10 Theses on War and Social Order: Preliminary Arguments on the Constitutive Functions of Armed Conflicts

Abstract

At the beginning of the article, the author explains its idea—to explicate the conceptual approach to war as the most important structural element and mechanism for maintaining social order. The author claims the existence of a stable tradition of theorizing based on the argument about the social functionality of the structural violence, which allows interpreting war as a special type of sociality. The representatives of this conventional line of argumentation mentioned in the article are such key figures in the history of ideas, as Thomas Hobbes, Carl von Clausewitz, Carl Schmitt and Michel Foucault. The author formulates ten theses, which problematize the heuristic aspects of war in relation to the theory of social order and are accompanied by short comments explaining the ambivalent status of war topics in the philosophical tradition and sociological classics, because neither of them developed a complete theory of war relevant from the social theory perspective. The key theses state that war experience is constitutive for human societies, and reconstruct the line of argumentation that emphasizes the constitutive function of war for social institutions and political order and the role of war as a major factor of social transformations in the modernity for this role is often underestimated in sociological theory. In conclusion, the author states the need for analytical explication of the organized violence functionality in relation to the structures of social action typical for the modern era. He also claims that within the proposed social-theoretical perspective the war can become a heuristic key to understanding the nature of the social, because this approach allows not only to consider war as a cultural-universal phenomenon, but to analyze more realistically the structural role of violence in the processes of production, reproduction and transformation of social orders.