David Armitage on Civil Wars

A fun but frustrating book

The claim that all political bargains (outside of advanced democracies) happen in the shadow of civil war is a provocative idea that I’ll be chewing on for a bit. It’s made me want learn about the phenomenon of civil war 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 learned a great deal from it. On the other hand, I found its core argument (as best I could make it out) to be thoroughly misguided.

The Fun Parts First

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

Armitage frames these two moments in purely intellectual terms. For the rebirth of civil war theory, he gives a typical story of classical learning that was lost during the middle ages and reemerged after the renaissance. This seems right, but he doesn’t really discuss how this intellectual history fits in to the long arc of state development in Western Europe. 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 an underlying political reality that made it make sense to bring these discussions back. Early modern English writers probably looked back on the Barons’ Wars as “civil wars” partly because they now had the term handy, but they also might have found the term more useful than their predecessors would have. Early modern writers might apply a Roman institutional concept more easily than would have people in the more amorphous state structure of Plantagenet England.

After the great burst of 16th century thought about civil war there came the birth of the concept of “revolutions,” and then eventually “revolution” in the singular. Armitage’s coverage of this genealogy is exciting and suggestive, but it again raises the question for me of whether the history of this specific concept that is used to describe a certain kind of state dissolution and rebirth should be primarily understood as the intellectual reaction to the development of a certain kind of state. A society probably needs a 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. In those revolutions, it might be the case that 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 Frustrating Parts

Armitage seems to be animated throughout the book by two outlooks which I think are often misguided. The first I’ll call “elite intellectual primacy,” and the second has been called “global legalism.”

Elite Intellectual Primacy

Elite 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, at least as strong generalization. I tend to think that elite intellectuals are very often catching up to events, and not leading them. I think there are big material, demographic, and 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 elite 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.

This is of course, not to say that elite ideas don’t matter. The moments where elite ideas are causally most relevant are incredibly important and hinge-y times in history. I think there is plenty of room for legitimate debate about how often and how much elite ideas have causal influence on political outcomes and I don’t think everyone who puts a lot of stock in the power of elite ideas is an idiot. But I do think you can commit yourself to intellectual explanations to a completely implausible degree, and that commitment is what I want to call “naive elite intellectual primacy.”

The way that I see naive elite intellectual primacy present itself in Armitage’s book 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 an intellectual phenomenon. He genuinely seems to committed to some version of the claim that people are getting killed because of some causal influence of the very idea of civil war, the way that one might claim 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)

Perhaps part of the explanation of how Armitage ends up advocating for this very strange position is that he makes too much of the relationship between “revolution” and “civil war.” While I am even resistant to a primarily intellectual explanation of the phenomenon of “revolution” in human history, I will readily concede that there a case to be made that the concept is so ideologically loaded that you need to offer some of its intellectual genealogy to explain the way we use the term, even if you want to give a basically essentialist definition of the underlying 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 we don’t we refer to the movements that ended communism in Eastern 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 tough puzzle for the intellectual historian. But I think it basically just reflects that “civil war” has never been a concept with romantic mass appeal. This is probably because the ones that get romanticized tend 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 seems to tacitly acknowledge this, often referring to civil war as “war within states,” which is a pretty good definition!

Global Legalism

I find the idea that civil war is kind of ideology that we need to unlearn so strange that it is hard to know how to respond to it. But Armitage’s second frustrating commitment, his globall legalism, is much easier to pin down and respond to. Global legalism is the idea that international law is morally very good and potentially very powerful, and that the political project of making it much more binding is highly feasible and ought to be pursued.

Global legalism often seems to come together with elite intellectual primacy. This makes sense to me, because elite intellectual primacists tend to be those people most likely to think that, as a descriptive matter, intellectual elites run the world. Given that assumption, it follows that some of our main normative political goals should be to make sure that the intellectual elites are good and have good ideas. To a strong contingent of people with this view, the small group of secular elite moralizers who do the writing and publicizing of public international law seem powerful, and their big ideas seem morally solid.

I hope to write more about the deep problems with global 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 arguments against it 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 to facilitate bilateral competition. Multilateral cooperation is simply too unstable to be solved structurally. It never has been maintained through international law, and almost certainly never will be.

• International legalism as a normative view is also wildly implausible. It gives a veneer of enlightened cosmopolitanism to what is ultimately a system of state privileges. But most states in world history (and the present!) are gravely predatory and oppressive. It might be prudential to respect their power, but it is not morally desirable in itself.

Armitage’s brand of global legalism comes through in the book most strongly when he presents as his main practical takeaway that we should find a way to regulate civil wars. He presents this task 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. The closest he comes is to make clear that he thinks that there was a succesfful intellectual and moral movement that gave us the laws of interstate war, and that we can presumably recreate that 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 the fact that belligerents often expect that the war will end with some parties ceasing to exist as political units capable of enforcing promises. This makes it difficult to effectively commit to refrain from doing horrible stuff to each other’s soldiers.