First 10 pages of Reconceptualizing War's Third Chapter

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 third chapter. The introduction, first, and second chapters' first ten pages were posted in LinkedIn articles over the last three weeks, located starting here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/reconceptualizing-war-first-10-pages-ben-zweibelson-phd-hpxxc/?trackingId=ZGukGtCpT%2Ba9gWslmJiTdA%3D%3D

(Chapter 3 title): "Functionalism (Part 1): The Scientifically Rationalized Lens for Human Conflict and War"

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Abstract:? The functionalist paradigm is the primary social framework for rationalizing conflict for most of the modern world, particularly in industrialized and technologically advanced societies that demonstrate a ‘Newtonian style’ of understanding social reality as they would the physical one.? Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm presents a vast conceptual territory for nearly all mainstream military theorists within the last several centuries. They capitalized on the rise of natural sciences and the professionalization of military instruments of state power in the five-century European transformation from a feudal, agrarian, and land-based economy/society to the modern, industrialized, technologically advanced state-based system. Militaries, strategists, and policymakers cast the nation-state as a realized entity complete with self-sovereignty and an ordered, universally recognized right to wage war against other states and targeted populations for clear, rationalized goals. Functionalism requires a positivistic epistemology where objectivity and reductionism provide analytical rigor and formulaic precision.? A foundational epistemology for the natural sciences, this would be mimicked by military organizations in how to exercise warfare and how to understand conflict. The Napoleonic Era features prominently in the rise of the functionalist paradigm, with the First World War producing the closest manifestation of ‘total’ or ‘ideal’ war, also triggering the consequences of emerging alternative war paradigms in the Interwar period. ???

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Keywords:? modern war, complexity, positivism, rationalism, systematic logic, international relations

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

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When it comes to war paradigms, there is a king of conflict. The functionalist paradigm is the dominant and most influential social framework for how many humans make sense of social reality today,[1] and subsequently most interpretations of what war is and how it ought to be waged are generated entirely within this functionalist lens. The impact and influence of the functionalist paradigm cannot be overstated; successful social paradigms run in our background like computer code, and functionalism is the primary operating system for most of civilization today. In modern civilization, most wars unfold through a functionalist lens for many participants, victims, commentators, and historians. Although frequently it is not the only war paradigm in utilization, a majority of narratives, strategic frameworks, and historical interpretations of conflict are rendered in compliance with how functionalism explains social reality. This chapter introduces functionalism and establishes how and why most conflict over the last several centuries is predominantly interpreted through some version of this war paradigm.

Functionalism declares a particular manner of recognizing social reality through highly objective, ordered, and scientifically rational ways. Science, particularly the objectivity of natural scientific approaches, is paramount over any other modes of curating knowledge. It is assumed value-free within the functionalist paradigm, in that all values applied by people must be separated from the scientific neutrality of rationalized logic.[2] This includes war. ?European thinking, infused with new scientific logic, would define objectivity as something impartial: “to have no preferences, predilections or prejudices, no biases, no preconceived values or judgments in the presence of the facts.”[3] The previously mysterious, magical, mythical world now suddenly could be probed, unlocked, and the inner mechanisms revealed in their exquisite (and predictable) details through science. Building upon earlier beliefs on some external natural order to the world, scientific thinking sought universal laws of nature that were not defined by the norms of the practitioner, but automatically supplied from beyond any individual or unique context. There is no such thing as ‘my truth’, ‘my lived experience’, or anything outside ‘the truth’, ‘the objectively measured events of reality.’[4] War was no longer guided by divine authority, nor explained through rituals, magic, or special access to the supernatural. It would become controlled and waged by humans against other humans, interpreted through scientific rationalization where perception of value depended on where one stood, while scientific understanding remained neutral and above such considerations.[5]

Modernity, to include modern warfare, is defined by “measurement, formalization, and systematization on the basis of fixed axioms.”[6] Whereas war in antiquities or in the steep hierarchy of Church doctrine would be understood through supernatural, mythological, and other ideological constructs, war in the rise of scientific thinking would be reinterpreted through a positivist, functionalist lens. Military doctrine, in the modern sense of the term, extends directly from religious doctrine, centering “correct teachings” on war for the war machine to master and believe.[7]? People might be passionate, irrational, and violent, but all possible activities in war still must obey certain universal, externally governed forces of nature. Boisot and McKelvey explain this profound shift in how societies went from understanding reality including war from what the hierarchical Church declared true to the nation state government, empowered by science, imposing a new hierarchical order and rationale to why the world is as it appears:

