War Before Politics

John Keegan’s Anthropological Challenge to Civilization

I. Introduction

Few modern writers have attempted to rewrite the conceptual foundations of military history. Fewer still have succeeded. John Keegan’s A History of Warfare (1993) is one of the rare works that does both: it challenges the intellectual architecture that has guided Western understandings of war since the early nineteenth century and reconstructs the genealogy of warfare on an entirely different basis. His principal target is what he calls the “Clausewitzian habit of mind,” the reflexive assumption that war is “the continuation of politics by other means,” a maxim drawn from Carl von Clausewitz’s On War and from the state-centric world of Napoleonic Europe. Keegan’s argument is as sweeping as it is disruptive. Clausewitz, he insists, described only a particular historical formation—one in which centralized states, professional armies, and diplomatic rivalries dominated the landscape. Far from being universal, that model obscures centuries of human experience in which war was anything but political in Clausewitz’s terms.

Keegan reorients our understanding of warfare by locating its origins in culture rather than strategy, in myth rather than policy, and in human imagination rather than geopolitical calculation. “War embraces much more than politics,” he writes; “it is always an expression of culture, often a determinant of cultural forms, in some societies the culture itself” (Keegan 1993). This marks a profound shift. Instead of treating war as a rational instrument of statecraft, Keegan identifies it as a symbolic practice interwoven with ritual, cosmology, identity, and deep social structure. In his account, statecraft arrives late. What comes first are hunting bands, warrior societies, rites of passage, sacred narratives, and performative displays of courage that frame war as a cultural event long before it becomes a strategic one.

Crucially, Keegan’s claim should not be read simply as a chronological observation. It is also an ontological claim about how human societies come into being. War, in his account, is one of the earliest practices through which order is generated. Long before formal institutions emerge, organized violence structures roles, hierarchies, obligations, and collective identity. Politics, by contrast, is a late achievement: a reflexive effort to stabilize, regulate, and justify powers first discovered and exercised through violence. War is not the negation of social life but one of its founding modalities.

This shift carries significant consequences for how we think about civilization. In my own work on the “double life of civilization,” I have argued that the institutions and symbolic orders through which societies refine their practices—law, learning, bureaucracy, and technical mastery—often generate new and more sophisticated forms of harm. Civilization refines cruelty even as it aspires to restrain it. Keegan’s anthropology of war strengthens this insight. “History lessons remind us,” he observes, “that the states in which we live, their institutions, even their laws, have come to us through conflict … while restraint has shaped violence into the particular form of ‘civilized warfare’” (Keegan 1993). The orderly façade of civilization does not eliminate the primal impulses from which war emerges; it domesticates them, rationalizes them, and occasionally magnifies them into unprecedented forms of destruction.

The essay that follows extends Keegan’s central insight and clarifies a paradox at the heart of the civilizational project. War has prehistoric roots in ritual, myth, and hunting culture. Political institutions reorganize these impulses, but do not extinguish them. Modern civilization, with its bureaucratic reach and industrial capacity, often intensifies rather than mitigates the destructive potentials latent in human sociality. Keegan’s achievement lies in showing that the history of war is inseparable from the history of civilization itself: its origins, its symbolic orders, its ambitions, and its catastrophes.

Figure 1. Aztec Sun Stone (Piedra del Sol). Basalt monolith (c. 1479)

II. Keegan’s Foundational Move: War Is Not (Primarily) Political

Clausewitz’s On War, written in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, situates war firmly within the logic of the state: rational, instrumental, bureaucratic, and diplomatic. It is a vision shaped by standing armies, centralized authority, permanent war ministries, and interstate rivalry. In this framework, war is political because it is waged by political institutions in pursuit of policy objectives. Its violence acquires meaning only as an extension of reasoned statecraft.

Keegan rejects this framework at its root. Clausewitz, he argues, described a historically specific form of warfare, not a universal one. For most of human history, societies did not possess states, let alone chancelleries or general staffs. Their conflicts were not episodes in an ongoing dialogue of policy; they were embedded in social structure rather than political sovereignty. War in such societies was bound to ritual, myth, rites of masculine formation, and communal identity. To project the Clausewitzian model backward onto these worlds is to erase thousands of years of human experience.

This critique does not depend on dismissing Clausewitz as naïve. Clausewitz understood friction, chance, fear, and the limits of rational control with remarkable acuity. What he nevertheless assumed—implicitly but decisively—was a world in which those forces had already been absorbed into the machinery of the state. His theory presupposes institutions capable, at least in principle, of subordinating violence to policy. Keegan’s objection is therefore categorical rather than empirical. Clausewitz treats war as an instrument; Keegan reveals it as a social practice.

