Chapter 2: The First Ten Pages; 'Reconceptualizing War'- coming out APR 25

Below is an excerpt from my upcoming book, 'Reconceptualizing War', coming out in April 2025 through Helion & Company Ltd . While the final edits and typeset work will continue, here are the first ten pages out of my first chapter. The introduction chapter's first ten pages was posted two weeks ago (check my history), and last week Chapter 1's first ten pages were posted in a LinkedIn article last week, located here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/chapter-1-first-ten-pages-reconceptualizing-war-ben-zweibelson-phd-4pxoc/?trackingId=XPe7GNP9kazngnwX3hYGvQ%3D%3D

I will post the first ten pages of all ten chapters this way, each week, for the next eight weeks.

Follow me for more updates and other promos, sneak peaks, and more. If you are on X, please connect at @bzweibelson and also tag and repost this to others that might find this sort of work interesting on either platform. Thanks! -Ben

Reading Rapoport: Deepening War Paradigm Appreciation with Conflict Philosophy

Abstract:? While the first chapter introduced social paradigm theory and the meta-theoretical thesis of Burrell and Morgan, this chapter presents compatible and complimentary concepts from one of the most underappreciated war theorists of the twentieth century. Anatol Rapoport provided one of the earliest frameworks for multiple philosophies of war. He began by setting the ideas and maxims of Carl Von Clausewitz into what he termed the political war philosophy.? This construct first emerged in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars and Europe’s rapid industrialization, with the rise of modern nation states and the professionalization of military forces. Political war theorists such as Jomini, Clausewitz, and others would form the foundation for how modern militaries entered World War I, and subsequently how many would continue versions of this framework through present day. Yet Rapoport introduces two other war philosophies, where an eschatological and a cataclysmic framing would differ from the political philosophy. Rapoport’s work, when synthesized with Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm theory, offer a different and compelling way to reconceptualize how and why our species engages in organized violence. His work remains largely marginalized or omitted from contemporary defense studies and military academia.

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Keywords:? conflict, belief systems, war philosophy, international relations, sociology????

Orcid ID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9760-3726

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If we examine the required reading lists, academic curriculum and primary theorists in contemporary security affairs, military war colleges, and related educational centers that curate military professionals and the institutional mainstream pathways for development, the name ‘Anatol Rapoport’ is likely absent. No program can possibly contain an exhaustive or complete list of theorists and concepts, which suggests that this general omission of Rapoport’s work in defense organizations and their associated academic enterprises indicates that he was a theorist of minor or possibly inconsequential status. Critics of his ideas also may argue that his emphasis on the nuclear arms race and the challenges of the Cold War are now irrelevant or obsolete. Yet the same community of security practitioners do adhere to far older, arguably much less relevant theories, models, methodologies, and historical content. Instead, in this chapter, we will explore how and why Rapoport is largely persona non grata in modern defense institutions of higher learning. Little of this concerns his deep research and extensive war philosophical content developed over his lengthy and varied academic career. Instead, Rapoport the anti-war protester, peace theorist, and critic of the military institution’s dominant ontological and epistemological assumptions on what war is (and is not) are the primary reason his name remains absent from most military curriculum.

Rapoport challenged the dominant military paradigm for war, functionalism, and in particular, he critiqued the theoretical foundations of Clausewitz while exploring beyond the limits of On War in thought-provoking, logical, and philosophically expansive ways.? This chapter will demonstrate that, as Rapoport pursued his life’s work across multiple disciplines such as applied mathematics, complexity science, political theory, nuclear deterrence policy, conflict studies, and peace studies, he centered his ground-breaking ideas on the nature of human conflict.? Why were we so violent and destructive, and with the rise of existential weapons of mass destruction, could our species find some way to avoid self-annihilation? Rapoport is guilty of telling the emperor that he is naked, and for those efforts, the military institution cast his work out, decrying it as ‘wrong’ or ‘a mistranslation’ of Clausewitz. His work was collectively dismissed by the broader functionalist paradigm used by the industrialized western world for societal conflict and war. Rapoport himself contributed to this status as a heretic, by later in life protesting the Vietnam War, becoming a vocal peace advocate, moving to Canada and publicly rejecting the American war machine as a danger to humanity. Yet like most heretics, many of them are visionaries and change agents. This chapter attempts to re-establish the name Anatol Rapoport as not just a primary theorist for conflict, but arguably one of the most significant military philosophers of the twentieth century.[1] His concepts, when synthesized with Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm theory, represents a new way forward in reconceptualizing war.