Modernism sought knowledge outside religious revelation; Baconian science argued for the empirical rather than the faith-based justification of truth claims. Truth arose from a correspondence between a claim and empirically observed facts, rather than divinely sanctioned revelations transmitted through sacred- and, hence, unmodifiable- texts. This required the repeatability or replicability of facts and the rejection of one-shot events such as miracles. Objectivity, however, could only be fully achieved by an independent and decontextualized observer endowed with a god’s eye view.[8]

Scientific rationalism, positivistic reductionism of everything down to their smallest measurable parts, and the search for universal laws and the objectively neutral universe advanced the fields of natural science, and consequently, the professionalization of militaries. The mystic with exclusive access to the supernatural world was cast aside and the objectively neutral scientist assumed his place, armed not with magical or contextually unique powers (sporadic, coincidental, impossible to duplicate) but those of generalized, sequential, and repeatable logics. No longer would great generals command armies due exclusively to divine province or elite birthright, as they could be defeated by a professionally educated, trained, and hierarchically managed leader with entire staffs of similarly professionalized officers.[9] The days of hiring one’s friends and families to manage the field army, of waging wars of conquest during periods outside of harvesting, and seeking divine approval or supernatural signs as justification to enter into battle were over. Functionalism represents the first modern war paradigm, one ontologically and epistemologically underpinned by scientific rationalism.

Functionalism prefers mechanistic and organismic models, where organization and management is shaped into stable, ordered bureaucracies that “are assumed to be rational, purposive, goal-seeking, adaptive enterprises coping with the demands of an environment.”[10] There are two significant challenges in presenting this paradigm to an audience likely composed of many active users of the functionalist war paradigm. Most participants subscribing to any social paradigm are unwittingly committed to it, in such deep acceptance that efforts to illuminate these often obscured processes are rejected outright. A second challenge is that even if users of a paradigm acknowledge the structures, limits, and conflicts with other social paradigms, they retreat to a defensive stance that their preferred paradigm remains uniquely superior to all others. With the functionalist paradigm, those utilizing it for war simply find little utility in doing anything different, or pursuing any conceptualization of conflict that violates the basic premises of this dominant war paradigm. The functionalist paradigm is explored in two chapters in this research, and even this level of examination is likely insufficient. Many declare assumed scientific objectivity superior to all other alternative views, especially regarding war.

Paradigmatic constructs are, if posited by an introspective explorer, often dismissed by other users of whatever paradigm they subscribe witting or unwittingly to as ‘obvious’, ‘well known’, ‘proven’, ‘established’, ‘elementary’, and otherwise not worth considering beyond the stated givens. Interestingly and as this and future chapters demonstrate, different social paradigms operate using different interpretations of what ‘science’ is and is not. ?This shapes how we view the construction of knowledge within their paradigm as truthful and rationalized as ‘scientific’ over any alternatives.[11] Once certain knowledge is generated within that paradigm, these constructs take on a canonical role (replacing the feudal supernatural justifications) that requires all further rationalization to posit such “facts” as scientific and indisputable, therefore raised to a level of reification.[12] This chapter and the next demonstrate the scientific reification of war within the functionalist paradigm, while other war paradigms take on different interpretations of what ‘scientific rationalism’ is and is not. Within each paradigm, operators hold to particular bodies of knowledge as ‘true and proven’, and thus usually seek to improve that knowledge in efficiency and rarely to transform or violate the deeply reified ontological and epistemological constructs.[13] Functionalism, as the paradigmatic king, tends to dominate this debate and enjoy the advantages of being in the majority, for now at least.

