Samuel Finer, The History of Government, Conceptual Prologue [Part 2]
Military Formats and Forms of Government
In his The History of Government From the Earliest Times, Samuel Finer wrote:
1.2. Military Formats and Forms of Government
… The difficulty in being brief about this topic is that of having to express sequentially a number of propositions which are simultaneously interdependent. The best that can be done here is to state each proposition briefly, give examples of its application, and pass on to the next one while showing how they are interrelated.
That being understood, we might put forward the following propositions:
(a) The military organization is central to the establishment and perpetuation of the political community, the regime, and the ruling authorities.
(b) The way in which military power is distributed among the various sections or strata of society is decisive for the form that regime takes.
(c) The format of the military forces—ad hoc or permanent, unpaid or paid, and so on—crisscrosses with what is laid out in (b), and also has a critical bearing on the perpetuation, and/or the stability of the political community, regime, or ruling authorities.
(d) The format of the military forces decides whether or not, or how far, the rulers can extract resources from the population; but, equally, the other way round—the resources decide what kind of military format is adopted. The interdependency of the two is what I have elsewhere called the ‘coercion-extraction’ cycle.
(e) Throughout the history of government, warfare, and hence the expenditure on the armed forces, has been—with the possible exception of the Old Empire in ancient Egypt [footnote: an exception made highly problematical in view of prodigal expenditure of manpower and material on pyramids and temples.]—the single most extravagant and continuous drain upon the fiscal and economic resources of the state.
(f) For this reason and the coercion-extraction cycle ((d) above), the raising and maintenance of military forces, particularly standing military forces, is the overwhelmingly most important reason for the emergence of the civil bureaucracy.
(g) Changing military technology is sometimes related to the domestic economy and society, but is sometimes an importation from outside, hence an independent variable. But some changes in that technology are decisive in (a), (b), and (c) above.
PROPOSITION A:
The military guarantees the existence of the political community, in so far as only it can prevent secession from it, or its conquest and absorption from the outside. Likewise, it guarantees the form of the regime against subversion via rebellions or revolts. And, finally, the ruling authorities depend critically upon it for maintaining them in power in the face of even small-scale revolts. In the second and third of these cases, the military is in fact playing a policing role. It has been pointed out, quite rightly, that that role was far more pronounced in premodern states than today, when the state has an extensive capability for the surveillance and the repression of the civil population. In premodern times—it is very noticeable in the Roman Empire, for instance—the military acted as a gendarmerie: to assist tax collectors, repress brigands, keep the roads open, and do a variety of jobs, including roadbuilding, that today would be carried out by the police or the civil service. The same is true, for the most part, of Imperial China.
In addition, in the face of external attack the state can nowadays draw upon kinds of social solidarity unknown to the premodern world, notably nationalism.
PROPOSITION B:
The way military power is distributed among the social strata is closely connected with the nature of its technology (bronze weapons or iron, chariots or cavalry, and so on), and also with the preexistent social stratification. The latter, indeed, forms a kind of ‘stratification-domination’ cycle; a nobility, for instance, will insist that only its members may tide a warhorse or carry a sword, and in so far as it succeeds in this will continue to dominate the rest of society.
The nomadic home starts off as highly democratic and egalitarian, until some war-leader can transform it into a state. The city-state, in its early phases at any rate, tends also towards republicanism for the same reason as in the nomadic horde—that the military force consists of all able-bodied men. But this does not entail an egalitarian distribution of power, that is, a democracy. For not everybody's weaponry is equally lethal, and the more lethal it is the more costly it tends to be; so that the distribution of political power tends to follow the distribution of wealth. Aristotle makes this absolutely explicit when he relates the preeminence of cavalry to an oligarchic republic, that of the hoplite to a sort of yeoman republic, while that of the navy corresponds to the democracy. Rome was notoriously a civitalii Republic—the population being divided into so many strata according to their weaponry, with the cavalry at the top of the pile and the proletarii, who had only their proles or children to offer up to the Republic, at the bottom—and this distinction was reflected in their respective voting rights. The tendency to distribute political power in accordance with the possession of the most lethal, and hence costly, weapons is even more marked in feudal and feudalistic polities. The European Middle Ages provide the paradigm case. Here the mail-clad cavalry are militarily, and hence politically, dominant in the state. But the situation is quite different when the population—or even privileged sectors of it like the nobility—is disarmed, and military equipment is monopolized by the state.
