Summary
Harold Lasswell’s projected future state, as Dowty presents it in Chapter 5, in which the specialists in violence would dominate and the entire population would be mobilized on behalf of the national military effort — the model against which Dowty measures, and rejects for, Israel (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1972-1985).
Details
- Lasswell projected the garrison state as “probable” in 1941 and elaborated it later: it would be characterized by constant increases in defense spending, the expansion and centralization of government, the withholding of information, the weakening of political parties and the legislature, loss of civil liberties, and the decline of courts as limits on the government (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1972-1980).
- Such a course seemed quite possible in the Israel of the 1950s, Dowty argues, and some of these developments — higher defense spending and weaker political parties — came to pass, yet overall Israel did not become a garrison state by Lasswell’s definition (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1972-1985).
- Dowty’s explanations include the routinization of a half-century crisis — Baruch Kimmerling’s “interrupted society” — and the absence of a strictly military tradition: the fighting forces began as extensions of civilian organizations, no separate military caste developed, and civilianization of the army is as apparent as militarization of society (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1976-1995).
- The leading military sociologists, as Dowty quotes them: “Israel has not turned into a garrison state, a modern Sparta ruled by specialists in violence whose entire way of life is subordinated to meeting the challenge of an external threat.” (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1985-1995)
- Dowty’s qualification: militarism can exist in a political culture even when civilian supremacy is secured — in Israel army and society share the view that military considerations have priority, and decisions on almost any policy issue are run through the security filter (The Jewish State: A Century Later, lines 1990-2000).
Related pages
The Jewish State: A Century Later, Baruch Kimmerling, Bitachon