The Paradoxes of War teaches us to understand that war is not only a normal part of human existence, but is arguably one of the most important factors in making us who we are. Through this course, I hope that you will come to appreciate that war is both a natural expression of common human emotions and interactions and a constitutive part of how we cohere as groups. That is, war is paradoxically an expression of our basest animal nature and the exemplar of our most vaunted and valued civilized virtues. You will learn some basic military history and sociology in this course as a lens for the more important purpose of seeing the broader social themes and issues related to war. I want you to both learn about war, but more importantly, use it as way of understanding your everyday social world. So, for example, the discussion of war and gender will serve to start you thinking about how expectations of masculinity are created and our discussion of nationalism will make clear how easy “us-them” dichotomies can be established and (ab)used. I will suggest some readings for you to complement the class and assign some activities through which you will be able to apply the theoretical insights from the course to your observations of everyday life. At the end of the course, you will start to see war everywhere and come to appreciate how much it defines our life. All the features of this course are available for free. It does not offer a certificate upon completion.
Phalanx
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来自 Princeton University 的课程
Paradoxes of War
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从本节课中
The Progress of Battle
Historical overview of battle formations from phalanx to gunpowder revolution to industrialized war.
与讲师见面
Miguel A. CentenoMusgrave Professor of Sociology and Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Sociology
Now I'm going to walk you through a set of progresses.
And again, I'm making it far too simple.
I'm making it much more linear than it actually is.
But I'm going to talk about different traditions in battle.
And how these reflected the kinds of changes we talked about last lesson.
We're going to start with the war of the square.
We're going to move to the war of the line.
And then we're going to talk about industrialized war.
Obviously, there's a great deal of variation in this.
And, again, the progress is not so simple or so linear.
But just to give you a rough idea of how
can, we can understand the social organization of massive death.
Which is at the heart of battle.
Now, for much of history, battles really
consisted of individual soldiers fighting each other.
Individual warriors fighting each other.
And in a sense, the organization of that violence, wasn't that important.
If you read Homer, for example.
The accounts of the battles are usually
between one individual warrior and another individual warrior.
Without a real sense of how these units come together.
It's still very much about a human being against another human being.
Very soon though, at around the 7th or 6th century BC, we
begin to see the development of something we will call the phalanx.
This is essentially a solid mass of men, a square.
And it can be different sizes, different levels
of, of rows or different levels of ranks.
It can be anywhere between two, three hundred, or five hundred.
Or even up to 1000 men.
And you essentially want to think of it as a square with
a lot of very, very pointy spears coming out in one end.
And what you're going to do is you're essentially meet on a.
Again, it's very important that it be a flat battlefield.
Otherwise, you're not going to be able to get these kinds of aggregations together.
And there's lots of debates about whether they
walked into battle, whether they ran into battle.
What they actually, the individual tactics were.
But it was fairly simple.
One group, one phalanx, one square.
Would run or walk or meet the other and they would essentially clash.
These front lines would clash with support from the back who were pushing them.
Depending on the size of the sphere, maybe the second or the
third or the fourth level be able to still hit the front.
And what you wanted, was again you didn't expect that
you were going to able to kill all the enemy.
The key to victory was to disrupt the unity of this front right here.
Once that started cracking and these soldiers would become individual warriors.
Then the organized square could proceed them.
The important thing about this, is that it didn't no
longer depended on the bravery or the strength of the individual.
But the capacity of the collective to be brave.
For the, the capacity of the collective to generate strength.
Now this is antithetical to the individual war hero.
Imagine Achilles again, from Homer, being willing to be part of this square.
Being willing not to move from that line.
Being willing to absorb the kind of pain and no engage in individual glory.
This is a different kind of war.
Now what you're saying is, it's not who has the bravest individuals.
It's not who has the strongest or even the best warriors.
It is about which side can impose more discipline.
Okay?
There is an increased focus on order and on discipline.
Which side can assure this continuation of its unity?
Of its organization?
And we see a classic example of this in Marathon, in 499 BC.
Where it proves that this form of strategy could
defeat much larger armies, without the same level of discipline.
Again, our accounts of Marathon are largely biased towards the Greeks.
And, you know, what we know about it, there's a lot of question marks.
But, we can establish roughly that the Persians had at least 25,000 men.
Perhaps many more.
The Greeks only had a fraction of that, let's say about 10,000 men.
And, it is the first classic example, of a maneuver of
turning an enemy's flank and allowing
for encirclement and its subsequent destruction.
But the key thing is not so much the
brilliance of the generalship, although that played a, a role.
As the kind of discipline that is exercised by the Greek phalanx.
As it is going into the battlefield, realizing that they are outnumbered,.
As it is able to move in particular ways in order to be able to flank the Persians.
And then destroy that unity of the Persians where they
become individual soldiers running, desperately
in order to reach their troops.
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