Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order [Paperback]

Charles Hill (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 24, 2011

“The international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm,” writes Charles Hill in this powerful work on the practice of international relations. “It is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out.”

A distinguished lifelong diplomat and educator, Hill aims to revive the ancient tradition of statecraft as practiced by humane and broadly educated men and women. Through lucid and compelling discussions of classic literary works from Homer to Rushdie, Grand Strategies represents a merger of literature and international relations, inspired by the conviction that “a grand strategist . . . needs to be immersed in classic texts from Sun Tzu to Thucydides to George Kennan, to gain real-world experience through internships in the realms of statecraft, and to bring this learning and experience to bear on contemporary issues.”

This fascinating and engaging introduction to the basic concepts of the international order not only defines what it is to build a civil society through diplomacy, justice, and lawful governance but also describes how these ideas emerge from and reflect human nature.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"'In an age of short attention spans and disaggregated facts, Charles Hill does much to revive two venerable traditions - the classical ideal of statesmanship, and the close engagement with great texts.' (Henry A. Kissinger) 'Grand Strategies concerns statesmanship and strategy: the uses of power, the fate of alliances, war and peace. It also, happily, provides a tour through the Great Books, giving special attention to nation-states and their vexed relations.' (William Anthony Hay, Wall Street Journal)"

About the Author

Charles Hill, a career minister in the U.S. Foreign Service, is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution as well as Brady-Johnson Distinguished Fellow in Grand Strategy, Senior Lecturer in International Studies, and Senior Lecturer in Humanities at Yale University. He lives in New Haven, CT.

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (May 24, 2011)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300171331
• ISBN-13: 978-0300171334
• Product Dimensions: 6.1 x 1 x 9.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #455,369 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

35 of 40 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderfully written, and very important August 27, 2010

By J. Scott Shipman

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

Mr. Hill's Grand Strategies is an important modern contribution on the powerful and nowadays often neglected connection between literature, governance, philosophy and history. His profound and deep understanding of these important topics is apparent on every page. Anyone in the foreign service or military would gain a better appreciation for "how we got here" and the obstacles that were overcome (or not overcome, and why). Hill covers the globe, starting with the classical Greeks (Homer, Xenophon, & Thucydides to name a few) and working his way towards more modern works/times---to include "The Imported State" and the evolution of China.

For me Hill's book was an a reintroduction to works I read many years ago (TE Lawrence, Kipling, Proust, Milton, & Locke) and an introduction to author's I've never read, but should.

This small, 300-page "introduction" of sorts would provide an excellent foundation for anyone with an interest in the intersection of literature and history, and should be required reading at foreign service schools and military academies at a minimum. We would be wise to reestablish the connection between a complete liberal arts background and the career fields determining our national policies/strategies.

Highest recommendation; this is an important book.

33 of 39 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A Manual for Literary Statecraft September 21, 2010

By Etienne ROLLAND-PIEGUE

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

There is a case for having diplomats trained as scientists. Paul Nitze, the arms control strategist and negotiator, used to explain how the United States needed to approach the USSR by using a diplomatic version of Niels Bohr's principle of complementarity: "Light can be both wave and particle at the same time"; the United States should have to be adversarial and accommodating at the same time. Strobe Talbott, expert on foreign relations and former classmate to Bill Clinton, was once praised for having established the diplomatic equivalent of impedance matching, a process used by electronics engineers, in the strategic dialogue he conducted with his counterpart Jaswand Singh following India's nuclear testing in 1998. The two countries were on different planes, but the current between them somehow got through.

But this case for the diplomat-engineer is seldom made. More often than not, it is considered that the statesman and his close kin, the diplomat, should be trained in the humanities. Charles Hill, a diplomat turned educator and a lover of great books, takes as his aim "the restoration of literature as a tutor for statecraft". The argument of his book is that the world should recognize high political ideas and actions of statecraft as aspects of the human condition that are fully within the scope of literary genius, and ones that great writers have consistently explored in important ways. For Charles Hill, the international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm; it is where the greatest ideas of the human condition are played on. Even literary works read and praised for insights on personal feelings and intimate matters, such as Jane Austen's Emma, possess a dimension wholly apt for statecraft--in Emma's case, the gathering and misanalysis of intelligence.... Conversely, when literary works take up matters of statecraft, images suggest that the foundation stone of world order is located in marriage and the family.

