‘O Effeminacy! Effeminacy!’ War,masculinity and the myth of liberal peace

Introduction

The ‘liberal peace’ is now a standard trope in the political discourse of international theory. In textbooks, academic articles and journalism one finds time and again liberalism and peace offered as conjoined histories. One of the key arguments concerning this conjunction is that commerce and free markets are the foundation of peace. This argument is in turn made by referring back to some classical liberal ideals as they emerged in the 18th century. The idea that ‘peace would encourage trade; trade would encourage peace’, as Michael Howard puts it in his work on war and the liberal conscience, is now almost a received wisdom, and has its roots in a reading of 18th-century liberalism as centred on a conception of ‘economic man’ keen to get on with the business of making money within civil society and thus desperate to avoid war:

Here, for the first time, is sounded the note which was to dominate so much liberal thinking about war and peace during the following two centuries. Wars arose because of international misunderstandings, and because of the dominance of a warrior-class. The answer to both lay in free trade — trade which would increase the wealth and power of the peace-loving productive sections of the population at the expense of the war-oriented aristocracy, and which would bring men of different nations into constant contact with one another. (Howard, 1978: 20)

This view is repeated, albeit with various nuances, in work after work in IR. ‘The classical liberals were right’, we are told, in their belief that ‘trade … increased the prosperity and political power of the peaceful’ (Oneal and Russett, 1997: 268). The view has also filtered into textbooks, which tend to repeat uncritically the idea that liberal internationalism has its roots in the 18th-century liberal appetite for free trade and peace rather than the more militarily offensive policies of mercantilism (Burchill et al., 2009: 60–61, 64–65).

One standard technique in this argument is to cite Kant’s suggestion in ‘Perpetual Peace’ that the ‘spirit of commerce’ cannot exist side by side with war. But beyond citing Kant, the usual claim is that the real roots of the conjunction of liberalism and peace lie in the Scottish liberal Enlightenment. The origins of the coming together of free trade and global order ‘lay primarily in the classical political economy of the Scottish Enlightenment that had engrafted a new theory of international trade on to a flourishing strand of discourse on universal peace’ (Howe, 2007: 27). The key figures referred to in this regard are Adam Smith’s account of ‘commercial man’ and Adam Ferguson’s account of ‘civil society’. One finds time and again the idea that ‘the wealth of nations conditions the liberal peace’ (Mousseau et al., 2003), that ‘the decisive step’ towards peace was made possible by ‘the adoption of barter or exchange’ (Von Hayek, 1979: 109), that ‘commercial pacifism’ is a ‘tradition that … originates in the eighteenth-century’ (Doyle, 1997: 230–231), that ‘from Adam Smith to its contemporary proponents, liberal thinkers … believe that trade and economic intercourse are a source of peaceful relations among nations (Gilpin, 1987: 27, 31), and that ‘peace and free markets’ have their roots in the work of Smith (Mandelbaum, 2004: 37). Or one finds claims that the theory and practice of peace is rooted in the Enlightenment’s conception of ‘civil society’ as a ‘peace project’ (Richmond, 2006: 295–296), or a ‘social ontology of peace’, with reference made to Ferguson’s (1966 [1767]) Essay on the History of Civil Society (MacMillan, 1998: 56–61; Rasmussen, 2003: 41, 42). Such arguments have become part of the received wisdom of the liberal peace thesis and, as a consequence, virtually a whole discipline or set of related disciplines around IR have bought into the idea that one of the key historical and intellectual roots of the liberal peace thesis is the account of commercial civil society in the Scottish Enlightenment.

In this article I aim to challenge this received wisdom. I do so by arguing that it overlooks the importance which 18th-century liberalism attached to martial values. This attachment concerns first and foremost the ability to wage war to secure the nation in the most effective way and so, as we shall see, central to the development of ideas about liberty, commerce and civil society was the question of military organization in general and the relative advantages of militias or standing armies in particular. Exploring the contours of this very specific dispute about military organization, however, reveals a much more general concern for martial virtues running through the work of the same thinkers. In particular, these thinkers articulate a strong sense that martial virtue is somehow threatened by commercial order. In the process of expressing this concern, 18th-century Scottish liberalism revealed a militaristic strand that is so deep and strong that it cannot be dismissed or ignored as a side issue. And yet this is precisely what most of the IR literature on ‘liberal peace’ does. Either the received wisdom is simply repeated without mentioning war at all, or, on the rare occasion that the issue of martial values is noted, it is either quickly dismissed — ‘these observations’ about martial virtues ‘are not critical to [their] contribution’ (Kauppi and Viotti, 1992: 105) — or just ignored, as when Michael Doyle (1997) notes some of Smith’s comments on the importance of martial values but makes nothing of them (van de Haar, 2010: 143). This tendency to either dismiss or ignore the issue is reinforced by careful selection for edited texts on classical political thought and IR: the material by Adam Smith in Brown, Nardin and Rengger’s standard text International Relations and Political Thought, for example, has a few pages from Smith on commercial treatises and a few on the division of labour (2002: 410–415, 532–534), but nothing from his copious comments on war and the importance of the military spirit.

I am therefore suggesting that a fuller engagement with the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment debunks one of the foundational myths of the liberal peace. Some critics (Long, 1996: 176; van de Haar, 2009: 1–3, 70; 2010) have criticized IR in general and the ‘liberal peace’ theorists in particular for failing to engage seriously with the history of ideas, despite their frequent reference back to the ‘classics’. My argument here reinforces that criticism; the classical liberals were complex thinkers and subtle writers, and the liberal peace theorists have systematically ignored their complexities and subtleties.

