Broadsheet

This week I want to try something a little different. Rather than taking apart a particular fantasy military system, I thought I might try to lay out a more general sense of how military systems tend to map on to societies, both because such general historical frameworks are handy for thinking about the past, but also because they make useful rules of thumb for imagining fantastical societies. So essentially here we are asking: how do societies end up with the sort of armies they have?

This is going to take a few posts to get through because there are actually quite a few key components to cover: the why and how of recruitment (both ‘why do these people feel obligated to serve’ and ‘how do you get them into the army’), how a society pay for that (or doesn’t), who leads it and how, and how once formed any army coheres in the field. Finally, we’ll wrap up with some historical ‘archetypes’ to show how these different facets link together with the underlying civilian society and also how that shapes what they look like on the battlefield (including weapons and tactics).

This series is also going to be a bit unusual because in some ways its purpose is to link up and summarize a bunch of other posts. We’ve had a lot of posts and series over the years which examined this or that historical or fictional military and discussed the ways in which their militaries reflected civilian society and I wanted to pull a lot of that together in one place. As a result in this series – more than most – the links are going to be ‘load bearing.’ Likewise a lot of the heavy bibliography here is going to live in the links, although I think for someone looking to get a handle on how pre-modern societies and pre-modern militaries come together, the two key readings I would suggest are P. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World (1989) and then J. Landers, The Field and the Forge: Population, Production and Power in the Pre-Industrial West (2003). Also well worth reading as an overview is Azar Gat, War in Human Civilization (2006).

Now we’re going to restrict ourselves a bit here in that we are going to stick to pre-modern or more correctly pre-industrial armies. The rules change a lot for industrial and post-industrial armies, though by the same token we really don’t have nearly the same range of examples for industrial armies either: we really have a single dominant model for industrial armies that emerged in Europe from 1914 to 1945 and then a bunch of reactions to that model (along with what we might term an industrial ‘transitional’ period from ~1800 to 1914). It is thus hard to build a complete typology, because the industrial sample size is so small.

By contrast, the sample for pre-industrial agrarian armies is really big, so it becomes a bit easier to spot recurring patterns of organization and structure as different societies stumble on to the same solutions for generating force. So that’s what we’re going to do this week: look at some of the patterns, keeping in mind that these are general rules with many complications and exceptions. In the process, we’re going to pull together a lot of the individual discussions of specific systems – historical and fantastical – as examples.

Fans of fictional worlds will have often run into the most egregious examples of the failure to think in these terms. Professional or seemingly professional armies employed by societies that lack the administrative structure to manage them, armies that are too large or too small for their parent societies, ‘guards’ that seem to spring out of holes in the ground rather than organically fit into society anywhere and so on.

But first, as always, recruiting and maintaining large pre-modern armies is expensive! Much like many of those pre-modern armies, this project is supported by devolving the costs of my ruinous book-buying habit on to ~~recruits~~ readers. You can help by spreading the word to new readers and by supporting this project over at Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears or want to hear my more bite-sized musings on history, security affairs and current events, you can follow me on Bluesky (@bretdevereaux.bsky.social). I am also active on Threads (bretdevereaux) and maintain a de minimis presence on Twitter (@bretdevereaux).

Armies and Societies

I have written this maxim a few different ways, but it is worth writing again: no army can help but recreate its civilian social structures on the battlefield.

When analyzing a historical army or creating a fictional one, everything must begin with that idea, that military systems grow out of and reflect their ‘civilian’ societies or – for societies that lack civilians as such – reflect the civilian side of the lives of their members. That means that armies tend to recreate civilian hierarchies, with similar – often identical – lines of status between the two.

So to understand what kind of military our society might come up with, we first need to ask some key questions about the civilian society.

First: is this society agrarian? Which is to say, are they farmers? In most cases, the answer will be yes because with only a handful of exceptions, if they’re not farmers you’re not going to have cities or states and most settings have those. That said, if your society consists of nomads – either hunter-gatherers or pastoral nomads – they aren’t going to have a state (which is a creature of the agrarian world) and so you want to think about non-state forms of military organization, which is going to channel them towards some specific solutions to our problems below.

Next: is this a state? Is military force in this society collected into a single political entity or is it fragmented among many different centers of power? One odd choice I see in a lot of fantasy settings is to have huge, sprawling cities with non-state systems of organization (power informally divided among a bunch of different groups that all wield force), but that’s not a pattern we see often historically. Instead, the more urban a society is, the more likely it is that military power is concentrated into a single political entity – the state. At the same time, non-state polities may lack a single political entity with a monopoly on the use of force, but that doesn’t mean they lack a military system, it just means that power is fragmented in that system.

Third: what kind of aristocracy does this society have? Every society has a socio-economic elite, but there are different kinds. Does aristocratic wealth mostly flow upwards from large landholdings or flow downwards from employment in a royal bureaucracy (the former is much more common)? Likewise, to what degree does this society have a bureaucracy as such and how much power does it wield? It can be easy to assume modern bureaucratic administrative structures, but these are rare in pre-modern societies: power is often wielded by local grandees than by employed representatives of the state and if the power is wielded by those grandees, the military system is likely to run through them to some extent as well as well.

Your aristocrats are going to assume that – since they lead society in peace – they lead society in war, but how they do so depends on their self-conception. Here, I distinguish sometimes between military aristocrats – aristocracies who understand their primary purpose is warfare generally (often leadership), as distinct from religious or bureaucracy aristocracies that might be of a non-military character – and warrior aristocrats, who understand their primary purpose in society as personally fighting in a specific way (usually but not always mounted).

Note that while warrior aristocrats’ legitimacy in claiming aristocratic status comes from their personal practice of violence, the source of their power is almost invariably wealth from large landholdings: they’re not aristocrats because they’re good at fighting. Instead, they’re aristocrats because they’re rich and then to justify the wealth and power they wield, they practice a certain form of direct, personal kind of warfare. A guy who is really good at fighting but is poor and without title is not a knight; a guy who has wealth and title but is terrible at fighting is a bad knight, but a knight nonetheless. Warrior-elites are thus elites-who-are-warriors, not necessarily warriors-who-are-elite-at-war, though since their social class places a lot of emphasis at being good at fighting, they’re often very good at fighting (in a specific way, again, usually but not always mounted).