A second, more treacherous manner in how social paradigms are defended is by a particular sort of anti-intellectualism, used in a paradigmatic context for this research. Social paradigms direct which theories, beliefs, and ideas are acceptable and thus ‘intellectually worthy’ for further development. They also deter and deflect intellectual inquiries and endeavors that threaten the underlying framework for that social paradigm. Such ideas, especially when produced by other war paradigms, are declared ‘irrelevant’, ‘inferior’, ‘illogical’, ‘false’, or become the cardinal sin of engaging in philosophical ‘navel-gazing’ that has no further value beyond introspecting for introspection’s sake. Functionalist operators value a pragmatic, rationalized mode of inquiry that requires an assumed scientific rigidity associated with the natural sciences and assumed to somehow manifest throughout all reality, including the human condition. These all are well sharpened tools for avoiding paradigmatic inquiry and wielded by institutionalists to stem debate within our schools, businesses, and homes. These are particularly significant within existing military education, training, and doctrine in that the dominance of the functionalist paradigm is so profound that any critique or challenge of anything foundational to that war frame is readily declared heretical and offensive.[14]

All social paradigms are guilty of these self-referential activities, and demonstrate what Burrell and Morgan established as their ontological and epistemological dimensions that form the boundaries of each social paradigm along with antagonistic and diametrically opposing paradigms. ?Paradigm incommensurability works to sustain users within the limits of one social paradigm, while convincing those same users to ignore, reject, or marginalize any content produced in another paradigm. Or, if social reality presents information and experiences that seem paradoxical or otherwise in tension with that user’s ontology and epistemology established by their social paradigm, users seek to assimilate such information without damaging the paradigmatic logic. As the functionalist paradigm reigns supreme over the majority of modern societies in comparison to the other three, we will explore how this war paradigm works with social reality first. The vast history and knowledge base of functionalism requires prioritization and greater explanation compared to alternative war paradigms.[15]

We thus begin with functionalism to establish the parameters of this scientifically rational manner of interpreting war in social reality, as these paradigmatic limits also act as barriers. Given that the functionalist paradigm is the prominent one across the industrialized western world, there is a near-universal resistance by the military profession to any philosophical inquiry that does not immediately comply or reinforce with those select war theories that are compliant within functionalism. As the functionalist paradigm permits a wide range of war theorists under the same broad umbrella, this large range of concepts is misconstrued as a sufficient diversity of ideas that can defend functionalism writ large without actually critiquing the ontological and epistemological assumptions governing the paradigm. Such positions defend the paradigm but avoid any serious philosophical inquiry beyond maintaining institutional admiration of those war theorists that define the functionalist war perspective of reality.

Burrell and Morgan’s Establishment of a Functionalist Paradigm:

In terms of natural philosophy, the roots of functionalism date back to the earliest ideas of ancient Greek and Roman thinking, albeit in pre-scientific rationalism that sought logical ordering of reality with mechanical, biological, and other tangible observations of the natural world.[16]? Nature was conceptualized in an external relationship to the human condition, whether governed by divine or universal conditions that societies would operate within. This logical arrangement scaled in a hierarchical form, where individuals were held to local and societal laws and customs, while the state became the higher manifestation of these aggregates of individuals.[17] From the hierarchical arrangement of individual family units, this logic moved up toward the largest configuration of society, the original city-state of Greek and Roman periods. At a higher level, “the rule of law within a state, it seemed, would be complete only when the state, too, was subject to law in its relationships with other states.”[18] The state entity, both in premodern and modern arrangements, claim a monopolization of power to engage in organized violence for what become self-referential and sovereign justifications.[19] This chapter establishes the gradual transformation from the earlier to the latter, with significant changes in levels of destruction, scale, scope, and technological precision. Although functionalism as a sociological paradigm for modernity would not fully manifest until the nineteenth century, the necessary precursors for it began in western antiquity.

Earlier Judeo-Christian traditions, complimenting Greek and Roman foundations in natural philosophy (albeit in certain ways but not others), would morph into new thinking that war in the Age of Enlightenment could escape earlier, barbaric and ‘ignorant’ clashes of violence. Increasing economic and technological developments also drove European nation states to compete politically over expanding opportunities both in territorial expansion and the rise of new markets. Starting with the sixteenth century European Renaissance, rational thinking was transformed. People began to challenge and reject the supernatural supremacy enjoyed by the Church, and they started reforming earlier Greek and Roman notions of passive reception by contemplation.[20] Humans took an active role in rationalizing reality, where one produced reason and could apply it directly for effect.[21]? This would include politics and war. ?Differences unresolved by diplomacy or trade could be rationalized in the state use of its military instrument of power to use war to reach peaceful goals that benefited one state over another. This established the foundations for a functionalist war paradigm. ?