I aim to show that far from peace, the liberalism ¹ of the time was animated by a desire to maintain military virtues as virtues. This has been noted by a number of writers (Berry, 1994: 169–170; Herman, 2003: 214–215; Hont, 2005: 6–8, 298; Manzer, 1996: 375–376; Robertson, 2009; van de Haar, 2009: 62–63; 2010: 142; Winch, 1978: 104). I seek to develop that argument by pointing to a major current in the political discourse of the time which held that the military virtues in question were under serious threat from one of the outcomes of an increasingly commercial and liberal order: the rise of effeminacy. J.G.A. Pocock (1985: 114) once claimed that the term ‘effeminacy’ has perhaps been a little neglected in debates about the 18th century, and in particular the rise of commerce and private property. Since Pocock made his claim, a number of writers have pointed to the role of effeminacy in debates ranging from French seductiveness to same-sex desire, and from questions of language to the social role of the dandy and effeminate figures such as the ‘molly’ and the ‘fop’ (Carter, 1997; Cohen, 1996; Gatrell, 2006: 354; Harvey, 2005; Kingsley Kent, 1990; Norton, 1992: 101–104, 126–127; Porter, 2000: 294; Trumbach, 1998: 3–22). I aim to show that the problem of effeminacy was also at the heart of liberal thinking about commerce and war: underpinning the liberal conception of war was a concern that a peaceful commercial order might become just a little too emasculated. By undermining the ‘manly’ virtues of discipline, courage and strength, effeminacy was considered a threat to the value of military prowess and national strength.

Exploring this fear is designed to reveal the deep-seated commitment to martial values and military virtue in the Scottish Enlightenment, and to thereby undermine one of the central planks of the liberal peace thesis in IR. More polemically, however, this argument also reinforces a developing strand of thinking which has recently emerged across political theory and IR: that instead of talking about liberalism and peace, we might be better off exploring the conjunction of liberalism and war. This conjunction, I suggest, can be found in some of the key texts of classical liberalism and the ‘liberal peace’ thesis.

From warriors to accountants

In a number of ways, the opening chapter of Adam Ferguson’s (1966 [1767]) Essay on the History of Civil Society constitutes a milestone in the history of political thought. By focusing on ‘civil society’ as the object and product of ‘civilization’ — one of the first uses of this term in the English language — Ferguson presents the emergence of a social order of the division of labour, commerce, the arts and a well-regulated system of government. Taken together, these constitute a condition of liberty and peace: ‘We may, with good reason, congratulate our species on their having escaped from a state of barbarous disorder and violence, into a state of domestic peace and regular policy’ (1966 [1767]: 225). It is this connection between the liberty of commercial society and peace that has filtered into the claim that the intellectual roots of the ‘liberal peace’ thesis can be found in part in 18th-century arguments about civil society. Yet this tells only part of the story.

A decade before the publication of the Essay on the History of Civil Society Ferguson published a much shorter and much less well-known pamphlet: Reflections Previous to the Establishment of a Militia (1756). The year of publication of the Reflections is important. In 1754 a new debating society of intellectuals had been formed, called the Select Society, including among its members key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment such as Ferguson, Smith and David Hume. From its very formation the main subject to which the Society repeatedly returned was the question of national defence and military organization (Robertson, 2009). For many Scots this question was especially important given the ease with which the Young Pretender’s army had advanced in Scotland during the 1745 rebellion and the subsequent suppression of the militia by Parliament. By 1756 the focus of the question had been narrowed down: at the heart of the debate were the nature and relative advantages of a militia compared to a standing army. Such debates overlapped with the reintroduction of the English Militia Bill in the House of Commons that year and a wider public agitation for such an introduction, heightened by the fact that a threatened invasion by the French in March led to the government sending for German troops to support them against the French (Western, 1965). But the issue of the relative advantages of militias compared to standing armies raised a more general issue: the compatibility of a military spirit in general within a commercial nation committed to liberty. Amidst this discussion there appeared Ferguson’s Reflections.

In the pamphlet Ferguson argues that although commercial society has become more peaceable and better mannered, with ‘Quarrels decided by the Edge of the Sword’ now decided by ‘Suits at Law’, this has been at the loss of ‘that martial spirit which prevailed in the early Ages of our Country’ (1756: 57). In the past, government was founded on military subordination and a militia. But ‘the Perfection now attained in every Art, and the Attention required to furnish what is demanded in every Branch of Business, have led away from the military Profession great Numbers of our People’. We have ‘gone too far’, he says, in pursuit of trade: ‘In Pursuit of such an Idea, we labour to acquire Wealth; but neglect the Means of defending it’ (1756: 12). Ferguson is thus concerned that the commercial life has softened the people and damaged the martial spirit: ‘The Hearts of our People are not Steel, they are softened by a Disuse of Arms, by Security, and pacific Employments’ (1756: 15). This softness and pacific mode of being ‘tempts an invasion’: ‘a few Banditti from the Mountains, trained by their Situation to a warlike Disposition, might over-run the Country’ (1756: 25). The task, he says, is to find a way ‘to mix the military Spirit with our civil and commercial Policy’ (1756: 3). Ferguson thus argues for a militia, formed from the body of the people (albeit with the attendant caution over involving the lower orders). In contrast to the softening of the people, Ferguson sees the possibility of ‘every man … deriving military Spirit more from the Use of Arms’ (1756: 30).

It is this theme of the militia as both a better defence of the country and a mechanism for mixing the military spirit with commercial policy that runs through Ferguson’s Essay. In fact, it is a theme that animated him through his whole life: ‘no subject has been more in my thoughts than the danger of making the Use of Arms a Separate Profession’, he wrote not long before his death (1995 [1797]: 412). We need to bear in mind that between the publication of the Reflections and the Essay there were continued and extensive militia agitations, most notably through 1760 and 1762. In 1762 a new club was formed in Edinburgh, called the Poker Club, of which Ferguson was a member along with Smith, Hume and Henry Home (Lord Kames). The main aim of the Poker Club was to ‘fan the flames’ of agitation for a Scottish Militia, which it continued to do for over 20 years. In other words, it would be no exaggeration to say that in the 10 years running up to the publication of Ferguson’s Essay the question of military organization in general and a militia in particular was at the heart of public debate, and that Ferguson and his friends and associates were at the heart of it. Indeed, one might argue that it is here that one finds one of the core themes of Scottish Enlightenment discourse.

One of the main themes of the Essay is the difference between the organization of violence in primitive and civilized society. War in primitive society is the business of everyone and a perpetual feature of the social order, but the development of commerce and the arts has led to ‘the departments of civil government and of war being severed’ (Ferguson, 1966 [1767]: 151). This separation between civil and military government is a necessary feature of the development of civil society ‘where, from a regard to the welfare of our fellow-creatures, we endeavour to pacify their animosities’ (1966 [1767]: 25). The process of pacification, however, comes at a cost, for it has separated the citizen from the warrior.