Anatol Rapoport lived a rich and varied life. He was a brilliant mathematician, systems theorist, World War II veteran, nuclear warfare theorist, games theory pioneer, and later a leading peace advocate and activist.? He spent his youth immersed in the terror of the first ‘Great War’, found safety in the United States, and later served as a young man in the U.S. Army Air Corps during World War II. Most famous for his mathematical work that established game theory, Rapoport invested his intellect toward studying conflict, societies, and how the world might somehow prevent a third world war waged with terrifying new nuclear weapons.? Indeed, Rapoport would likely shun any attempt to define him as a war theorist including this one. He relocated to Canada in 1970 out of frustration with American foreign policy including the Vietnam War, but also the looming concerns of mutually assured destruction by competing nuclear superpowers. Readers that begin this chapter with a certain sense of loyalty or obligation to defend Clausewitzian theory should take Rapoport’s arguments with two considerations. First, Rapoport certainly is critical, even dismissive, of how relevant or effective Clausewitz’s ideas were in the mid-twentieth century where Rapoport was attempting to reconceptualize conflict in a Nuclear Age. Secondly, Rapoport’s own personal history experiencing two World Wars that were largely dictated by various interpretations (or misinterpretations) of Clausewitz lend to his biases. However, few philosophers ever construct clear and creative arguments that challenge the Clausewitzian world without becoming yet another incommensurate argument of ‘my theorist beats your theorist.’ Rapoport’s critique maintains a Clausewitzian world, albeit in a limited, contextually dependent format that advocates of the Prussian may find unsettling.

Rapoport lived in an important and different world to that of Clausewitz, where the original Newtonian styled, natural science inspired frameworks available in the Napoleonic Era of warfare would be joined by new, twentieth century developments. Gifted with a scientific mind, Anatol Rapoport was a pioneering thinker in general systems theory, the study of game theory, social networks, and cybernetic theory. These ideas and theories simply did not exist in the nineteenth century, meaning that Rapoport also gains additional ways to critique Napoleonic Era theorists that exceed the available intellectual constructs, something unavoidable in the passage of time.[2] Rapoport studied conflict and peace studies in a lifelong attempt to make sense of why our species engaged in organized violence, and how we might overcome this through philosophy, logic, and science to prevent a nuclear annihilation, and perhaps how to resolve conflicts without war at all.[3] Rapoport’s activism after World War II marginalized him with mainstream military theorists and thinkers, largely due to his desire not to protest a particular conflict, but to instead advocate for the elimination of all war entirely.[4] Although highly influential in other fields and disciplines, Rapoport’s research is curiously absent in military education, doctrine, theory, or in discussions on military reform and change. His attempts at critiquing the most popular military theorist also suggest other social and institutional reasons for Rapoport’s unpopularity in military circles.

While Rapoport once had the distinction of being asked to pen the introduction to the Penguin Classic abridged version of Clausewitz’s On War, that version published in 1968 gained the ire of mainstream military academics, policymakers, and armchair generals blogging from their living rooms.[5]? Rapoport’s introduction would, arguably for the first time in such a systemic approach, frame the content and the conceptual limits of Clausewitz’s war theory while exploring areas outside and beyond those imposed barriers.[6] Rapoport takes a deep, philosophical journey to explain to readers the framework of Clausewitz’s original ideas, and then what is beyond those Napoleonic Era limits in the modern context of the Cold War and mid-twentieth century reality. His introduction is creative, critical, and challenges directly the works he is tasked to introduce in a manner unlike most other introductions to the Prussian war theorist.[7]? He is also quick to critique the Prussian, which again likely contributes to institutional rejection of his main arguments. Rapoport defined Clausewitzian war logic, and then, as an applied mathematician and games theorist, explored well beyond those confines by introducing multiple paradoxes in human conflict since the early nineteenth century. He would reconceptualize war in ways that contained Clausewitzian ideas, but also in ways that disputed or conflicted with them ontologically and epistemologically.

