Abstract
Unrecognized work, perhaps a little dated or in any case little frequented by Italian scholars, Gaston Bouthoul’s Le Guerre remains a source of numerous intellectual stimuli, useful for deciphering the sociological meaning of Man's behavior in war and, in addition, the different cultural and organizational models to which human societies refer over time. To the questions posed by the author: "why does man make war?"; “for what reasons the violent conflict between peoples or single individuals arises?”; even without explicitly constructing ideal-types, Bouthoul seems to respond through an accurate analysis of specific and recurring models of social action. Our aim, therefore, in this brief study of the sociology of war, is the theoretical reworking of four fighter figures (the volunteer, the fanatic, the mercenary and the conscript). Using passages and textual references from the work, the Research Paper intends to focus on the reasons and meanings that individuals attribute to their military conduct; without neglecting the analysis of the social consequences that these ways of acting produce on the structure of groups and relationships between men.