The Liberal Paradigm of Security in Sir Walter Scott's The Antiquary

If war forms the prototypical content of Sir Walter Scott’s historical fiction, his novels nonetheless repudiate war’s violence as they propel their heroes into a future of peaceful progress and development (Jameson 266). Epitomized by Scott’s first three Waverley novels, which recount the progress of Scottish manners and society in the second half of the 18th century (the novels “by the Author of Waverley”), the historical novel archetypally tracks a historical progression from military action to companionate love and a settled, domestic life (Duncan 51–105; Christensen 153–75). The hero’s path to maturity and social integration allegorizes the nation’s own historical movement away from a past dominated by civil war, fierce and bloody conflicts between Jacobites and Hanoverians or Saxons and Normans, and towards a liberal world of peace and prosperity in which conflict is resolved through the discursive institutions of the law and polite conversation. In this liberal reading, war may be central to the historical novel, but war appears as an aestheticized and archaic romance which can invigorate yet which stands outside the progress and political control of modern life. The passive hero of the historical novel is a key figure of liberalism and its peaceful negotiation of conflict, the capacious form of the novel itself mimicking the inclusiveness that defines civil society. It is the contention of this article, however, that the emergence of liberalism cannot be so easily disentangled from the violence that it disavows. Focusing on The Antiquary (1816), in which Scott concluded the first three of his Waverley novels by bringing his history of Scotland up to his own era, this article argues that the novel does not simply displace war into romance but, rather, reveals a transformation of war under liberal regimes into a new kind of militarized discourse of security, or what Jacques Rancière has described as the “pacification of the political” (1995: 20). Georg Lukács’s Marxist analysis of Scott’s fiction invites us to read war back into the historical novel: his thesis is that individuals first began to see themselves as historical participants in national life as a result of the mass mobilization and political propaganda of the French