This would land his introduction and the associated version of that book in many ‘do not read’ lists,[8] with Rapoport’s ideas often absent from any serious consideration within the military community of practice. Rapoport rallied against the positivist tendencies in most social sciences including the study of war and conflict, where the emulation of natural scientific methodologies creates an artificial rift between the natural phenomena being studied and the social events and activities that define the essence of the human condition. ?War, being first and foremost a social activity for Rapoport, cannot be contained entirely through such positivistic logic. ?In other words, if war is assumed to operate just as the universal laws of gravitation does, one might write about the gravitational pull of the moon and the tides on earth without influencing these things whatsoever.? The moon itself does not change simply because Galileo might have written about it. Brute physical facts in reality remain unchanged when examined by humans, but social facts do not. Rapoport emphasizes how human affairs are social, meaning that when one writes about war as a social construct designed and exercised in reality by humans, the very act of thinking and writing about war influences (and might transform) the social reality where war manifests.[9] When Clausewitz wrote about war, society changed, just as when Jomini, Vauban, Svechin, Marx, or a host of other prominent theorists added to the social collective on what conflict is (and is not).[10] Right now, as you read this chapter, you are thinking about conflict and in doing so, changing your understanding of war (even if just in ways that reinforce existing beliefs). This leads to societal shifts as we go about our lives engaging and reconceptualizing this and many other ideas about reality.

Holding to a broad, philosophical view on how and why humans engage in conflict, Rapoport creates a series of interlocking arguments that are organizationally in similar terrain with how Burrell and Morgan map out different social paradigms. Rapoport wrote many of his concepts concerning human conflict well before Burrell and Morgan started publishing their own ideas. Rapoport predates Thomas Kuhn’s work on scientific paradigm shifts, while implying several overlapping ideas on how war, as a social construct, changes. He demonstrates a general appreciation of how groups of humans actively construct a social reality within which they can engage in organized violence.? Writing in 1960, Rapoport states:

We shall assume that such things as ideologies, ethical systems, religious and political convictions, complexes of attitudes, are also perceptual systems and that they arise through the process of selective learning, as the simpler patterns [expressed in applied mathematics and game theory] do… The second hypothesis states that in addition to the ordinary inertia responsible for the resistance that perceptual patterns offer to modification, those larger patterns, which we shall call “world images” or “outlooks” usually offer additional resistance to being changed, stemming from certain emotional commitments.[11]

It is not whether a theory or belief system is more accurate or less than others, but whether the concepts themselves offer a deeper, systemic appreciation of how different groups of humans tend to erect institutions that are self-referential, curating certain properties of assumptions and predictions about how the world ought to function while ignoring or rejecting others. Rapoport remarks: “reading Hobbes or Rousseau or Kant or Lenin or Hitler can be of great help, not because those thinkers were right in their observations… but because their writings are themselves raw data of social processes reflecting the social and ideational climate in which those authors lived.”[12] This also implies that one ought not read Lenin through one’s own preferred, institutionalized frame or we may just interpret the ideas by assimilating them into our ontological and epistemological frameworks, not those of the author. To appreciate Lenin using Lenin’s paradigm and include our own paradigm that may be paradoxical, we must attempt to synthesize at the multiparadigmatic level. This is where Rapoport’s philosophy of conflict finds fertile soil in the social paradigm thesis presented by Burrell and Morgan. His work predates social paradigm theory by decades, yet shares many of the common themes to how our species designs a rich social world upon the natural one.

Rapoport’s war philosophies, once synthesized with Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm thesis, provides us with a new way to reconceptualize conflict. The last chapter and this one act as the foundation to all subsequent chapters. Together, these concepts present one way to generate a universal meta-theory of human conflict, notwithstanding the irony that at least one of the contributors identified as anti-war. Rapoport self-identified as a peace theorist, with his extensive tome The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict being a primary source in addition to his introduction to On War and his renowned work in game theory and rational actor theory. While he was against organized violence, he studied the topic extensively, and invested immense intellectual energies into what war meant, why war occurred, and how our species might find solutions without resorting to war. Thus, this chapter begins with two camps already in hostile opposition to the premise offered. Devoted Clausewitzians are likely to hold to certain unshakeable devotion to defending his work against any sort of critical examination.? Proponents of Rapoport’s peace studies and his overarching vision of a world without war may also assume immediate bias at the notion of his work being a central chapter in a book about war. Those willing to suspend their beliefs, if they feel affinity to either of these institutional camps, may find the rest of this chapter provocative and stimulating.

