Stanislaw Andrzejewski - Military Organization and Society

MILITARY ORGANIZATION AND SOCIETY

THE SOCIOLOGY OF WORK AND ORGANIZATION

In 18 Volumes

MILITARY ORGANIZATION AND SOCIETY

by
STANISLAW ANDRZEJEWSKI

With a Foreword by
A. R. RADCLIFFE-BROWN

First published 1954
by Routledge

Reprinted 1998, 2000, 2002
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2007

1954 Stanislaw Andrzejewski

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library

Military Organization and Society
ISBN 0-415-17680-8
The Sociology of Work and Organization: 18 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17829-0
The International Library of Sociology: 274 Volumes
ISBN 0-415-17838-X

Publisher's Note
The publisher has gone to great lengths to ensure the quality of this reprint but points out that some imperfections in the original may be apparent

BY PROFESSOR A. R. RADCLIFFE-BROWN, F.B.A.

T HE name sociology is nowadays applied to a great many different kinds of writing about society, but when it was invented by Auguste Comte he intended it to designate a positive, inductive science of human society. Such science may be said to have had its first significant development in the work of Montesquieu in the middle of the eighteenth century. The author of the present book belongs to the sociological tradition that, starting from Montesquieu, includes such thinkers as Herbert Spencer, mile Durkheim and Max Weber. The idea formulated by Montesquieu is that there are important relations of interdependence amongst the various features of social life that characterize different societies, and he applied this idea in an attempt to discover the relations between the laws of society and other features of social life, the form of government, the religion, the economic institutions, usages of various kinds and geographical environment. Such relations of interdependence or, to use Comte's term, consensus can only be discovered by a comparative study of many societies of diverse types. It is for this reason that Herbert Spencer referred to the subject on which he wrote as comparative sociology. The scientific use of this comparative method is admirably illustrated in this most remarkable book by Dr. Andrzejewski. He employs it not in order to construct a grandiose sociological system, but to deal with a properly limited though nevertheless extremely intricate and interesting set of problems.

The characteristic of science since Galileo is the use of experimental method. This term is frequently taken to denote experimentation in the sense of operations by which an event to be observed is brought about by the experimenter. But the Latin experiri means only to put to test. What the experimental method, in the broad sense of the word, really is, is a method of investigation and reasoning in which general ideas are systematically tested by reference to carefully observed facts. As Claude Bernard says in his Introduction a l'tude de la mdicine experimentale: The experimental method, considered in itself, is nothing other than a reasoning in the aid of which we methodically submit our ideas to the test of facts. The reasoning is always the same, in the sciences which study living beings just as much as in those which are concerned with inanimate bodies. But, in each kind of science, the phenomena vary and present a complexity of their own. In social sciences the only way of applying the experimental mode of reasoning is by comparing diverse forms of social life and their changes.

Observation is only scientific when it is directed by some hypothesis, some tentative generalization. Although it is true that fruitful hypotheses can be conceived only on the basis of a survey of facts. Charles Darwin wrote: How odd it is that anyone should not see that all observation must be for or against some view if it is to be of any service. Claude Bernard, again, wrote: The experimental method cannot give new and fruitful ideas to men who have none; it can serve only to guide the ideas of men who have them, to direct their ideas and develop them so as to get the best possible results. As only what has been sown in the ground will ever grow in it, so nothing will be developed by the experimental method except the ideas submitted to it. The method itself gives birth to nothing. The most difficult and important task in science is that offormulating problems. It can even be said that it is much harder to know what kind of questions to ask than it is to answer them. It is from this point of view that the value of the present book ought to be judged. There can be no doubt that it contains an extraordinarily large number of extremely penetrating and original ideas of fundamental importance.

The formation and development of an inductive science requires two things. One is the provision of some acceptable systematic classification of the phenomena with which the science has to deal; the other is the creation of a coherent set of technical terms; these two tasks are interconnected. The value of classifications and terminologies lies in their essential service in the discovery of valid generalizations. As Whewell aptly puts it: The fundamental principle and supreme rule of all scientific terminology is that terms must be constructed and appropriated so as to be fitted to enunciate simply and clearly true general propositions. These considerations should be borne in mind by those who may feel inclined to object to the terms proposed by Dr. Andrzejewski. The provision of heuristically useful classifications and terminologies is a condition of further progress of social sciences, but this task is so difficult that serious, let alone successful, attempts in that direction are quite exceptional.