Hey folks! I had a few other projects that I really needed to get finished this week, which left me with limited time to put a blog post together. My plan for next week is something for the worldbuilders out there, a sort of ‘guide’ to different kinds of army structures, drawing on a number of the series we’ve done looking at different ways armies could be raised.
That said, I don’t want to leave you with nothing to read on a Friday so here are some suggested things:
From Kiran Pfitzner (‘Dead Carl’), an older essay of his I found interesting, “The Kaiser and a ‘Mediocre Man’ Theory of History: A Case Study in the Historical Importance of Incompetence.” We’ve never done a full take-down of Thomas Carlyle style ‘great man’ history here (we should, at some point), but one of the real objections to it is that not only is history often shaped by impersonal forces (so not singular leaders at all), but often history is shaped not by ‘great men’ but by greatly incompetent men in positions of leader (a possibly which Carlyle’s ‘heroic’ great man theory does not really permit).
He also had a wonderful more recent essay, “Rights and Righteousness: From ‘The War People’ to ‘A People at War,’” which builds off of a discussion of The War People (recommended here back in February!) to think more broadly about how armies are shaped by conditions of service and how and why those conditions evolved from the 17th century into the 20th. Perhaps most on point is the reminder he offers that just because the resources for war expanded from the 18th century to 1945 does not mean they will so expand forever.
I also really liked James’ meditation on the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides and how it should be understood today, “American Melos.” The Melian Dialogue is one of those very famous passages in Thucydides that is often taught in isolation – often in political science contexts – where the removal of the context Thucydides assumes his reader knows (because they had all lived through it) really warps and undermines the passage. I think we probably ought to do a second ‘Trip Through’ Thucydides focused on the Dialogue at some point; maybe soon.
So we’ll be back next week with something more substantive!
‘The War People’ has got to be one of my favorite history reads. Thanks for recommending it and nice to see it pop up here again.
I know I had to read Thucydides in college, and I think it was in the school’s “if you’re not going to major in a social science you need to take this yearlong survey course” – I think it was the same professor who assigned, at various points, Thucydides, Marx, and Durkheim.
Anyway, definitely we learned it in context and I’m baffled that it would occur to anybody to teach it otherwise. Especially since in a modern cultural context, a reading of the Melian Dialogue that doesn’t rely on the dramatic irony of the audience knowing what was going to happen to Athens ought to founder on the Athenian position being at odds with the informal ethical tradition we’ve all been steeped in since kindergarten.
Very often the people who quote the Melian Dialogue are making an argument that relies on the context being suppressed.
So basically Mike Duncan’s Great Idiot Theory of History then?