Fourth: how do the regular farmers (who are 90+% of the population) connect to the aristocracy? Are they mostly free-holders who own their own land, but are economically dependent on the Big Man? Or does the local Big Man – that is, the aristocrat who is nearest them – own their land itself? Or does the king (or state, in some other form; it might be a temple!) own their land, in which case the aristocrat they engage with is an administrator rather than a land-owner?

For the aristocracy to exist (and for the state to exist, if it does), it has to be siphoning agricultural production from these smaller farmers, so consider how that happens as well. Aristocrats collect rents on the lands they own or control. The state may collect taxes, but in many pre-modern states, royal revenues are dominated by the lands the king owns rather than taxes. Naturally, if taxes are being collected, that implies some kind of bureaucracy collecting them, which non-state societies may not have and which may be underdeveloped in weak-state societies.

What we’re trying to get with all of these questions is thinking about how the peasantry and the aristocracy relate to each other and how that relationship is understood and justified. Those questions are important because civil society comes first – armies are built out of existing subsistence systems and social structures, not usually the other way around – and because the structure of a society limits the possible military systems it can house.

Recruitment Principles

Once we have a sense of our civilian society, the next thing we need to think about is how do we get recruits?

Landers (op. cit.) breaks down recruitment systems based on the principle they function on, distinguishing between general compulsion (conscription by force, levies), the entitlement principle (service as the flip-side of the coin for some set of rights or status), the vocational principle (standing armies or military aristocracies that served because that was their role in society) or devolution (devolve the problem downward onto vassals, communities or households). That’s a useful framework, but I want to shift it around somewhat for our purposes, because I want to separate clearly why the recruits fight from how you get them (and because I think ‘general compulsion’ is actually not the most useful category here).

So we can start with what I am going to call the recruitment principle (as distinct from the recruitment method), which is the why of your recruitment: why do these fellows feel like they must or ought to serve. A lot of historical fiction or fantasy settings fail to address this particular question or else answer it with a very crude ‘because they have to’ (that is, compulsion) but that’s not usually how this works. After all, this society is about to give these fellows weapons, so without some broader social structure that encourages or constrains them to remind at the standard, there is very little preventing them from deserting or revolting. Compulsion can get me into the ranks, but it struggles to keep them there.

The first place most modern folks’ mind goes, of course, is to pattern this task off of their own jobs and so to assume that these fellows are under arms because they are paid to be, which I am going to term the employment principle (separate from the vocational principle). We may sum it up with, “recruits show up purely as an economic transaction: service for money” – it’s a job. These may be foreign troops (in which case they’re mercenaries) or domestic troops, but the key thing here is that the bond which holds them to the army is monetary: they get paid.

The problem is this is not actually the most common recruitment principle. Indeed, while many armies may employ mercenaries as auxiliary troops or maintain some small standing employment-based component (like non-noble professional retainers, for instance), it is fairly rare for pre-modern armies to function purely ‘as a job.’ The exceptions are professional armies, but professional armies are the exception, not the rule: the later Han dynasty, the Roman Empire (but not the Republic) and early modern Europe feature professional armies, but otherwise these are uncommon. Crucially – and we’ll come back to this as we move along – professional armies require a strong state with a capable bureaucracy and extensive revenues, because the state is taking on the whole administrative and financial burden of maintaining the army. Early modern European states famously struggled horribly under those burdens, while the Roman Army of the imperial period consumed well over half of the state’s budget.

Note that warriors and soldiers recruited by other principles might also get paid (although often not as much), the difference is that there is some other social connection that is underlying their recruitment.

Instead, it is more common that the core of military forces in pre-modern societies arise out of three basic sets of principles (two of which I am borrowing from Landers): the entitlement principle, the vocational principle and what I am going to call the clientage principle. All three share an element in that what ties an individual to recruitment is who they are which in pre-modern societies that are generally extremely low social-mobility societies, is almost invariably a product of what family they were born into.

In entitlement principle recruiting, liability for military service is an expectation that corresponds to a set of social rights and privileges, most often citizenship. Note that we’re not talking about citizenship as a reward for service, but rather service as a requirement of citizens. Naturally, for an entitlement system like this to really function, there needs to be some socially valuable position, with connected rights and privileges, available for common folk (we’ll talk about aristocrats in a second). That tends to make entitlement principle service a creature of smaller citizenship-based communities: A Greek polis recruiting hoplites, the Roman Republic recruiting its legions, or medieval town and commune governments establishing a service requirements amongst the townfolk (the burghers), whose citizenship in the town marks them apart from the regular peasantry.

Via the British Museum (1837,0609.74), an Attic kylix (c. 500BC) showing a hoplite donning his armor (in this case for a race, the hoplitodromia, a race in hoplite armor). Note that these young men **have their own equipment** they are using here, because purchasing it was an expected part of being a well-to-do citizen.

The great advantage of entitlement principle systems is that, because social status and military service are tightly interconnected, getting soldiers to muster and keeping them in the ranks is relatively easier. Think about a Roman citizen soldier in the Middle Republic: if he deserts, where does he even desert to – his hometown where everyone knows he’s supposed to be with the army and where he and his family’s entire social identity is tied up with his liability for military service? The system creates really strong social pressures that make this easier.

The limitation of such systems is that they require that entitlement in the first place and that entitlement almost always comes with the expectation of a political voice through some kind of voting or communal consensus decision-making. That may not sound like a tradeoff to you, but it certainly is to the elites of this society: to recruit on this basis they have to cede power to the commons to some degree in order to create the political entitlement worth fighting for. In practice, it should be noted, the systems don’t generally seem to form that way: they are not grants from the aristocracy to the commons (‘fight for me and I’ll let you vote!’) but rather concessions wrested from the aristocracy by the commons through collective action (‘let us vote or we won’t fight!’), which then acquire the heavy reinforcement of becoming the traditional rights and privileges of the citizenry.