Rapoport likely would object to any attempt to use his ideas to further the ability of nations to wage war, perhaps including how this book is arranged and presented.[13] Perhaps, one might reject Rapoport outright because we confuse his works with who he was, and what he believed.? Yet one cannot dismiss his ideas or his motivations, nor should military theorists shy away from a controversial, critical mind when attempting to understand war beyond our institutionally curated preferences. Rapoport’s thesis on a meta-theory of conflict is one of the first of its kind, demonstrating a deep appreciation of various theories on war, broader framings of how societies think and act, and how different groups might interpret reality in entirely dissimilar ways. Rapoport did invest his mental energies toward the goal of solving the same problem that many previous intellectual giants attempted, from Kant to Einstein. How might humanity rid itself of war? This is aspirational, but philosophically, offers us ample cognitive space to explore the ontological and epistemological limits of several dissimilar ways Rapoport understands the major ways humanity already engages in organized violence.

This chapter’s title uses the term ‘conflict philosophy’ in an attempt to restore Rapoport as one of the significant yet underappreciated conflict theorists of the last century.? He deeply opposed war, yet dedicated much of his life to studying and theorizing about it. ?This chapter also illuminates for a new generation his clear desires to encourage new ways of thinking about organized violence so that humanity might somehow shed itself of war, or perhaps just the high frequency and devastation of modern warfare in the Nuclear Age. Rapoport’s ability to philosophize upon war in the abstract is unique, and yet his extensive work is largely lost to any defense or security professionals not because Rapoport turned his back upon such institutions, but because these communities collectively cast out his contrarian ideas as heretical and irrelevant.? If the metaphoric device that war and peace are two sides of the same coin remains at all useful (within a war paradigm), we should strive to consider deeply the meaningful ideas and thinkers on either side.? Those able to synthesize them to gain deeper appreciation can only be in greater positions to advise and reflect, whether one is a policymaker, soldier, citizen, or community activist for change.

Rapoport’s Conflict Trident: Three Prongs for Philosophical Approaches to War

??????????? Rapoport provides a historical framing of three contemporary war philosophies, branching from earlier and less relevant ones that date back to premodern periods of conflict.? He offers that the political war philosophy is one that stems from the organization of nations with ruling classes and the international exchange of economics, culture, diplomacy, and organized violence in a rationalized, rule-centric manner of application. Rapoport uses the last five centuries of European societal development through the Enlightenment and the rise of scientific rationalism as the foundation for the modern state system. This forms the central plank to his political war philosophy, one that in the next chapter is aligned directly to the functionalist paradigm.[14] Political war philosophy normalizes conflict as a natural, reoccurring activity just as different states may trade, negotiate marriages between elite and powerful families, or declare new territorial possessions through exploration and occupation. Politics and war are considered a rational instrument of national policy and is always goal oriented. This political war philosophy will in the next chapter be further developed in terms of theorists, models, methods, and terminology, but first we need to define the competing and alternative war philosophies and demonstrate Rapoport’s synthesis of how he explained why our species perpetrates conflict. For him, this unfolds through one of these three war philosophies regardless of societal, technological, or cultural developments.

??????????? The second war philosophy offered by Rapoport is the eschatological, which means that operators within this framework hold a normative view where a final, ultimate battle must occur that concludes in a prescribed or otherwise decreed final victory. After which, war itself is suggested to no longer be necessary for the species, or social reality is so disrupted that little from present day has continued relevance after such an eschatological event. If the world does not end outright, it will be transformed in such a way that those existing in the new reality after the eschatological or final battle will experience a totally different (and superior) existence. War should be eradicated, usually through some ultimate activity that unifies humanity, eliminates the things that currently cause war and suffering, and our species achieves some enlightened, superior, or new level of existence that sheds the old world along with why humans wage war.

