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

Abstract This article challenges a received wisdom in the liberal peace thesis, namely that the roots of the conjunction of liberalism and peace can be traced back to the idea of an essentially pacific commercial civil society in the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment. The article instead shows that the Scottish Enlightenment was committed to the idea of military virtue. Textual analysis …