Chapter three analyses the period between 1650 and 1800. Many thinkers see The Enlightenment’ as intoxicated with ideas of reason, control and with building perfect knowledge, organizations and societies. I demonstrate that this view is exaggerated. The ravages of wars produced two opposed intellectual movements: on the one hand, natural law and rationalism whose adherents believed in certain knowledge and abstract schemes; on the other, thinking in terms of probabilities, which recognizes and accommodates uncertainty. Hume, Smith, Voltaire and Montesquieu saw the limits of human reason and foresight and made considerable room for uncertainty. Military thinkers cautioned that war is unpredictable and that systematic knowledge is a pipe dream. Uncertainty and unpredictability occupied the centre stage in European culture; in paintings, the picaresque novel and the popularity of gambling and betting. This era was much contested as three different world views established themselves: The idea that the world could be understood and predicted, the sense that it is entirely uncertain and a pragmatic world view that recognizes and accommodates uncertainty as a part of the world.

Chapter five analyses the period between 1914 and 1989. Several sociological theories frame this period as one of rational planning, certain knowledge and control. Such beliefs were certainly prominent but they were related to uncertainty: The First World War ended in the fall of empires and social upheaval. Intellectual and political reactions were threefold: art emphasized a fractured world, social sciences accommodated uncertainty and political ideologies claimed to banish uncertainty and offered total control. Totalitarian states blended promises of certainty and determinism with a world of omnipresent threats and dangers. The Second World War was heavily influenced by their conviction that they had uncovered the hidden laws of history. After 1945, the advent of thermonuclear weapons caused widespread existential uncertainty. I interpret the strategy of deterrence as a pragmatic expression of minimal communication in an unpredictable world. The experience of insecurity and a breakdown of international society also spurred scientific ontologies of certainty. Modernization theory and Marxism dominated post-war social science and created the strategies that reaped tragedy in Vietnam.

Chapter four analyses the period between the French Revolution and the First World War. For the first time, Europeans believed that it was possible to reorder societies to create new futures. Politics was turned towards a future that was open to human action. These ideas generated paradoxical results. The revolutionary urge to reshape societies according a rational plan sparked twenty-five years of wars and uncertainty. The turbulence of these years generated two consequences. First, at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the experience of unpredictability gave rise to an idea that international politics requires active and multilateral management. This pragmatic approach, born out of uncertainty, increased predictability in the international system. Second, it created a yearning for certainty. A number of ideologies and sciences emerged claiming that societies are governed by underlying laws that can be discovered and manipulated. In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, determinist world views dominated modern thinking and would play a key role in the outbreak and conduct of the First World War.

Chapter one introduces the topics of the book, describes how I analyse them and outlines how the work is structured. It shows that there are many books on uncertainty as a philosophical issue but they do not deal with the problems and solutions of warfare. Conversely, there are many books on surprise and strategy in war but none that connect these problems to philosophical discussions on uncertainty, ontology and predictability. Many sociologists see our time as characterized by uncertainty but they overlook the dominance of ideologies of certainty and systems of predictability. I also argue that modernity is a civilization, not just a historical period; a theory that emphasizes that societies have always created predictability through law, norms and science but in different ways. Predictability and unpredictability should be seen as properties, existing in degrees, in different social systems. On the basis of this theory and drawing upon Machiavelli, Hume, Dewey and Luhmann, I argue that searching for certainty is not only dangerous but also unnecessary. We will always face shocks and surprises but through knowledge, collaboration and trust these will fade away with time.

Chapter two analyses world views, conceptions of time and practices of war from the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This chapter provides a comparison and contrast with the time after 1650 and after 1800. Medieval world views emphasized certainty and predictability since everything was a part of Divine Providence and history proceeded along a given trajectory towards the return of Christ. However, there was considerable room for human agency that brought about change in the world. Without a free will, there would be neither sin nor grace. Contemporaries created rules and norms to make war more predictable and to hem in the workings of chance. During the Renaissance, thinking about predictability and the limits of human control advanced dramatically. Humanists used terms like Fortuna, Virtù and Decorum to conceptualize chance, human capability and the necessity of adapting to circumstances. The Protestant reformers argued that the world is essentially predetermined by God and humans have no freedom of choice. Paradoxically, this world view galvanized Protestants to political and strategic action in England, France, Germany and Scandinavia.

Chapter six deals with the period after the Cold War. Social theory describes this era in terms of uncertainty. Such accounts overlook the prevalence of ontologies of certainty in politics, the steady advancement of technologies of predictability and how the current security situation was produced by acts of omission and commission. After 1991, liberal teleologies dominated Western strategy. The seeming ‘end of history’ and triumph of liberalism appeared to close off the future and justify strategies that sidestepped international institutions of predictability. Russia reacted by further undermining institutions and norms that created predictability. This downward spiral has culminated in the current security climate. Russian political world views of the period emphasize eternal political laws, conspiracies and a hostile world. The chapter analyses the starting phases of the Russo-Ukrainian war of 2022. Paradoxically, Western societies are increasingly regular and predictable in numerous ways but reproduce discourses of uncertainty. These trends feed off each other – the more regular everyday life is, the more shocking and disturbing exceptions and surprises become.

Chapter seven has two tasks. First, it summarizes the argument and the broad themes of the book. Second, it discusses the character of modernity. My argument is that we should view modernity as a distinct civilization, rather than as a period. This civilization is caught in a complex interplay and tension between the confrontation with uncertainty and the strivings for certainty, unfortunately often conceptualized as ontological absolutes. Although ontologies of uncertainty and certainty are co-constitutive, our culture tends to see the world in either–or terms, which explains the tendency to oscillation between hubris and despair and the difficulty of pragmatic and balanced accounts to enter into mainstream world views. Third, I propose a modest remedy for these modernist tendencies: namely, drawing inspiration from non-dualist traditions and classical virtue ethics.