Via Wikipedia, *Banquet of Members of Amsterdam’s Crossbow Civic Guard* (1533) by Cornelis Anthonisz, showing an Amsterdam crossbow guild. These guilds were, in effect, a voluntary civic militia which supported the town government and provided a defensive military presence. They too are an **entitlement** system: the *Schuttersgilde* (‘schooter’s guild’), composed of well-off burghers, were the same sorts of men who ran the town government and indeed guild membership was often a necessary stepping stone to political office. You could thus get these men to defend the town government **because they were the town government**, in a corporate sense.
For more on these voluntary shooter’s guilds, see L. Crombie, *Archery and Crossbow Guilds in Medieval Flanders, 1300-1500* (2016).
As an aside, this is one case where the fantasy-style ‘large city with fragmented internal power structures’ that one sees frequently in high fantasy RPGs (thinking places like Baldur’s Gate or Defiance Bay), though notably in the low countries, these guilds were subject to a higher political authority, be it a town government or a noble.

The next option is what we can call (following Landers) the vocational principle, which also connects service to who you are, but rather than connecting it to your place in a political order, it connects service to a place in the broader social order: the vocational principle is one in which a certain class of people fight because they are the warrior class, typically because you were born into the warrior class.

The vocational principle can come in two forms. First, in many non-agrarian, (hunter-gatherer or pastoral nomads (like Steppe nomads)), or relatively less complex ‘horticultural‘ societies, it is often the case that the entire free adult male population is part of the ‘warrior class.’ These are, after all, generally very small clan- or tribal-based societies with a lot less social stratification so ‘everybody’ (that is, all free adult males) fights. For men, participating in communal warfare is a core component to belonging to the tribe, camp, clan or village.

Via Wikipedia, warriors of the Dani people from the central highlands of western Papua New Guinea. At least until large-scale warfare among the Dani was largely discontinued in the late 1960s, this was the sort of early agricultural society in which functionally all adult males were warriors. Towards the end, we’re going to come back to the kind of ‘first system warfare’ these societies tend to engage in, because it is a mistake to assume that the somewhat ritualistic set-piece battles are the whole of it.

The mistake one sees in a lot of speculative fiction (and also certain reactionary political movements) is assuming that this sort of ‘everyone is a warrior’ social structure can be transplanted to more complex societies with greater degrees of specialization. The reductio ad absurdum of this are some portrayals of Star Trek’s Klingons: an entire post-industrial multi-planet empire that can design starships (and so must be hyper-specialized) but where also somehow everyone is a warrior trained in close-combat weapons. Real societies do not train their starship designers (or their blacksmiths) to also be master swordsmen because that isn’t worth anyone‘s time.¹ But they pretty clearly can’t: the moment a society begins specializing its labor (required to achieve high population densities), ‘fighting’ becomes to one degree or another a specialized role too.

The thing is, as we’ve discussed, while non-specialized ‘all warrior’ societies can sometimes overwhelm highly specialized agrarian societies by and large since the advent of farming the most resource-rich parts of the world have been dominated by complex, stratified and specialized agrarian societies, because of their higher population densities – pre-modern agrarian societies can get into the 30-70 people per square mile range, compared to something like 0.5 person per square mile for hunter-gatherers outside of very resource rich zones and something like around 2-5 per square mile for nomadic pastoralists. It usually doesn’t matter if everyone in your tribe is trained to be a warrior if those farmers over there can triple your numbers by mobilizing just 10% of their peasants. There are exceptions, of course, but they’re rare.

Instead in more specialized societies we see the second form of the vocational principle: a warrior class in which a distinct specialized class in society are warriors (or military leaders), usually by birth (because, again, these are low social mobility societies). In essence, this is a case where in the more complex society, just as ‘farmer’ and ‘blacksmith’ and so on have become both specialized jobs and also basically hereditary classes (because who is picking ‘subsistence farmer’ if ‘pampered noble’ is an option?), ‘warrior’ becomes just one more specialist social class, defined largely by heredity.

Via WIkipedia, a detail of the Bayeux Tapestry depicting William of Normandy’s army departing for England prior to the Battle of Hastings (1066). Note that we have our vocational warrior aristocrats on horseback with their retainers following carrying their weapons and supplies. **These two groups are not recruited the same way, nor do they fight for the same reasons** – a single army may use (and indeed, for pre-modern armies, usually does!) multiple recruitment principles for different troops.

That can take a number of forms, the most common of which is the military aristocracy. The aristocracy – or some part of it (there may be a parallel civic or religious aristocracy) – has as its justification for its existence that it is the part of society that fights or at least that specializes in warfare. These fellows are aristocrats, to be clear, because they’re rich, not because the fight well – but to be a member of the aristocratic class in good standing with the disproportionate access to prestige and resources that implies also requires being a military specialist and so they develop those skills and are available for privileged military positions (like cavalry or command). We’ll get into, in a later part of this series, the differences between warrior aristocracies and what I’m going to call officer aristocracies (does the noble primarily fight or lead?).

That said, this category also includes some other ways of structuring a military vocation for a society. One we’ve discussed only a little bit are military slaves (like the Mamluks)- a low status class of vocational warriors, though these fellows have a habit of not remaining low-status or slaves for very long, because – of course – they have weapons.

Alternately, conquering empires might seek to create a vocational military class by putting soldiers on plots of land (complete with laborers) in the expectation that they and their children will remain liable for an elite kind of military service. These we call military settlers and they are usually a feature of a regime moving in – societies usually do not impose military settlers on themselves. The ‘Macedonians’ in Hellenistic kingdoms make for a good example of this, as do Arab garrison cities in the Rashidun Caliphate. For ‘everyone is a warrior’ societies that do end up overrunning larger, more complex agrarian societies, this is often what happens: the tribal ethnic group becomes a military aristocracy settled as overlords over the resource rich land of the conquered.

Finally, we have clientage principle recruitment, where the recruiting principle is that the men being pulled into the ranks are – in their civilian society – dependents of the fellows recruiting them. In this case military service is part of the obligations of the dependent towards their superior. That may seem strange in some cases – as a condition of giving the local Big Man a chunk of your food, you also sometimes have to fight for him? – but its important to remember that these societies do not see the exchange that way. Instead, they’d frame it that, as a condition of having the Big Man’s protection and being able to farm his land, you give him a chunk of the produce and are also expected to fight for him. It’s important to remember that these principles for recruitment are not laws about the physical universe, but fundamentally questions of psychology and culture: if the entire culture agrees that the land belongs to the lord or the king or the temple and you are paying (in a way) for the privilege of farming it, then that is the reality for all concerned.