With the rise of natural sciences over the last five centuries, the earliest sociological and organizational theories would manifest in a functionalist frame,[22] given the attempts for social science to imitate natural science objectivity and stability in prediction, control, and universal application.[23] Karl Mannheim (1893-1947) deftly explains this major cognitive shift for humanity, which previously had for thousands of years assumed the world and their participation within it was controlled not by something that could be objectively reasoned and tested, but through supernatural forces. “Man’s thought had from time immemorial appeared to him as a segment of his spiritual existence and not simply as a discrete objective fact.”[24] The previous restrictions in thinking gradually became loosened, breaking apart earlier static hierarchical arrangements of authority and historical, ritualized processes. Instead of intellectual energies spent on how one might partake in the divine, rational thought on reality reorientated toward how one could control nature and society.[25]

Older modes of understanding and interacting with reality would be challenged with new ones.? The social paradigms of the antiquities and feudal periods were increasingly insufficient in addressing changes as the world progressed toward modernity. Modern social paradigms became new requirements for this emerging reality, with such changes occurring unevenly as different societies would modernize only as they could begin to critique and fragment the earlier set ways of thinking. Functionalism as a social paradigm would emerge first, working through innovations produced in the European Enlightenment. Although since ancient times societies had myths, religions, and beliefs that established various natural laws, this rationalization would be challenged. Laws declared through divine reason or cherished ritual would be replaced by scientific ones. These early mythological, religious, legal, and empirical-based laws for the world would in the rise of natural scientific thinking would be secularized, converted from the divine to the scientifically rationalized, becoming powerful ‘natural’ laws that were not localized to various provinces, kingdoms, and empires, but universal across all time and space, for everyone and everything.[26] God may have created the universe, but scientifically reasoning humans could now begin to decipher the codes.

Modern society and the rise of the modern state system differed from earlier imperialistic, feudal, and autocratic societies in significant ways. ?Knowledge was reconfigured to a new realignment with scientific rationalism, and specialized, technically oriented experts would master how these disciplines, professions, and fields worked. No longer could earlier divine, aristocratic, or arbitrary justifications achieve the same outcomes. Additionally, the idea of state and society changed, as would war. Premodern societies may have enjoyed strong defense walls, armies and navies able to extend far and wide, but these empires frequently could not prevent chaos and conflict with any sense of order or stability. These premodern societies suffered periodic invasions of nomadic warrior hordes, illicit criminal enterprise by gangs of bandits operating within their territories, or piracy on the high seas. Male?evi? explains that all sorts of organized violence and conflict occurred regularly in premodern societies because they were unable to legitimately claim and politically enforce a monopoly on the use of war and organized violence.[27] We enjoy tales of Robin Hood, or how Viking raids and Mongol hordes raided across European villages and settlements, yet they all are examples of what separates the modern state system from premodern prototypes. The centralized, bureaucratic, and politically effective policing of the domestic (internal) affairs of a modern state are matched with an effective external facing military capability able to project force outward against adversaries and other threats.[28] That this transformation occurred gradually, blending economic and social forces, technology and scientific progress, where new classes of society emerged, expansive wealth and resources, along with modern requirements for medical care, specialized skills, educational demands, increased literacy, and the rise of professional disciplines and organizations.

The world changed from a land-based economy with low technological progress to a fluid monetary capital economy coupled with rapid scientific and technological developments that upset all earlier status quos. Earlier warrior societies morphed into a contractual arrangement of feudal age vassalage where individual loyalty to one’s warlord or king moved from personal to financial justifications.[29] Feudal wealth remained locked in a land-based economy for centuries until this shift to modernity. For generations, nobility pledged fidelity to the king, the king provided necessary land-based wealth and power, and lords would obligate forces to battle with a dual motivation of sustaining or improving their land holdings, and maintaining their high status on the battlefield and in the King’s court.[30] Once this slower, restrictive land-based economic system gave way to a dynamic, expansive money-based and subsequently capitalistic model, European societies quickly moved into modernity ahead of most other regions of the world. The Enlightenment, scientific thinking, capitalism, industrialization, and colonial expansion all played major roles in this rapid transformation of the world.

