Critiquing Paul Kelly's unsophisticated grouping of political thinkers into two broad camps of a pre-state and (post-)state era, this article attempts to use the paradigm of technology as an alternative narrative to examine the phenomena of war, conflict and revolution. Drawing on Heidegger and Stiegler, the technology in war is regarded as a way of not only revealing our being in the world, but unconcealing the way we interact and construct intersubjectivity. Five paradigms of technology in war can be discerned, namely the first paradigm of primitive tools (from classical times to 1500 A.D.), the second one of early sciences and machines (1500–1830), the third one of interconnected systems (1830–1945), the fourth one of instruments of automation (1945–2000), and the current fifth one of artificial intelligence. These paradigms offer us a logical (while not necessarily linear) way to (re)examine the history of political thoughts.
Photo by Alex Green