Dependents here can come in a few varieties. The highest status such dependents might be retainers, men maintained in an aristocrats household as full time ‘muscle.’ While these fellows might be paid mercenaries, in a lot of societies they’re not getting paid in cash but rather in status and a living: they get to live as part of the Big Man’s household, they get their food and other necessities and they’re a more important person than the peasantry. Crucially, retainers of this sort are not ‘free agents’ to the highest bidder, but often tightly bound by formal ties (clientage, hospitality, familial bonds, homage and so on) to a specific aristocrat.

Below that, a Big Man might expect that as part of the unequal reciprocal exchange of clientage, his clients – the poor farmers around him – might owe him support which would include following his lead in warfare. At the same time, as we’ll see, we can flip this sort of thinking around and say that for the community, the Big Man forms a natural leader around which the community, if it is under threat, can rally (and the flipside of that, the Big Man is probably a vocational warrior, as above). Finally, the dependents here might be some form of non-free persons – not usually slaves, but rather tenants or serfs. Often the package of obligations these folks owed their overlord included corvée labor of some sort, so military service as such an obligation makes some sense.

We can see these sorts of systems at work with the Carolingian general and select levies or the Anglo-Saxon fyrd. In both the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon system, there was a ‘general levy’ of all free men called up as a local defense militia, but households were also brigaded together and required collectively to furnish a man for the select levy to provide a standing or expeditionary force. It is striking how these systems required the active participation of local magnates in order to act as focal points for organization and leadership. As a result, these systems tend to be fundamentally local: while the king has the authority to call up a whole bunch of regional select-levies or fyrds to make up a field army, in practice these are local units, not a ‘national’ conscription system. Notably, Charlemagne’s effort to impose a royal bureaucracy on the Carolingian levy using royal officials (the missi, ‘those having been sent [by the king]’) emerges as a kind of last-gasp effort to keep this system running as it comes apart and never quite works as a centralized system.

That said, this sort of system could be centralized and extended to form a ‘national’ conscription system, with the example that springs to mind being the early Han dynasty (202BC-220AD) military system in China, which emerged out of the mass conscription systems of the Warring States period, where very large armies were raised for specific campaigns against peer competitor states. Notably, as the Han dynasty’s primary security challenges lay with holding frontiers (the Qin dynasty having already removed all of the peer competitors before being replaced by the Han), the Han system steadily transformed into a professional standing army composed of a mix of paid professionals and military settlers. That said – and we’ll come right back to this next week – mass conscription requires record-keeping, bureaucracy and state centralization that relatively few pre-modern polities have. Still it certainly is possible to have a society with at least the notion that the common peasant is simply obligated to perform some amount of military service.

Putting Society and Principle Together

So to recap, we can list our recruitment principles with a very rough sense of how common they are and where:

The Employment Principle (because they get paid): frequently used to supplement armies that have a core recruited another way but only rarely the main recruitment principle. Where it is used as such (professional armies), it requires a strong state with a lot of revenue and state capacity. Examples: Imperial Rome, the later Han Dynasty, some early modern European armies.
The Entitlement Principle (because it is the converse of some set of rights these fellows have): common for city-states or other sorts of republics, but requires having a legal/political status like citizenship which is valuable enough to fight for. Troops recruited on this principle can be expected to basically recruit and arm themselves in many cases, but they’re ‘paid’ in political rights as much as cash. Examples: The Roman Republic, Greek polis-armies, medieval town militias.
The Vocational Principle (because it is their social role/class):
- All-Warrior Society (every free adult male is a warrior): common in largely non-specialized societies – hunter-gatherers, nomadic pastoralists, very early agriculture. Troops recruited on this basis arm, organize and largely recruit themselves, but these societies tend to be small, low population density and comparatively poor. Examples: Plains Native Americans, Steppe nomads, hunter-gatherer societies.
- Warrior Class or Officer Class (specialized society with a dedicated fighting or military-leadership class): extremely common among complex agrarian societies, a military aristocracy of some sort is practically the default mode of leadership in such societies, but note that warrior-aristocrats and officer-aristocrats may have very different expectations of what that means. Often the fellows provide the leadership for otherwise employment-, entitlement- or clientage-based armies or alternately a core of specialist warriors around which such levies are grafted. Examples: Almost too numerous to provide – non-state Gallic aristocrats, medieval European knights and nobility, the Roman Senate (an ‘officer class’ example!), and so on.
- Military Settlers (an imposed military aristocracy of fighters given land in exchange for future service): a fairly common solution for consolidating conquest (especially for societies which simply lack the bureaucratic infrastructure for direct governance), creating a new upper-stratum of military-aristocrats that are often ethnically distinct from the ruled. Examples: Macedonian military-settlers after Alexander’s conquests; the garrison-cities of the Rashidun Caliphate.
- Military Slaves (a subordinate class of specialist warriors): a relatively uncommon and historically unstable system, but hardly an unknown one, heavily dependent on the availability of an ethnically distinct class of warriors available to be enslaved. Examples: Mamluks, Janissaries.
  - We might also put Prisoner Armies (recruitment as punishment for a crime) in this category. These tend to be somewhat more stable, but their military performance is not always stellar. Example: the armies of the Song Dynasty.²
The Clientage Principle (because it is an obligation they have towards social superiors)
- Retainers and Clientage (little men have specific ties of loyalty to Big Men who can call them to arms): as far as I can tell, the primary way complex non-state societies raise military force. Because it relies on personal ties, it tends to stay fragmented. Examples: non-state Gaul and Spain, but also vassalage-based medieval polities.
- Universal Military Service (little men owe military service to their lord, king or the state): common although rarely as universal or centralized as the name implies. Often takes the form of regional militias agglomerated into a larger army (examples: Carolingian select-levy, the Anglo-Saxon fyrd), but there are rare examples of truly mass conscription systems, particularly in China (examples: Warring States period, Qin Dynasty, early Han Dynasty).

