Chartbook 251: In the beginning was Napoleon
— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) December 3, 2023
Infruriated by the terrible Ridley Scott film, @CameronAbadi and I did a podcast https://t.co/V0IiDWoBGv
And I followed it up with this Chartbook 251 pulling together some recent econ history https://t.co/t8mFESrsny
Adam Tooze:
If the period between 1790s and the early 1800s was, according to Reinhart Koselleck, the period in which the modern Western conception of secular history took shape (Sattelzeit), then Napoleon was perhaps its first hero (or antihero). If there was such a thing as history, then Napoleon showed how war and military command could make and remake it.
Not for nothing, Hegel described the emperor cantering through Jena as the “world soul” on horseback. It was the historical efficacy of Napoleonic war-fighting that Prussian theorist of war, Clausewitz, tried to grasp with his radically historical and romantic view of war as an antidote to the rationalist and geometric conceptions of war beloved of the 18th century.
One hundred and eighty years later, the historian Thomas Nipperdey began his history of 19th-century Germany with the simple statement: In the beginning was Napoleon.*
*a link; see a note on notes and links and a disclaimer; see also the about post and the archives of miscellany, notrehta, or fw posts