Functionalism, nested with this technological, scientific race to modernity, emerged from a broad societal shift away from premodern thinking. ?Reality now could be explored, measured, and subsequently managed through scientific rationalism and the discovery of universal, natural laws that humanity could begin to manipulate themselves. Within functionalism, the mode of analysis prioritizes a linear-causal, reductionist, categorical mindset using universal and predefined laws and structures.[31] Lorraine Daston summarizes this with:

Throughout the early modern period, European thinking about natural laws and the laws of nature had evolved in parallel. There were obvious contrasts: natural law held only for human nature and compelled by reason rather than physical necessity; laws of nature could be called such only metaphorically and had to be discovered by empirical inquiry rather than thought experiments about a hypothetical primordial state. Yet their commonalities dwarfed these differences. Both embraced a foundational model in which vast and varied consequences could be derived from a few simple, general laws; both contrasted the universality, uniformity, and immutability of these laws with the mosaic of local customs and local natures.[32]

We start with functionalism grounded upon an epistemological belief in positivism and an ordered, relatively stable world.[33] Burrell and Morgan define this as based upon the models derived from the natural sciences, where human nature (including war) is arranged ontologically, epistemologically, and methodologically via a deterministic view.[34] This enables a natural, enduring order for reality that is not dependent upon something divine or supernatural. The timeless laws of physics occur regardless of human activity or desire. This functionalist understanding of the physical world would, in time, be extended to attempt to rationalize how and why societies do or do not, act or not act, bounded not by the supernatural but an extension of universal laws and principles so that all of reality becomes objectively ordered.[35] The divine creator, previously linked directly to enlightened elites and royals with bloodlines binding them to these special roles, took new form in how governments made decisions including on war. The United States, beginning with its colonial declaration of independence from the most powerful autocratic civilization at the time, would declare that ‘all men’ are ‘endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights’, yet this was cast in a non-specific form of divine province that separated the powers of the Church and the State. Humanity had ‘natural rights’ that took on clear inspiration from Newtonian constructs, with a designed separation of powers so that European feudal systems were marginalized in the New World.[36]

With the functionalist war paradigm, reality can be examined via scientific rationalism and the deductive or inductive inquiries of the scientist, or person attempting a pseudo-scientific inquiry.[37] Those findings are assumed (paradigmatically) to be far more reliable, reasoned, and in turn capable of predicting the future than any ideological or mythological alternatives.[38] Carl von Clausewitz, a prominent war theorist of this war paradigm, argued, “war is not an act of senseless passion.”[39] This insistence reflects the functionalist ontology that war is a natural, regular, entirely rational activity that state entities (comprised of mostly rational human actors) engage with. We are not beasts, and despite war being violent and destructive, it must have a certain organizing logic. War in this paradigm is reciprocal in that whether one is aggressor or defender, all participants acknowledge ontologically they are in a war.[40] They carry forward activities designed to commence, engage, and conclude the conflict in such a way that achieves or satisfies national or group interests, usually to the detriment of the opponent. Senseless passion may be chaos or anarchy, but it is not war for functionalists. Mindless or random violence and destruction fails to meet the definition of ‘war’, in that violence for violence’s sake is irrational to the functionalist perspective. Individual crimes and acts of passion are also discounted as internal, domestic matters a nation state manages. Wars start and end with purposeful goals, motives, and intents, although the messy bits in the middle may feature instances of senseless acts and chaotic moments that defy any rational explanation. Functionalism rests upon order, stability, and analytically sound processes that may be hidden in the complexities of an unfolding conflict, but they must be in there. The below figure emphasizes these paradigmatic limits imposed on social reality.