What I hope emerges from this quick comparison is how sensitive these principles are to the structure of the underlying society: for most societies, the options whittle down to just a handful almost immediately. A fragmented state with a weak central bureaucracy will almost inevitably need to reply on military aristocrats, their retainers and clients because it hasn’t the revenues or the political structure for anything else, for instance. A society with specialized economic roles isn’t going to be able to set up as an ‘all warrior’ society and a society without specialized economic roles isn’t going to be able to use any other system. A society without a tradition of universal military service is going to have a hard time conscripting its peasantry and a society without a citizenship-like legal/political status is going to have a hard time recruiting on an entitlement basis. Likewise, if a society lacks a large warrior-aristocrat class, then it lacks a large warrior-aristocrat class and cannot recruit on that basis.

Next week, we’ll look at putting these principles into action, thinking about how armies are raised and paid for.

For many years, I was a big proponent of the idea that increased market power was harming the U.S. economy in various ways. In the 2010s, in the economics world, circumstantial evidence began piling up that implicated increased industrial concentration as the culprit in a variety of recent negative trends. Here’s what I wrote in 2017, after reading a bunch of that evidence:

[B]asically I see the case of the Market Power Story - or any big economic story like this - as detective work. We’re collecting circumstantial evidence, and while no piece of evidence is a smoking gun, each adds to the overall picture. IF the economy were being throttled by increased market power, we’d expect to see:
1. Increased market concentration (Check! See Autor et al.)
2. Increased markups (Check! See De Loecker and Eeckhout)
3. Increased profits (Check! See Barkai)
4. Decreased investment (Check! See Gutierrez and Philippon)
5. Decreased wages in concentrated markets (Check! See Azar et al.)
6. Increased prices following mergers (Maybe! See Blonigen and Pierce)
7. Weakened antitrust enforcement (Check! See Kwoka)
8. Decreased output (Maybe not? See Ganapati)
So, as I see it, the evidence is piling up from a number of sides here.

Some of this is micro evidence, demonstrating some of the pieces of the causal chain that some economists think leads from lax antitrust to bad economic outcomes. The Azar et al. (2017) paper shows that labor market concentration hurts wages. The Blonigen and Pierce (2016) paper shows that mergers raise prices.

The rest is macro evidence and macro theory. Economists see some trend in the economy — a lower labor share of national income, or decreased business investment, or fewer new companies being formed — and they think about whether something like monopoly power could explain those trends.

Just because a single story can explain the trends, of course, doesn’t mean it does. Ultimately you need a whole lot of micro evidence — not just a few papers — to prove each link in the chain of causality from weak antitrust enforcement to higher prices, lower output, lower wages, and so on. But in this case, the market power explanation was very tantalizing, because it had the power to explain so many of 21st century America’s dysfunctions at the same time.

This is why at Bloomberg, I wrote consistently in support of the idea that market power was making the American economy both less efficient and more unequal, and that stronger antitrust enforcement was a good solution to try. (However, I did note that antitrust wasn’t guaranteed to be a remedy, and that Big Tech companies were a bad target for antitrust enforcement.)

When Biden was elected, I was optimistic. His appointment of people like Lina Khan showed that antitrust was finally being taken seriously in Democratic Party circles. Finally, it seemed, the growing clamor of economists was going to result in some real efforts at reform:

In that post, I revisited some of the important recent papers about market power, and I also noted that prominent economists were increasingly putting their reputations on the line by writing popular books advancing the thesis that market power was hurting our economy:

[Economists] have also raised the alarm about corporate power in other forums — Thomas Philippon’s book The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets, John Kwoka’s book Mergers, Merger Control, and Remedies and his 2017 report on mergers, and various speeches sounding the alarm at Federal Reserve conferences. (Update: I was remiss in not mentioning Jason Furman’s briefs on market power when he was chair of the Council of Economic Advisers under Obama! They were very influential. I also neglected the interesting and often-overlooked role of sports economists, who have been complaining about market power for quite a while!)

I concluded that the Biden administration’s shift toward antitrust was a healthy example of ideas making their way from academic economics to the halls of power:

Economists have been suspicious of excess profits ever since Adam Smith complained about “the bad effects of high profits” and declared that “people of the same trade seldom meet together…but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” The idea that competition should reduce profits to a low level in a well-functioning economy is Econ 101, as is the theory of monopoly. Biden’s tweet about capitalism and competition might sound like bold populist rhetoric, but it also could have come right out of an econ textbook…
What this means is that economists are included in the vanguard of this revolt against American corporate power…Economists make unlikely crusaders, but here they are, taking on the biggest companies in the country.

I wasn’t always happy with the Biden administration’s antitrust actions — the government lost most of its cases against Big Tech, and the vendetta against Meta seemed misplaced. But overall, a lot of action seemed to be happening in the prosaic, boring sectors of the economy where market power has probably been eroding the foundations of capitalism for years. In meat processing (multiple times), in publishing, in insurance brokering, in pharma, in medical care provision, and so on, Biden’s FTC and DOJ notched up real wins — not enough to reverse the U.S. economy’s trend toward greater concentration, but possibly enough to create a “chilling effect” that would restrain the trend toward megacorporations-in-everything.

And yet over the last couple of years, I’ve had increasingly serious doubts about the antimonopoly movement. I’m still concerned about corporate power itself — in fact, in many ways, I’m more concerned than I was a decade ago, because of the advent of AI and the unprecedented corruption of the Trump administration. But I’m increasingly unenthusiastic about the ability of the antimonopoly movement, as it currently exists in the Democratic Party, to make useful headway in curbing or balancing corporate power.

Antimonopoly is simply too important to leave to the antimonopolists.

Antimonopoly should be a tool, not an obsession

Speaking about Milton Friedman, Robert Solow once quipped: “Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper.” I am starting to feel that way about the antimonopoly folks.

Jonathan Chait has a long and very damning article about the antimonopoly movement, focusing on its crusading founder, the former journalist Barry C. Lynn. Until I read Chait’s article, I had never even heard of Lynn; this demonstrates that I’m very much out of the loop when it comes to D.C. policymaking and thought leadership, but it also shows how Lynn has escaped scrutiny compared to more popular figures like Lina Khan, Elizabeth Warren, and Matt Stoller.

