Chapter 6 - War and the ‘Science of Man’

Summary

This chapter examines the attempts of Enlightenment philosophers David Hume and Adam Smith to reconcile war with their theories of progress. Both made impartiality a touchstone of enlightened judgement, and so found that the national partiality aroused by war was deeply problematic. Humes optimistic view of progress was undermined by his pessimistic account of the passions released in war, and by the evidence of the destructive waste entailed in contemporary war-making. His desire to moderate contemporary bellicosity led him, in his History of England, to emphasise medieval magnanimity in victory, in a way that was at odds with his progressive agenda. Adam Smith encountered a comparable problem. His attempts in his Theory of Moral Sentiments to provide improving models of public responses to war were at odds with his later conviction that the public was dangerously insulated from the destructive realities of war.