ABSTRACT
The modern idea that politics and war constitute autonomous domains of existence subject to their own laws of development first originated in the Renaissance.1 War, especially, was newly conceived as an art defined by its own rationalities, disciplines and economy (Wolin 2004: 197-200). The sovereign’s task was to master these. ‘A prince’, Machiavelli, for example, insisted, ‘ought never to have out of his thoughts this subject of war, and in peace he should addict himself more to its exercise than in war’ (1993: 112). What is modern about modern war is this conviction that war is subject to its own independent and universal dynamics, and that these rationalities and technologies are accessible to human reason.