In any case, from Chait’s description of Lynn, he is not the type of person whose movement I would want to follow. First of all, he seems monomaniacally obsessed with monopoly power:

“It is vital to understand,” Lynn wrote in his 2020 book, Liberty from All Masters, “that monopoly is not one of many economics problems but rather the political economic problem of our time,” causing “just about every ill in our society today.”
When he says that he holds corporate consolidation responsible for just about every problem, he means it. A list of social ills Lynn has attributed to monopolists includes not just the cost of goods and services but also: “The vast and growing inequality of wealth, political power, and control. The rise of the radical right. The surge in racism and homophobia. The attacks on reproductive choice and marriage. The collapse of our news media.”…
Anti-monopolization, Lynn argues, is “an all-encompassing framework for seeing and shaping power in every corner of our democratic republic.”…Lynn sees American history as a struggle against monopolization…A profound crisis must have profound causes, and Lynn was offering a totalistic account of social decay.

This monomania is obviously just silly. A lot of these links are just incredibly tenuous, requiring heroic leaps of assumptions about society, politics, culture, and economics. If you want to say that corporate concentration is responsible for racism, for example, you have to believe that:

racism has risen recently (highly doubtful)
the rise in racism, if it exists, is caused by economic factors (doubtful)
those economic factors are primarily — not just slightly — due to corporate concentration (highly doubtful)

Even the economics papers that find measurable effects of corporate concentration on low wages, for example, find that the effect differs enormously by geographic location. If monopsony power is responsible for low wages, then minimum wages should increase employment rather than decreasing it; in some areas, this does seem to happen, while in other areas minimum wages decrease employment, consistent with a greater amount of competition in the latter areas.

Furthermore, several credible research teams — Rossi-Hansberg et al. (2021), Rinz (2022), Autor et al. (2023) and others — have found that employer concentration has actually decreased in local markets in recent decades. This means that not just racism, but any social ill that Barry C. Lynn and his followers want to ascribe to labor monopsony, should have decreased over that period.

Another example is inflation. Antimonopoly crusaders like Elizabeth Warren were quick to blame corporate greed for inflation in 2021-22. There was extremely little data to back this up. Here’s what I wrote at the time:

Alvarez et al. (2025) found that markups — i.e., the amount that companies charge for things above and beyond what those things cost to produce — stayed constant during the post-pandemic inflation, meaning that companies weren’t actually able to use the inflation to gouge consumers…Leduc et al. (2024) and Bouras et al. (2023) found the same. And Jose Azar found that industries with higher markups — implying more market power — actually passed on less of their costs to consumers during the post-pandemic inflation…Greedflation, in other words, is not a real thing.

These are just two examples of the shaky chain of reasoning and evidence that backs up expansive claims like Lynn’s. There are many more, if you want to go looking for them. More sober antitrust types absolutely know that monopoly power is not a Grand Theory of Everything Bad in America. From Chait’s article:

Diana Moss of the Progressive Policy Institute [and] a former head of the American Antitrust Institute…told me the neo-Brandeisians’ error is to view antitrust policy “not as law enforcement but as a broad policy tool for fixing a lot of problems—economic, political, and social.” Antitrust enforcement isn’t that powerful, for the simple reason that corporate concentration is not the root cause of every problem.

This is good. But this reasonable, moderate perspective doesn’t seem to be what’s animating the modern antimonopoly movement. Chait details a telling exchange between Ezra Klein and Zephyr Teachout:

Last year, the New York Times columnist Ezra Klein asked Teachout on his podcast if she could think of any issues that cannot be solved by smashing corporate concentration. At first she ventured, “I don’t think that anti-monopoly can solve significant problems of racism in this country,” but quickly retracted even this concession. “Having said that,” she continued, “there’s a reason that Frederick Douglass and [W. E. B.] Du Bois were so concerned about monopoly power.”

Admittedly, these are words, and not actions. Chait may have also cherry-picked them from among antimonopoly movement leaders’ more reasonable statements, in order to make his point.

But when you look at the movement’s actual actions, you can clearly see the obsessive, all-encompassing nature of the belief system. For example, consider the movement’s choice of targets. These include some industries with high profit margins, but also some with very low margins. These include grocery stores, airlines, and health insurers. Grocery stores and health insurers both consistently have much lower profit margins than American corporations in general, often hovering near the zero mark. Airlines are a cyclical industry that sometimes sees some very profitable years, but generally hovers below the average:

Sources: NAIC, FMI/Food Industry Association, BEA/FRED, BLS/FRED via GPT-5.5

The causal chain that runs from weak antitrust to all sorts of social harms necessarily runs through profits. If companies aren’t making profit, they aren’t controlling the market. Yet Elizabeth Warren blamed high food prices on grocery stores’ market power during the post-pandemic inflation, despite the fact that these stores make very little profit, and their margins actually declined as inflation accelerated. You could see that exact same misplaced focus in Lina Khan’s blockage of the Kroger/Albertsons merger.

As for airlines, the Biden administration’s blockage of the Spirit/JetBlue merger resulted in Spirit Airlines simply going out of business entirely. Corporate concentration was achieved after all — but it was achieved with disorder, corporate failure, and 17,000 unemployed workers rather than with an orderly merger that would have preserved some of Spirit’s routes and workers. Not exactly a resounding success for the antimonopoly movement — but that’s what happens when you try to use antitrust tools against companies in low-margin industries.

Then there’s the case of housing. The antimonopoly people have eagerly embraced the idea that corporate landlords buying up rental properties and jacking up the price is a major cause of high rent. Democrats and Republicans have both embraced this piece of “slopulism”, despite the fact that the percent of homes owned by corporate landlords is tiny and there’s some evidence showing that corporate landlords tend to charge lower rents. Supply constraints — failure to build more housing — is actually the reason for high rents, so the antimonopoly movement is distracting us from solving the real problem.

The movement’s obsessive monomania — its conviction that corporate concentration is the root of all of America’s problems — is causing it to pick the wrong targets and hurt workers. That doesn’t mean bigger corporations are better, or that there aren’t industries where we need stronger antitrust. But the antimonopolists’ totalizing obsession causes them to ignore the evidence of where and when their ideas are needed, because they assume that their ideas are always the top priority in every situation and should be applied in a blanket way to any target they choose.

