The All-Volunteer Force and Collingwood in WWI

My intellectual stagnation can be explained partially in terms of my personal life. I've suffered some heart break, and I've become frustrated with my working life.

But there are also genuine intellectual problems that have felt insurmountable.

The biggest problem has been my graduate school personal statement. I don't know how to frame myself to these schools.

On the one hand, I have a very clear idea that could be pursued through military history programs: The problem of democracy and state service in America, and the way that the all-volunteer military has effected the political process in America. More specifically, the question as to how the all-volunteer force has effected democracy. Has it strengthened it or made it weaker? I think the latter. Disentangling the citizenry and the military, I suspect, is dangerous. It means that the government can fight wars without the people's approval, because, at the end of the day, we are not the ones doing the fighting. They have a military that is fully in their control and that is paid to be in their control.

This line of research goes well with many of the current issues in American politics. If we want to know how democracy in America has been corrupted by the role of corporate money, we might want to ask ourselves why we let corporate money into our war making. This decision, I think, may have something to do with our ignorance about the relationship between the participation in war and inclusion in the political process.

On the other hand, I love R.G. Collingwood and want to devote my time thinking about him and his ideas.

So much of my thinking and writing during the last two years has been devoted to Collingwood. He is without a doubt the thinker I feel the most connected to. When I read him I feel like I am genuinely communing with another mind. His thoughts are so excellent, and I feel such a personal connection with him.

I could also conceivably write a military history dissertation on Collingwood. The question would be: What the hell happened to Collingwood in WWI that influenced his philosophy?

Collingwood is very clear in his Autobiography that the war was the event that inspired him to try and create a science of human affairs, a method by which men could learn to deal with problems in the human world as skillfully as the natural sciences had taught him to deal with nature.

This would be a question of war, of politics, of education, of philosophy.

This, then, is what my personal statement needs to explain.

I need to explain how torn I am between these two projects, these two paths.

On the one hand I have a clear historical problem that also has relevance to the present.

On the other I have the philosophical love of my life, and questions about the war that drove his work.

What to do...

It feels so good to be thinking.