Habeas Corpus: British Imaginations of Power in Walter Scott's Old Mortality
after Scott visited the battleground at Waterloo. 1 Noting that “all the more ghastly tokens of the carnage are now removed,” Scott lingers over the torn landscape and the debris of war: “cartridges, old hats, and shoes, and various relics of the fray” along with the fragments of memorandum books “in which every French soldier was obliged to enter his receipts and expenditure, his services, and even his punishments.” Waterloo fascinates Scott, as it still fascinates us, because of its association with the terrible power that Napoleon briefly embodied. Like Scott, we still imagine political power as both a “who” and a “where,” to give it both embodiment (whether in an individual body or a collective body) and location. But the resonance that we sense between power in our time and in Scott’s belies the fact that the Waterloo letter reflects a political framework very different from our own. The dramatic conceptual shifts that culminated in Napoleon’s Wars changed the way modernity conceives of sovereignty. Twenty-first-century constructions of the democratic state locate sovereignty within each and every subject body, an incomplete convergence of self-regulation and ultimate power inscribed in the fragile physical mass of a citizen. Through the work of philosophers like Michel Foucault and more recently Giorgio Agamben, we understand the tensions and the dangers buried within this conception of political power. With its endgame in the horrors of genocide, Agamben’s history of Western politics in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life suggests the importance of returning to an author who was also fascinated by the shifts that created the modern subject and who was equally concerned with the ramifications of those changes. In this essay I place Scott’s fictional histories alongside Agamben’s philosophical history to argue that even as Agamben’s work helps us to clarify the political implications of Scott’s novels, those novels reveal alternatives to modern subjectivity through an older, law-based conception of land. Scott’s fictional landscapes demand a reading that is far