For Charles Hill, political science proves inadequate in dealing with "the great matters of high politics, statecraft, and grand strategy". Political scientists are experts who ignore the reality of politics in search of "scientific" answers to some trivial or obvious aspects of a problem. Political science by self-definition must confine itself to a narrow band of problems, capable of scientifically replicable solutions--leaving the biggest questions beyond its reach. Neither can history provide the answer to the issues at hand. Historians have the pleasure of dealing with all the facts known to all the participants of any past event. But the statesmen of the time must make decisions when knowing only a small portion of what is happening. Neither historians nor political scientists can deal with the complexity of true strategy and statecraft.

As the author claims in Grand Strategies, statecraft cannot be practiced in the absence of literary insight, without a "grasp of the ungraspable" that only literature allows. Decisions in diplomacy must be taken before all the facts are in, when all the implications cannot be known. That is why diplomacy must be practiced as one of the humanities and informed by all of humanistic learning, with literature at the apex. The dimension of fiction, and of poetic license, is indispensable to the strategist who cannot, by the nature of the craft, know all of the facts, considerations, and potential consequences of a situation at the time a decision must be made, ready or not. Literature lives in the realm grand strategy requires, beyond rational calculation, in acts of the imagination.

Charles Hills begins his literary grand tour with Homer's epic of war between assembled Greek warriors and the citadel of Troy. In the Iliad, Achilles has retreated under his tent and Odysseus is sent by Agamemnon on a diplomatic mission to convince him to join back the fray. But Odysseus violates two fundamental laws of diplomacy. He doesn't follow his instructions to the letter, putting aside the demand that Achilles bow down to Agamemnon as a token of allegiance. And he doesn't report back to Agamemnon accurately, stating that Achilles is still bursting with anger whereas the Greek hero agreed to consider the request carefully. In any case, Odysseus' diplomatic mission to Achilles, and his later trials on his way back to Ithaca, demonstrate that diplomacy precedes the state, and may count among the oldest trades humanity has ever practiced. Halfway between the myth and the epic, Aeschylus's great trilogy The Oresteia locates civilization's origin in the creation of the state. The drama tracks the aristocratic house of Atreus, disintegrating under a curse that demands revenge down the generations until Orestes, in Athens, is the central character in a transition from the primeval cycle of revenge to civil society based on judicial order.

There is a literary genre that takes at its subject the foundation and preservation of a polity. This genre is the epic, and its evolution through the ages provides the Ariadne's thread that runs throughout the labyrinth of great literary works. Epic stories come in verse or in prose, and they may stick to fact and realism or give leeway to the powers of the imagination. But they all have a state-making quality: the hero's fate is closely linked to the birth of a nation, and it is told with the benefit of hindsight by the heirs to that national tradition. Epics are political narratives that tell the story of a state before history began, through the trials of one individual who shoulders the destiny of a community without knowing that all his wanderings and chance encounters will ultimately make sense.

Every classic epic involves a visit by the hero to the Underworld, where the experience will reveal to him his true, fated mission. Reaching the nether region requires contact with a vegetation symbol, like Virgil's Golden Bough, and a guiding companion. Charles Hill finds that same narrative structure in many works of fiction, from the classic narrative poems of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Milton to the modern novels of Jonathan Swift, Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. The descent to the underworld, and the walk in the woods that precedes it, infuse the political order with a mythical element that sustains it. To be legitimate, any political system must at least hint at the underlying divinely founded order.

Although Charles Hill is mostly preoccupied with works of fiction and poetry, he also suffuses the text with his real-life experience. He was a direct witness when Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew visited Harvard in 1970 and when, in front of anti-war protesters and New Left faculty, he declared: "If the U.S. were not fighting in Vietnam, Singapore would be gone by now". The author concurs and adds that "not many years later, the emergence of the Asian Tigers as successful states in the global economy would prove Lee correct." The author also refers to his close relationship with Henry Kissinger, who shared the same literary tastes and passion for history. Kissinger poked fun at State Department officers who had never heard of Cardinal Richelieu, or misquoted Thucydides without having read The Peloponnesian War. Clearly the community of grand strategists and readers of ancient epics is an exclusive club. On the other hand, being steeped in books does not necessarily make one a more enlightened statesman. During the epoch-making visit to China in 1972, Mao received Nixon and Kissinger in his private room full of books and manuscripts, a location which looked more like the retreat of a scholar than the audience room of a political leader. But Chairman Mao is certainly no model for Charles Hill, who was trained as a China watcher during the horrendous years of the Cultural Revolution.

