Some costs of the Great War: nationalizing private life.

• Author: Tooley, T. Hunt
• Position: Essay

The Great War's costs were truly astronomical. As with numbering the stars, the final accounting is in God's hands. The lives, the treasure, the faith in ordered society--all were among the costs. Wilfred Owen suggested in his disconcerting poem "Strange Meeting" that the culture of Europe seemed hell-bent on trekking away from progress. He clearly had in mind what the literary historian Paul Fussell would later call the "troglodyte world" (1975, chap. 2): a kind of Hobbesian vision, one might say, rendered in pen and ink by Otto Dix. Costs, indeed.

Yet in this article I am concerned not so much with the number of lives ended as with altered lives or, rather, with changes in the status of the private life of the modern individual, the modern family, the modern community. I am concerned here with private property, the autonomy of the individual, and the disastrous trend, which World War I accelerated, toward the state's exercise of a right to take anything within its reach on its whim.

My secondary theme is that this great change in private life was already under way before 1914. The real agent of change was not the war itself, but the state and its backers and minions. That the war accelerated the change, however, was bad enough (see Rothbard 1994). Political and intellectual leaders in all countries welcomed the war for the augmented collectivism it would inevitably bring. In the United States, one of the more important figures who welcomed the war was John Dewey, a veritable god in the pantheon of our modern civil religion. Dewey saw the war, rightly, as the accelerator of the coming industrial society, a managed positivist society that he thought of as democracy itself.

Mere Statistics

Mere statistics do not tell the whole Story, but they begin it. Fifty million men worldwide were mobilized for military service in the war. More than one-fifth of them died (Ayers 1919). Civilian deaths are more difficult to calculate, but many millions died of deliberate mass murder, forced migration, execution in reprisal or for spying, accidental killing by either "friendly" or "unfriendly" fire, deliberate violence by individual soldiers ("friendly" or "unfriendly"), and starvation (as in the case of Germany, where perhaps seven hundred thousand civilians died from malnutrition), and other causes (Vincent 1989). (1)

Apart from its ability to transform living individuals into dead ones, the state during World War I also managed to pollute, disrupt, and destroy ecologies of countryside and town in Europe and elsewhere that had developed over a span of two thousand years. The zone of destruction along the Western Front is of course the most notable example. Every city and town in this zone was damaged; a large number of them disappeared. Some survived only as reunion associations because the very terrain of their locations had been left physically altered, polluted, and honeycombed with live explosives. Indeed, unnatural amounts of rotting organic material and an enormous distribution of toxic chemicals (including heavy metals), along with the almost complete disruption of natural and man-made drainage systems in most areas, meant that some of the places were simply irreclaimable for the following ninety years--and for how many more years in the future we can only guess. Even now, lives continue to be lost or threatened because of these explosives and other left-behind dangers (see Tooley 2003, chap. 8).

On other fronts, the destruction tended to be less intense. Nevertheless, town after town was bombed and burned throughout eastern central Europe and southeastern Europe, as well as elsewhere. Early in World War I, Russian armies "cleansed" the areas close to the front by forcibly removing millions of Jews, Germans, and other persons considered likely to favor the German army. Many hundreds of thousands died in the process (Levene 1993; Gattrell 1999). The Turks massacred Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks at about the same time. Indeed, these cases of ethnic cleansing and ethnic murder opened yet another Pandora's box, establishing the "technique" of violently forced migration as one of the principle motifs of the twentieth-century world.

We should also think of the long-term results: the misery caused by these deaths and brutality, the productive lives lost to the world, the work never done, the family traditions that ended, and much more. And if we extend our thinking to the war's geopolitical results, we see additional miseries flowing from the human decisions of the time. The Bolshevik Revolution and conflicts that flowed from the almost inexplicable Paris Peace Conference conjured up untold misery, death, and despair, and created problems that still seem insoluble (for example, achieving peace in the Middle East).

European Civilization and Individuals

I concentrate here, however, not on the lives lost, but on the consequences for private life and its extension, private property. In the first place, one of the war's enormous costs was reflected by the increased percentage of wealth or productive capacity transferred from private hands to the state. Even the original theorist of state power Nicolo Machiavelli advised aspiring absolutists to keep their hands off the property (and the women) of their peasants and other productive citizens ([1532] 1997, chap. 8).

In effect, Machiavelli's absolutists struggled against the Europe of individualism and constitutionalism for three hundred years, until the liberal individualists seemed to have won the upper hand in both Europe and its overseas appendages. By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, however, the Europe of empires, nationalism, and growing collectivism had turned its back on the achievements of individuals and on the autonomy of individuals and their families. Just before Word War I, Europeans...