{"id":28504,"date":"2013-10-03T03:10:04","date_gmt":"2013-10-03T03:10:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=28504"},"modified":"2013-10-04T13:44:48","modified_gmt":"2013-10-04T13:44:48","slug":"charles-hill-on-freedmans-strategy-a-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/?p=28504","title":{"rendered":"Charles Hill on Freedman’s Strategy: A History"},"content":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski<\/strong>, a.k.a. “zen<\/strong>“]<\/p>\n

\"\"
\nCharles Hill<\/strong> <\/a>pens a favorable but also fairly critical review of Sir Lawrence Freedman’s<\/strong> <\/a>tome-like,\u00a0Strategy: A History<\/a><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The snares of strategizing<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

.…Sir Lawrence Freedman\u2019s 750-page magnum opus,\u00a0Strategy: A History<\/em>, is encyclopedic, although not alphabetical, a pleasure to dip into here and there to get a carefully considered summary briefing on the strategy of the Hebrew Bible, the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Jane Addams, Black Power, or the strange array of social science attempts to redefine human behavior as a contribution to strategy. Everybody talks about strategy, but no one seems to know what it is. But now there are no excuses; it\u2019s all here, at least in chronological array. As with my childhood set of\u00a0Compton\u2019s<\/em>, I read it straight through for its several-thousand-years\u2019-long narrative arc; it only remains to try to make sense of the whole thing as one big idea.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Freedman begins by admitting that there is no agreed-upon definition of strategy. When one encounters the word applied to battle plans, political campaigns, and business deals, \u201cnot to mention means of coping with the stresses of everyday life,\u201d the concept may begin to seem meaningless. But not so for Sir Lawrence, a most distinguished professor of war studies at King\u2019s College, London, who unapologetically focuses his modern section on American approaches because \u201cthe United States has been not only the most powerful but also the most intellectually innovative country in recent times.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

The \u201corigins\u201d of strategy run from David and Goliath to Machiavelli to Milton\u2019s\u00a0Paradise Lost<\/em>,\u00a0<\/em>a vast stretch of time covered, for this big book, in a relatively short space, as though the author is hurrying to get to strategy in our modern age. All the old warhorses are here. Thucydides is analyzed as the start of \u201creal\u201d strategy and the distortions of language as a cause of Athens\u2019 fall is featured. Plato\u2019s\u00a0Republic\u00a0<\/em>is taken seriously as a \u201cstrategic coup\u201d by which philosophy defeats strategy. (I am one of those who read Plato\u2019s Socrates as ironic, playing along with an overnight concoction of a perfect polity\u2014which turns out horribly\u2014as the most effective way of showing us what\u00a0not\u00a0<\/em>to do when thinking strategically.) Sun Tzu is properly portrayed not so much as a strategist as a master of stratagems, a subset of the art in full: To do the opposite of what is expected is not enough to qualify as strategy. Overall, the centuries of \u201cOrigins\u201d analyzed here could be characterized as \u201ca series of footnotes to Homer,\u201d a running debate between advocates of force (Achilles) and those who prefer guile (Odysseus). The Trojan Horse was guile personified; it worked, but thereafter could be scorned as a despicable trick unworthy of heroes. The strategic approach of Milton\u2019s Satan to his own demonic team, as well as toward Adam and Eve, was all seductive guile and still seems to be working….<\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The book comes across as being rather unwieldy in size, scope and definition of strategy, though informative. I disagree with Hill’s interpretation of Sun Tzu<\/strong> as well as Plato<\/strong> ( Socrates<\/strong> was an ironist, Plato? Well, he wandered quite far from his master’s teachings in the fullness of time). Nevertheless, worth a read.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[by Mark Safranski, a.k.a. “zen“] Charles Hill pens a favorable but also fairly critical review of Sir Lawrence Freedman’s tome-like,\u00a0Strategy: A History. The snares of strategizing .…Sir Lawrence Freedman\u2019s 750-page magnum opus,\u00a0Strategy: A History, is encyclopedic, although not alphabetical, a pleasure to dip into here and there to get a carefully considered summary briefing on […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[216,133,131,481,127,530,18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28504","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-book","category-security","category-strategist","category-strategy","category-strategy-and-war","category-war"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28504","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28504"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28534,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28504\/revisions\/28534"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}