Brutality of modernity and the American Civil War

While the Crimean War (1853-1856) was the first modern war, the American Civil War (1861-1865) came to be the first modern total war, which foreshadowed the terrible modern cruelty of the two World Wars. As such, the Civil War played a crucial role in the transformation towards brutalization, totalization, and dehumanization of warfare in the West in the 19th and 20th century. Since modern war was the product of modernity, the origins of its instrumentalization, technicalization, bureaucratization, and in turn – also barbarization and totalization, can be drawn from “the dark face” of modernity. Modernity carried within itself a great potential for progress and development, but also – being exceptionally dialectical – an enormous capacity for destruction. Therefore, one can look for connections between modern war and the “cruelty of modernity”, for which the American Civil War is a good case study.