This chapter briefly surveys the intellectual history of modern, western counterinsurgency theory, as conservative, high modernist utopianism. It sets out concise and synoptic evidence for the argument, which serves as context for the later case chapters. I focus on counterinsurgency manuals—applied theoretical texts written by counterinsurgency practitioners, aiming to shape battlefield and political conduct. Manuals link theory and practice, connecting idealized military and political theory to the history of on-the-ground conduct. My approach is primarily contextualist. Proceeding chronologically, I draw connections and contrasts between canonical manuals, from the early modern period to the present. While small wars or counterinsurgency manuals were conservative from early on, high modernism and utopianism emerged only gradually and incidentally, taking multiple forms. I show how ideas cross-pollinated across texts, accumulating scattershot political idealizations and military practices alike. In so doing, I link micro-level individual intellectual change with larger historical processes, at the global level.

The concluding chapter reviews the book’s findings, then considers implications for ongoing conflicts globally. Counterinsurgency and cognate ideas, I argue, are likely to persist, whatever their past failures and ambivalent reception. I consider potential future developments, in a period of reactionary politics and “the empire come home.” Alternatives are nonetheless possible.

This chapter introduces the study and sets out a framework for investigating counterinsurgency’s intellectual history. I argue late twentieth and early twenty-first century counterinsurgency is a form of conservative, high modern utopianism. It is conservative in aiming to protect a given status quo against revolution or other transformative change. Counterinsurgency is “high modernist” in James C. Scott’s sense: it imagines a linear, schematized world, effacing local difference and resistance—in line with modern ideologies of progress. It is utopian in aiming to (re)make not actually existing systems and practices, but instead the idealized preferences of their elites, shorn of compromise, incidental variation, and historical specificity. Counterinsurgencies are thus conservative worldmaking projects: attempts to reimagine and reorder the world, in response to insurrection. The book’s purpose is the explain how this configuration of armed politics arose. To do so, it focuses on counterinsurgency manuals: the military theoretical and instructional texts designed to make counterinsurgency doable in practice.

Chapter 18 analyzes his work after his retirement in Rotterdam, in particular, on international governance. The first part of the chapter demonstrates that in response to frustrated attempts to further integrate the international community, Tinbergen became more radical and ambitious. He promoted a global government and international order along the lines of the developments that had taken place at the national level. He became more critical of the short-sightedness of both political leaders and voters and grew more critical of democracy. The second part of the chapter analyzes the underlying perspective of Tinbergen about the fallibility of man and the need for economic order. His view of humans is shaped by his Protestant, in particular, Remonstrant, beliefs, and he believed that (economic) order in the form of rules and institutions was required because humans are flawed. Harmony and peace must be actively constructed. The chapter suggests that next to a deep-seated sense of responsibility there is an element of fear in Tinbergen’s outlook. In his later works these fears and worries come more into the foreground, and he became pessimistic about the future, but he tried to remain hopeful.

This chapter connects the art and science of eating well known as gastronomy to the literary and social histories of modernism. It foregrounds how modernist writers both advance and satirize gastronomic principles of good taste and refined dining, and in doing so prompt explorations of popular versus high culture and nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. The analysis compares Italian avant-garde artist and writer F.T. Marinetti’s The Futurist Cookbook (1932), Wisconsin poet Lorine Niedecker’s New Goose volume (1946), and California culinary figure M.F.K. Fisher’s cookbooks from the 1940s. The Futurist Cookbook implicitly adapts the nationalism of nineteenth-century French gastronomy to the ideology of twentieth-century fascism by promoting technologically fabricated dishes and steel-like Italian citizens. In contrast, Niedecker’s New Goose uses lyric poetry to expose the hunger of small-scale farmers during the Second World War, a period when affluent gourmands continued to patronize urban restaurants. Finally, Fisher’s cookbooks employ modernist narrative techniques in the cookbook genre while expressing dissent with the broader status of gastronomy during wartime.