Eschatological war philosophies come from ideological, economic, social, technological, and even environmental perspectives on reality as the following chapters will demonstrate. Some date back thousands of years to the first evidence of recorded civilization, while others are postmodern constructions, generated only in recent decades and using quite new, often radical interpretations of what reality is (and is not). The rationalism underpinning any political-based war philosophy, including a Clausewitzian rendering of our world, becomes incompatible with that of an eschatological one. Rapoport uses this paradox to explore the Cold War and clear ideological tensions between western, democratic and capitalistic societies with those advocating communism, Marxism, or socialism in some form. Each of the three war philosophies Rapoport designed are able to manifest in various war paradigms, through a synthesis of Rapoport’s ideas and those of Burrell and Morgan’s sociological thesis. The ontological and epistemological choices made to support one war philosophy or another may cause them to migrate across different ends of a single paradigm while still remaining within that paradigm. ?In other representations they leap from one paradigm into another.

Rapoport prefers the term ideology, a broader construct that he states: “embodies some basic assumptions about how the world is and how it ought to be. Often, these assumptions remain unstated either because they are regarded as self-evident or because they have been so deeply internalized that they are no longer in the field of consciousness.”[15]Ideologies also present diametrically opposing doctrines on the nature of humanity, our purpose here in the world, and how we should live amongst our fellow species.[16] Arguably, he used this term as one sufficient for a larger audience he was writing for, whereas here we shall further specify the ontological, epistemological, and paradigmatic within which various ideologies flourish. War philosophies are not necessarily interchangeable with ideologies, but they do maintain significant overlap, often depending on the activities and context where a war philosophy is exercised. Ideologies are formed on the basis of sophisticated philosophies.[17] One can have an ideology for war, conduct war for ideological goals, or declare war against ideologies, with multiple grey areas where certain political philosophies for war become ideological in execution. These will be explored further in subsequent chapters. Rapoport’s concept of an eschatological war philosophy is distinct from the political war philosophy, and that of a cataclysmic one.

The political war philosophy rationalizes organized violence as a normal, re-occurring activity by populations for certain goals. Eschatological war philosophy positions war as an external tool that guides all of reality toward some final conclusion or transformation, after which, war is potentially a spent concept and irrelevant beyond that final battle. The third war philosophy, that of a cataclysmic war framework, differs from both the political and eschatological ones in that all war is considered detrimental, even existential to our species. Cataclysmic war frames posit that one group of chosen or targeted people might be destroyed if wars are allowed to continue, or that all of humanity is at risk.? For example, the original Zionist movement justified a restoration of an ancient, geographically defined, and ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. They rationalized this movement through arguments drawing from original biblical texts and other historical evidence, a long history of antisemitism and marginalization of the Jewish people scattered across other countries and regions, and the fear that the Jewish people without a state could be cast into yet another holocaust. Their reasoning, whether one agrees or not, is framed in an ethno-cataclysmic (Jewish) war philosophy.? In an incommensurate yet conceptually parallel argument, the theocratic government of Iran since their 1979 revolution have called for the total destruction of Israel and the Jewish people writ large, and indirectly through proxies and surrogates, both suggesting cataclysmic, and also in many ways, eschatological war philosophies.[18] The anti-war movements in post-World War I Germany, Russia, France, and England would also assume cataclysmic ontological positions that all of humanity could not survive yet another world war. Beyond the Interwar Period, the post-World War II and Nuclear Age would further these cataclysmic war philosophical arguments on a global scale, for all civilizations and perhaps life on this planet. Contemporary anti-nuclear positions sustain the cataclysmic war philosophy, while emerging anti-artificial intelligence arguments (explained in the fourth chapter under Neo-Luddism) present yet another twist in the cataclysmic concerns for humanity.

