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The military not as battles but as an institution: Weber's monopoly on legitimate violence, Tilly's insight that war made the state, the long shift from warrior aristocrats to citizen-soldiers to professional standing armies to mass conscription...
The military not as battles but as an institution: Weber's monopoly on legitimate violence, Tilly's insight that war made the state, the long shift from warrior aristocrats to citizen-soldiers to professional standing armies to mass conscription, the problem of civilian control, militarism as ideology, and the just-war tradition.
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Greek city-states developed the hoplite phalanx, a close-order infantry formation of citizens who bought their own armor and fought as equals in the line. Hoplite service tied military duty to citizenship: the man who could afford arms had a stake in, and a voice in, the polis. This citizen-soldier model shaped Greek political life and became a reference point for later ideas about who has the right and duty to fight.
Sparta built its citizen body around compulsory military education, the agoge, which took boys from around age seven and trained them for a lifetime as soldiers. The system made Sparta the most militarized society of classical Greece, where the male citizen's role was defined almost entirely by war. Ancient writers, including Xenophon and Plutarch, treated Sparta as the model case of a state organized around military virtue.
With the founding of the Roman Republic, military service became a duty of property-owning male citizens organized into legions, funded and led largely by the citizens themselves. Command rotated through elected magistrates, and soldiers returned to civilian life after campaigns. This citizen-army model lasted for centuries before Rome moved toward a professional standing force.
According to Roman tradition, the farmer Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus was appointed dictator to lead Rome against an invading army, won the campaign in sixteen days, then resigned his absolute power and returned to his farm. Whether or not the story is literally accurate, Romans told it as the ideal of the citizen-soldier who takes up arms only when needed and gives up power willingly. The Cincinnatus figure became a lasting symbol of civilian restraint over military power, invoked centuries later by figures such as George Washington.
The consul Gaius Marius opened army recruitment to landless citizens and put the state, rather than individual soldiers, in charge of equipping the legions. Soldiers now served long terms for pay and looked to their generals, rather than the Senate, for land grants and rewards after discharge. The reform created Rome's first professional standing army and tied soldiers' loyalty to individual commanders, a shift historians link to the collapse of the Republic.
Julius Caesar led his legion across the Rubicon River into Italy, defying the Roman Senate's order to disband his army before returning to Rome. The act triggered civil war and marked one of the clearest breaches of the principle that Roman generals should not turn their armies against the civilian state. It became a lasting example of praetorianism: a military commander using his troops for domestic political power.
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Emperor Augustus formalized the Praetorian Guard, an elite force stationed in and around Rome to protect the emperor. Over the following two centuries the Guard repeatedly made and unmade emperors, becoming the textbook case of praetorianism, where the very troops meant to guard the state's ruler instead control who rules. The term "praetorian" entered later political vocabulary to describe any military force that dominates civilian government.
After murdering the emperor Pertinax, the Praetorian Guard publicly auctioned the imperial throne to the highest bidder, the senator Didius Julianus. The episode is one of the starkest documented instances of a military body openly overriding civilian and constitutional authority. It is cited in civil-military relations literature as an extreme case of praetorianism, where armed force replaces political legitimacy outright.
In The City of God, completed around 426, Augustine of Hippo argued that war could be morally justified when waged by legitimate authority, for a just cause, and with right intention, rather than out of hatred or lust for power. His arguments, developed across several of his writings, became the foundation of the Christian just-war tradition. Later thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, built directly on Augustine's criteria.
Under Charlemagne and his successors, military obligation became tied to landholding: nobles who held land from the king owed him mounted warriors, knights, in return. This system of feudal levies spread across medieval Europe and made war-fighting the specialized business of an armored aristocracy rather than the general citizenry. It set the pattern for European "who fights" arrangements for the next several centuries, until the rise of paid professional and mercenary forces.
In the Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas laid out three conditions for a just war: it must be declared by a legitimate sovereign authority, fought for a just cause, and waged with rightful intention. Aquinas explicitly built on Augustine's earlier arguments and gave the just-war tradition its most systematic medieval statement. His formulation remained the standard reference point for Christian and later secular just-war theory.
The Ottoman sultans built the Janissary corps, an infantry force recruited chiefly through the devshirme system, which levied Christian boys from the Balkans, converted them to Islam, and trained them from childhood as soldiers directly loyal to the sultan. The Janissaries gave the Ottoman state a standing professional force independent of the feudal nobility, centuries before most of Europe developed comparable armies. They later became a powerful political faction in their own right, at times deposing sultans.
Swiss cantons hired out disciplined pike infantry to European rulers, and Swiss mercenaries became the most sought-after soldiers on Renaissance battlefields, fighting for whichever prince paid them. Their success helped make mercenary armies the dominant model of Renaissance warfare, especially in Italy, where city-states relied on hired captains called condottieri. This reliance on paid outsiders rather than citizen soldiers drew sharp criticism from contemporaries who saw it as corrosive to the state.
