Chapter three analyses the period between 1650 and 1800. Many thinkers see The Enlightenment’ as intoxicated with ideas of reason, control and with building perfect knowledge, organizations and societies. I demonstrate that this view is exaggerated. The ravages of wars produced two opposed intellectual movements: on the one hand, natural law and rationalism whose adherents believed in certain knowledge and abstract schemes; on the other, thinking in terms of probabilities, which recognizes and accommodates uncertainty. Hume, Smith, Voltaire and Montesquieu saw the limits of human reason and foresight and made considerable room for uncertainty. Military thinkers cautioned that war is unpredictable and that systematic knowledge is a pipe dream. Uncertainty and unpredictability occupied the centre stage in European culture; in paintings, the picaresque novel and the popularity of gambling and betting. This era was much contested as three different world views established themselves: The idea that the world could be understood and predicted, the sense that it is entirely uncertain and a pragmatic world view that recognizes and accommodates uncertainty as a part of the world.

The introduction outlines the central argument of this study, that military literature was of vital importance to the cultural understanding of warfare in the Romantic era. Locating military writing in relation to the massive expansion of print of the latter half of the eighteenth century, it also delineates the theoretical basis of the study in Jacques Rancière’s theorisation of indisciplinarity, or a poetics of knowledge. Concerned with how a science assumes authority over a domain of knowledge, an indisciplinary approach means asking how military thought was able to position itself as a science and assume authority over war discourse. At the heart of this was the growth of a new disciplinary regime that conceptualised the disciplined subject in terms of what Michel Foucault describes as the ‘natural body’, a biopolitical body of vital, living forces, a body informed by inner depths and potentials that resist the imposition of ‘mechanical’ authority. The introduction concludes by observing the striking yet inverted parallels between Romantic concerns with the living body and the sublimity, genius, organicism, perceptions and force associated with this new conception of war that place the state’s war machine in a strangely transposed relationship with Romantic aesthetics.

Chapter 1 outlines the growth of military writing in Britain during the Romantic period. It does so by situating this growth in relation to the extensive expansion of print of the late eighteenth century, in particular the expansion of periodical writing. Seeking to develop an intellectual culture out of the increasingly daily experience of wartime, the military journals played a foundational role in the formation of a new kind of deep but narrow field of military disciplinary knowledge. The appearance of military journals reflects how knowledge in this era was undergoing what Michel Foucault terms a process of ‘disciplinarization’, as the localised and fragmentary forms of earlier technical knowledges were variously disqualified or else centralised, normalised and hierarchicised into a set of modern disciplinary fields that formed the basis of modern science. This chapter also considers, however, how this disciplinarization of military knowledge gave rise to counter-histories of war’s sublime shock and brute force. Addressing the subjective side of disciplinarity, the formation of self-writing and what Ian Hacking has theorised as memoro-politics, this chapter concludes by placing literature and science as twinned elements forming the disciplinary knowledge of war.