Social paradigms in the modern sense did not begin emerging from earlier, feudal-centered versions until the eighteenth century, with functionalism taking central stage until the late nineteenth century. Rapoport’s three war philosophies are similar modern designs, working upon the last few centuries of societal, scientific, and technological development. Modernity features a far more complex, dynamic social reality where different groups of people understand and act upon the world through different social facts, pursuing different purposes and goals, and generating ontologically distinct identities and meanings. The rise of modern social paradigms would change how we think and debate what organized violence is, why it exists, and what purpose it is intended for. Even the notion of an enduring nature of war, in the scientific sense of the term, is one of these modern inventions within a particular war paradigm. As Rapoport explains:

The nature of war is itself to a large extent determined by how man conceives of it… the answer to the all-important questions (no longer philosophical ones) of whether civilization will be destroyed by a global war, or whether war will persist as a chronic or reoccurring condition in human affairs, or whether war will be eradicated, may depend in no small measure on how people think, talk, and write about war, i.e. on which philosophies of war prevail.[19]?

??????????? These three modern war philosophies will be considered and then synthesized with last chapter’s explanation of social paradigms into the following chapters. Combined into this synthetic framework, readers should reconceptualize how and why a conflict might feature vastly different beliefs, values, theories, models, and methods that still are expressed in a violent clash between people in physical reality. Military professionals, security experts, policy makers and related academics able to understand which social paradigm their own forces, political leaders, population, and allies or adversaries prefer should appreciate war differently to those that merely assume a single paradigm and/or a single war philosophy.? Factoring in the likelihood that adversaries in a conflict hold to different war philosophies and also may operate within an incommensurate and different social paradigm compounds the need for this meta-theoretical framework. We need to become comfortable thinking beyond our institutional limits, including how we might parry those institutional efforts to keep us within the sanctioned areas that sustain a paradigm’s self-relevance. Without these newfound skills, we cannot begin to consider synthesis of incommensurate war paradigms, the paradoxical interaction of two or more war philosophies unfolding in conflict, and how there are previously unimagined, unrealized opportunities that exist in this synthesis that are absent in any single-paradigm offering.?

??????????? Burrell and Morgan composed their social paradigm thesis with a model that positions each paradigm within a quadrant that enables sensemaking of how each paradigm relates to another, and in abstraction how all four social paradigms might be conceptualized together. Rapoport does not attempt such a model to hang his philosophical analysis upon. Rather, he explains each war philosophy and the various ways one might modify each of the branches to explain related ideas in conflict. Attempts to illustrate his ideas could oversimplify them, and there is an abundance of caution in any graphical overlays of Rapoport’s ideas onto those of Burrell and Morgan.[20]? However, the concepts provided in this chapter may stimulate readers to attempt to bridge between these offered here and the previous chapter. Illustrations offered here are merely one approximation on how to go about relating Rapoport with Burrell and Morgan. Readers inspired by this initial framework are encouraged to develop beyond these first arrangements. ?

Rapoport and Earlier Periods of Human Conflict: Premodern versus Modern

??????????? Ancient societies waged war using physical violence and earlier technological and social processes and components, yet death and destruction (or the threat therein) remains consistent to modern war today. What changed is how those earlier societies conceived of warfare and the rules, rituals, and behaviors therein, and also how they understood what war itself was for.? Earlier societies would position the humans inflicting organized violence upon one another as the pieces on the board, yet the orchestrator or ultimate arbitrator of what would unfold was often placed in a supra-human position of a deity, deities, or some enduring nature of war that pulled the invisible strings that the human actors and their war tools had to obey.? Some elite humans assumed a divine role of administrator of a deity’s power or mandate, such as when Christian armies marched to war during various Crusades at the behest of kings or popes.[21]? The Oracles at Delhi were, for ancient Greek society, the symbolic touchpoint where Greek strategists or leaders might glimpse into what the gods fancied or favored concerning a future war.? Gods could divinely inspire human rulers to declare just wars, and the support of such affairs carried religious and political obligations across entire societies.[22]? Most of our history is filled with a blending of the pragmatic or practical and the spiritual or divine, such as how ancient astronomy and mathematics blurred with astrology and fortune telling.?