In The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli argued that mercenary soldiers were unreliable and dangerous, since they fought for pay rather than loyalty and would abandon or even turn on the ruler who hired them. He held up citizen militias, armed and committed to their own state, as the only sound basis for military power. The argument was a direct response to Italy's reliance on condottieri and became a founding text of the case against mercenary armies.
Machiavelli's The Art of War expanded his case against mercenaries, arguing in detail for a citizen militia modeled on the armies of the Roman Republic. He tied military reform to political renewal, contending that a state's strength rested on its own armed citizens rather than hired soldiers. The book influenced later republican and revolutionary thinking about who should bear arms for the state.
Jean Bodin's Six Books of the Commonwealth set out an early systematic theory of sovereignty, arguing that a legitimate state must hold supreme, indivisible authority within its territory. Bodin's account of sovereign power, including control over force and law, laid groundwork for later theories of the state's exclusive claim to legitimate violence. His work influenced Hobbes and the broader development of early modern state theory.
Parliament created the New Model Army during the English Civil War as a centrally funded, professionally trained, full-time force, replacing the patchwork of regional militias it had relied on earlier. Soldiers were paid regularly from national taxation rather than raised locally on an ad hoc basis, making it one of the first standing professional armies in early modern Europe. The New Model Army also became a political force in its own right, ultimately backing the execution of Charles I.
also in Hinges of history, Making peace: the great settlements, State, law, and coercion, The Catholic Church as a world power
Twin treaties ending the Thirty Years' War in the Holy Roman Empire and the Eighty Years' War between Spain and the Dutch Republic. They are widely seen as the foundation of the modern system of sovereign states.
Thomas Hobbes published Leviathan, arguing that individuals surrender their right to use force to a sovereign authority in exchange for protection and order, since without such an authority life would be a war of all against all. Hobbes' argument gave a philosophical grounding to the idea that legitimate force should be concentrated in the state, an idea later formalized by Max Weber. Leviathan remains a founding text in thinking about the state's claim to control violence.
As Louis XIV's Secretary of War, the Marquis de Louvois reorganized the French army into a large, centrally administered, and permanently maintained force, with standardized ranks, supply, and discipline. France's standing army grew to be the largest in Europe and became the model other monarchies tried to match. The buildup required steadily rising taxation, an early example of the fiscal and military demands of the state growing together.
The English government chartered the Bank of England specifically to raise loans to fund war against France, creating a permanent institution for financing military spending through public debt. The arrangement let England sustain far larger and longer wars than tax revenue alone could support, and historians treat it as a central pillar of what they call the "fiscal-military state." The link between war finance and state institution-building is a core example in Charles Tilly's account of how war built modern states.
King Frederick William I, known as the "Soldier King," directed a huge share of Prussia's revenue toward building and drilling its army, which grew to be disproportionately large for the kingdom's size and wealth. He built the bureaucracy and tax system largely around the needs of the military, making Prussia an early and extreme example of a state organized around its armed forces. The arrangement is often cited as a precursor to later German and Prussian militarism.
The French National Convention decreed the levée en masse, declaring all unmarried men eligible for military service and mobilizing the wider population to supply, arm, and support the war effort against foreign coalitions. It marked a shift from small professional or mercenary armies to nationwide conscription tied to citizenship and revolutionary identity. The model shaped mass conscript armies across Europe through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
General Napoleon Bonaparte used troops loyal to him to overthrow the French Directory and install himself as First Consul, ending the revolutionary government and beginning his rise to power. The coup is a well-documented case of a military commander converting battlefield loyalty into domestic political control. It became a reference case in later studies of praetorianism and military coups.
After Napoleon's defeat of Prussia forced a treaty limiting the size of its standing army, Prussian reformers led by Gerhard von Scharnhorst introduced the Krümper system, rapidly training and discharging recruits so that a large reserve of trained men existed outside the capped standing force. The scheme let Prussia rebuild a mass fighting capacity while formally complying with the treaty's limits. It fed into the broader nineteenth-century Prussian model of conscription paired with a large trained reserve.
Home Secretary Robert Peel established London's Metropolitan Police as a civilian force distinct from the army, built around the idea that ordinary policing should rest on public consent rather than military force. The reform drew a sharper institutional line between the police, tasked with everyday domestic order, and the military, reserved for external defense and extreme internal crises. The distinction is central to modern discussions of which uses of force by the state count as legitimate and in what context.
Twelve European states signed the first Geneva Convention, agreeing to protect wounded soldiers and medical personnel on the battlefield regardless of which side they fought for. The treaty, driven by Henry Dunant's campaigning after the Battle of Solferino, was the first modern international agreement to codify limits on the conduct of war. It began the treaty-based body of international humanitarian law that later Geneva and Hague conventions expanded.