When Keegan insists that war is “always an expression of culture,” he does not invoke culture as a vague backdrop. He identifies specific operative dimensions through which societies render violence intelligible and repeatable. Warfare encodes symbolic meaning through myth and cosmology; it is ritualized through initiation, sacrifice, and regulated combat; it is embodied through disciplined training of bodies to endure pain, fear, and exhaustion; and it is sustained narratively through memory, ancestry, and heroic or cautionary stories. War does not merely occur within culture—it produces and reproduces cultural forms.

Keegan does not deny that modern states wage war for political ends. Nor does he dismiss the explanatory power of Clausewitz within the world of centralized sovereignty. His claim is deeper and more unsettling. Politics does not generate war; it inherits and reorganizes it. What Clausewitz describes is a late historical refinement—a moment when violence has already been absorbed into bureaucratic institutions and made to serve policy. Keegan asks us to look beneath that refinement, to the cultural and anthropological foundations from which organized violence first emerged. In doing so, he shifts the question from how states use war to why human societies generate it at all.

Once this shift is made, the relationship between war and civilization appears in a new light. If war is culturally generative before it is politically instrumental, then the institutions of civilization do not abolish violence; they reshape and amplify it. The history of warfare becomes inseparable from the history of institutional refinement itself.

III. The Civilizational Turn

As societies settle and states emerge, the character of warfare undergoes a decisive transformation. Ritual and symbolism do not disappear, but infrastructure becomes increasingly determinative. Organized warfare depends less on individual valour than on granaries capable of sustaining armies, roads and waterways that permit movement, taxation systems that extract surplus, and administrative capacities that mobilize labour at scale. Civilization makes war possible on a qualitatively new level by constructing the material and institutional architecture through which violence can be planned, supplied, and sustained.

Figure 2. Terracotta Army (Qin Dynasty). Painted terracotta figures (c. 210–209 BCE)

Professional armies dissolve individual heroism into disciplined formations. Greek phalanxes, Roman legions, and Qin conscript forces subordinate personal courage to cohesion, drill, and obedience. The warrior becomes a function of a system rather than an autonomous figure. War begins to mirror the administrative structures that sustain it—governed by routines, hierarchies, and standardized procedures. Technologies like siege engines, standardized weapons, fortifications, and naval platforms further multiply destructive capacity, extending violence across space and time. Civilization refines violence precisely by organizing it.

Norbert Elias’s analysis of the civilizing process helps to clarify the paradox Keegan identifies. Civilization does not suppress violence; it reorganizes and redistributes it, transferring aggression from personal encounters into institutional systems that appear more controlled and restrained. Yet restraint and intensification advance together. The same capacities that enable law, bureaucracy, and social order also enable large-scale, impersonal destruction. Refinement does not humanize violence; it magnifies its reach while distancing its agents from its effects.

Figure 3. Assyrian Reliefs of the Siege of Lachish. Gypsum wall reliefs, Neo-Assyrian period (c. 701 BCE)

IV. Industrial War and the Collapse of Meaning

The industrial era represents not a departure from Keegan’s account but its culmination. If early warfare was embedded in ritual and later reorganized by administration, industrial war subjects violence to the full logic of modern civilization. Mechanization replaces ritual, honour, and face-to-face combat with systems of mass production and attrition. Railways, telegraphs, standardized artillery, and machine guns reorganize violence into an industrial process governed less by tactical ingenuity or personal courage than by logistics, output, and the sustained expenditure of men and material. Decision-making migrates upward into planning staffs and ministries; endurance, rather than heroism, becomes the decisive virtue. War now reflects the dominant structures of industrial society itself.

More profoundly, industrial warfare transforms the experience of violence. In earlier settings, killing occurred within bounded encounters, embedded in visible relationships between combatants. Industrial war disperses violence across bureaucratic systems and technical chains. Killing ceases to be an embodied act and becomes an outcome generated by procedure—schedules, quotas, and protocols. Responsibility dissolves into hierarchies designed precisely to diffuse accountability. Earlier wars, however brutal, were sustained by narratives that explained suffering through honour, faith, or fate. Industrial war replaces narrative with statistics, tonnage, and casualty ratios.

