The Ultimate Experience Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450-2000

by Harari, Yuval Noah

• ISBN13: 9780230536920
• ISBN10: 0230536921
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-04-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

For millennia, war was viewed as a supreme test. In the period 1750-1850 war became much more than a test: it became a secular revelation. This new understanding of war as revelation completely transformed Western war culture, revolutionizing politics, the personal experience of war, the status of common soldiers, and the tenets of military theory.

Author Biography

YUVAL NOAH HARARI is a military historian specializing in the study of war experience and war culture. He lectures at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

Table of Contents

List of Figures	p. ix
Preface	p. xii
Acknowledgments	p. xiv
Introduction: War as Revelation, 1865-2000	p. 1
The Supremacy of Mind: 1450-1740	p. 27
Suffering, Death, and Revelation in Early Modern Culture	p. 29
The Absence of Revelation from Early Modern Military Memoirs	p. 35
The conversion narratives of Christian soldiers	p. 35
Secular military memoirs	p. 56
Why War Revealed Nothing	p. 95
Bodies should not think	p. 96
Conclusions	p. 124
The Revolt of the Body: 1740-1865	p. 127
Bodies Begin to Think	p. 129
The War of Austrian Succession and La Mettrie's L'Homme-machine	p. 129
Sensationism and sensibility	p. 135
The novel of sensibility, the Bildungsroman, and the ideals of Erlebnis and Bildung	p. 145
Romanticism, nature, and the sublime	p. 150
The Rise of the Common Soldier	p. 160
Common soldiers begin to think	p. 160
Common soldiers begin to write	p. 190
Conclusions: War and Bildung	p. 193
The Rise of the Revelatory Interpretation of War	p. 197
Sentimentalizing and Romanticizing war	p. 199
The key experiences of war	p. 213
Flesh-witnessing: Those who weren't there cannot understand	p. 231
The master narratives of late modern military experience	p. 240
Conclusions: The Things Which Make You Know, 1865-2000	p. 299
Notes	p. 307
Works Cited	p. 347
Index	p. 373
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