Unlimited War and Social Change: Unpacking the Cold War’s Impact Mary L. Dudziak USC Legal Studies Research Paper No. 10-15 LEGAL STUDIES RESEARCH PAPER SERIES University of Southern California Law School Los Angeles, CA 90089-0071 Unlimited War and Social Change: Unpacking the Cold War’s Impact Mary L. Dudziak Judge Edward J. and Ruey L. Guirado Professor of Law, History and Political Science USC Gould Law School September 2010 This paper is a draft chapter of WAR · TIME: A CRITICAL HISTORY (under contract with Oxford University Press). For more on this project, see Law, War, and the History of Time (forthcoming California Law Review): http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1374454. NOTE: This is very much a working draft, not a finished piece of work. I would be grateful for any comments and criticism. I can be reached at:
[email protected]. copyright Mary L. Dudziak © 2010 Unlimited War and Social Change: Unpacking the Cold War’s Impact Abstract This paper is a draft chapter of a short book critically examining the way assumptions about the temporality of war inform American legal and political thought. In earlier work, I show that a set of ideas about time are a feature of the way we think about war. Historical progression is thought to consist in movement from one kind of time to another (from wartime to peacetime, to wartime, etc.). Wartime is thought of as an exception to normal life, inevitably followed by peacetime. Scholars who study the impact of war on American law and politics tend to work within this framework, viewing war as exceptional.