Figure 4. Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano (c. 1435–1460)

Modern war is not only more destructive; it is more abstract. Civilization achieves unprecedented technical mastery even as it strips violence of the symbolic and ritual frameworks that once constrained and interpreted it. In Keegan’s terms, war remains an expression of culture—but now it expresses the culture of bureaucracy, industry, and impersonal administration. The refinement of civilization does not eliminate violence; it reorganizes it into forms that are simultaneously more controlled and more devastating.

V. War and the Civilizational Imagination

Keegan’s deepest insight emerges at this juncture. If war is an expression of culture, then it functions as a mirror of a civilization’s moral architecture. It reveals not only how societies fight, but how they understand authority, obligation, sacrifice, and meaning itself. The Greeks embedded warfare within discipline and civic order, treating the battlefield as an extension of the polis and of the citizen’s ethical formation. Medieval Europe sacralized war through faith, elevating violence into a cosmic drama of salvation and damnation, where killing could be transfigured into a redemptive act. Industrial states, by contrast, transformed war into a test of production, organization, and endurance, measuring success not by virtue or honour but by output, logistics, and attrition. Each form of warfare discloses the deeper values and anxieties of its civilization: what it reveres, what it fears, and what it is prepared to destroy in order to endure.

Figure 5. Francisco Goya, The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra) (1810–1820)

In this sense, war is not merely something civilizations do; it is one of the ways they express themselves. The organization of violence reveals how societies imagine human worth, collective destiny, and the limits of moral restraint. Where ritual governs war, meaning constrains destruction. Where bureaucracy governs war, efficiency displaces meaning. The evolution of warfare tracks the evolution of civilization’s symbolic orders as closely as it tracks changes in technology or strategy.

Here the distinction between Clausewitz and Keegan becomes decisive. Clausewitz clarifies how modern states wage war—how violence is subordinated to policy, managed through institutions, and directed toward strategic ends. His theory presupposes a world in which the state already exists as the primary organizer of force. Keegan poses a prior question: why do human societies wage war at all? His answer does not begin with policy, but with culture—with imagination, ritual, identity, and the deep practices through which human groups form themselves as collective actors.

By relocating war within culture rather than politics, Keegan does not deny the importance of the state. Politics appears as a late and fragile mechanism, designed to regulate forces that long predate it and continually threaten to exceed its control. War, in this light, is not an aberration of political order but one of its conditions. The enduring struggle is not to abolish war, but to contain, interpret, and justify a practice that arises from the same human capacities that make civilization possible in the first place.

Figure 6. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d’Invenzione (c. 1745)

VI. Conclusion

A History of Warfare exposes a fundamental truth: the history of war is inseparable from the history of human meaning-making. Through war, societies express beliefs about courage, obligation, masculinity, transcendence, and identity. Violence is not an external intrusion into civilization; it is woven into its structure.

Keegan’s refusal to reduce war to policy mirrors a refusal to reduce civilization to rational administration. Civilization appears instead as a moral ecology—one that generates both refinement and cruelty. War is among its clearest expressions. It reveals how societies organize bodies, mobilize meaning, construct enemies, and legitimize destruction.

Keegan’s achievement is to demonstrate that violence and refinement, ritual and bureaucracy, myth and machinery are not opposites but partners in the long history of civilization. Grandeur and barbarism arise from the same cultural soil. War, as Keegan shows, is not merely something civilizations do; it is one of the ways they come to know themselves.

Works Cited

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Translated by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton University Press, 1976.

Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Blackwell, 2000.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

Keegan, John. A History of Warfare. Alfred A. Knopf, 1993.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Aldine, 1969.

Image Credits

Figure 1. Aztec Sun Stone (Piedra del Sol). Basalt monolith, Mexica (Aztec), c. 1479. Museo Nacional de Antropología, Mexico City. Source.

Figure 2. Terracotta Army (Qin Dynasty). Painted terracotta figures, c. 210–209 BCE. Mausoleum of the First Qin Emperor, Lintong District, Xi’an, Shaanxi, China. Source.

Figure 3. Assyrian Reliefs of the Siege of Lachish. Gypsum wall reliefs, Neo-Assyrian period, c. 701 BCE. Palace of Sennacherib, Nineveh; now in the British Museum, London. Source.

Figure 4. Paolo Uccello, The Battle of San Romano. c. 1435–1460. Tempera on panel. National Gallery, London. Source.

Figure 5. Francisco Goya, The Disasters of War (Los Desastres de la Guerra). Etching and aquatint series, 1810–1820 (published 1863). Museo del Prado, Madrid. Source.

Figure 6. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Carceri d’Invenzione. Etching series, first edition c. 1745; second edition 1761. Various collections (e.g., British Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art). Source.