraction of violence from society. The text argues that modern presumptions of an ahistorical dichotomy between military and civil society mat thus distort our understanding of the past and perhaps also of the future.

Michael Drake is a teaching fellow at the School of Economic and Social Studies, University of East Anglia.