The science on monopoly power isn’t settled

Richard Feynman once said of science that “Of all its many values, the greatest must be the freedom to doubt.” Now you can respond that economics and politics aren’t “science”, but that makes the freedom to doubt even more important; the less conclusively that any one data set can answer your questions, the more important it is to look at a wide variety of data sets and consider a variety of explanations and theories.

From Jonathan Chait’s description of Barry C. Lynn, he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy who’s inclined to look at evidence that goes against his ideas:

[Lynn] believes that “most prices are entirely arbitrary and political in nature.”…More expansively, Lynn believes that “market forces”—which he places in scare quotes—do not exist. His indictment of economics is neither mild nor limited. He has compared the discipline to Lysenkoism, a pseudo-scientific fad under Stalin. “The ‘science’ of economics today … ,” he wrote in his 2011 book, Cornered, “has become a form of madness, a dream of human imagination we mistake for a pattern of the world.”

Lina Khan has also written that “There are no such things as market ‘forces’.” Statements like this certainly don’t do much to refute Chait’s allegation that the antimonopoly belief system “is more like a religion than an economic theory”.

First of all, as an aside, we should consider what it would mean for market forces not to exist and prices to be determined by politics. It would mean that grocery stores carefully calculate exactly how much they can charge for a cucumber or a package of napkins without Senators giving them an angry call or the working class rioting, or something like that. That’s kind of preposterous. It would also mean that small businesses would charge lower prices, because they’re less politically powerful than big businesses. But in fact, it’s big businesses that charge lower prices for the same goods. So the “prices are determined by politics” idea is just abjectly ridiculous, except maybe in a few special cases or where explicit regulation is involved.

But more to the point: Market forces obviously do exist. When you include sales taxes on price tags — reminding people that prices are higher than they had thought — they buy less, proving that demand curves exist and slope downward. When there is bad weather at sea, the price of fish goes up. When you charge electricity customers more, they use less electricity.

And so on. Market forces are not easy to observe in all cases, and they’re not always the most important determinant of prices. But their existence has been proven so thoroughly, by so much careful empirical observation, that to deny their existence requires a deep level of mysticism and blind faith.

If you’re not the kind of person to believe in empirical economics, then of course you’re not going to care if economists find evidence against your worldview. But once we move out of the realm of willful faith-based belief and into the real world of evidence and observation, we find that the science on monopoly power is far from settled.

First of all, there is the evidence I cited before about decreasing concentration in local labor markets (even as concentration increases nationwide). The monopsony wage penalty might be very high, but it was probably even higher in the past; this leaves room for antitrust action to help workers, but it should make us question whether monopoly power is at the root of slow wage growth.

But more fundamentally, the entire story about creeping market power being responsible for a bunch of different ills in the modern American economy is under serious dispute.

For example, the whole story about monopoly power increasing in recent decades relies on the idea that price markups have increased — if companies can’t charge higher prices relative to their costs, they must not be very powerful. Economists like De Loecker and Eeckhout find that markups have increased a lot, but there are plenty of economists who disagree with that finding! There are tons of measurement issues involved in trying to estimate markups across the whole economy. Some economists claim that essentially the entire increase in markups is due to the finance sector.

There are plenty of other pieces of the monopoly power story that are also disputed. Shapiro and Yurukoglu (2024) summarize a bunch of these. It’s hard to define what each “market” is over time, because the boundaries of the categories are arbitrary, and the nature of products themselves keeps changing. It’s hard to choose the region over which local concentration should be measured (when is one store in the same “market” as another?). Companies’ costs are hard to measure for many reasons — for example, companies sell lots of different things, and researchers don’t necessarily have the data to determine which costs are for which products. Profits are hard to measure because the cost of risk is hard to assess. And so on. In general, choosing a different set of assumptions can get you wildly different results regarding how much monopoly power has actually risen in America.

The point here is not that De Loecker and Eeckhout, or the other economists who concluded in the 2010s that monopoly power is a big deal, were wrong. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t. Nor should you conclude that economics is just a game of “he said, she said” where everyone contradicts each other and nobody really knows anything. The correct takeaway here is that these questions are very subtle and difficult, and the most careful, serious researchers will take a long time to hash out the correct answer. In the meantime, we must live with uncertainty.

A big problem with the antimonopoly crusaders is that they don’t just refuse to live with uncertainty — they insist that you don’t live with uncertainty either. If you say “Hey dudes, maybe corporate landlords actually lower rents”, they won’t debate the finer points of causal estimation with you — they’ll simply label you as a corporate shill and dismiss you.

Don’t let the factionalists win

It’s this last bit — the anathematization of anyone who disagrees with them — that really warns me away from the antimonopoly movement. Chait describes in his article how anyone who tries to buck the antimonopoly people gets accused of being a paid corporate hack:

“We’ve largely won the intellectual debate,” [Lynn] told me matter-of-factly, allowing that the only remaining liberals who disagree with him are “those who are paid to do so.”…
When Biden considered appointing Susan Davies, a former deputy White House counsel under President Obama, to the Justice Department’s top antitrust post, a slew of articles savaged her as a corporate shill. Her candidacy died. [emphasis mine]

This tactic was clearly on display when the antimonopoly people leapt to savage Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s book Abundance. Matt Stoller wrote a post entitled “An Abundance of Sleaze: How a Beltway Brain Trust Sells Oligarchy to Liberals”. Dylan Gyauch-Lewis1 called the Abundance movement “The new centrist push to regain control of the Democratic Party, with corporate money”. Barry C. Lynn said that Abundance wants “to cozy up to good oligarchs, so they can shelter us until the MAGA storm blows over.”

First of all, claiming that anyone who disagrees with your ideas must be on the payroll of nefarious forces is blatant intellectual dishonesty. It also signals how weak your argument is if you have to accuse every critic of being a bad actor.

But beyond that, the antimonopoly crusaders’ reaction to Abundance shows how utterly factionalist they are. They could have simply said “Yes, we want abundance too. Guess how you get abundance? By breaking up monopolies!” Or something like that. They could have easily tried to co-opt the energy behind Abundance and treated Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson as potential allies. Instead, they leapt instantly to the attack with maximum savagery.