With a disarmed population on the one side and a permanent professionalized force on the other, the way is open for an absolutist regime; as in the Roman, the Byzantine, and the Chinese empires. But this very monopolization of weaponry in the hands of the state paradoxically threatens the ruling authorities' tenure of power; for the military forces may be more loyal to their own military leaders than their military leaders are to the ruling authorities. Hence the perennial problem of civil-military relations: such forces put the civil government under permanent threat of a ‘takeover'. There are countless examples in antiquity where the troops substitute one ruler for another; the Praetorian Guard is particularly notorious but is really only one example among many. The way in which the fraught civil-military relationship has not disappeared but has simply been altered by the conditions in the modern as against the premodern state has been explored in my Man on Horseback.
PROPOSITION C:
The format of the military forces is not determined just by advances in technology, though it is influenced by them, nor just by pre-existing social stratification and the like, for it is also a matter of deliberate choice on the part of the authorities. As I have shown elsewhere, rulers have to make a choice—or arrive at a combination—of three priorities: efficiency in battle, expense, and loyalty. Different kinds of armed forces correspond to each of these priorities. One sees this kind of calculus in Machiavelli's Art of War. By his time, the Italian city republics had abandoned their original civic militias for paid mercenaries the condottieri. By general consent (though not by Machiavelli's, admittedly), they were more efficient; but they were untrustworthy and even actively disloyal. Hence Machiavelli's decided preference, as a republican, for the civic militia, and hence the raison d'être of his book.
On the whole, paid professional troops were the most efficient but also the most expensive. By the same token, popular militias or feudal levies were the least expensive but not the most efficient. And, finally, when it came to loyalty, the militia or the feudality or the paid army of nationals were likely to be more loyal than foreign mercenaries; yet that loyalty would be towards the political community or to the regime, not necessarily to the political authorities. On the contrary: a ruler might fancy himself more secure when surrounded by a band of foreign mercenaries who were entirely dependent on his pay and favour, like the Varangian Guard around a Byzantine emperor, than when he was dependent on the generals of his own native forces.
In some historical polities—the nomad states like those of the Mongols and the Arabs, or the republican states like those of Greece or the Roman Republic or the early Italian city republics—the army is almost entirely, or entirely, an ad hoc mass levy of the able-bodied adults. At the other extreme we find standing forces of paid professional volunteers, like those of the Roman Empire, Byzantium, or the armies of eighteenth-century Europe. These might be nationals but this was a pretty late development in Europe. Until the French Revolution they tended to be a mixed force of native and foreign mercenary troops, and Napoleon himself used large bodies of foreign troops to fight his battles. In the earlier stages, as Europe emerged from its Middle Ages, the preference of the authorities was ‘rent-an-army’. It was simpler, in other words, to hire paid and highly trained foreign troops like the Swiss pikemen than to try to train your own.
However, as this History shows, it was rare for a state to use only one pure form of military format. Much more usual was a mixture, and the most common form of this was a kernel of standing regular troops who served both as a palace guard and the garrison for the imperial capital, and also served as the cadre for the mass army; plus a mass force made up of popular levies. This could be ad hoc, as in the case of the Persian army on its way to Marathon (so described by Herodotus); or it could be a permanent arrangement, as it was—under most dynasties, though not all—in China.
