ABSTRACT
Enlightenment thinkers condemned war as the product of irrational behaviour stemming from princely ambition, the people having no interest in making war (Rousseau 2005: 55-6). War is against the laws of nature and humanity, namely rationality, civility and the rule of law. War is essentially anti-social in that society is defined as the reign of peace within the realm of justice: ‘Peace is maintained by justice, which is a fruit of government, as government is from society, and society from consent’ (Penn 1916: 348-9). Since they considered peace to be the normal order of things, eighteenth-century thinkers criticized the military harshly. Standing armies – which Rousseau describes as the ‘plague and depopulation of Europe’ (Rousseau 2005: 217) – should, according to Kant’s Perpertual Peace, gradually disappear and be replaced by a civic militia such as existed in Switzerland (Kant 1991: 94). Interestingly, progressive army officers, such as the French general Guibert, who described the army as consisting of foreign mercenaries and vagabonds instead of citizens, also shared this viewpoint. According to Guibert, governments ‘are in a secret war against their subjects. They corrupt one part in order to dominate the other’ (Guibert 1977: 56, 100). As a remedy for this deplorable situation, Guibert proposed bringing together the state and the nation, which meant that soldiers had to be citizens. Drawing on the example of Ancient Greece and the Roman Republic, Enlightenment thinkers compared the figure of the citizen-soldier with the armies of the eighteenth century (Grell 1995). In contrast to the mercenary, the citizen-in-arms was defined as virtuous by his attachment to the community. Eighteenth-century political theory thus recommended the strengthening of these moral attitudes through civic practices such as military service. In this way, service in the armed forces became an essential part of a political framework that was most clearly expressed by Rousseau.
