Masculinity, Militarism, and Eighteenth-Century Culture, 1689–1815 by Julia Banister (review)

What was the nature of the eighteenth-century debate concerning the relationship between masculinity and the modern soldier? Comprised of creative readings and judicious inclusions, Banister’s book succeeds in pointing to the significant instabilities that characterized efforts to fix the identity of the military man in an era of rising politeness, sensibility, and frequent war.

The strength of this literary study is the diversity of texts explored. Readings of Steele, Boswell, Adam Smith, Henry Mackenzie, Southey, and Austen might be said to go with the territory, but Banister productively supplements them with attention to several notorious courts-martial of the period. The study benefits from their inclusion, because they offer particularly dramatic examples of the contrast between external and internal mechanisms of discipline—that characteristic considered integral to masculinity in its eighteenth-century forms.

After an introduction that makes appropriate theoretical genuflections to Foucault, Judith Butler, and Habermas, Banister commences by framing the contrast that supplies her study with its architecture: this is the opposed views of masculinity expressed by participants in the standing army debate of the reign of William III. Civic humanists such as John Trenchard opposed standing armies as agents of absolutism, but they also considered military prowess and courage to be essentially male characteristics. (Hence their advocacy of militia-centered schemes of national defense.) Those who advocated a standing army pointed out the greater complexity and professional nature of war in the era of the military revolution. Their argument that soldiers were trained, not born, implied that neither the virtue nor the loyalty of a professional soldier could be trusted (a realization that brought little comfort to essentialists). But it also accepted that military identity was a performance. This “proto-constructionism” attached their notion of the modern military man to another emerging performative corollary—politeness—in ways that, Banister shows, authors like Steele and Boswell struggled to reconcile.

Having introduced essentialism and proto-constructionism, Banister moves on to explore their ramifications in the public sphere, particularly in the 1744–1746 trials of Admirals Mathews and Lestock during the War of the Austrian Succession. The officers had clashed after the battle of Toulon in 1744, when Mathews accused Lestock of failure to engage the enemy. To public incredulity, Lestock was acquitted and Mathews found guilty. Banister argues that Lestock emerged victorious because his view of centralized naval authority and his conception of a wider professional discipline more fully conformed to the rising vision of the Admiralty. While Mathews claimed the discretionary authority of a general in the field, Lestock argued that his prioritization of maintenance of the line of battle over engaging the enemy was dictated by the service’s adherence to the official Fighting Instructions. Lestock’s defense was grounded in the anti-standing army position of performance. He exemplified the new professional model of the military man in which discipline was held to involve self-control and adherence to external regimes. For his part, Mathews denounced this “new-fangled discipline” and projected a robust masculinity. In Banister’s view the negative public reaction to Lestock’s acquittal underlines how unsettled the ideal of “the modern, professionalized military man” was at mid-century. Blowback came, as evidenced by the trial of Admiral Byng in the darker days of the Seven Years’ War. Byng’s defense replayed the arguments of Lestock—that his actions conformed to the external discipline of his professional judgment. But for Byng the arguments failed. He was found guilty and shot—an outcome that Banister attributes to the strength of the critique of the modern military man that had taken hold since the previous war. This was the ideal of the “new old military hero”—an essentialized heroic ideal Banister sees at play not only in the heroic affect for General Blakeney (the victim of Byng’s cowardice at Minorca), but also in John Brown’s Estimate of the Manners and Principles of the Times (1761), and the attempted militia reforms of the Elder Pitt...