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.

We know from the ancient epics that war has been entangled with literature since the earliest times. But war has also had a profound influence on the broader field of literary studies. Indeed, numerous twentieth- and twenty-first-century literary theories have been shaped by warfare, while contemporary critical engagements have given rise to several recurring and emerging concepts that together structure the field of literary war studies. The introductory chapter seeks to inscribe war and literature within the larger frame of the history of knowledge. It traces the emergence of the theory and history of knowledge as a distinct discipline from its French origins in Foucault’s archaeology to the contemporary German Wissensgeschichte and it explores the place of war literature within this tradition. The chapter argues that literature serves as an archive of military knowledges and a distinct form of knowledge in its own right. And it examines war as a disruptive and generative force that at once disturbs established concepts and theories and produces new modes of knowing, thinking, and writing.

This is the preliminary section to the structural history presented in Part I. It briefly describes the pan-European aversion to speculative and systematic philosophising c.1700, and contrasts it with the situation two centuries earlier. It asks how this remarkable transformation came about.

This chapter summarises the argument of the book. It also discusses the consequences of the dwindling status of speculative philosophy for the European system of knowledge in the eighteenth century and beyond.

This short chapter introduces the book as a study in the history of knowledge, and specifically of changing conceptions of what kind of knowledge was and wasn’t worth pursuing in the period 1500–1700, with speculative forms of philosophising coming out as the loser. It summarises the contents and argument of the book, and warns against reading early modern intellectual history from the perspective of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with philosophical ‘rationalism’ as a driving force. It also sets out the book’s double approach: first, a longue durée structural account of the changing nature of the early modern system of knowledge; second, in-depth contextualisations of Bayle and Newton showing how they were individual products of that system. Both of them ended up developing elaborate genealogical visions of a ‘Kingdom of Darkness’ no less interesting and sophisticated than that of Thomas Hobbes. As for him, the inheritance of speculative philosophy ended up explaining almost all the evils (both intellectual and social) in the world.