For Ferguson, the roots of conflict are found in human nature: just as animals play out some of the conflicts that dominate their lives, ‘man too is disposed to opposition, and to employ the forces of his nature against an equal antagonist’. Hence ‘sports are frequently an image of war’. Such sentiments ‘are dispositions most favourable to mankind’ in that they ‘animate the warrior in defence of his country’. And the defence of the country is fundamental to the development of civil society: ‘without the rivalship of nations, and the practice of war, civil society itself could scarcely have found an object, or a form’ (1966 [1767]: 24). This shift of the exercise of opposition and aggression from the ‘natural’ to the politically organized is important, since ‘the sense of a common danger, and the assaults of an enemy, have been frequently useful to nations, by uniting their members more firmly together’ (1966 [1767]: 22). ‘We applaud, as proceeding from a national or party spirit, what we could not endure as the effect of a private dislike.’ Indeed, more than just important, the creation of organized fighting is one of the most profound developments of civil society: ‘amidst the competitions of rival states … we have found, for the patriot and the warrior, in the practice of violence and stratagem, the most illustrious career of human virtue’. Ferguson then spells out that ‘war itself, which in one view appears so fatal, in another is the exercise of a liberal spirit’ (1966 [1767]: 25).

Thus Ferguson’s comment, noted earlier, regarding the move from barbarous disorder and violence to domestic peace and regular policy, is in part designed to highlight a potentially huge problem:

We may, with good reason, congratulate our species on their having escaped from a state of barbarous disorder and violence, into a state of domestic peace and regular policy; when they have sheathed the dagger, and disarmed the animosities of civil contention; when the weapons with which they contend are the reasoning’s of the wise, and the tongue of the eloquent. But we cannot, mean-time, help to regret, that they should ever proceed, in search of perfection, to place every branch of administration behind the counter, and come to employ, instead of the statesman and warrior, the mere clerk and accountant. (1966 [1767]: 225)

This fear that the warrior in man has been lost with the growth of the accountant is in many ways the ultimate concern animating Ferguson’s Essay.

Yet this issue is not simply one of social structure and the division of labour. It is also very much about human character and the virtue of being — or, in commercial society, the possibility of remaining — a warrior. There is a danger, for Ferguson, in making ‘a kind of separation between the civil and the military character’:

The subdivision of arts and professions, in certain examples, tends to improve the practice of them, and to promote their ends. By having separated the arts of the clothier and the tanner, we are the better supplied with shoes and with cloth. But to separate the arts which form the citizen and the statesman, the arts of policy and war, is an attempt to dismember the human character…. By this separation, we in effect deprive a free people of what is necessary to their safety. (1966 [1767]: 229–230)

The division of labour that is so crucial to commercial order and a liberal civil society is thus, in another fundamental way, also a threat to that order. As he puts it elsewhere in the Essay:

In the progress of arts and of policy, the members of every state are divided into classes; and in the commencement of this distribution, there is no distinction more serious than that of the warrior and the pacific inhabitant; no more is required to place men in the relation of master and slave. Even when the rigours of an established slavery abate, as they have done in modern Europe, in consequence of a protection, and a property, allowed to the mechanic and labourer, this distinction serves still to separate the noble from the base, and to point out that class of men who are destined to reign and to domineer in their country. (1966 [1767]: 150)

Hence Ferguson’s articulation of a conception of civil society as liberal, commercial and peaceful, is also very much a demand that we remix — the term he uses in the Reflections — the military spirit with the commercial policy. It is for this reason that Duncan Forbes (1966: xxxiv) suggests that in a rather unexpected way all the leading themes of the Essay meet in the forum of the militia question, and others have argued that the Essay is in many ways an extension of the themes outlined by Ferguson in the militia pamphlet (Carr, 2008; Kalyvas and Katznelson, 1998; Kettler, 1965; Oz-Salzberger, 1995: 109; Robertson, 2009: 121, 201–202; Sher, 1989). I am suggesting that beyond the militia question, the Essay is also very much an articulation of the concern that in separating the arts of policy and war, civilization might ‘dismember the human character’. The pacific citizen is in some senses a poor citizen; or, to put it another way, the good citizen — that is, the good, liberal, commercially driven citizen — needs to remain a warrior.

In this context we might briefly note that the feeling amongst Ferguson’s friends was that he personally ‘relished military valour’ (Kettler, 1965: 90) and that this relish remained present throughout his whole life. One anecdote told by Walter Scott and repeated by Ferguson’s biographers describes the young Ferguson, during his time as Chaplain of the First Highland Regiment of Foot, with sword in hand, leading the column of men at the battle of Fontenoy (Kettler, 1965: 45, 69). As the Chaplain he addressed the soldiers prior to their battles with Jacobite forces, emphasizing in his Sermon their masculine duty to defend the country and protect ‘Security and Liberty as a treasure’. So taken was he by his own argument in the Sermon that he published it in English translation the following year (Ferguson, 1746). Some 50 years later Ferguson commented to a friend that the Napoleonic wars were a reminder that ‘it is more fortunate to have our Lot amidst great Events than in times of undisturbed tranquillity’ (1995a [1796]: 399). And, reflecting back on his life, Ferguson suggested as his own epitaph: ‘He lived a great statesman and Warriour’ (1995c [1798]: 447). As we shall now see, Ferguson’s desire to press the liberal case for the virtues of the warrior was far from isolated.

