Empire of chance: the napoleonic wars and the disorder of things

Engberg-Pedersen s book can be characterized as an epistemological seismograph, registering, recording, and evaluating the tremors that the Napoleonic warfare sent through many fields of knowledge: military science, literature, philosophy, pedagogy, historiography, and cartography. It detects a radical transformation of the order of things in the period around 1800. But moving beyond Foucault, Engberg-Pedersen argues that this transformation installs not simply history, but chance as the organizing principle of modernity. He substantiates this argument with hitherto little known historical material (e.g. game design and military cartography), as well as with perceptive readings of canonical literary texts ranging from "Tristram Shandy" to vintage nineteenth-century European novels. All this is done in a style both lucid and elegant.--Chenxi Tang, University of California, Berkeley"