David Armitage on Civil Wars

A fun but silly book

North Wallis and Weingast’s idea that all political bargains outside of advanced democracies happen in the shadow of civil wars is a provocative idea that I’ll be chewing on for a bit. It’s made me want learn about the concept of civil war a little more systematically, which motivated me to pick up David Armitage’s Civil Wars: A History in Ideas.

I’m pulled in different directions by this book. On the one hand, I found it overwhelmingly silly. On the other hand, there was a great deal of interesting information.

The Fun Parts First

Armitage’s book is most enjoyable for its sections on early modern Europe. The 17th and 18th century sections cover a rebirth of European political theory of civil wars, and the birth of the concept of revolution. These are both very neat moments and Armitage leaves a lot to think about.

Armitage frames these two moments in purely intellectual terms. As for the rebirth, he gives a typical story of classical learning that was lost during the middle ages to re-emerge after the renaissance. That’s all fair, but what he doesn’t really reflect on, which is striking at a very naive level, is how this intellectual history fits with the long arc of state development. The early modern era was the perhaps the first time that non-Byzantine Europe had states approaching Roman levels of institutionalization since the empire fell. So while the early moderns surely needed Roman sources to have the exact conversations they did about Civil War, there was also a real underlying political reality that made it make sense to bring these discussions back. English writers probably looked back on the Barons Wars as “civil wars” partly because they now had the term, but they also probably found the term useful because they now lived in a world where a Roman institutional concept made much more sense than it did in the much more amorphous state structure of Plantagenet England.

After the great burst of 16th century thought about civil war came the birth of the concept of revolutions, and then eventually revolution in the singular. This section is very exciting and suggestive but I should not do any grand theorizing, other than to say again, that it is a fun exercise to use the development of this specific concept of state dissolution and rebirth as a way to measure the development of a certain kind of state.

A society needs a pretty well institutionalized state to meaningfully be described as having a revolution. You need some minimum core of impersonal state power and private organizations to even imagine seizing power or rapidly transforming society through revolutionary action. Of course, many famous revolutions took place in societies where the impersonal state had only loose control in a lot of territories and thus in those revolutions much of society experienced the revolution more as state building than state seizing. But still, it seems like there needs to be some impersonal core to seize for us as observers (and usually for contemporaries) to see something as a revolution.

The Silliness

Armitage is animated throughout the book by two outlooks which I find absurdly naive. The first I’ll call “naive intellectual primacy,” and the second is naive international legalism.

Intellectual Primacy

Intellectual primacy (I’m sure someone has a better name for this) is the idea that in causal descriptions of politics, ideas come first, particularly the ideas of the intellectual and political elite. This seems wrong to me because I tend to think that intellectuals are generally catching up to events, and not leading them. I think there are big material, demographic, and hard-to-articulate cultural forces rolling around in society that produce changes in political life, and most of the intellectual record we have of great political thought is smart people reacting to those things and trying to explain what is already under way. I tend to think that political ideas only really have causal force during punctuated windows where cultural or institutional changes are in the offing and persuasive or rousing intellectual work (propagated through the right people) can help certain cultural or institutional forms beat out plausible alternatives.

I think there is plenty of room for legitimate debate about how often and how much ideas matter, and I don’t think everyone who puts a lot of stock in the power of ideas is an idiot. But I do think you can commit yourself to intellectual explanations to a farcical degree, and that commitment is what I want to call “naive intellectual primacy.”

The way this presents in Armitage is that he seems to think that “civil war” – the phenomenon out there in the world that has killed millions of people – needs to be primarily understood as a political idea. I think on some level he really believes that people are getting killed because of the idea of civil war the way people have been killed because of the ideas of nazism and marxism. I’m not really sure how else to interpret this passage (particularly the last line):

[W]e should be cautious about assuming civil war is an inevitable part out our makeup–a feature, not a bug, in the software that makes us human. For that would be to doom us to suffer civil war ad infinitum, never to reach Kant’s promise of perpetual peace. To unsettle the notion that we are condemned to interminable civil war, rather than destined for perpetual peace, I here bring historical tools to confront the challenge of civil war. Over the course of this book, I show that civil war is neither eternal not inexplicable. I argue that the phenomenon is coterminous with its historical conception, from its fraught origins in republican Rome to its contested present and its likely no less confusing or controversial future. It has a history with an identifiable beginning, if not yet a discernible end. A historical treatment reveals the contingency of the phenomenon, contradicting those who claim its permanence and durability. It is my aim to show that what humans have invented, they may yet dismantle; that what intellectual will has enshrined, an equal effort of imaginative determination can dethrone. (p. 11)

