Militarism, Capitalism, and the Nation-State: Towards a Realist Synthesis

Publisher Website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Military activities currently play a major role in social and economic development, even in noncombatant countries, This fact has received remarkably little attention in the social science literature, until recently. As a result, the theoretical frameworks which are available for the analysis of military activities arc underdeveloped. In this paper it is argued that there are in effect two such frameworks, derived from the Marxist and Weberian traditions, respectively. The many weaknesses of these, and the conflicts between them, are blurred rather than resolved in most recent studies of military phenomena, such as the ‘military industrial complex’. This is because the theory of the relationship between capitalist production and state institutions embedded in each perspective is seriously inadequate. A realist reconstruction is presented which highlights the significance of the national form of the state, and the contingent nature of capitalist production. This is designed to provide a new framework for appraising military activities, but it has implications for a wide range of questions concerned with the relationship between capital and state.

This publication has 21 references indexed in Scilit: