ABSTRACT
In previous chapters we argued that, just as the rise of the state was preoccupied with removing war from the life of civil society, so also did the rise of modern liberalism embrace the idea of removing war from the life of humanity by promoting its account of the biohuman. And this it did progressively from the latter half of the seventeenth century. Removing war from the life of civil society – the political revolution of the seventeenth century – did not entail the end of war. It historically re-problematized political violence in novel and newly complex ways, and in the process also, of course, re-problematized war. This entailed a fundamental reconfiguration of the space and time of political violence: from King, Empire and Church to the State; and from the cosmic time of Christian doctrine to history, as well as to the physical time of Galileo and Newton (Fletcher 2009; Le Goff 1992; Le Goff 1986; Le Goff 1982). As Norbert Elias put it, in respect of the last especially, ‘the significance of the emergence of “physical time” from the matrix of “social time” can hardly be overrated’ (Elias 1992: 115). The complex shifts involved also entailed a change in the very ways in which war was cognized and waged, indeed a change in the very purposes and values placed on, as well as invested in, war, from those which had obtained during the course of the Renaissance as well as the Middle Ages. Here, too, the technologies involved were not simply those born out of improvements in science (Parker 1988). The ‘technology’ of military organization has also moved on substantially since Weber drew attention to the correlation between forms of life and forms of war, especially among liberal states. In particular, it has done so because forms of liberal life have themselves been transformed by a wide variety of historical developments including not only the wars of the twentieth century, and the economic growth and techno-scientific developments which these stimulated, but also the globalization
of capital, the associated development of information and communication technologies, and particularly the molecular revolution.
