Arthur Stein's The Nation at War

This review will discuss Arthur Stein's book, The Nation at War. The discussion will include a brief description of the book and an evaluation of the book's strengths and weaknesses, particularly with regards to Stein's main theses. The discussion of the book will also include evaluations by other reviewers.

First published in 1978, The Nation at War is supposed to evaluate the domestic effects of war upon a participant. Stein's main hypotheses are: 1) while a perceived threat to the nation will increase the overall group cohesion of a nation's population, war on the whole reduces this cohesion, with the level of decrease dependent upon the level of mobilization (pp. 11-14) ; 2) concentration and centralization of government and production increases as mobilization exceeds a threshold defined by the society's prewar production capacity (p. 20); and 3) inequality in society decreases as mobilization requires increased participation by members of society in production and as the government spends more on social services (p. 26). Stein evaluates these three hypotheses by examining statistical evidence concerning the United States during its four major wars during the Twentieth Century: World War I, World War II, Korea, and Vietnam.

Stein actually divides his first hypothesis into two parts. In the first part, he says domestic cohesion actually increases, at least initially, when the population believes that the war constitutes an external threat to the survival of the na

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sing before the end of the Vietnam War; Stein explains this as the result of President Nixon's Vietnamization program, making the South Vietnamese responsible for most of the fighting. Thus, demobilization began at least two years before the United States officially withdrew from the war. Ironically, however, the disunity indicators for the Vietnam War were higher than for any other war during the Twentieth Century, despite the fact that the mobilization for the War was smaller than for any of the other previous wars. Stein's explanation for this is that Americans felt no threat to the country; the relatively large mobilization did not match the perceived need. While the elites may have perceived a need to protect American interests, the mass of people who shouldered the burden of the mobilization did not. In contrast, Stein asserts, without documentation, that the majority of Americans may have felt some sort of threat during the Korean War since it involved the massive invasion of an ally during the beginning of the Cold War (pp. 99-100). While this first hypothesis appeals to common sense, it has a few problems. First, as one reviewer pointed out, Stein relies upon the appraisals of historians to assess the threat to the

Category: History - A