More Noted Things

by Cliopatria

"Military Advantage in History" (Office of Net Assessment, 2002) is an 85 page report that examines four empires or"pivotal hegemonic powers in history" – Alexander the Great's Macedonian Empire, the Roman Empire, Genghis Khan's Mongol Empire, and France's Napoleonic Empire -- for lessons about how the United States"should think about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century." Justin Elliott,"Don't Know Much about History," Mother Jones, 4 August, assesses the quality of this official history.

Peter D. Smith,"The Tragic Sense of Life," TLS, 25 July, reviews Robert J. Richards's The Tragic Sense of Life: Ernst Haeckel and the Struggle over Evolutionary Thought.

Patricia Cohen,"A Textbook Example of Ranking Artworks," NYT, 4 August, reports on University of Chicago economist David Galenson's quantitative identification of the most important works in 20th century art. See also: Galenson's And Now for Something Completely Different: Conceptual Revolutions in Twentieth-Century Art, preliminary draft chapters of his book, which will be published by Cambridge University Press.

"Passing the Torch: An Evolution of Form," NYT, 1 August, is a timeline of the Olympic torch, from Berlin's Summer Olympic Games in 1936 to this summer's Beijing Olympics.

Andrew Keen,"Arianna Huffington," Prospect, August, asks: if Arianna can do the news in her pajamas from Brentwood, what happens to the news when print journalism closes its foreign desk in Athens? Hat tip.

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Ralph M. Hitchens - 8/5/2008

I agree with the unnamed scholars in the Mother Jones critique who called the scholarship in this report "shoddy and superficial." Looks like the authors did OK from an operational/tactical perspective but were out of their depth when looking at things from a systemic perspective. E.g., re. Rome, they assert that "political generals" sufficed until the 2nd Punic War, but "the system failed" when they came up against a military genius like Hannibal, and thereafter Rome turned to "professional generals." This is false -- Rome won the second war against Carthage precisely through the superiority of its political institutions, which furnished a sufficiency of trained manpower and a succession of average and (on occasion) above-average generals who wore down the Carthaginian mercenary armies (commanded by professionals). Not until after the final collapse of the Republic did professional generals emerge. There's certainly a lesson here...

Alan Allport - 8/5/2008

Much as I'm sure the folks at Mother Jones wanted to be horrified by this, it seems to contain a lot of unremarkable common sense - e.g. the defense of liberal values in wartime on page 82.

Andrew D. Todd - 8/5/2008

The study "Military Advantage in History" (Office of Net Assessment, 2002) seems a fairly typical example of "soldier's military history, though, as it happens, the authors are mostly from the commercial wargames industry. Professional solders writing military history have certain styles-- for example a preference for secondary, and even tertiary sources, and, related to this, a lack of command of the relevant languages. As against that, they tend to do big comparisons. I think one can safely say that, according to academic standards, no one except a professional linguist would have the linguistic grasp for a study comparing Alexander (Greek), The Roman Empire (Greek and Latin), Temujin (Chinese, Persian, Arabic, maybe Old Slavonic and Hindi), and Napoleon (French, German, Spanish, Russian). In other words, academic historians are strongly discouraged from attempting anything like a broad comparative study. The characteristics of soldier-written military history are shared, and indeed exemplified, by the great soldier-military historians, eg. B. H. Lidell-Hart, J. F. C. Fuller, and more recently John Keegan, who taught at Sandhurst, but is paradoxically not a soldier. It is simply an unavoidable trade-off. It is like Isiah Berlin's "Hedgehog and Fox" distinction, and a certain amount of name-calling goes on between Hedgehogs and Foxes, simply as a matter of course. Justin Elliot, writing in Mother Jones, has fundamentally misunderstood the book, and has collected as set of denunciations from academic hedgehogs complaining about its "foxiness."

The tone of the study seems basically Braudelian, though unconsciously so. Soldier-historians simply don't read at the doctoral comps level, and they don't have a conscious sense of where ideas came from. The central argument seems to be that military genius is not enough-- that empires are not sustainable unless they are grounded in the economy, demographics, and political system of the state which aspires to found an empire. In other words, in the case of the United States, forget about it. In many respects, the study reminds me of Roger O'Connell's _Of Arms and Men_ (1989), especially in its discussion of citizenship and military power.