. Abstract Sociologists have been reluctant to study the military. It is peripheral to core concerns of sociology. This absence is routinely explained by going back to the discipline’s conception. H. Saint-Simon and A. Comte conjured sociology after the close of the Napoleonic War which ushered in a century of relative European peace. C. Wright Mills (1956) argued that this cessation of hostilities created the classic liberal worldview: industrialism would replace militarism. Bizarrely, two World Wars and the Holocaust hardly altered sociology’s focus. While Mills’ disciplinary influence is indisputable, his call for a sociology of war has largely been ignored (his Causes of World War Three swiftly went out of print). To this day scholars repeatedly stress the military’s invisibility in the social sciences (e.g Ender, Gibson, 2005). Yet having exited the most murderous century in all of human history and entered a new one with a War on Terror that was defined as global and perpetual, this task is surely pressing. A question, however, arises why the powerful must remain sociologically invisible. This article presents challenges to sociology’s pedagogy and practice, which is to say sociology-as-taught and sociology-as-researched. It argues for study of the military, but in so doing it distinguishes itself from two existing literatures, those emanating from the sub-discipline of military sociology, and those emerging post-11-September that stress the ways in which society is now becoming militarised (Giroux 2008). At its worst this military sociology is embedded sociology, which is to say it is scholarship in the service of the powerful, and at best it stops at the garrison gates, treating the military as its own society. While H. Giroux’s approach is much more profitable it appears to miss an essential point: society is always already militarised

Sociology and the Military

In this article we make the case for a strong program of sociological research into war, the military and their symmetry with civil society, pointing to the ways in which sociology has failed to ap...

Towards a strong program in the sociology of war, the military and civil society:

Violence and the State: The Political Sociology of War

Handle everyday research tasks with reliable, citation-backed results

Your personal Research Agent to handle research tasks with citation-backed results

Popular Tasks used by Researchers

How can I help with your research?

Meet SciSpace

Get more enhanced response by uploading the PDFs you want me to reference.

No relevant PDFs in your library

SciSpace is the AI research assistant for academics. Run systematic literature reviews on 280M+ papers, and write papers with cited sources. Trusted by 1M+ students, PhDs & researchers.

SciSpace | AI for Research

Analyze PDFs

Code & Manuscripts

Funding & Grants

Literature & Patents

Medical & Clinical Data

Systematic Review

Visualize & Present

Web & Data

Build a Google Scholar-like website for your research.

Build a website

Create charts and images for your research

Create a Chart

Write a paper for submission to a journal

Draft a manuscript

Patent Search

Design eye-catching scientific posters in minutes.

Scientific Poster Generation

Systematic Literature Review

One task is running at the moment. Your messages will be shown right after.

Drag and drop or click here to browse

Loved by <highlight>1 million+</highlight> researchers

Extract a list of specific topics and their sources from unstructured text

Topics

Compare and analyze relevant papers that matches with your search

Papers

Get insights from PDFs and bookmarked papers from your library

My library

Recent searches

Try searching for:

Catch AI-generated content in scholarly and non-scholarly content

{ai} Detector

Ai Writer

Get PDF Summaries, highlighted text explanations 

Chat with PDF

Effortlessly create in-text citations and bibliographies in APA and 2,500 other formats

Citation generator

Get explanations, summaries, and answers on academic papers

Ease up your research workflow with {scispace}'s cohort of exciting AI tools

Elevate your academic writing skills and convey your ideas the way you want

Paraphraser

Explore our range of reading and writing tools

Your file is being prepared and should be ready in a few minutes. If it's a large file, it might take a bit longer. You can close this window, and we'll email you the file when it's done.

You have reached a maximum limit of <strong>{limit}</strong> columns in the table. Remove at least <strong>1</strong> column to add or create another one.

Alan Scott

Author Tools

Chat about Author

Papers

Violence and the State: The Political Sociology of War