In the Lectures on Jurisprudence, which he delivered in the early 1760s (at the same time as the creation of the Poker Club), Adam Smith takes as his starting point ‘the first and chief design of all civill governments’, which in the Wealth of Nations becomes ‘the first duty of the sovereign’: that of ‘protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies … by means of a military force’ (Smith, 1982b [1762–6]: 7; 1979 [1776]: 689). In the Lectures he comments on the necessity that ‘an armed force should be maintained’ but that ‘various species of armed forces’ and ‘the different sorts of militias and train’d bands’ are suited to different types of government (Smith, 1982b [1762–6]: 7). This treatment is only properly developed in the Wealth of Nations where Smith comments that preparing military force in times of peace and employing it in time of war ‘is very different in the different states of society, in the different periods of improvement’ (Smith, 1979 [1776]: 689). As with other writers such as Ferguson, Smith argues that in the more primitive states of society every man was naturally a warrior, but that a shift in the techniques of both production and arms has brought about a division of labour: on the one hand, it is now impossible for those engaged in commerce and trade to give up their employment to fight without serious loss; on the other hand, the art of war has shifted such that it is now a skilled task. As society progresses, the art of war necessarily becomes more and more complicated, to the point that it has become ‘necessary that it should become the sole or principal occupation of a particular class of citizens, and the division of labour is as necessary for the improvement of this, as of every other art’ (Smith, 1979 [1776]: 697). The theme is the same as we have encountered with Ferguson: we are back on the militia question. Yet the outcome is different.

Despite his long membership of the Poker Club, Smith was drawn to the conclusion that the commercial order made a standing army inevitable. He identifies ‘two methods, by which the state can make any tolerable provision for the public defence’, Smith (1979 [1776]: 698):

It may either, first, by means of a very rigorous police, and in spite of the whole bent of the interest, genius and inclinations of the people, enforce the practice of military exercises, and oblige either all the citizens of the military age, or a certain number of them, to join in some measure the trade of a soldier to whatever other trade or profession they may happen to carry on.

Or, secondly, by maintaining and employing a certain number of citizens in the constant practice of military exercises, it may render the trade of a soldier a particular trade, separate and distinct from all others.

Because arms, military exercises and martial skills are now so specialized, regular troops are required. Thus for Smith a standing army is the only means by which civilization can be defended: ‘a militia … in whatever manner it may be disciplined or exercised, must always be much inferior to a well disciplined and well exercised standing army’ (1979 [1776]: 699–700; also see Simpson Ross, 1995: 141). Smith makes the point that this is especially the case given the barbarous nature of some nations: ‘When a civilized nation depends for its defence upon a militia, it is at all times exposed to be conquered by any barbarous nation.’ The historical examples show that ‘a well-regulated standing army is superior to every militia’. Hence ‘it is only by means of a standing army … that the civilization of any country can be perpetuated, or even preserved for any time’. And just as it is only by means of a standing army that a civilized nation can be defended, ‘so it is only by means of it, that a barbarous country can be suddenly and tolerably civilized’ (1979 [1776]: 705–706).

These comments have been the subject of much debate since, according to some interpretations, it seems to have been one of the central issues about which Smith and Ferguson had a fundamental disagreement. In a letter to Smith following the publication of the Wealth of Nations, Ferguson (1987 [1776]: 193–194) wrote that ‘You have provoked, it is true, the church, the universities, and the merchants, against whom I am willing to take your part; but you have likewise provoked the militia, and there I must be against you’. There is some evidence that Smith was misunderstood on this point. Or at least, Smith certainly claims that he had been misunderstood. This seems to be the case in Smith’s response to an attack on him along these lines by Alexander Carlyle, in his Letter from a Gentleman to his Grace the Duke of Buccleugh on National Defence, published in 1778, in which he attacks Smith over the question of a standing army rather than a militia. In a letter to Andreas Holt two years later Smith seems confused by the attack:

When he Wrote his book, he had not read mine to the end. He fancies that because I insist that a Militia is in all cases inferior to a well regulated and well disciplined standing Army, that I disaprove of Militias altogether. With regard to that subject, he and I happen to be precisly of the same opinion. (Smith, 1987 [1780]: 251)

Smith is especially surprised given that he has been told that the man is ‘one of my acquaintance’, a comment which suggests that he thinks anyone who knows him would know that he does not disapprove of militias.

Whether Ferguson and Smith may or may not have diverged in their views on the militia is actually tangential to the central argument here, which is that regardless of the actual military structures the question of martial virtues and military values was at the heart of their thought. One can see this from Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments where he comments on the martial spirit of those soldiers who ‘cheerfully sacrifice’ themselves ‘to the prosperity of a greater system’ (Smith, 1982a [1759]: 236). In the same work he refers to war and civil faction as ‘the two situations which afford the most splendid opportunities for the display of public spirit’. It is the martial spirit that animates a well-ordered public world: ‘War is the great school for both acquiring and exercising … magnanimity’ (Smith, 1982a [1759]: 232, 239). This view gets developed through the Lectures and into the Wealth of Nations.

In the Lectures, Smith comments that one ‘bad effect of commerce is that it sinks the courage of mankind, and tends to extinguish the martial spirit’. With the increasing division of labour, ‘war comes to be a trade also’. ‘The defence of the country is therefore committed to a certain sett of men who have nothing else to do’ with the danger that ‘among the bulk of the people military courage diminishes’ (Smith, 1982b [1762–6]: 540). Thus, as he puts it in the Wealth of Nations, the real problem is that the arts of war become so specialized that ‘military exercises come to be as much neglected by the inhabitants … and the great body of the people becomes altogether unwarlike’ (Smith, 1979 [1776]: 697).

This concern over the decline of martial valour sheds light on the famous passage in the Wealth of Nations in which Smith comments on the disturbing effects of the division of labour. The passage runs as follows:

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same … has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention.… He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and as ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving of any generous, noble, or tender sentiment.… Of the great and extensive interests of his country, he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind.

The passage has gone down as an early insight into the damaging effects of capital and thus an indication of liberal concern for human well-being under industrial production. Yet the passage ends with the claim that the uniformity of the worker’s life means the worker will ‘regard with abhorrence the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier’. In other words, the destructive effect of the division of labour is that ‘dexterity at [a] particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of … intellectual, social, and martial values’ (1979 [1776]: 782).

This in turn explains Smith’s recommendation (1979 [1776]: 786–787) of military exercises as part of a country’s education programme.

In the progress of improvement the practice of military exercises, unless government takes proper pains to support it, goes gradually to decay, and together with it, the martial spirit of the great body of the people, the example of modern Europe sufficiently demonstrates. But the security of every society must always depend, more or less, on the martial spirit of the great body of the people.

