Forged Through Fire: War, Peace, and the Democratic Bargain

by John Ferejohn, Frances McCall Rosenbluth

Overview

Peace, many would agree, is a goal that democratic nations should strive to achieve. But is democracy, in fact, dependent on war to survive?

Having spent their celebrated careers exploring this provocative question, John Ferejohn and Frances McCall Rosenbluth trace the surprising ways in which governments have mobilized armies since antiquity, discovering that our modern form of democracy not only evolved in a brutally competitive environment but also quickly disintegrated when the powerful elite no longer needed their citizenry to defend against existential threats.

Bringing to vivid life the major battles that shaped our current political landscape, the authors begin with the fierce warrior states of Athens and the Roman Republic. While these experiments in “mixed government” would serve as a basis for the bargain between politics and protection at the heart of modern democracy, Ferejohn and Rosenbluth brilliantly chronicle the generations of bloodshed that it would take for the world’s dominant states to hand over power to the people. In fact, for over a thousand years, even as medieval empires gave way to feudal Europe, the king still ruled. Not even the advancements of gunpowder—which decisively tipped the balance away from the cavalry-dominated militaries and in favor of mass armies—could threaten the reign of monarchs and “landed elites” of yore.

The incredibly wealthy, however, were not well equipped to handle the massive labor classes produced by industrialization. As we learn, the Napoleonic Wars stoked genuine, bottom-up nationalism and pulled splintered societies back together as “commoners” stepped up to fight for their freedom. Soon after, Hitler and Stalin perfectly illustrated the military limitations of dictatorships, a style of governance that might be effective for mobilizing an army but not for winning a world war. This was a lesson quickly heeded by the American military, who would begin to reinforce their ranks with minorities in exchange for greater civil liberties at home.

Like Francis Fukuyama and Jared Diamond’s most acclaimed works, Forged Through Fire concludes in the modern world, where the “tug of war” between the powerful and the powerless continues to play out in profound ways. Indeed, in the covert battlefields of today, drones have begun to erode the need for manpower, giving politicians even less incentive than before to listen to the demands of their constituency. With American democracy’s flanks now exposed, this urgent examination explores the conditions under which war has promoted one of the most cherished human inventions: a government of the people, by the people, for the people. The result promises to become one of the most important history books to emerge in our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631491603
Publisher:	Liveright Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	12/06/2016
Pages:	480
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 8.70(h) x 1.70(d)

About the Author

John Ferejohn is the Samuel Tilden Professor of Law at New York University and a member of the National Academy of Sciences as well as the American Academy of Sciences. He is the author of Pork Barrel Politics and the coauthor of The Personal Vote and A Republic of Statutes.

Frances McCall Rosenbluth is the Damon Wells Professor of Political Science at Yale University and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of Financial Politics in Contemporary Japan and the coauthor of Japan’s Political Marketplace; The Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan; Women, Work, and Power; and Japan Transformed.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Introduction 1

Chapter 1 The Twenty-First-Century Wars Without Citizen Armies 9

Part I From Antiquity to Medieval Times

Chapter 2 War and Democracy in Classical Athens 25

Chapter 3 The Glory That Was Rome 53

Chapter 4 A Millennium of. Landed Aristocracy 69

Part II Monarchy and Other Experiments

Chapter 5 The Emergence of Monarchy in France and Spain 93

Chapter 6 War and Representation in England, the Netherlands, and Sweden 107

Chapter 7 Italian Republics 129

Chapter 8 Eastern Lands in Early Modern Europe 151

Chapter 9 Mountain Republics 177

Part III War and Democracy

Chapter 10 The Nineteenth-Century Pivot 203

Chapter 11 Twentieth-Century Wars of Full Mobilization 233

Chapter 12 War, Racism, and Civil Rights in the United States 265

Conclusions 305

Acknowledgments 317

Notes 319

Bibliography 357

Illustration Credits 419

Index 425

Editorial Reviews

"llluminating…The book begins with fascinating chapters about war and democracy in classical Athens and Rome; later chapters explore the nineteenth century’s grand armies and the emergence of “total war” in the twentieth century, which had profound effects on the expansion of democratic life in the West."

Foreign Affairs - G. John Ikenberry

"Impressive, wide reaching, extremely important—this book provides a welcome impressive historical sweep of the connection between democracy and war. It reaches back to the Greek classics to draw on key concepts in how to understand political systems, then takes us through major episodes and cases in world history, war, and revolution. We’ve long known ‘politics does not stop at the water’s edge,’ as the old cliché put it. This book makes it clear why. A must-read."

