THE HISTORICAL FORMATION OF THE MODERN MILITARY: LEGACIES OF THE ANCIEN ARMY, REVOLUTIONARY AND COUNTER- REVOLUTIONARY FORCES

Date

2024-9

Author

Akkaya, Ahmet

Metadata

Show full item record

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Item Usage Stats

259
views

482
downloads

Cite This

According to the evolutionary conceptualization, the modern military is a product of historical progress achieved by technical innovations in weaponry, the adoption of rationalism to organize armed forces, and the development of scientific approaches to warfare. However, the evolutionary conceptualization, which implies progress, is insufficient to explain why the organization of the armed forces in their relationship to the political structure is formed in distinct ways in advanced modern states. As a symptom of the limitations of this conceptualization, the thesis of exceptionalism or particularity appears in examinations of examples not fitting the given definition. The thesis problematizes the modern army itself with questions on its class character to overcome these limitations and seeks to reveal the class tensions characterizing the modern army and its historical formation, concealed by the evolutionary conceptualization, by framing them within the capitalist social relations' contradictory development. The Open Marxist position in the Marxist state debate provides enabling tools thanks to their specifying the complex relationship of the political and economic forms of capitalist domination, and notifying the French Revolution of 1789 as a critical rupture in the historical development of capitalist relations. By resting on Simon Clarke’s theorizing on forms of capitalist domination as the object of class struggle, and Heide Gerstenberger’s stress on the specificity of the bourgeois form of state power, the thesis develops the categories of ancien army, revolutionary army, and counter-revolutionary army to study the modern military and the historical process forming it by focusing on their contradictory features.

Subject Keywords

modern military, modern state, capitalist state, French Revolution, class struggle

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/111486

Collections

Graduate School of Social Sciences, Thesis