War, Violence, and Modernity

Ingo Trauschweizer, Ohio University

This course is an upper-level elective – open to graduate students - that will explore the correlation of war, violence organized and controlled by the state or unbounded and uncontrolled, and modernity. Specifically, it will consider the relationship of state and society with regard to war and domestic order from the end of the Middle Ages (roughly the mid-fifteenth century) to the present. We will focus primarily on the West, i.e., Europe and North America, although comparisons to other regions and cultures will be introduced where appropriate. We will assess the assumption that “war made the state and the state made war” and consider to what extent our understanding of modernity (political, social, technological, and even cultural) has been shaped by war and by advances in the military realm. We will investigate whether Europe and the United States developed along similar lines toward a modern state. Finally, we will consider the rise of the state’s monopoly of significant violence from the sixteenth century, its solidification in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, and its erosion in recent times.