Afterword

Summary

By investigating the development of a proto-disciplinary field of military thought, this book documents the rise of militarism as a sombre shadow across British Romantic culture. This afterword concludes the book, however, by taking a different perspective on the potentialities and instabilities that can also be located within this field of thought. Taking inspiration from this emergent work on the relationship between capitalist modernity, war and emancipation, this book ends with a short afterward to consider how the ‘wartime poetry’ of Romanticism align with the counter-strategic thought of French theory. French theorists such as Michel Foucault, Raymond Aron, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel de Certeau constructed their thought out of a very real recovery of Carl von Clausewitz. But there has been no interest in the thought that surrounds and informs Clausewitz. Read in relation to modern war writing, Romantic wartime literature could be understood not simply through theories of trauma, therefore, but as representing an earlier version of this counter-strategic thought. Romantic counter-strategic thought can be seen to turn strategic military thought back against itself as it renders inoperative the strategic modes for ordering and managing life that we have inherited from the Napoleonic era.