Romantics at War: Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorism.

• Author: Michael, William B.
• Position: Book Review

Romantics at War: Glory and Guilt in the Age of Terrorism. By George P. Fletcher. * Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Pp. 251. $24.95.

George P. Fletcher's Romantics at War begins by describing an ironic blindness. The threat of terrorism has forced Americans to consider questions of war and guilt with a new sense of immediacy and relevance, to disorienting effect. We remain unable to reconcile our instinctive view of the war on terror as a moral conflict, pitting good against evil, with our basic legal and moral commitments, rooted in notions of fairness and individual justice. Professor Fletcher proposes to clarify this "conceptual morass" (p. 5) by drawing our attention to what may be an irreducible contradiction between our liberal aspirations and our Romantic impulses.

The first step in Fletcher's argument is to reveal what he perceives as the shortcomings of a liberal tradition embraced by most American legal theorists. According to Fletcher, liberalism cannot fully explain the nature of our legal duties in the context of war, much less account for the feelings of solidarity that shape a nation's willingness or unwillingness to engage in war. What we need in order to think more clearly about these issues is an altogether different vantage point. Fletcher finds this alternative footing in Romanticism, from which he develops a concept of the nation as a collective agent and as a potential bearer of guilt.

Fletcher is by no means the first to criticize liberalism for its preoccupation with the individual and its tendency toward a universalism based on abstract principles of reason. (1) More unique is his intent to focus on the tension between liberalism and Romanticism without necessarily arguing for one over the other. In order to defend the Romantic perspective against its own potential excesses, however, Fletcher adopts too narrow a view of the Romantic movement to make the tension productive. He is, paradoxically, forced to resort to liberal principles in order to vindicate a mode of thinking he characterizes as diametrically opposed to liberalism.

The aim of this Comment is to extend and modify Fletcher's account of the conflict between liberals and Romantics by examining an aspect of the Romantic tradition that he ignores. Specifically, it highlights a particular conception of imagination central to the English Romantics' understanding of national identity. At the same time, it argues that Fletcher's approach to the question of war's appeal and his argument for the principle of collective guilt are inconsistent with his own premises.

I

At a philosophical level, "the Romantic break with the Enlightenment was meant to be radical and irreconcilable" (p. 26). (2) Fletcher describes this break by contrasting the Romantics' commitment to a world of sensual impulse and inner feeling with a more detached, Kantian belief in transcendent reason as the path to truth (pp. 17-21). Privileging the subjective and partial over the objective and universal has a methodological significance as well: Only by entering the Romantic mindset, he argues, is it possible to understand phenomena that to liberals appear simply irrational, such as the concept of national honor or the necessary violence of war. (3)

One central part of Romantic thinking in Fletcher's analysis is a commitment to the ideas of nationhood and national identity. Whereas liberals define the nation according to its political and legal institutions, Romantics see the nation itself as an organic actor in history. While nations cannot partake of the essential human dignity that liberalism attributes to rational beings, they can, Fletcher asserts, "experience glory and grandeur as well as humiliation" (p. 21). In the Romantic conception, moreover, the identity of individuals is bound up tightly with that of their nations. The Romantic views national identification not in terms of the rights and duties of citizenship, but rather as a mode of self-expression. (4)

The internal cohesion of self and nation serves as the basis for Fletcher's argument that nations themselves can be meaningfully characterized as bearers of guilt. Sometimes--most notably during war--the nation not only demands certain actions of its citizens but also acts through individuals in a way that expresses their collective intentions. These actions manifest a unique form of agency, distinct from the agency of individuals (pp. 72-74, 82-83). If a nation can experience honor on the basis of its actions, it can also, he claims, bear guilt on that basis.

To grasp fully Fletcher's theory of collective guilt, it is important to recognize that he does not propose a new form of criminal liability, nor does he suggest that nations themselves be put on trial. Rather, the primary effect of collective guilt would be to mitigate the guilt of individuals. Fletcher's paradigm case is the trial of a war criminal like Slobodan Milosevic or Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann was rightly found guilty of the most serious offenses against...