It seems to me that perhaps part of the explanation of how Armitage ends up in this very strange place is that he makes too much of the relationship between “revolution” and “civil war.” While I am resistant to intellectual primacy in explaining the phenomenon of “revolution” in human history, I can at least concede that there a case to be made that the concept is so ideologically loaded that you have to mix in some intellectual genealogy even if you want to give a basically essentialist definition of the concept. There have been so many powerful strands of revolutionary myth-making throughout history (American, French, liberal-nationalist, Marxist, anti-colonial, etc.) and some of these strands are still around, so you have to at least acknowledge that they frame our discourse (e.g. why do we generally not refer to the movements that ended communism in Europe as revolutions).

But the same is not true of civil war! Armitage seems to think that the lack of great speeches and books theorizing civil war is a great puzzle and challenge for the intellectual historian. But I think it basically reflects that “civil war” has never been a concept with romantic mass appeal. This is probably because a lot ones that are most easy to romanticize get to be called revolutions! I think the solution to Armitage’s “puzzle” is just to accept that “civil war” as a concept is a lot closer to a natural kind than “revolution” is. “Civil war” is probably about as cleanly recognizable and definable as the necessarily related concept of “the state.” Armitage even tacitly acknowledges this, referring to civil war several times as “war within states,” which is a pretty good definition!

International Legalism

The idea that civil war as kind of ideology that we need to unlearn is so weird that it is hard to know how to respond to it. But Armitage’s second brand of naivete, his naive international legalism, is much easier to pin down and respond to.

Naive international legalism seems popular with naive intellectual primacists This makes sense to me, because naive primacists tend to think that as a descriptive matter, intellectual elites (writ large) run the world, and that one of our main normative political goals should be to make sure that the intellectual elites are good and have good ideas. To a lot of this crowd, the small group of secular elite moralizers who do the writing and publicizing of public international law seem powerful, and a their big ideas seem morally solid.

I hope to write more about the silliness of international legalism at another time, but for now I will just say that I think Eric Posner and Jack Goldsmith have given it an all-time-classic definitive take down. Their argument can be presented pretty briefly.

• Multilateral international law is only stable and “binding” when it deals with simple coordination problems.

• In terms of real cooperation problems, international law can only help facilitate bilateral competition. Multilateral cooperation is too unstable and never has been, and almost certainly never will be, maintained through international law.

• International legalism as a normative view is also wildly implausible, because it gives a veneer of enlightened cosmopolitanism to what is ultimately a system of state privileges, and most states in world history (and the present!) are predatory and oppressive.

Armitage’s brand of international legalism comes through in the book insofar as his big “what is to be done” takeaway is that “we” should find a way to regulate civil wars. He presents this basically as a question of intellectual effort on behalf of the world’s legal and political elites. He says a number of times that tons of people’s lives hang on whether we get this figured out. But he never really explains what the mechanism would be by which “we” would regulate civil war and end these deaths. He seems to just think that there was some sort of intellectual and moral triumph that gave us the laws of interstate war, and that we just need that to happen for civil war.

Of course, for the average political scientist of a realist bent, the fact that there are laws of war that are often upheld is not an example of a triumphant “regulatory” success. Instead, the existence of moderately binding laws of war mostly just reflects the fact that states generally expect not to annihilate each other when they go to war. This means that there are still opportunities for ongoing bits of coordination and cooperation, even in the context of a shooting war. Much of the nastiness of civil war reflects that belligerents often reasonably expect that the war will end with some parties ceasing to exist as political units that could enforce promises. Any sort of bargaining to not to horrible stuff to each others’ soldiers is thus really difficult.

I would be inclined to let Armitage off the hook for this all this silliness if it wasn’t for the the fact that he exemplifies the worst kind of anti-social-science history writing. He constantly sneers at social science explanations of civil war and calls it a “doomed enterprise.” He clearly has read a fair amount of the political science literature on civil war but his approach to it is consistently uncharitable and willfully obtuse, so I don’t think you can give him a pass for putting forward so much nonsense.