On the one hand, this is again an argument about the virtues of standing armies and militias: ‘In the present times, indeed, that martial spirit alone, and unsupported by a well-disciplined standing army, would not, perhaps, be sufficient for the defence and security of any society. But where every citizen had the spirit of a soldier, a smaller standing army would surely be requisite.’ On the other hand, however, Smith acknowledges that notwithstanding the complications of the militia question, the main point is the wider benefit that comes from nurturing the martial spirit: ‘Even though the martial spirit of the people were of no use towards the defence of the society, yet to prevent that sort of mental mutilation, deformity and wretchedness, which cowardice necessarily involves … from spreading themselves through the great body of the people’, the martial spirit really must be attended to by government; so damaging is the weakening of the martial spirit among the people that Smith compares it to the spread of leprosy. Moreover, nurturing the martial spirit among the people ‘would necessarily diminish very much the dangers to liberty’ (1979 [1776]: 787). Liberty, in effect, depends on the martial spirit. It is for this reason that Smith proposes that as well as teaching the working class basic skills such as reading, writing and accounting, schooling also provides for ‘the acquisition of … military and gymnastic exercises’. It was only ‘by imposing upon the whole body of the people the necessity of learning those exercises, that the Greek and Roman republicks maintained the martial spirit’ (1979 [1776]: 786).

The extent to which this whole issue is central to Smith’s work can be seen in the new section added to his revised edition of the Theory of Moral Sentiments. First published in 1759, the Theory of Moral Sentiments went through several editions before having some ‘principal alterations’ for an edition published just before Smith’s death in 1790. Most significant of these is Part Six, which Smith describes in the ‘Advertisement’ of the edition as ‘altogether new’, and where he reinforces the view that he had been developing through the Lectures and the Wealth of Nations concerning the importance of the martial spirit (1982a [1759]: 3).

Thus Smith’s argument for a standing army came with the concern that the martial spirit would be lost, and he thus sought to maintain such a spirit without turning to the militia as a solution. Yet the principle is the same: this is a liberal martial spirit. Liberalism must be geared for battle. Peace may be necessary for the commercial arts, but ‘the art of war’, he says, ‘is certainly the noblest of all arts’ (1979 [1776]: 697), and one can hear in his comment the echoes of Ferguson’s vision of war as the ‘exercise of a liberal spirit’. Together they reveal the importance attached by the thinkers of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment to military valour and martial virtues.

Cultures of war, cultures of effeminacy

Late in the 18th century and some five years after writing his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke writes a series of letters to Members of Parliament, which together constitute the Letters on a Regicide Peace. Early in the first letter he comments on the practical vigour displayed by England against the French: ‘Never did the masculine spirit of England display itself with more energy … than at the time when frivolity and effeminacy had been at least tacitly acknowledged as their national character by the good people of this kingdom’ (1901 [1796]: 240). The comment about a masculine spirit revealing itself at a time when effeminacy seems to have been acknowledged as the national character might be put down as one of Burke’s rhetorical strokes and an indication of the gendered nature of his political ideas. In fact, there is more at stake.

Burke’s comment is made in the light of a reference earlier in the same paragraph to the ‘eloquent writer and ingenious speculator Dr. Brown’, who in ‘an elaborate philosophical discourse’ proved ‘that the distinguishing features of the people of England had been totally changed, and that a frivolous effeminacy was become the national character’. The ‘Dr Brown’ in question is John Brown and the ‘philosophical discourse’ to which Burke refers is Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1757). That Burke could refer to Brown’s book in such a shorthand fashion is an indication of how well known it had become: ‘nothing could be more popular than that work’, says Burke, without feeling any need to give the title of a book which had run to seven editions and had been extracted in journals such as The Gentleman’s Magazine and London Magazine.

Brown’s main theme in the Estimate was the effect on the ‘spirit of liberty’ of the relationship between the general character of the people and national decline. This was understood through the category of ‘effeminacy’. The ‘the ruling character of the present Times is that of a vain, luxurious and selfish EFFEMINACY’ and the ‘luxurious and effeminate Manners in the Higher Ranks’. An effeminate nation is ‘a Nation which resembles Women’, he suggested, and a direct effect of the increase in commerce: the ‘exorbitant Degree of Trade and Wealth … naturally tends to produce luxurious and effeminate Manners’. The key issue for Brown was ‘the natural Effects of these effeminate Manners, on Fleets and Armies’, which he thought would make the nation ‘Prey to the Insults and Invasions of our most powerful Enemies’. Yet it is also the fear of rebellion within that drives his concern: ‘How far this dastard Spirit of Effeminacy hath crept upon us, and destroyed the national Spirit of Defence, may appear from the general Panic the Nation was thrown into, at the late Rebellion’ (Brown, 1757: 29, 67, 82, 89, 91, 181).

Brown was far from alone in articulating this concern. The Oxford English Dictionary records the rise of ‘effeminate’ and ‘effeminacy’ from the late 16th century. By the 18th century this was understood as posing a real danger, whether because of aristocratic influences or ‘French’ habits of luxury. The problem was embodied in figures such as the effeminate fop, for example, a figure seen as a product of French influence, symptom of excessive luxury and symbol of national decline. The scene for this debate was set partly by the third Earl of Shaftesbury early in the century. In his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, first published in 1711, Shaftesbury sought to reconcile ‘manly liberty’ with the ‘goodly order of the universe’ by arguing for a softness, serenity and harmoniousness among men. But he was concerned that a man should not have so much softness that it turns into an ‘effeminacy as unfits him to bear Poverty, Crosses or Adversity’. For Shaftesbury, effeminacy is associated with laziness, fondness, exaggerated pity, weakness, sloth, supineness and ‘looseness of a thousand passions’ (2001 [1732], II: 16, 35, 88). Thus the refinement of manners needed to be developed alongside ‘boldness’, ‘good muscling’ and ‘strong reason’ lest it succumb to effeminacy. Reinforced by the new revised edition of Shaftesbury’s text in 1732, effeminacy was by mid-century widely seen as central to the problem of national weakness and political impotence. As Kathleen Wilson (1995: 188) comments, ‘a variety of observers, from almanac writers and journalists to playwrights, philanthropists and village shopkeepers decried the nation’s corrupted and “effeminate” spirit, which threatened the collapse of distinctions between public and private, men and women, and resulted in displays of national “impotency” abroad and ignominious imperial decline’. Effeminacy was thus part of the range of pejorative terms of the discourse of civic humanism (Barrell, 1992: 67, 82). It was also intimately connected to the question of military organization.

