Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book is about the connection between 'liberal' political order and the activity of waging war. Its intellectual starting point is a near-truism: war is a violent conflict between large-scale social groups in which each group must generate the kind of motivations that lead at least some of its members to kill and to risk being killed. Some of the necessary motivations may be induced in military-minded specialists trained up within self-consciously martial subculture. The history of liberal thought as liberals themselves generally construct it stresses the right to violent rebellion defended in John Locke's Two treatises of government, a work in which the test of government legitimacy is said to be protection of 'lives, liberties and estates', that is, of rights that are enjoyed by private individuals severally.