PROPOSITION D:
The extraction-coercion cycle is so obvious it really requires no elaboration. Military forces call for men, materials, and once monetization has set in—for money too. It has always proved difficult for the authorities to extract these from the population, especially in the agrarian economies, partly because their net tax base was very difficult to ascertain, partly because the techniques of tax-collection were primitive, and most important of all, because populations of peasants on the margin of subsistence were extremely recalcitrant. (It was relatively easy for city-states like Florence and Venice to tax their populations compared with the difficulties of the king of France or of the various 'Spains'.) Rulers had only two alternatives: they could try to coerce, or they could persuade. It was the ravenous need for money to fight the increasingly expensive wars of the fourteenth century and after in Europe that led rulers to convene assemblies of potential taxpayers and so to 'invent' the notion of representation. But since these assemblies never gave the rulers as much money as they demanded, the latter also tried the alternative course of coercion. The transition is marked by the struggle between the ruler and his Estates or parliament or whatever, in the course of which the rulers throughout most of Europe were able to neuter or to abolish the Estates and establish their own fiscal absolutism. But to do this they needed an armed force, the upkeep and pay of which was the original object of the entire exercise. In France, King Louis VII and his agents took to levying taxes without anybody's consent while in the throes of the Hundred Years War, and with the money so acquired he established the first standing army in post-Roman Europe, the Compagnies d'Ordonnance. From that time on French fiscal absolutism marched hand in hand with the repressive powers of the standing army. In Prussia the Great Elector began by using force to exact taxes despite the opposition of his Estates, expanded his army with the taxes, and then proceeded to make the Estates in Brandenburg compromise, while the rebellious Koenigsbergers were forcibly suppressed. From that time on (1669) the Hohenzollern forces continued to expand, establishing an administrative and fiscal grip on the country which was so great that wags remarked that Prussia was not a country with an army, but an army with a country.
These examples from Europe have parallels in antiquity and in other parts of the world. The ruler uses a military force to extract taxes, builds up that force, and with it extracts more taxes. There is a fixed connection between fiscal absolutism and standing armies. However, a change in the relationship occurred in the nineteenth century, first in Europe and then in many other parts of the globe. The reason was the rise of the novel ideology of nationalism. In the name of the nation, individuals were willing to fight and die on a scale quite unknown in the past.
Individuals who were prepared to die for their country were equally prepared to pay taxes to sustain it. Wherever this ideology took root, the need for coercion diminished in proportion as popular consent, even enthusiasm, prevailed. The tacit consent to what in the past would have been regarded as massive extortion is one of the most striking features of the modern as contrasted with the premodern state. It goes hand in hand, we may remark parenthetically, with the improved surveillance and administrative techniques available to the authorities which makes detection of tax-evasion more easy, and progressive (hence more equitable) taxation possible.
PROPOSITIONS E AND F:
Nam neque quies gentium sine armis neque arma sine stipendiis neque stipendia sine tributis haberi queunt (Tacitus) [Hist. IV. 74: ‘… for you can have neither peace among peoples without armies, nor armies without pay, nor armies pay without taxes.’]
It is not argued here that civil bureaucracies originate with the need to maintain armed forces. This is dearly contradicted by the earliest known bureaucracies in the Sumerian cities and the Old Kingdom in Egypt. The great mass of these bureaucracies was concerned with redistributing wealth in a natural economy, that is, the counting, checking in, and checking out of countless and diverse commodities. These were what Weber calls oikos economies. In the redistributive process some of the commodities went to the temples, some went on the conspicuous expenditure of the palace— the pyramids are the most phenomenal example, but so are the grave goods in both cultures—and some went to pay the functionaries for their work. In the Sumerian cities, however, the great bulk of the goods collected went back to the peasant who produced them, as a form of stipend. In neither case are we able to estimate how much went to the armed forces, for we have no notion of how large these were. It is pretty dear, however, that most of the revenue went to satisfy other claims.
