Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Anders Engberg-Pedersen. Empire of Chance: The Napoleonic Wars and the Disorder of Things. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2015. 336 pp.

Review by Jan Mieszkowski

4 February 2016

The past fifteen years have seen the French Revolution lose its pride of place in Enlightenment and Romantic studies as the turn of the nineteenth century has increasingly come to be discussed as an age of protracted warfare. In Empire of Chance, Anders Engberg-Pedersen argues that war in the Napoleonic era could no longer be considered a purely political phenomenon. Prompting wholesale reconsiderations of agency and epistemology, the emerging military discourses constituted philosophical accounts of human subjectivity in their own right, and their defining concern was the degree to which chance and contingency dominated, if not defined, a decidedly nondeterministic battlefield. To master the enemy, one would first have to master probability.

Gaining the practical know-how to prevail in such conflicts required that one be exposed to simulations dominated by contingent variables in order to train one’s subconscious to respond appropriately. While this may sound like a version of Aristotelian virtue ethics—one is habituated to react correctly when the need arises—Engberg-Pedersen stresses that the goal was to refine the sensorial apparatus more than the faculties of reason; and some of the richest sections of Empire of Chance are the detailed accounts of the ways in which maps, board games, and novels served to generate “the auditory, visual, and emotional experiences of the battlefield” (p. 144). Even dyed-in-the-wool scholars will find much new and exciting with which to work in these presentations of the historiography, pedagogy, and cartography of the period. The discussion of military theory is similarly engaging, going into much greater depth about a larger group of thinkers than is normally the case. 

Engberg-Pedersen demonstrates that these replications of battlefield experiences inexorably assumed a priority over and against the “actual” thing. Napoleon himself was unable to understand the events of combat without some reliance on their simulacra. This, however, is only the first step of the far-reaching argument that Empire of Chance offers. Under the influence of Kant’s theory of tact, the militarized subject that emerged in the work of Clausewitz and contemporaries such as Stendhal and Heinrich von Kleist presented a genuine alternative to the transcendental subject of reason. As the hegemony of rational cognition was displaced by a “world-oriented model based on subconscious processing of the situated body,” priority was given to aesthetic knowledge grounded in the sensory faculties (p. 92).

The ambition of the argument will raise some questions. Despite the space devoted to Stendhal and Leo Tolstoy, the analyses of their novels remain largely thematic. One would like more clarification of the model of textuality underwriting the claim that these books “build [a] kind of three-dimensional world” such that “the reader might easily walk into the fictional universe and become implicated in the affairs” (pp. 246-47). It would also be interesting to hear more about what happens in ensuing decades to this counter-idealist discourse of a situated body that has been trained to contend with the contingencies of empirical reality. Does it die out, perhaps supplanted by less individualistic Marxist conceptions of praxis, or does it persist to this day in various forms?  

Empire of Chance persuasively demonstrates the degree to which the military theory of the Napoleonic era reshaped a broad range of discourses. The book sets a high standard for the ways in which the cultural, political, and philosophical dimensions of warfare can and should be explored, boldly pointing the way forward for the next wave of scholarship.