Mediating between the effeminate and the martial was the idea of ‘luxury’. For Shaftesbury, effeminacy is associated with luxury on the one hand and cowardice on the other (2001 [1732], I: 193, 195; III: 16). ‘Effeminate wealth has shattered our age with venal luxury’, as John Millar (2006 [1771]: 152) was to put it. Any society which creates the possibility of widespread consumption creates equally the possibility of getting lost in luxury. Here is William Russell, for example, in his highly popular History of Europe, first published in 1786:

So great an influx of wealth, without any extraordinary expenditure, or call to bold enterprise, must soon have produced a total dissolution of manners; and the British nation, overwhelmed with luxury and effeminacy, might have sunk into an early decline. The martial spirit, which seemed to languish for want of exercise, was revived by the war. (Russell, 1839 [1786]: 468)

These comments from Millar and Russell reflect a wider consensus developed during the 18th-century liberal Enlightenment concerning luxury — by then ‘an omnicompetent explanation-cum-scapegoat for various social ills’ (Berry, 1994: 142) — and effeminacy. This is illustrated in the work of the two thinkers on whom I am concentrating here.

Ferguson, for example, notes (1767: 103–104) the dangers of ‘the opiates of effeminacy, or a servile weakness, founded on luxury’. Historical examples abound of cases where despotic tribes have easily taken over ‘effeminate provinces’. Developing this idea later in the Essay he notes that Europe in particular is in danger from those mercenary and disciplined armies ready to ‘traverse the earth’, and what are at most at risk are the ‘effeminate kingdoms and empires’ (1966 [1767]: 153). ‘We are not … to conclude, that luxury, with all its concomitant circumstances, which either serve to favour its increase, or which, in the arrangements of civil society, follow it as consequences, can have no effect to the disadvantage of national manners.’ The leisure that comes with the commercial arts can lead to a decline in ‘national efforts’ connected to military affairs: ‘if the individual, not called to unite with his country, be left to pursue his private advantage; we may find him become effeminate’ (1966 [1767]: 250). It is perhaps significant that the key concept for which Ferguson became known, ‘civil society’, was at this time closely connected to the debate about effeminacy, since one of the features of the new spaces of civil society, such as the coffee house, was that ‘owing to the presence of so many women and the lack of traditional masculine recreations … these new public spaces were perceived to erase distinctions between the sexes and they threatened to make men “effeminate”’ (Shoemaker, 1998: 278).

The threat was thought to especially affect character and intellect. ‘That weakness and effeminacy of which polished nations are sometimes accused, has its place probably in the mind alone’, notes Ferguson. Much depends, for man and animal, on the physical environment and the kind of labour exercised. ‘Delicate living, and good accommodation, are not found to enervate the body’, a problem which affects ‘the children of opulent families, bred in effeminacy’. In contrast, ‘Wholesome food, and hard labour, the portion of many in every polished and commercial nation, secure to the public a number of men endued with bodily strength, and inured to hardship and toil’. Hence experiments have shown that all that is needed to allow the opulent to retain their strength is to allow the children of the opulent to spend a little more time subsisting in the forest and imitating the arts of the savage, thereby ‘recovering’ the knowledge and experience which ‘it has cost civilized nations many ages to unlearn’ (Ferguson, 1966 [1767]: 228):

When the bulky constituents of wealth, and of rustic magnificence, can be exchanged for refinements; and when the produce of the soil may be turned into equipage, and mere decoration; when the combination of many is no longer required for personal safety; the master may become the sole consumer of his own estate: he may refer the use of every subject to himself; he may employ the materials of generosity to feed a personal vanity, or to indulge a sickly and effeminate fancy. (Ferguson, 1966 [1767]: 252)

For Ferguson, monarchy is always in danger of being corrupted by luxury, resulting in ‘a fatal dissolution of manners, under which men of every condition … have no remains of real ambition’. He goes on (1966 [1767]: 251): ‘they have neither the elevation of nobles, nor the fidelity of subjects; they have changed into effeminate vanity’ and ‘a servile baseness’. Thus the integrity of manners in Sparta is contrasted to ‘the weakness of nations sunk in effeminacy’ (1966 [1767]: 161). Comparing ‘tribes of warlike barbarians’ with civilized society, Ferguson comments (1966 [1767]: 155) that what makes us regard them with contempt or even horror is ‘our sense of humanity, our regard to the rights of nations, our admiration of civil wisdom and justice, even our effeminacy’.

This same concern runs through the work of Smith. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments Smith comments (1982a [1759]: 187) that the happiness of the individual and society is dependent on the character of men as well as the contrivances of art and the institutions of civil government:

The prudent, the equitable, the active, resolute, and sober character promises prosperity and satisfaction, both to himself and to every one connected with him. The rash, the insolent, the slothful, effeminate, and voluptuous, on the contrary, forebodes ruin to the individual, and misfortune to all who have any thing to do with him.

