Joseph A. Schumpeter:
For it is always a question, when one speaks of imperialism, of the assertion of an
aggressiveness whose real basis does not lie in the aims followed at the moment but an
aggressiveness in itself. And actually history shows us people and classes who desire
expansion for the sake of expanding, war for the sake of fighting, domination for the sake
of dominating. It values conquest not so much because of the advantages it brings, which
are often more than doubtful, as because it is conquest, success, activity. Although
expansion as self-purpose always needs concrete objects to activate it and support it, its
meaning is not included therein. Hence its tendency toward the infinite unto the
exhaustion of its forces, and its motto: plus ultra. Thus we define: Imperialism
is the object-less disposition of a state to expansion by force without assigned limits.
Our analysis of historical material show:
First, the undoubted fact
that object-less tendencies toward forceful expansion without definite limits of purpose,
nonrational and irrational, purely instinctive inclinations to war and conquest, play a
very great role in the history of humanity. As paradoxical as it sounds, innumerable wars,
perhaps the majority of all wars, have been waged without sufficient reason.
Secondly,
the explanation of the martial, functional need, this will to war, lies in the necessities
of a situation, in which peoples and classes must become fighters or go under, and in the
fact that the physical dispositions and social structure acquired in the past, once
existent and consolidated, maintain themselves and continue to work after they have lost
their meaning and their function of preserving life.
Thirdly, the existence of
supporting elements which ease the continued life of these dispositions ans structures can
be divided into groups. Martial dispositions are especially furthered by the groups ruling
the internal relationships of interests. And with martial dispositions are allied the
influences of all those who individually stand to gain, either economically or socially,
by martial policy. Both groups of motives are in general overgrown by another kind of
foliage which is not merely political propaganda but also individual psychological
motivation.
Imperialism is an atavism. It falls in the great group of those
things that live on from earlier epochs, things which play so great a role in every
concrete situation and which are to be explained not from the conditions of the present
but from the conditions of the past. It is an atavism of social structure and an atavism
of individual emotional habits. Since the necessities which created it have gone forever,
it must--though ever martial development tends to revitalize it--disappear in time.
Modern Imperialism is one of the heirlooms of the absolute monarchical state. The
"inner logic" of capitalism would have never evolved it. Its sources come from
the policy of the princes and the customs of a pre-capitalist milieu. But even export
monopoly is not imperialism and it would never have developed to imperialism in the hands
of the pacific bourgeoisie. This happened only because the war machine, its social
atmosphere, and the martial will were inherited and because a martially-oriented class (i.e.,
the nobility) maintained itself in a ruling position with which of all the varied
interests of the bourgeoisie the martial ones could ally themselves. This alliance keeps
alive fighting instincts and ideas of domination. It led to social relations which perhaps
ultimately are to be explained by relations of production but not by the productive
relations of capitalism alone.
Source:
This text is part of the Internet
Modern History Sourcebook. The Sourcebook is a collection of public domain and
copy-permitted texts for introductory level classes in modern European and World history.
Unless otherwise indicated the specific electronic form of the document is copyright.
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© Paul Halsall, July 1998