Prussia's wins over Austria and France, capped by the proclamation of the German Empire in 1871, were built on a system pairing universal conscription with a professional General Staff under Helmuth von Moltke the Elder, which planned mobilization and campaigns with unprecedented precision. The victories made the Prussian model, mass conscript armies directed by a specialized planning staff, the template other European powers raced to copy. The same system fed a culture of military prestige and deference that historians identify as Prussian and later German militarism.
Representatives of major and smaller powers met at The Hague and adopted conventions restricting the means and methods of warfare, including bans on certain weapons and rules for the treatment of prisoners. It was the first large multilateral conference dedicated specifically to limiting how wars could be fought, building on the humanitarian principles of the Geneva Convention. The Hague Conventions became a core part of the codified laws of war.
also in World order: the transnational forums
A larger follow-up conference of 44 states expanded the rules of warfare and arbitration. It reinforced the idea of a codified body of international law governing relations between states.
In a lecture to students in Munich, later published as "Politics as a Vocation," the sociologist Max Weber defined the state as the human community that successfully claims a monopoly on the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Weber's definition became the standard reference point in political science and sociology for distinguishing legitimate state violence, such as policing and lawful warfare, from illegitimate private violence. The lecture is one of the most cited texts in the modern study of the state and organized force.
also in Curriculum, programming, and propaganda
Former World War I commander Erich Ludendorff published Der Totale Krieg (The Total War), arguing that modern war required mobilizing an entire nation's economy, population, and politics under military direction, with civilian leadership subordinated to the demands of war. The book argued explicitly against the idea of civilian control over military strategy, inverting the standard civil-military relationship. It became an influential statement of militarist ideology in the interwar period.
also in Curriculum, programming, and propaganda
Japan's Ministry of Education issued Kokutai no Hongi (Cardinal Principles of the National Entity), a state-sponsored text promoting emperor worship, self-sacrifice, and military duty as the core of Japanese national identity. It was distributed widely in schools as part of a broader state effort to fuse Shinto ideology, imperial loyalty, and military expansion into official doctrine. The text is a documented example of state-driven militarist ideology in Imperial Japan during the lead-up to the Pacific War.
Founding members signed the United Nations Charter, which in Article 2(4) bars member states from the threat or use of force against another state's territorial integrity or political independence, except in self-defense or with Security Council authorization. The Charter extended the idea of legitimate versus illegitimate force from the domestic to the international level, attempting to make interstate war itself subject to collective legal limits. It remains the primary international legal framework governing when states may use armed force.
President Harry Truman relieved General Douglas MacArthur of command in Korea after MacArthur publicly challenged administration policy and pushed for wider war against China. The dismissal of a highly popular wartime general was a stark, documented assertion that elected civilian leadership, not military command, has final authority over strategy and policy. The episode is a standard case study in American civil-military relations.
Political scientist Samuel Huntington published The Soldier and the State, arguing that civilian control of the military is best secured through "objective control": a professionalized, politically neutral officer corps that stays out of policy debates in exchange for autonomy over strictly military matters. The book became one of the most influential and debated texts in the academic study of civil-military relations. Later scholars have both built on and challenged Huntington's framework, but it remains a core reference point in the field.
also in Anatomy of a superpower: the American state, The military-industrial complex and Pax Americana
In his farewell address President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the unchecked power of a joined arms industry and military establishment. The phrase military-industrial complex entered lasting political debate.
The United States moved to an all-volunteer military force, ending the conscription that had supplied much of its manpower since World War II and through the Vietnam War. The shift followed years of public opposition to the draft and a 1970 commission, chaired by Thomas Gates, that recommended reliance on paid volunteers instead. It marked a broader trend among developed states toward smaller, professional standing forces rather than mass conscript armies.
General Augusto Pinochet led the Chilean armed forces in overthrowing the elected government of President Salvador Allende, installing a military junta that ruled Chile for the next seventeen years. It is one of the most documented twentieth-century cases of praetorianism, a military establishment removing a civilian government by force and replacing it with direct military rule. The coup became a central case study in later scholarship on military coups and civil-military relations in Latin America.
In his essay "Reflections on the History of European State-Making," published in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, sociologist Charles Tilly argued that the demands of waging war, raising armies, and extracting taxes to pay for them, drove the building of modern European state institutions. His summary formulation, "war made the state, and the state made war," became one of the most cited theses in historical sociology and political science. Tilly later extended the argument in his 1990 book Coercion, Capital, and European States.
Charles Tilly published Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1990, extending his earlier thesis with a detailed historical account of how the need to fund and staff armies over a thousand years shaped the paths that different European states took, from city-states and empires to the standardized national state. The book distinguished states that built power mainly through coercion, capital, or a combination of both, depending on their local economic and military conditions. It remains a foundational text in the study of war and state formation.