Effeminacy is therefore clearly a problem to both individual and social well-being. There is therefore a huge amount at stake in the issue of effeminacy. Smith comments too that ‘perhaps the delicate sensibility required in civilized nations sometimes destroys the masculine firmness of character’ (1982a [1759]: 209). But this reference to the effeminate side of consumption is not just about the fact that wealth is, in the end, a ‘mere trinket of frivolous utility’ (1982a [1759]: 181). It also connects to his arguments about war: ‘the external graces, the frivolous accomplishments of that impertinent and foolish thing called a man of fashion, are commonly more admired than the solid and masculine virtues of a warrior’ (1982a [1759]: 63). This is not a straightforward comparison between a man so rooted in commerce that he becomes an effeminate man of fashion and the more masculine warrior. Rather, Smith’s point is that commercial society as a whole has this emasculating effect — it produces ‘weak men’ (1982a [1759]: 117). Hence he contrasts the Spartan discipline of the savage, faced by constant danger, and thus resistant to the kinds of feelings of, say, love and grief, that the civilized age allows expression: ‘The weakness of love, which is so much indulged in ages of humanity and politeness, is regarded among savages as the most unpardonable effeminacy’ (1982a [1759]: 205). Smith is here picking up on the complexities surrounding shows of emotion in an age in which we are supposed to have become more sympathetic, an age in which ‘if we shed any tears, we carefully conceal them, and are afraid, lest the spectators, not entering into this excessive tenderness, should regard it as effeminacy and weakness’ (1982a [1759]: 46). Thus in terms of Smith’s theory of moral sentiments, one of the negative consequences of commercial society is that its main actors will end up lacking the kind of manly virtue which we even now, in a sentimental age, still admire: ‘the man, who under the severest tortures allows no weakness to escape him, vents no groan, gives way to no passion which we do not entirely enter into, commands our highest admiration’ (1982a [1759]: 30–31). This point is explained by Smith with constant recourse to the army and military life — as in his comments on the sentiment which is deeply impressed ‘upon every tolerably good soldier’ or the idea that ‘war and faction are certainly the best schools for forming every man’ (1982a [1759]: 138, 244).

Commentators have noted that the ‘spectator’ at the core of Smith’s theory of moral sympathy and the autonomous subject that dominates Smith’s theory of commercial order are both unquestionably male (Barker-Benfield, 1992: 140; Justman, 1993). We might add that surrounding this autonomous male, his liberties, property, arts and government, is the danger of effeminacy, rooted in the luxurious wealth of commercial society. When in the Lectures Smith comments (1982b [1762–6]: 189, 202) that one bad effect of commerce is that it sinks the courage of mankind and tends to extinguish the martial spirit, the issue is the combined development of luxury with effeminacy. ‘Having their minds constantly employed on the arts of luxury’, he says, men ‘grow effeminate and dastardly’ (1982b [1762–6]: 540). For Smith, the historical evidence of this is incontrovertible: it is weaker (i.e. more effeminate) nations which get conquered easily (1982b [1762–6]: 158). Commenting on the rise of the Italian republics, Smith notes that ‘as soon as arts, etc. were improvd, there was an intire decradation and loss of courage in the whole state’. He adds (1982b [1762–6]: 231–232) that ‘whenever therefore arts and commerce engage the citizens, either as artizans or as master trades men, the strength and force of the city must be very much diminished’. In the Theory of Moral Sentiments he uses this to explain why the Italians have historically relied too heavily on mercenaries. Thus, the problem of effeminacy is a problem for military organization. The trick is to balance the experience of ‘war and faction’ as ‘the best schools for forming every man to this hardiness and firmness of temper’ and for ‘curing him of the opposite weaknesses’, with our ‘sensibilities to the pleasures, to the amusements and enjoyments’ of liberty, commerce and the arts (Smith, 1982a [1759]: 245–246). On this view current citizens are an ‘effeminate and puny set of mortals’, depending as they do on goods such as glass to allow heat and light and without which the country would be uninhabitable (Smith, 1982b [1762–6]: 339). This reference to the ‘present effeminate and puny set of mortals’ makes its way into the drafts of the Wealth of Nations, albeit tweaked a little to ‘effeminate and delicate race of mortals’ (Smith, 1982c [1763]: 563).

This same connection between effeminacy and luxury is made by writer after writer, and is always connected to the question of military virtues. Three further examples will suffice.

First, Lord Kames, close friend of Ferguson and Smith, who notes (2007 [1774], II: 493) that ‘where arts, manufactures, and commerce, have arrived at perfection, a pacific spirit prevails universally’, but sees this as a danger on the grounds that now ‘not a spark of military ardor’ remains ‘nor will any man be a soldier’. Thus he argues that militias are the right military form for a people at liberty; a standing army ‘is dangerous to liberty’, but the real danger is that nations with a pacific spirit will tend to have recourse to mercenary troops — a sure sign of a nation that has become too weak and vulnerable (Kames, 2007 [1774], II: 493, 520). More generally, luxury and effeminacy go hand-in-hand, along with a set of related weaknesses such as softness, selfishness and sloth. This is a dangerous condition: on the one hand, ‘by accumulating wealth, a manufacturing and commercial people become a tempting object for military conquest’; on the other hand, the same wealth tends to make them effeminate, and ‘by effeminacy become an easy conquest’ (Kames, 2007 [1774], I: 205, 322; II: 394, 421, 494–495, 509). In stark contrast to the ‘original adventurers’ whose ‘piety, exalted courage, and indefatigable industry’ made them ‘more than men’, the current ‘indolence, sensuality, and effeminacy’ of the commercial world has ‘rendered their successors less than women’, a view which Kames uses to read the whole history of decline and fall of empires and monarchs: from ‘the luxury and effeminacy of a great monarchy’ which left ‘no appetite for war, either in the sovereign or in his subjects’ through to empires being ‘poisoned with sensual pleasure’ and run by ‘voluptuous and effeminate’ princes and monarchs (Kames, 2007 [1774], II: 390–394, 424–425):

The voluptuousness and effeminacy of the late kings of Persia, has rendered that kingdom a prey to every bold invader.… A nation corrupted with luxury and sensuality is a ready morsel for every invader. The potent Assyrian monarchy, having long subsisted in peace without a single enemy, sunk into sloth and effeminacy, and became an easy prey to the kings of Media and Babylon. These two nations, in like circumstances of sloth and effeminacy, were in their turn swallowed up. (Kames, 2007 [1774] II: 401–402)

The same ‘Asiatic luxury and effeminacy … got hold of the Greeks and Macedonians before the Roman invasion’ and ‘rendered them easy prey’, and the Whidah in Guinea likewise ‘produced luxury and effeminacy’ and so became easy prey to enemies. Through close on 1000 pages of similar sketches of the history of man, Kames can find just one counter-example, the small principality of Palmyra, the size and geographical position of which meant that it retained ‘the most assiduous military discipline’ which ‘preserved the inhabitants from luxury and effeminacy’ (2007 [1774], II: 409–410, 493, 494). Ultimately for Kames (2007 [1774] II: 412) even the anarchy of perpetual war is better than ‘effeminacy produced by long peace’.