The functionalist paradigm is characterized by this objectivist view of the organizational world with an orientation toward a self-stabilizing sort of world sufficiency or status quo, such as a natural order that permeates everything.[41] Power is viewed not as a social construct or contextually subjective, but as an “established fact” exercising an external influence upon other real things, where “reality is characterized by objective power.”[42] If warfare changes characteristically with contexts, technology, geography, and culture, the universal stasis of war as defined by functionalists reflect this objectivity upon social reality where war unfolds. Individual leaders wield power and may do so effectively or poorly, yet power itself holds to an objective, external quality of its own universal design.

Such a stable and ordered reality thus is understood as a separation between the external environment and the individual participants experiencing war in reality. Change is an unwelcomed guest. It instead should already be predicted, fit with the existing rational framework, or unfold in such a way one can prepare for change before it arrives to spoil things.[43] Greater scientific knowledge and technical precision means that such things are reduced, managed, or contained. Novelty and surprise must be reduced or eliminated in that if one rationally establishes sufficient theory, wisdom, experience, and refined knowledge about a conflict, the superior general manages to accomplish pre-determined goals in battle without succumbing to surprise. The thinking, social individual should ideally become completely detached from cold, formal, and abstract constructs such as mathematics, geometry, and pure economics within the functionalist worldview.[44] In other words, the great general should cooly and calmly render decisions in battle that hold to scientific rigor, regardless of emotions running high by other participants. Humans wage warfare violently, but all wars remain determined through certain externally imposed limits declared by the functionalist orientation. ?There can be chaos on battlefields and in daily rush hour traffic, but all drivers and all soldiers must obey fundamental laws controlling and constraining what is possible versus what is not. Linda Putnam explains: “Functionalists treat social reality as concrete facts, external to the individual. These facts come into being prior to human activity; hence they impose on and shape the behavior of participants.”[45] In this worldview, the social laws of society including conflict and war operate just as physical laws of the universe regulate physical reality.

Determinism requires a stable social reality so that historical patterns work as clear signposts for establishing timeless, universal constructs and principles in human conflict. While the characteristics of any particular period of technology, geography, and cultural norms may specify certain forms of war, these timeless and pervasive aspects of war must be found wherever and whenever conflict occurs. Military theorists associated in the functionalist paradigm such as Prussian reformers in the Napoleonic Era would commence to emphasize military history, rendered through scientific rationalism, in how officers would be educated and developed. Prussian military reformers such as Scharnhorst and Clausewitz maintained a perspective that history, coupled with the foundational logic of mathematics and scientific reasoning, formed an essential framework for officer professionalization.[46] Historical analysis of past wars should present, via a functionalist lens, scientific structures and patterns that illustrate both the general, enduring natural configuration of war, and aid in anticipating technological, social, economic, and contextual shifts in war’s characteristics.[47] This shifting ‘character of war’ creates the branches, variations, and developments across history as different types of conflicts manifest across the globe while still obeying war’s enduring ‘natural order.’ Deeper historical analysis on the past would shape which war theories are valid, and which should be eliminated. The past does not just inform, but regulates future pathways in that useful war theories adequately explain past war in order toanticipate future opportunities. All relationships including any irregularities in social reality are examined so that general and, ideally, universal principles and processes are established.[48]

That was the first ten (and a half) pages from Chapter 3. There are another 77 plus pages in that chapter, and this book will roughly be around 550-600 pages when published in hardcover around 01 APR 2025. Stay tuned for more chapter excerpts, share and link for interested parties, and follow me on social media for more. Endnotes below will likely be footnotes in the final book version.

[1] Robert Chia, “Teaching Paradigm Shifting in Management Education: University Business Schools and the Entrepreneurial Imagination,” Journal of Management Studies 33, no. 4 (July 1996): 410.

[2] Mark Rutgers, “Be Rational! But What Does It Mean? A History of the Idea of Rationality and Its Relation to Management Thought,” Journal of Management History 5, no. 1 (1999): 22.

[3] Louis Wirth, “Preface,” in Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, by Karl Mannheim (Eastford, Connecticut: Martino Fine Books, 2015), xvii–xviii.

[4] This becomes a paradigmatic tension when we explore other war paradigms such as radical humanism and interpretivism, where subjective reality is socially constructed and one’s ‘lived experience’ cannot be dismissed this way.

