Preface to the paperback edition

I wrote a preface for the paperback edition of the book (long overdue):

“Writing the preface to a new edition of a book that first appeared twelve years ago is like trying to introduce a very good, but long-lost, friend. You know the person really well but you are at the same time not quite sure what he or she has been up to lately. Thus, although this book undoubtedly has spent some of the last ten years on library shelves, it has also, I am told, been off contributing to various debates and controversies: over the nature of warfare in early modern Europe, over the importance of identities in social and political life, over the role and nature of international law, over narrative and metaphor as tools of social explanation, and so on. Moreover the book seems to have kept company with students and scholars in fields as diverse as historical sociology, comparative politics, European and post-Communist studies, international relations theory and plain old-fashioned history. This is surely more precociousness than one can expect in any 12 year old. Obviously it is my hope that this paperback edition will allow it to make even more new friends and to go even more exciting places.

In these terms, the book has been very successful. It is not a history book although the material is historical. It is rather a work in sociological imagination, an attempt to rescue a historical reality from the descriptions provided of it by flat-footed empiricists and overly pedantic antiquarians. What I wanted to do was to philosophise in relation to facts rather than in relation to philosophical texts. My aim, to put it grandly, was to distance us from ourselves, to establish a vantage point from which our contemporary world would come to look strange and accidental. The seventeenth century and the Thirty Years War served well for these purposes, and the fact that the historical material – king Gustav II Adolf and all that — is rather parochial was actually an advantage. Twelve years later I’m delighted that a sufficient number of readers have understood these points.

Speaking of 12-year-olds, My first daughter, Saga, to whom the first edition was dedicated is now a beautiful young lady and she has been joined by three equally beautiful sisters — Beata, Yrsa and Rima. Twelve years on, their mother is still as wonderfully wonderful.”