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This short introduction describes the approach taken by the book and gives a brief outline of its contents. The story is about wars and military occupation, and the ideas underlying them, and the search for these ideas is carried out in the domain of the laws of war by addressing the challenge posed by a particular principle in these laws: the distinction between combatant and non-combatant, a concept which has been recognized as the fundamental principle upon which the entire notion of ‘humanity in warfare’ rests (and has also been acknowledged as the most fragile). The forces underpinning this distinction (more precisely, a distinction between the lawful and unlawful combatant) are explored by presenting three ideologies, each representing a distinct political tradition of war, and each rooted in incommensurable conceptions of the good life; the overall argument of the book is that this incommensurability lay at the source of the failure fully to resolve the problem of distinction between lawful and unlawful combatants between 1874 and 1949. The book makes use of concepts and methods borrowed from a range of intellectual disciplines: political thought, history, and the ‘classical’ traditions of international theory. In the case of the latter, it examines the influence of key thinkers on war, such as Machiavelli, Grotius, and Rousseau, but differs from this orthodox approach in two ways: first, it is not seeking to ascertain the ‘true’ meaning of their philosophies, but rather to find how their political thoughts were interpreted and shaped by later generations; second, the examination is not restricted to abstract theorists and philosophers but is centrally concerned with paradigms constructed by practitioners of war, both professional and civilian.

This is the third of three chapters on the three traditions of war, and introduces the republican tradition, which is represented partially through the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau, who, along with Pasquale Paoli and Tadeusz Kosciuszko, advanced a unified system of the republican good life and war in conjunction with the laws of war. The way in which this tradition developed in the nineteenth century is depicted. The different sections of the chapter are: The Republican Tradition of War; Republicanism; The Three Founders [Rousseau, Paoli and Kosciuszko]; Rousseau’s Republican War; Rousseau, Paoli and Kosciuszko; The Nature of Man and the State of Nature: Rousseau contra Hobbes and Grotius; The Nature of War; Liberty; Government, Society, and the Republic; Republic; Patriotism and Nationalism; Republican Nationalism; Republican Founders of the Tradition of War: Paoli and Kosciuszko; The Republican Tradition in the Nineteenth Century; The Nineteenth-Century Republican Tradition of War; and The Development of the Republican Tradition of War.

This chapter analyzes a number of nationalist statements in Enlightenment political thought. Although the most ardent voices of late 18th-century nationalism are themselves not always viewed as friends of the Enlightenment, this categorizing tendency is itself partly a reflection of the assumption that the Enlightenment is opposed to nationalism. It is shown that even the most canonical supporters of the Enlightenment themselves embraced a fundamentally nationalist message.

Beginning in 1794, Bentley began to adopt the economic components of republicanism as well as the spiritual ones. In seeing merchants choose what he considered interest over commonwealth, Bentley for the first time was awakened to the economic side of republican ideology. Underscored by his unique embrace of Rousseau's theories of the state of nature and the origins of social inequality, Bentley's new republicanism was as much theological as it was social. In being willing to consider an allegorical reading of the Eden story from Genesis, Bentley could redefine original sin not as pride or envy but instead as self‐interest itself.

Bentley had led the Democratic‐Republican Party to victory, but not all of Salem's Republicans followed along for the reasons he offered. Many, perhaps most, of Salem's Republicans were evangelicals, not rationalists. They supported the party not because of its advocacy of disestablishment—at least that was not an important part of the public rhetoric—but rather because they too were economic republicans, even if of a different sort than Bentley. They brought to the party a social ideology derived from Jonathan Edwards rather than from Rousseau. Even so, both Bentley and the evangelicals—Baptists and Methodists and New Light Congregationalists—stood on the essential common ground of Christian republicanism, and if it was an awkward fit for both factions, such was the nature of oppositionalism in New England's First Party System.

Jean Sartre's fictional hero Roquentin believes that one cannot seriously take the task of writing one's life. For him, biography is an impossibility, a work of ‘pure imagination’ subjected to the biases of the writer and devoid of resemblance to the subject. In the early days, biographies served as testimony to the greatness a person. They served as models from which people could emulate the exemplary individual. Then, the essential thing was to tell a story based on external facts and on psychological plausibility. However, in the age of Rousseau's Confessions, it was argued that biographies were accounts of inner truths, and that self-revelation was only achieved by the person himself: ‘No man can write a man's life but himself’. Even in the days when new methods of understanding the life of a man were increasingly becoming available, biographies were often seen as suspect enterprises. They were often seen as approaches that obscure the proper comprehension of the literary process and as illusions of profound knowledge of the inner truth, when in fact biographers continue to approach biographies with misgivings. In spite of all the criticisms against biographies, they have remained of great interest. They reach out to a broad public as a literature in its own right and have played a vital role in the history of European culture. Biographies have served as an inspiration, as a celebration of the great personages of the nation, as an insight to the gender roles of the society, and so on.

This chapter looks into instances of individual self-obsession and what these have to say not only about persons but also the society or culture in which they must survive. As representatives of the need to write the story of the self in order to understand its identity, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Stendhal (Henri Beyle) both show to a high degree the work of the shaper on the shaped: the presence of the retrospective narrator and creator of the tale of the self. If the self would tell its story to and for itself, that story will end up being as much about the narrator as the narrated, as much about the creator as the created. This instance of egotism, this self-reflexiveness and self dramatization of the speaker, may have to do with the newness, the lack of precedent of their enterprise.

This chapter examines one of the most commonly cited examples of religious violence: the “wars of religion” in Europe. The story of these wars serves as a kind of creation myth for the modern state, because it indicates that the modern state was born as a peace maker between warring religions by relegating religion to private life and uniting people around loyalty to the sovereign state. After showing how the myth is used in liberal political theory (Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Rawls, Shklar, Fukuyama, et al.), this chapter examines the historical record and argues that the very creation of religion was at stake in the wars and that the rise of the sovereign state was a cause of, not a solution to, the wars in question.

This chapter provides an overview of the key arguments in the debate on war and peace carried on from the time of Thomas Hobbes up to the Napoleonic Wars between philosophers, political economists, and political thinkers. This era, which was bookended by the names of Hobbes and Carl von Clausewitz, reveals four highly disparate theoretical standpoints from which authors explored these topics. There is the power-political realist position, associated with the name of Hobbes; the utilitarian-liberal conception, directly linked with the name of Jeremy Bentham, but which undoubtedly has roots in the work of Montesquieu as well; the republican-universalist stance that goes back to Immanuel Kant, though certain arguments can be found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau; and finally the position linked with the “neo-Roman understanding of history” and the associated emphasis on the ideal of virtue.