Consideraciones sobre la Historia Militar

Abstract

This article is a reflection about military history —the old, the new, the political, the social, the economic—, about the present state of its relations with social history —in other words, about the present situation of the social approach to military history— and its foreseeable future evolution, and about the existing relationship —and the one which should exist— between military history and the field of Armed Forces and Society, a wider notion than military sociology. The framework of the article is Spain in the 19th and 20th centuries; although this is a flexible framework, since, obviously, the theme I develop exceeds these limits. In the conclusion, I defend the opinion that military history has to be total from at least four points of view: the typological, the chronological, the spacial and the thematic. In like manner, I consider that the concept of Armed Forces and Society lacks a fundamental term: the State.