Polemology

POLEMOLOGY. The Principles of War exhibited in the Practice of the Camp, and as developed in a Series of General Orders of the Duke of Wellington; with parallel Orders of George II. Duke of Marlborough, &c. &c. 8vo.

[I]f all the sciences were similarly subdivided, all use in classification would be lost by the multiplicity of the sciences; […] The Destructive, as well as the Industrial, instinct in Man would claim a separate science; and we should have a Polemology or Polemonomy, and about 10,000 other sciences.

In the language of international economic relations the use of the terms employed in the field of polemology occurs more and more frequently. People speak of warm and cold economic wars, guerrillas, financial and commercial aggression, economic security, economic peace-keeping, and so on.

Strategy as calculus on the one hand, and strategy as manipulation/manoeuvre on the other: these are two types presupposing two kinds of polemology. The two conceptions of strategy are in fact derived from two ways of thinking about war.

If we desire a resolution of the paradoxes which liberal modernity throws at us, and which are the crux of this contemporary global civil war over the political constitution of life, we may want to establish other ways of construing the life of human being, ones which compromise its seemingly endless polemologies and messianic yearnings for Terror.

Against such polemologies, we find the [Michel] Foucault of Society Must be Defended posing the problem of war and its relation to modern political power in starkly different terms of a problematisation.

Polemology locates popular culture in a long (even archaic and nonhuman) tradition of warfare. The "ageless art" of tricks and ruses permeates the texts and practices comprising everyday life, a cat-and-mouse game with power that also produces innovation, creativity, invention. […] Polemology allows us to bring together media convergence with the history of communications warfare, especially as they involve the very social media often cited as features of convergence politics.