Morale

Morale is a perennially popular topic in the field of military history, yet each new study proposes a new definition of the term. Is it a mood, a feeling, a set of actions—individual or collective? Is it a cause or consequence of discipline? Given that each author’s definition of morale is subtly different from the next, one may well wonder how an idea, the importance of which is so universally agreed, remains so poorly defined. Daniel Ussishkin illuminates this question by tracing the evolution of the concept in Britain. It is at once a history of the term and its usage, and of the ways in which morale was understood and theorised. It is not, as he points out in the introduction, a book which catalogues the different definitions of morale, or which summarises the ways it has been managed. Instead, he traces the transition of the concept from the uniquely military sphere into the civilian realm—where it became intimately linked to the process of democratisation, and then underwent a process of reification such as to appear as an inherent and self-evident category of social analysis

American Constitutional Law and Politics · History