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The contemporary difficulties of French social sciences to properly grasp military phenomena can be partly construed as legacies of a tradition going back to the emergence of the scientific ambition applied to societies and history. As mix of an aspiration for objective knowledge and ideological developments, the French sociological tradition turned to the military issue, from the early 19th century to 1945, in multiple ways which all share the refusal to consider it as a political issue relatively independent from other dimensions of social life. But a synthetic examination of the most prominent ideas produced by this tradition shows that its relation to politics is more complex, and that one all too easily slips from an apolitical into an anti-political worldview.