[5] Sini?a Male?evi?, The Sociology of War and Violence (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 81–85.

[6] Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (Eastford, Connecticut: Martino Fine Books, 2015), 147.

[7] Geoffrey Sloan, “Military Doctrine, Command Philosophy and the Generation of Fighting Power: Genesis and Theory,” International Affairs 88, no. 2 (2012): 243–44; Ben Zweibelson, Beyond the Pale: Designing Military Decision-Making Anew(Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama: Air University Press, 2023), https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/Portals/10/AUPress/Books/B_181_Zweibelson_Beyond_the_Pale.3.pdf; Shimon Naveh, Jim Schneider, and Timothy Challans, The Structure of Operational Revolution: A Prolegomena, A Product of the Center for the Application of Design (Fort Leavenworth, Kansas: Booz Allen Hamilton, 2009).

[8] Max Boisot and Bill McKelvey, “Integrating Modernist and Postmodernist Perspectives on Organizations: A Complexity Science Bridge,” Academy of Management Review 35, no. 3 (2010): 418.

[9] Elite classes would still insist on ancestral justified access to military leadership positions well into the twentieth century, such as in the British military forces. However, the Age of Enlightenment started the gradual rejection of divine or class-based qualification versus that of merit and evaluated, formal military education.

[10] Gibson Burrell, “Modernism, Postmodernism and Organizational Analysis 4: The Contribution of Jurgen Habermas,” Organizational Studies 15, no. 1 (1994): 220.

[11] Christopher Paparone, “On Metaphors We Are Led By,” Military Review 88, no. 6 (December 2008): 64.

[12] Shirley-Ann Hazlett, Rodney McAdam, and Seamus Gallagher, “Theory Building in Knowledge Management: In Search of Paradigms,” Journal of Management Inquiry 14, no. 1 (March 2005): 36; Paparone, “On Metaphors We Are Led By,” 55.

[13] Hazlett, McAdam, and Gallagher, “Theory Building in Knowledge Management: In Search of Paradigms,” 36.

[14] Ben Zweibelson, Understanding the Military Design Movement: War, Change and Innovation, first (New York: Routledge, 2023), 6; Ofra Graicer, “Beware of the Power of the Dark Side: The Inevitable Coupling of Doctrine and Design,” Experticia Militar, October 2017, 30–37; Ofra Graicer, “Self Disruption: Seizing the High Ground of Systemic Operational Design (SOD),” Journal of Military and Strategic Studies 17, no. 4 (June 2017): 21–37.

[15] The author assumes that the majority of readers will likely identify with functionalism over the other social paradigms, whether they do so individually or by acknowledging that their institution associated with conflict uses functionalism exclusively.

[16] Antoine Bousquet, The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity (London: HURST Publishers Ltd., 2009), 13; Herbert Rosinski, Power and Human Destiny, 1st ed. (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1965), 152–53; Jürgen Habermas, “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective,” in Critical Theory: The Essential Readings, ed. David Ingram and Julia Simon, First Edition (Saint Paul, Minnesota: Paragon House, 1992), 256–57.

[17] Max Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, reprint of original 1947 Oxford University Press edition (Eastford, Connecticut: Martino Fine Books, 2013), 46–47.

[18] Rosinski, Power and Human Destiny, 152.

[19] Male?evi?, The Sociology of War and Violence, 24–28.

[20] Machiavelli’s work in particular, covered later in this chapter, sought to promote earlier Greek and Roman theory on politics, society, and war over that of Judeo-Christian compassion and morality. Winning wars and sustaining political order requires a firm, neutral, and objective hand that may use organized violence or set disciplinary examples in ways that violated Christian virtues. This tension remains within functionalism and how users approach difficult matters of ethics, legality, and morality in conflict.

[21] Rutgers, “Be Rational! But What Does It Mean? A History of the Idea of Rationality and Its Relation to Management Thought,” 21; Francois Jullien, A Treatise on Efficacy Between Western and Chinese Thinking, trans. Janet Lloyd (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of Hawai’i Press, 2004).

