It might be said that Ulysses S. Grant’s memoir killed him. The Civil War General and former President of the United States had no intention of writing a memoir. In a life so full of personal and professional crises, one final personal crisis compelled Grant to break his silence. A twenty nine-year-old
While Washington famously urges America in his 1796 Farewell Address to focus on preserving union at home for the “permanency of [its] felicity as a people,” Eisenhower in his 1961 Farewell Address identifies extensive foreign involvement as a necessity to preserve peace and “enhance liberty, dignity, and integrity among people and among nations.” These two presidents seem to offer very different visions of American foreign policy’s basic purposes. Can the principles of the two speeches admit reconciliation?
Art in its widest sense is any human activity for which the ability is not directly given to him by Nature, nor is it developed through her hand. Man has received from Nature the developed abilities of the senses (at least it seems so); he has learned (through instinct) to walk, eat, drink, etc., by her hand. Both kinds of abilities cannot count as art.
“On Art and the Theory of Art” is a rigorous investigation exploring the differences between art and science; the possibility of art theory; the necessity of practice and talent; the possibility of any laws or rules of art; and the difficulty of exceptions to these rules or laws, among other topics. It is a deep meditation on the relationship between purposes (Zweck) and means (Mittel), which is also the title of On War Book One, chapter two. Art requires judgment, one of the most important mental capabilities of the commander, while science—in the broad 19th century philosophical sense—requires cognition.
In the aftermath of the Second World War, engineer and chief science advisor to Franklin Delano Roosevelt Vannevar Bush wrote "Modern Arms and Free Men: A Discussion of the Role of Science in Preserving Democracy." World War II had been marked by incredible technological innovations that changed the course of the war, culminating in the atom bomb. The lessons of that war, Bush hoped, would help chart a course for the United States through its new confrontation with its ally-turned-adversary, the Soviet Union.
The hard-won trajectory of his career enabled Richelieu to develop the temperament and experience to step into the role of Prime Minister for a struggling France in 1624. At the time, the kingdom was not ready to challenge the dominance of the Habsburgs, whose extensive borders almost surrounded France. Years of war, religious turmoil, and bitter domestic conflict had weakened France’s finances, military, and foreign policy institutions. Therefore, the first decade or so of Richelieu’s appointment was occupied with strengthening the state administration, tempering heated domestic divisions, and solidifying the monarchy’s power by crushing threats to it. His tactics against the Habsburgs in particular tended to be oriented to the long-term, employing exhaustion, harassment, and the solidifying of other alliances—at times in opposition to Catholic hardliners who disliked forming alliances with Protestant powers. Despite being a cardinal of the church, Richelieu was responsible more than any other individual for turning this conflict from a primarily religious one into a primarily political one. He was able to do so through his focus on strengthening France’s international relations once the domestic relations were put in order. Richelieu’s influence on France came at a critical moment in the evolution of diplomatic practices, from ad hoc missions to resident embassies, which ushered in what has been called “the golden age of diplomacy.” He particularly aided in solidifying the practice of continuous negotiations, being one of the first prominent political figures “to insist on [its] importance to a community of states,” and its compatibility with the doctrine of raison d'état in modern European history.
Musashi’s main contention in the Book of Five Rings is that the secrets of the ultimate style of successful samurai swordsmanship contain the secrets to success in warfare itself. Therefore, a revelation of such secrets is as important to the front-line combatant on the ground, as it is to the commander and to the planner(s). My argument is, in turn, that Musashi’s equation of perfection in the Way of combat strategy, to perfection in any Way (tradecraft, art, or profession) means that Musashi’s manuscript was intended to transcend its immediate reception. If such an argument were to be accepted as a premise, one may partially begin to comprehend how Musashi’s work has ended up being read by students of any competitive discipline, indeed utterly transcending the time and the space which gave birth to it. Miyamoto Musashi (1582-1645) is considered Japan’s greatest swordsman—and perhaps one of the most famous swordsmen anywhere. He was born in Harima’s Yonedamura Village as the second son of Tabaru Iesada. At some point in the late 1580s, Miyamoto Munisai of Mimasaka adopted the young Musashi. Musashi lived a considerably long life, becoming supremely accomplished in all aspects of the world of a bushi or warrior. In 1643, he began writing the manuscripts of the Five Rings. He died on the nineteenth day of the fifth month of the very year in which he passed the aforementioned manuscripts to his student Terao Magonojo. With both folklore and popular culture elevating his story to legend status, Musashi epitomizes the ideal of the warrior-scholar of late feudal, pre-modern Japan.
Two general schools of thought regarding Crowe and his famous Memorandum have emerged. Some scholars paint Crowe as a latter-day Cassandra who foresaw the structural trends that were hurling the two powers toward confrontation and articulated the necessary course of action, which his government failed to undertake until it was too late. Harvard’s Graham Allison compares the Crowe Memorandum to the writings of Thucydides, whose History of the Peloponnesian War identified the dilemma that a dominant power faces when it must either accede to the rise of a challenger or risk eventual war with it. The other school of thought argues that Crowe delivered only self-fulfilling prophecies by helping to institutionalize an attitude of anti-German animus. One prominent German historian even dubbed Crowe the “evil spirit of the Foreign Office.” With these two schools of thought forming in play, the bulk of the literature on Crowe has accordingly sought to determine the precise extent and manner of his influence on British-German relations both before and after the First World War.
As a history of naval war Influence makes for dull reading. Rather, Mahan is interested in the more fundamental relationship between national primacy and the sea. Without commerce, territorial infrastructure, and political will, naval preponderance is unsustainable. Momentary superiority in tonnage or deployable warships often masks a deeper brittleness. As Mahan puts it when discussing the War of the Spanish Succession: “The sea power of England therefore was not merely in the great navy, with which we too commonly and exclusively associate it; France had had such a navy in 1688, and it shriveled away like a leaf in the fire.” In this respect, Mahan actually shares a great deal with later critics who highlight the importance of a dynamic economy as the ultimate source of national or imperial power. Today, U.S. strategists concerned with the vulnerability of sea lines of communication, a retreat from global commitments, or the hollowing out of the domestic industrial base, could find common cause with Mahan’s logic. Without those elements of Sea Power, pure military or naval strength is a colossus with feet of clay.
The Idrimi Statue Inscription is perhaps the earliest complete biography of a political figure that has been discovered to date. Written on a statue of Idrimi sitting on a throne, the inscription is a generally chronological abridgement of King Idrimi’s political and military activities in fifteenth century northern Levant (BCE). While there exists more biographical information about the lives and acts of earlier political figures, information about those figures is usually spread among many sources, requiring synthesis in order to construct something that resembles a complete biography. In contrast, Idrimi’s inscription presents a whole story. It addresses his youth, his rise to power, his activities while in power, and, implicitly, his death.The advantage of an inscription like Idrimi’s is that it provides access to a complete political story of a known leader, composed by his political and familial associates in their own words, from their own perspective. While telling us about Idrimi and his work, the inscription also identifies what made for successful strategy and statecraft in a particular milieu.
It is with great sadness that we write to let you know that CSD founder and executive director Dr. Patrick Garrity passed away peacefully after a long battle with skin cancer. Right up until the end, he devoted his time and thoughts to his life’s work, attending to his John Quincy Adams essay, the work of future scholars, and outreach for his beloved CSD.