??????????? Throughout our varied history of different civilizations occupying diverse locations across what was until the Age of Exploration and Imperial European Conquest a divided and isolated world, many people waged wars differently and understood war itself on entirely different grounds. European nobility, usually those sons not next in line, were sent off to war as part of their noble duty and right, along with the lust for adventure and treasure.? Some sought war as a dangerous sport, while certain Native American tribes would even prioritize non-violent acts such as tapping the head of an enemy in battle as superior to striking him down violently, suggesting a ritualistic, game-like undercurrent that propelled further acts of aggression between native tribes. Chivalry in Feudal Europe not only motivated the shipping of young nobles off to war, but would create elaborate ceremonies and rituals such as two knights deciding to duel one another and decide the entire battle, or how two forces moving in parade-like fashion might maneuver around one another until one gained the decisive advantage, with the other declaring defeat without a single blow struck. Sieges of medieval towns and cities often ended without a single blow struck, depending on the effectiveness of one side or the other. This of course does not mean that many times, excessive blood was spilled, with devastating conflicts and horrific outcomes found in nearly all chronicles of various empires and civilizations. Violence was often framed in divine or supernatural justifications, such as burning the heretic at the stake to punish them in this world, but to also save their eternal soul and thus associate societally sanctioned violence as ‘good’, or necessary for the greater society.[23]

??????????? Rapoport differs from many modern military theorists in that he begins with an assumption that the sources of violence are in perpetual flux, meaning that the context of one particular age, culture, or location is hardly indicative of where war might transform into for the next conflict.[24] Thus, he is immediately in conflict with the positivist epistemology that defines the functionalist paradigm (and that of radical structuralism), where most military theorists draw inspiration from the natural sciences to explain war. Rapoport’s positioning within Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm model is speculative, given that in his decades of work, he did not engage using specific sociological concepts that might directly associate him with a particular paradigm. He shares the view with many modern researchers on the professionalization of the military, where an emphasis on natural sciences have resulted in an institutional bias towards objectivity, reductionism, and attempts to channel all aspects of human sociological ‘messiness’ into cold, formulaic analysis to include conflict. Yet the early orientation of natural sciences toward this sort of ‘classification’ fetish gave way to mature appreciations that humans and their complex social actions should not be treated as such.[25] His approach to conflict suggests placement in the interpretivist paradigm, and throughout the following chapters we will integrate his war philosophies employing those paradigmatic preferences.

Interested in more? Keep following these as I put them out weekly and get ready for some new information on this book as Helion & Company Ltd gets it prepared for hardcover release. Follow me on social media and tag names in the comments section for those that might be interested in this. Thanks!

[1] Just as Thomas Kuhn vigorously rejected later efforts of sociologists to adapt his scientific paradigm theory into their discipline, Rapoport vocally objected to militarization of any of his efforts except if they were done to prevent war. Rapoport would, this author firmly believes, resent any attempt to refashion his legacy as a military theorist.? However, theory about conflict is unavoidably part of the military discipline, and his ideas are essential for any attempt at producing a unified theory of human conflict. If this prevents or reduces the horrors of future war, then perhaps it will still be in keeping with Rapoport’s earnest efforts during his lifetime.

[2] This does not suggest that all old concepts are defeated by new ones. Instead, the tension of how later theorists gain additional theoretical areas to draw from creates issues with how to appropriately interpret earlier yet comprehensive concepts written by theorists of an earlier age. Further, this opens up a difficult question of whether reality, including war, becomes more complex over time or not. Is the world Rapoport must deal with ‘more complex’ than the one Clausewitz considered??

[3] Anatol Rapoport, The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transactions Publishers, 1995), x–xi.

[4] Rapoport, xiv–xvi.

[5] Objections to the paperback edited version vary. Some critique the removal of certain portions of Clausewitz’s original book, while others argue over translation issues.? Rapoport’s introduction is extensive, yet he does not engage in any worshiping of the Prussian, nor does he overlook the glaring issues and faults of the work, the man, and how modern societies prefer to interpret Clausewitz’s ideas.?

[6] His paperback edition had significant edits to On War that are irrelevant here, as his 77-page introduction is what matters in presenting Rapoport’s ideas about Clausewitz. Critics of Rapoport occasionally take issue with the version of On War presented in the Penguin paperback edition, sidestepping Rapoport’s introduction entirely.

[7] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Indexed Edition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984). For example, the most popular version of On War is the Howard and Paret version, where the editors present several quite complimentary and supportive introduction essays that reinforce the Clausewitzian (and thus, functionalist paradigm) philosophy of war.