The second example is William Thornton who, in a pamphlet on the choice between a militia and a standing army, makes a claim for a militia on the basis of the problem of effeminacy: ‘It is said, The people of this Country are so effeminated by Luxury, as to be averse to Arms, consequently, not likely to enter a Militia.’ For Thornton (1753: 24), the reverse is the case: a militia would help the people avoid becoming ‘too effeminate for Arms’. This is despite the fact that, as it stands, the problem of effeminacy is a real one, as evidenced by the strength of the New England militia’s ability to battle the Indians and the French compared to the inability of ‘old England’ to deal with 5000 highlanders and a few Frenchmen. ‘When they [the New England colonists] were invaded, the last war, by an Army of 20,000 French and Indians, the New England Militia, untainted with the corrupt and lying Politics of their effeminated Mother-Country, immediately took to their Arms and made the Enemy fly before them’ (Thornton, 1753: 31–32).

The final further example is John Millar’s comment, noted above, that ‘effeminate wealth has shattered our age with venal luxury’. This is linked by him to the view that ‘industry breeds effeminacy and this in turn makes a people lose their martial spirit and come to rely on mercenaries’. He gives as a historical example the ancient republics which owed their liberty to the narrowness of territory and small number of people, which together allowed them to abolish the power of petty princes ‘before their effeminacy or industry had introduced the practice of maintaining mercenary troops’ (Millar, 2006 [1771]: 241–242).

Conclusion: Against the myth of liberal peace

‘O Effeminacy! Effeminacy! Who wou’d imagine this could be the Vice of such as appear no inconsiderable Men?’ (Shaftesbury, 2001 [1732], III: 113). Such was the concern of Shaftesbury in 1732. I have been arguing that this concern permeated the political discourse of 18th-century liberalism. The reason the thinkers in question thought effeminacy a vice is because they believed that, along with associated vices such as luxury, it undermined the martial spirit. As I have shown, the extent of this concern was huge. I suggest that this is also politically telling, in a number of ways.

First, because it reveals the belief in the necessity for strong martial spirit and sustained military values among the thinkers in question. Indeed, the liberals in question were not merely sensitive to the tradition of thought which emphasized the creative role of war in the development of civilization and the shaping of the character of human beings, but actually believed in and perpetuated this tradition. Far from perpetual peace, what was at stake in the liberal thinking of the time was a concern with how to maintain commercial order as a realm of liberty such that the virtues of civil society did not threaten the virtues of martial power. Within this, the question of how to stop the effeminacy and luxury of civilization from overawing the masculinity of military virtue and undermining the martial nature of masculine power was paramount. One might note here that this argument reinforces the feminist claim regarding classical liberalism’s patriarchal nature, pointing as it does to the unity of the masculinity required for war and the masculinity required for citizenship (Elshtain, 1987; Lloyd, 1986: 63–76). My point is that this somewhat undermines one of the historical claims made within the liberal peace thesis, namely that the conceptual underpinning of the liberal peace lies in part in the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment’s conception of commercial man and civil society.

My second suggestion is that any reasonable exercise in the history of 18th-century political thought would have shown IR theorists the need to disentangle the association of economic liberalism and peace. The association itself is a product of a link first made by the more doctrinaire ‘free traders’ of the 19th century peddling the myth of a link between peace and trade (Earle, 1990: 222, 226; Howe, 2007; Winch, 1978: 104). From there, the idea of a liberal vision of peace rooted in an image of economic order very easily became a piece of received wisdom. Too many IR theorists have accepted this received wisdom uncritically and perpetuated it unthinkingly, systematically ignoring the importance which the 18th-century liberals attached to military valour and martial virtues and which suggests that the belief that key thinkers of the liberal Enlightenment valued peace above all else is a piece of political mythology of the highest order. Some years ago David Spiro (1994) challenged some of the empirical data of the liberal peace thesis and provocatively called his paper ‘The insignificance of the liberal peace’. The problem, I suggest, is not the insignificance of the thesis but its status as a modern political myth.

As such, my third suggestion is that as well as debunking such myths and challenging the received wisdom of IR, a critical engagement in the history of ideas supports recent attempts to radically rethink the liberal tradition. I have elsewhere argued that liberalism’s key concept is less liberty and more security. Nowhere is this clearer than in 18th-century liberal thought, which subsumed liberty under the idea of security (Neocleous, 2000, 2008). But as Michael Shapiro (1993: 15) notes, ‘security’ in the work of Smith (and, we might add, other classical liberals) is never a reference to mere ‘defence’, but also connotes an active and militaristic practice. Liberalism as a political ideology has been committed to this active militaristic practice since its inception, which is one of the reasons why liberal states as organized political powers have turned out to be so fundamentally violent.

The implications of this argument therefore go beyond merely pointing out the poor engagement with the history of political thought on the part of too many IR scholars. Rather, the argument lends support to a growing body of work arguing that liberalism needs to be considered less as a doctrine inherently committed to peace and much more through the ‘ferocious violence with which it deploys techniques to penetrate and organise the dispositions of liberal subjects themselves’ (Reid, 2004: 64). In the history of ideas there has been a revival of interest in what Pocock (1975) calls the Machiavellian moment, a key aspect of which is the cultivation of military virtue as part of one’s civic duty. There is a decidedly liberal version of this through the centuries. ‘There is a kind of violence within liberalism’, notes Richard Tuck, ‘in which liberty and warfare (both civil and international conflict) were bound together’ (1999: 195). A fair amount of recent work from a range of positions and with a variety of foci lends weight to this argument, and really points us towards the idea that liberalism needs to be seen less through the lens of peace and more through the lens of war (Barkawi and Laffey, 2001; Dillon and Reid, 2009; Kochi, 2009; Losurdo, 2011; Meyer, 2008; Neocleous, 2010, 2011; Seymour, 2008; Spieker, 2011; Thorup, 2006). Far from being insignificant, the liberal peace thesis plays a crucial ideological role in masking classical liberalism’s understanding of war as the exercise of the liberal spirit.