D aniel U ssishkin . Morale

In Morale: A Modern British History, Daniel Ussishkin offers a compelling analysis of one of the central ideological premises upon which the management of men was imagined to take place over a period of two hundred years. “Morale,” or le moral, emerged as an obscure French term following the Napoleonic Wars. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century, British strategists, intrigued with the concept, began to embrace it as a potent way of managing soldiers through internal self-discipline rather than through the externally imposed threat of the lash. As a mental counterpoise to the physical discipline of armies, often made up of those unwilling recruits the Duke of Wellington unceremoniously referred to as “the scum of the earth,” the idea of morale cultivated the emotional rather than the physical battle readiness of the soldier. According to Ussishkin, this arcane, foreign idea would eventually become one of the central organizing principles of the British managerial state. By tracing the concept of morale through the years during which Britain emerged as a liberal metropolitan society, Ussishkin explains how this protean military concept came to be regarded as essential to the management of a democratic population. Through the character-building ideas of the late nineteenth-century imperial project, which assiduously distinguished British from native soldiers and subjects, morale evolved into a disciplinary quality widely understood to be essential for military preparedness. During the two world wars, the idea of morale jumped the divide between military and civilian life, accepted as vital to collective security and to the mobilization of civil society during times of “total war.” So promising did the morale appear to be that even when the wars were over, managers hoped to harness the concept to build a productive workforce and a pliant population, united behind a vision of the common good. In the workplace, where willing regimentation and positive esprit de corps belied the military origins of the term, morale was nurtured as the key to group dynamics, productivity, and a docile and contented workforce increasingly looked upon as “human resources.” To retain some of the collective spirit forged during wartime, experts expanded this elastic concept from the factory floor to the enterprise of managing a modern democratic citizenry.

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