[8] The ‘ClausewitzStudies.org website specifically recommends avoidance of Rapoport’s introduction to the Penguin classic paperback version. They riddle their argument with ad hominem attacks, blaming Rapoport’s introduction for inspiring John Keegan’s “despise” of the great Prussian. Yet they provide no counterpoints to Rapoport’s ideas and spend much of the paragraph making unsubstantiated declarations.? See: https://clausewitzstudies.org/mobile/whichtrans.htm

[9] Rapoport, The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict, xiv–xv.

[10] This argument rests on a subjective logical argument best positioned in the interpretivist paradigm. See the seventh chapter for more. Rapoport is associated with interpretivism for this book’s overarching thesis.

[11] Anatol Rapoport, Fights, Games, and Debates (Michigan: Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1974), 255.

[12] Rapoport, The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict, xv.

[13] One idealistic goal for writing this book is that if those who are tasked to design, prepare, and engage in the horrors of war are deeply knowledgeable and reflective upon it, there is the possibility that we might resolve conflicts in ways we currently are unable to realize or imagine. I believe this remains in keeping with the overarching vision that Rapoport pursued throughout his life.

[14] Understandably, history spans far into the past where societies understood war, politics, and some natural or supernatural relationship for explaining war. Yet as covered in this chapter and the next one on functionalism, the rise of scientific thinking, Westphalian nation states, a money-based economy, and other particularly European developments would demonstrate clear linkages in political aims and military goals in some hierarchical arrangement. ?

[15] Rapoport, The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict, 122–23.

[16] Rapoport, 9.

[17] Rapoport, 198.

[18] Michael Pompeo, “The Iran-al-Qa’ida Axis” (speech, U.S. Department of State offical transcript, National Press Club, January 12, 2021), https://2017-2021.state.gov/the-iran-al-qaida-axis/ ; Bruce Riedel, “The Mysterious Relationship Between Al-Qa’ida and Iran,” CTC Sentinel 3, no. 7 (July 2010): 1–3; Thomas Joscelyn, “Al-Qaeda’s ‘de Facto’ Leader Is Protected by Iran,” Nexus, February 2023, 1–5; Daniel Byman, “Unlikely Alliance: Iran’s Secretive Relationship with Al-Qaeda,” IHS Defense, Risk and Seccurity Consulting, July 2012. Pompeo stated in this speech “al-Qa’ida has a new home base: it is the Islamic Republic of Iran….Tehran has allowed Al-Qa’ida to fundraise, to freely communicate…and to perform many other functions that were previously directed from Afghanistan or Pakistan.” The linkages between apocalyptic terror groups and various social paradigms for war are explored in subsequent chapters, with specific focus in the fifth chapter on radical structuralism.

[19] Anatol Rapoport, “Editor’s Introduction to On War,” in On War, by Carl Von Clausewitz, ed. Anatol Rapoport (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), 12.

[20] For example, Burrell and Morgan’s radical structuralist paradigm does not account for Rapoport’s divine messianic eschatological war philosophy utilized in war by radical extremist groups dedicated to some doomsday prophesy. In the fifth chapter addressing radical structuralism, I introduce a careful modification with ‘radical omnism’, or a social paradigm established for divine eschatological belief systems as a way to incorporate Rapoport’s concepts with Burrell and Morgan’s overarching social paradigm thesis.

[21] Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages, Revised and Expanded (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970). Cohn’s deep study of the eleventh through sixteenth century Christian European societies includes extensive discussions on the roles of the Church and State, religious wars, persecution of Jews and other perceived enemies, and social norms set within feudal Europe.

[22] Beatrice Heuser, The Evolution of Strategy: Thinking War from Antiquity to the Present (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 45.

[23] Rapoport, The Origins of Violence: Approaches to the Study of Conflict, 63. This ideological sanctioning of violence upon one’s population is not necessarily applied externally, such as in wars against non-believers and infidels. The act of war against such enemies is divinely validated, but the death or mistreatment of outsiders often does not produce moral or ideological concerns over notions of sin.

[24] Rapoport, xvi. By these declarations, Rapoport likely is best positioned in the interpretivist paradigm, addressed in the eighth chapter. Arguments could be made for other paradigmatic locations, which offer additional research areas beyond the scope of this project.

[25] Anatol Rapoport, Two-Person Game Theory, Dover paperback edition (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1999), 15.