Perilous Glory: The Rise of Western Military Power by John France (review)

Perilous Glory is a work of immense erudition that strives in 393 pages of text to be a global military history from earliest times until today. By and large John France succeeds in his ambitious task. His primary purpose is to explain “how we fight” (p. 4) rather than why we fight. He concedes that “[w]ar may exercise the intellect, as Sun Tzu asserted, but the material conditions of society imposed remarkably similar methods of fighting upon peoples, no matter how diverse their cultures” (p. 4). The theme of anti-culturalism runs through the book, reappearing periodically as sharp comments. As a social scientist with strong historical leanings and sympathies, I have some reservations about the book. Despite France’s excellent explanation of how the human race has fought over millennia, he commits the familiar error of taking sensible skepticism of culturalist arguments too far. Given the strength and steadiness of France’s negative assessment of the influence of culture on behavior, the book is weakened considerably by his failure to explain just what he means by culture and how it might be made manifest. Potent swipes at the thesis of a “Western Way of War” versus “an Eastern Way of War” are all very well, and are well taken, but they barely scratch the surface of the important subject of cultural influence on war. My point is not that France is wrong but rather that he shows scant evidence of understanding the extensive argument that has swirled about the contested concept of culture in respect to strategy, inter alia.

France corrals and marshals his historical narrative impressively and boldly. The text is dense though not forbiddingly so. If one slackens concentration over a paragraph here and there, one might well miss a reign or two, certainly a campaign and vital detail. I hasten to add that I am, and I believe any reasonable social scientist (if that is not an oxymoron) will also be, almost awestruck by the scale and quality of France’s achievement in Perilous Glory. He has succeeded in telling the coherent strategic story of literally millennia of human history. His particular success is in combining tactical detail about material conditions with the larger story that is the narrative drive of history in the great stream of time. France clearly conveys his not uncontentious view that, although much changes over time, the essential continuities in historical experience are vastly more impressive than the discontinuities. This profoundly conservative view, which this reviewer shares, reveals itself in commentary about recent strategic challenges in the final chapter (“A New Age of War”), which is almost heroically politically incorrect. I enjoyed particularly his contention that “[t]he appeal to international law to regulate conflict is a noble ideal, but it is dangerously unrealistic” (p. 390). France believes that “[i]t is sometimes suggested that the risks are not really great, that small groups of hostile forces have nothing like the power that western nations enjoy. But this is merely an excuse for inaction. It is essential to have the will to fight, and if it is lacking and if there is no drive to develop skills in arms, and if soldiers are not loosed from the bonds of ideas which have nothing to do with war, the mere hardware will serve no purpose” (p. 392). This is strong stuff; it expresses beliefs about the permanence of war (“It is patent that war will not go away,” p. 398) and the need for a public and popular culture permissive of effectiveness in war. In his first-rate treatment of the two world wars, especially the second, France is almost brutally honest in the respect he displays for the fighting quality of German soldiers. They were not confused by liberal desiderata antithetical to winning in combat.

Given the strength of France’s case for recognition of the continuities in human awfulness across the centuries, and the undoubted extraordinary range and reach of...