Joseph Wright'sThe Dead Soldier (frontispiece) highlights the issues addressed by the chapters in this section. First exhibited at the Royal Academy in May 1789, a few weeks before the dramatic inception of the French Revolution, Wright's painting depicts the corpse of a British soldier, his grieving widow and their newly orphaned child. Most likely a recollection of the recent war against the American colonies, the legal, political and social distinctions between civilians and combatants are blurred in this image. As the circle of suffering extends beyond the immediate scene of devastation, the message of the painting appears insistent to the point of banality: it is one thing for a soldier to lay down his life in defence of his country, but what of the effects of war on ordinary men, women and children?

The question prompts some further reflections on the relations between war, critical debate and the nature of citizenship. Writing in 1767 in An Essay on the History of Civil Society, the social philosopher Adam Ferguson announced that ‘he who has not learned to resign his personal freedom in the field [with] the same magnanimity with which he maintains it in the political deliberations of his country, has yet to learn the most important lesson of civil society, and is only fit to occupy a place in a rude, or in a corrupted state’. Not only the soldier but the citizen too must learn to renounce his personal liberty so that the nation, considered as a whole, may be free.