History and Sociology: A genealogical perspective

Abstract

What could we possibly learn from a 70 year correspondence from the years of the Second World War, when the course of subsequent history has already been known? The sociologist is interested in seeing how an event unfolds, how it generates other actions, how the actors are driven by, what their strategies are and how they interact. The aim of the present essay is to identify those sociological concepts, that could lead us to explanations of the geopolitical, regarding the way Germany built up its hegemony, by starting from a genealogical perspective, that is, by identifying the logics of a situation and by understanding the reasoning behind individual decision while taking into consideration the analysis of the discourse. We take into account how enforcing a drastic peace treaty on Germany has lead to high surveillance costs that could not be sustained by the victors because of their path dependence, which ultimately led to the fact of the ‘good’ being sacrificed for the sake of the ‘comfortable’. We understand how military successes represent the test of truth for an ideology and provide the Nazi leaders with their legitimacy, inciting a group phantasm. We discern, in the relations between Germany, Soviet Union and the French-English duo, all the elements of a triad and, implicitly, all elements of power that are generated by a game based on imposing and accepting uncertainties. All of the above bare evidence to the fact that sociological notions and concepts can produce revelations when taken into new domains, such as geopolitics and war.

Keywords

• interdependence
• surveillance costs
• path dependence
• power
• uncertainty