But what can be argued is that once we have moved past the redistributive oikos economies of archaic times to the open economies that succeeded them, and particularly after about 800 BC when they started to become monetized, any movement away from the ad hoc mass levy of the armed citizenry towards standing regular forces necessitated a fiscal apparatus; in short, a bureaucracy. The cost of delivering justice was small, as indeed it is to this day. Public works were on a relatively small scale and in many societies—for example, in China or ancient Egypt—were carried out by corvée labour. Apart from the upkeep and glorification of the state cult, the other primordial function of the state was defence and this, for the reasons outlined, bulked larger and larger as warfare demanded larger forces, longer campaigns, and professional armies, including mercenaries. The result is that where we can put numbers to the bureaucracy—for instance, in the later Roman Empire or the Chinese Empire at various dates—by far the largest proportion of its members are to be found in the fiscal services. Consider, then, the administrative effort required in China c.140 BC in the reign of the warlike emperor Wu Ti when it is estimated that the 'conscript' army numbered anything between a quarter of a million and one-and-a-third millions for a population of some 60 millions (i.e. between ½ per cent to 2 per cent of the population); or in the case of the later Roman Empire, where Jones estimates the total armed forces at 600,000 for a population of some 60 millions.
On a much smaller scale—but with greater information—it is possible to trace the growth in the medieval European states of a central (and in some countries, such as France, of a local) bureaucracy, as feudal knight service was replaced by payment to ad hoc bandes, and then from the bandes to foreign mercenaries and native-born standing troops.
The bureaucracy spawned by such developments was by no means what we should today regard as fiscal only. In those states with highly organized standing forces like China, Rome, or Byzantium it included a highly developed logistical sector—which provided the arms and equipment, clothing, and the like from state-run armouries and magazines as well as rations in kind from state storehouses.
PROPOSITION G:
This proposition concerns changes in military technology. I call it a 'wild card' because (until contemporary times) military innovations have more often than not been the consequences of serendipity (the bayonet) or reactions to enemy innovations (longbow or pike) than the result of conscious research and invention. Very often the technological innovation is of so simple a nature one might almost call it a gadget: the iron stirrup or the ring-bayonet are examples of such innovations, which completely transformed the art of war for centuries.
Such military innovations bear independently upon the subject-matters of propositions (a), (b), and (c). They have an obvious bearing, for instance, upon the state’s capacity for defence and attack. Fourteenth-century England, a dwarf compared with France, was able to savage and indeed conquer that country by using the military format based on the longbow and dismounted armoured cavalry, against the heavily armoured cavalry charge.
More interesting is the effect of military technology on the second proposition, that is, on the social distribution of military power. The most extravagant example of this relationship is Lynn White's prodigious hypothesis about the consequences of the iron stirrup. It argues that the iron stirrup (as against leather stirrups) permitted mounted shock combat of very heavily armoured cavalry, a tactic so powerful that it dominated the battlefield until the fourteenth century. Mounted and armoured shock cavalry, in their turn, required men both rich enough to equip themselves in this expensive way; and trained from childhood in this mode of warfare. Hence the social and political dominance of the medieval knight, and the feudalism that went with it. All because the stirrup was made of iron and not leather! This hypothesis is hotly contested—it explains so much with so little; but there is absolutely no doubt that the superior effectiveness of the armoured shock cavalry over other arms guaranteed the social and political supremacy of the noblemen in the European Middle Ages.
Finally, military technology must dearly have an effect upon the subject of the third proposition, that is, upon the rulers' choice of military format. This is because one of the three considerations a ruler would have to bear in mind was, precisely, efficiency. Thus, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it became usual for monarchs— particularly French ones—to rent pike-phalanxes from the Swiss cantons; these mercenary troops dominated the Continental battlefields for about a century-and-a-half. They were extremely efficient, but were they loyal? Only as long as the ruler paid them: point d'argent, point de suisse. Or, they might change sides if they got a better offer. Such switches of allegiance occurred during the French Fronde (1638-53). The Italian city-states which began to employ condottieri in the fourteenth century suffered similar experiences.
This History, therefore, tries inter alia to demonstrate how the preservation, the internal order, the social distribution of power, the tenure of the authorities, the degree of bureaucratization, and the nature of the regime—popular or absolutist, for example—are all intertwined with the nature of a given state's military institutions.
The Source:
S. E. Finer, The History of Government From the Earliest Times: Volume I, Ancient Monarchies and Empires, Oxford University Press 1997
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.