This is the behavior of factionalists, for whom ideas and policy are less important than building power for a clique of favored allies and fellow-travelers within the Democratic Party. Klein and Thompson were a threat not because their ideas contradicted those of the antimonopoly clique, but simply because they were not beholden to the patronage or the intellectual legacy of that clique. They were not on the team, so they were the enemy.

In my view, it is very dangerous for any political party to allow itself to be entered and captured by a clique or faction like this. I’ve spent a long time being very favorable to the ideas being put forward by the antimonopoly people, but their behavior with regards to the Abundance liberals — and the shoddy reasoning, baseless accusations, and backroom arm-twisting that they employ in these debates — has given me what the Zoomers call “the ick”.

A problem with economic policy is that it is very vulnerable to intellectual pseudo-cults. Economics research is very hard to understand, isn’t always useful, and rarely offers clear-cut answers. So policymakers and writers seeking certainty and a reason for decisiveness often fall victim to charismatic gangs of intellectuals who claim that economics is solved and that they have it all figured out. On the GOP side, these include the “supply-siders” in the 1980s and the “national conservatives” today. On the Democratic side, it includes the MMT people.

But MMT failed — essentially no one listens to people who say infinite deficits are good. The antimonopoly faction, on the other hand, appears to have succeeded in winning enormous power and prestige within an increasingly epistemically closed progressive movement. Elizabeth Warren was basically a one-woman Organization Department2 for the Biden administration, popular Democrats like AOC are going around claiming that “market power” is what produces billionaires, and every major progressive publication now platforms the antimonopoly people’s intellectual output.

Given my writings about the problems of corporate power in the past — and my fear of the overwhelming power that AI companies might achieve — it would be relatively easy for me to join this movement. But I can’t, because monomaniacal obsession, epistemic closure, anti-empiricism, and intense factionalism are the kinds of things I just can’t sign on to.

Corporate power is a real problem in our society. But we need more reasonable programs, and more reasonable people, to fight it effectively. Banning corporate landlords, calling for price controls, attacking the grocery store industry, forcing airlines out of business, and making accusations against anyone who calls for deregulation of housing supply are just signs of an approach that’s going to lead nowhere good.

Subscribe now

When I had GPT proofread this post before publication, it flagged the name “Dylan Gyauch-Lewis”, but its only comment was: “This unusual spelling appears to be correct.”

This is quite a compliment!

Generic Workout Plans	Personalized Programs
Same plan for most users	Adjusted to individual goals
Limited flexibility	More adaptive over time
Often cheaper or free	Usually subscription-based
May not match fitness level	Better suited for beginners
Basic progress tracking	More detailed guidance and support

Comments

Related Stories

Armies and Societies

Recruitment Principles

Putting Society and Principle Together

Generic Plans vs Personalised Fitness Programs

Why Consistency Matters More Than the “Perfect” Plan

Coaching Features and User Support

Nutrition Support Is Often Overlooked

Subscription Transparency Matters

Realistic Expectations Lead to Better Results

Final Thoughts

The Verification Trap: Why Your Documents Are Never ‘Good Enough’

Why a ‘Selfie’ With Your ID Often Gets Blocked

Bonus Abuse Algorithms: Turning Wins Into ‘Illegitimate’ Play

The ‘Maximum Bet’ Rule: The Most Common Trap

The ‘Pending Review’ Black Hole: How Long is Too Long?

The Dangerous Trap: ‘Cancel and Play More’ Buttons

Payment Method ‘Limitations’: Why Your Credit Card Won’t Work

Chargeback Prevention: Why Casinos Delay Crypto Withdrawals

The Account ‘Security’ Lock: When a Win Triggers an Investigation

The ‘VPN’ Excuse: How Casinos Invalidate Legitimate Players

The Only Three Ways to Actually Get Your Money Out

Step 1: The Night Before – Clean Up Your Mess

Step 2: The Withdrawal Request – Play It Boring

Step 3: The Escalation – Make Noise the Right Way

Outdoor Conditions Expose Weak Construction Fast

Simpler Equipment Usually Lasts Longer

Corrosion Resistance Matters More Than Appearance

Maintenance Access Quietly Determines Long-Term Value

Real Outdoor Equipment Needs Operational Stability

The Best Equipment Stops Drawing Attention to Itself

Solar Took a Major Hit at the End of 2025

What’s Happening With Lawn and Garden Chemicals

EPA’s New Pesticide General Permit Takes Effect in Late 2026

State and Local Rules Are Now Doing More of the Work

What Homeowners Can Still Do to Save Money and Reduce Impact

How to Stay Informed Without Getting Overwhelmed

Side Hustles Started Feeling More Serious

People Want More Control Over Their Time

Burnout Changed the Definition of Success

The Internet Changed What Feels Possible

Traditional Career Paths Feel Less Predictable

The Rise of Personalized Workout Solutions

Key Features of AI Fitness Apps

Why Choose Specialized AI Fitness App Development Companies

Benefits of Partnering with Experts

Common Challenges in AI Fitness App Development

Steps to Find the Right AI Fitness App Development Company

Define Your Project Requirements

Research and Shortlist Potential Companies

Evaluate Company Portfolios and Case Studies

Assess Technical Expertise and AI Capabilities

Check Client Reviews and Testimonials

Request Proposals and Conduct Interviews

Essential Qualities to Look for in AI Fitness App Development Companies

Experience in AI and Machine Learning

Understanding of Fitness Industry Trends

Commitment to Data Security and Privacy

Post-Launch Support and Maintenance

Questions to Ask Before Hiring an AI Fitness App Development Company

Conclusion: Choosing the Best AI Fitness App Development Partner for Personalized Workout Solutions

Comments

There Are Ways Democrats Could Focus and Amplify Their Message

Odd Lots: How the Invention of Rope Gave us Modern Civilization

Here are a few fascinating hummingbird factoids from Perspetive AI:

Then I asked Perspective if the Bee Hummingbird was smaller than an Anna’s:

Conclusion

What’s the big idea?

1. Morally contested markets.

2. Bans on markets need social support to work well.

3. Moral intuitions aren’t enough by themselves.

4. Sometimes adding money to a transaction arouses repugnance.

5. Religion remains important in many controversies.

Comments

Related Stories

Comments

Related Stories

Please support my work—by taking out a premium subscription for just $6 per month (and less if you sign up for a full year).

Downloads