Peter Gourevitch

"Democracies are rare, so history tells us, and fragile. How do they arise? In a vivid and insightful analysis that reaches back to the ancient Greeks and up to the twenty-first century, Ferejohn and Rosenbluth link the rise of democracy to mass mobilization warfare. War, they show, shapes political institutions, but politics affects war."

Philip T. Hoffman

"This sweeping, sophisticated historical analysis charts the interplay of war, state-building, and franchise extension from ancient Athens to the civil rights revolution in the United States that followed World War II. While never losing sight of the timelessness of the main argument about the conflict between elite and mass, all the subtle nuances, contingencies, and tradeoffs are brilliantly brought out in this innovative, compelling account."

James E. Alt

"This isn’t the story we’re taught in high-school civics. But it’s a compelling one, powerfully told by two scholars with mastery of their subject. The authors walk the reader through 2,500 bloody years of Western history, from the Peloponnesian wars to the war in Vietnam, highlighting, again and again, a brutal trade-off: The emergence and consolidation of democracy depends on warfare, and a particular kind of warfare, at that…Their magisterial volume makes the case in persuasive and explicit detail."

Wall Street Journal - Rosa Brooks

"With an account that spans continents and centuries, John Ferejohn and Frances Rosenbluth explore the complex and shifting ties between wars and democratic government. Academic stars in comparative politics, they provide a brilliant account of the growth and decline of modern democracy, and of their causes in the very technology of warfare."

J. Mark Ramseyer

"In this hugely erudite, deeply engaging, and highly readable book, John Ferejohn and Frances Rosenbluth conjoin a mastery of 2,500 years of military history with cutting-edge political science to produce a convincing and sobering account of how mass mobilization for war led to the rise of modern democracy. This deep dive into history offers new insight into the democratic dilemmas we now face as we enter a world of globalization, nationalism, and inequality, when war is no longer a driver of popular self-government."

Josiah Ober

02/15/2017
War encourages democracy to flourish because those who govern must bargain with citizens who fight, claim Ferejohn (law, New York Univ.; A Republic of States) and Rosenbluth (political science, Yale Univ.; Japan Transformed) in this compact investigation of representative democracy from fifth century BCE Athens to the 20th-century struggle for civil rights in the United States. The authors demonstrate that both geographic isolation, which requires less centralized authority, and warfare depending on large armies have coaxed democracy to emerge in ancient and modern times. However, representative democracy with its universal voting and property rights did not appear until the 19th and 20th centuries. Only then were democratic benefits granted permanently to the working classes; in earlier times, benefits tended to be temporary and tenuous. Included here is a useful overview of discrimination rampant in the U.S. armed services, which prevented democratic bargains for African Americans. The authors warn that as current wars are fought with more technology and by mercenaries, democratic bargains might dwindle because citizens will comprise fewer fighting forces. VERDICT Although the authors target this book for a general audience as well as historians and political philosophers, its abundance of details will likely discourage nonspecialists. Those who persevere will find it an informed interpretation of democracy's evolution.—Karl Helicher, formerly Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, PA

Library Journal

★ 2016-12-14
A sometimes-counterintuitive but always fascinating interrogation of the history and uses of war.War—what is it good for? No, not nothing, absolutely or not. By the account of Ferejohn (Law/New York Univ.; Pork Barrel Politics: Rivers and Harbors Legislation, 1947-1968, 1974, etc.) and Rosenbluth (Political Science/Yale Univ.; co-author: Japan Transformed: Political Change and Economic Restructuring, 2010, etc.), war is a kind of "alchemy of iron and blood" that, though fiercely destructive, can give birth to social orders more just and advanced than the ones that preceded them. The authors, known in scholarly circles for work on "warlike democracies," offer numerous case studies taken from the broad sweep of world history. As they note, one reason for the expansion of popular power is that when governments depend on the support of their lower classes for survival, as in the case of war, then they tend to loosen up. Thus, "warfare appears to have been instrumental in brokering the modern democratic compromise between wealth and manpower." Monarchies can be more democratic than aristocracies precisely because they levy popular armies instead of hired guns; in medieval England, for instance, "the wars that the king undertook were generally wars that the nobles, and increasingly the commoners, had agreed to fund and support." Yet presumed democracies are not always paragons of democratic virtue; one extensive case study involves the interplay of the Vietnam War with the civil rights movement, with racism being a major obstacle to military recruitment among blacks in the South. This densely argued but readily accessible book is full of fascinating asides worthy of books of their own—e.g., the role of women voters in pushing peacetime social spending and the fear of outside enemies in forging stronger unions of rich and poor. Yet, as the authors write in conclusion, "war has stopped functioning as a democratizing force" today; even in the fury of destruction, inequality reigns. A book of big ideas backed by fine-grained analyses, worthy of attention by readers with an interest in history and contemporary events alike.

Kirkus Reviews