Fukuyama: On Warfare and Military Organization

" Getting rich was obviously a motive for making war in tribal societies (...) But war is not motivated by the acquisitive impulse alone. Although warriors may be greedy for silver and gold, they also display courage in battle not so much for the sake of resources, but for honor. Honor has to do with the willingness to risk one's life for a cause, and for the recognition of other warriors. Consider Tacitus account of the German tribes written in the 1st century A.D., one of the few contemporaneous accounts of these progenitors of modern Europeans.

And so is great rivalry among the retainers to decide who shall have the first place with his chief, and among the chieftains as who shall have the largest and keenest retinue. This means rank and strength, to be surrounded always with a large band pf chosen youths ... when the battlefield is reached is a reproach for a chief to be surpassed in prowess, a reproach for his retinue not to equal the prowess of a chief; but to have left he field and survived one's chief, this means lifelong infamy and shame: to defend and protect him, to devote one's own feats even to his glorification, this the gist of their allegiance: the chief fights for victory, but the retainer for the chief. 

(Check 1:40 min)


A warrior will not trace places with a farmer or a tradesman even if the return to agriculture or trade proves higher, because he is only partly motivated by the desire for wealth. Warriors find the life or a farmer contemptible because does not partake of danger and community.

Should it happen that the community where they are born be drugged with long years of peace and quiet, many of the high-born youth voluntarily seek those tribes which are at the time engaged in some war, for rest is unwelcome to the race, and they distinguish themselves more readily in the midst of uncertainties: besides, you cannot keep a great retinue except by war and violence ... you would not so readily persuade then to plough the land and wait for the year's returns as to challenge the enemy and earn wounds: besides, it seems limps and slack to get with the sweating of your brow what you can gain with the shedding of your blood. 

Tacitus remarks than in the periods between wars, these youthful warriors spend their time in idleness, because engaging in civilian occupations would be demeaning to them. It was only with the rise of bourgeois class in seventeen-and-eighteen-century in Europe that the warrior ethic was replaced by an ethic that placed gain and economic calculation above honor as the mark of the virtuous individual." (Fukuyama 74-75)

Check at 1:43 min: Cruelty of the idle class:

(will cont.)

Fukuyama, Francis. The Origins of Political Order, From Pre-Human Times to the French Revolution. Farrar, Strauss and Giroux. New York.