[22] Again, Burrell and Morgan’s social paradigm theory posits the rise of functionalism only in the last two centuries. They use their theory to explain the rise of various sociological disciplines and modes of analysis. This research extends their theory toward how societies think and act in conflict, with the earlier social origins of these paradigms dating back before the rise of any scientific thinking, including sociology.

[23] Dennis Gioia and Evelyn Pitre, “Multiparadigm Perspectives on Theory Building,” Academy of Management Review 15, no. 4 (1990): 590.

[24] Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, 37.

[25] Rutgers, “Be Rational! But What Does It Mean? A History of the Idea of Rationality and Its Relation to Management Thought,” 22.

[26] Max Weber, The Vocation Lectures: “Science as a Vocation” & “Politics as a Vocation,” ed. David Owen and Tracy Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2004), 51–52.

[27] Male?evi?, The Sociology of War and Violence, 244.

[28] Modern states do feature episodic periods of instability such as piracy or criminal enterprise, but these challenges are managed by domestic law enforcement coupled with a robust judicial and penal system. International treaties and shared laws, intelligence, and security cooperation further add to state sovereignty and regional order in developed areas of the world. Premodern societies did not enjoy such benefits.

[29] Male?evi?, The Sociology of War and Violence, 27.

[30] Male?evi?, 27.

[31] Majken Schultz and Mary Jo Hatch, “Living with Multiple Paradigms: The Case of Paradigm Interplay in Organizational Culture Studies,” Academy of Management Review 21, no. 2 (1996): 537.

[32] Early Greek concepts would inspire seventeenth century scientific reforms that would displace and challenge the “pre-modern” through a new “scientific rationalism.” Lorraine Daston, Rules: A Short History of What We Live By (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022), 233–34.

[33] Habermas, “Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective,” 256–59.

[34] Gibson Burrell and Gareth Morgan, Sociological Paradigms and Organisational Analysis: Elements of the Sociology of Corporate Life (Portsmouth, New Hampshire: Heinemann, 1979), 56–57; Gioia and Pitre, “Multiparadigm Perspectives on Theory Building,” 590.

[35] Horkheimer, Eclipse of Reason, 46–51.

[36] This does not suggest that the American experiment was non- or anti-religious. Most if not all of the founding members that produced the Declaration of Independence and later the United States Constitution were religious, ‘God-fearing’ men representative of their society and culture. However, the move to separate governmental power including the ability to declare war so that religious hierarchical structures and that of an elected political one was uniquely part of the Age of Enlightenment.

[37] Zweibelson, Understanding the Military Design Movement: War, Change and Innovation, 76–77; Christopher Paparone, The Sociology of Military Science: Prospects for Postinstitutional Military Design (New York: Bloomsbury Academic Publishing, 2013), 13–14.

[38] Linda Putnam, “The Interpretive Perspective: An Alternative to Functionalism,” in Communication and Organizations: An Interpretive Approach, ed. Linda Putnam and Michael Pacanowsky (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1983), 42–46.

[39] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Indexed Edition (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1984), 92.

[40] Astrid Nordin and Dan ?berg, “Targeting the Ontology of War: From Clausewitz to Baudrillard,” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 43, no. 2 (November 3, 2014): 395.

[41] Gioia and Pitre, “Multiparadigm Perspectives on Theory Building,” 585–86.

[42] Rosinski, Power and Human Destiny, 20.

[43] Donald Sch?n, Displacement of Concepts (London: Tavistock Publications (1959) Limited, 1963), 128–29.

[44] Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge, 39; Stephen Waring, “Management by the Numbers: Operations Research and Management Science,” in Taylorism Transformed: Scientific Management Theory since 1945(Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 20–21.

[45] Putnam, “The Interpretive Perspective: An Alternative to Functionalism,” 44.

[46] Charles White, Scharnhorst: The Formative Years, 1755-1801 (Warwick, England: Helion & Company, 2020), 123, 389; Zweibelson, Understanding the Military Design Movement: War, Change and Innovation, 73.

[47] Peter Paret, Clausewitz and the State: The Man, His Theories, and His Times, 1985 Paperback (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1985), 71.

[48] Gioia and Pitre, “Multiparadigm Perspectives on Theory Building,” 590.