Charles Hill has a good knowledge of the literary canon, as he revisits the masterworks "every schoolboy used to know" but nobody now remembers, such as the long march of the Ten Thousand in Xenophon's Anabasis. His command of diplomatic history also enlightens the text, as when he retells the story of the Telegram from Ems that Bismarck rewrote and leaked in order to trick the French into declaring war to Prussia. To be true, the connections that the author establishes between works of fiction or poetry and the course of history are sometimes tedious, and we get the impression that the author writes about certain works just because he likes them for their literary value, which is fine. The parallel he draws between T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points is rather far-fetched, even though he is right to draw attention to the literary dimension of what he considers "the most influential document in American diplomatic history".

Based on Hill's lectures at Yale, the book leaves the reader with a long list of suggested readings, including the masterworks whose reading one always postpone, such as Dante's Divine Comedy, Milton's Paradise Lost, or Whitman's Leaves of Grass. But a reader's humanistic culture is always a work in progress, and Charles Hill is no exception: the misspellings in his quotes of Rimbaud's volumes suggest that his French could need a little refreshing. Perhaps more than the classics, I was drawn to the works of contemporary fiction that he refers to in the book, and which I have added to my reading list. These are Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave, David Stacton's People of the Book, and Roberto Calasso's The Ruin of Kasch. Readers' feedback on these books would be most appreciated. Read more ›

28 of 36 people found the following review helpful

2.0 out of 5 stars Disappointing March 6, 2011

By RedWell

Format:Hardcover

I wanted to like it, but Hill's book is a remarkable disappointment. It floats vague theses followed by a rambling series of synopses. It offers scattershot insights without clear organizing principles. It insults political science without understanding it. Most lamentably, given this opportunity to explore how literature might illuminate and even affect international politics, Hill merely samples the typical set of Western writings that speak more to classic, domestic political theory than "world order."

And after all its praise for literature, it's a dull read.

And it has nothing to do with grand strategy.

Hill begins with a lot of claims. The Westphalian state system is a "moral order." Literature reveals the "sources and motivations" behind accepting that state system. Today, "state order and literature are under assault." Most fundamentally, he's arguing that "high political ideas and actions of statecraft [are] aspects of the human condition that are fully within the scope of literary genius."

However, a basic logic behind choosing or analyzing texts is missing. Hill wants to highlight the intangible art of strategy and diplomatic thinking, but without SOME guiding principles, the work incoherently drifts outward. For instance, Hill dwells in depth on Dante's "Inferno" without a word on writers like Grotius or Vattel, whose work actually and broadly shaped Europeans' international thinking and practice. Similarly, Hill (with some disdain) discusses French revolutionary writers but offers nothing from Edmund Burke. Why not? There may be good reasons, but the reader suspects Hill's idiosyncratic tastes and personal reading history are the only logics behind the book's parameters....

Hill's treatment of Milton and Swift illuminate the book's essential incoherence. In "Paradise Lost," says Hill, God and Satan pursued clear grand strategies. Satan in particular shifts from general to spy to unlawful combatant, but at what point does such a modern re-framing violate the author's intentions and lose the original meaning? More to the point, Hill expends such energy restating the story and stretching its meaning that we learn nothing substantive about "statecraft and world order."

In visiting "Gulliver's Travels," Hill's approach belies an essential weakness of the whole project: most literature, classic and otherwise, speaks to domestic rather than international politics. Even when Lilliputians interact with an adversary state, for example, the narrative still focuses on their own venality. Yes, domestic politics and human nature matter to international affairs, but can't "world order" take on a life of its own and display unique characteristics beyond those of any one state? Unfortunately, Hill never convincingly addresses the invisible force of the international system.

Hill concludes as he began: broadcasting claims in the apparent hope that one or two kernels will take root. "Sacral nature," he says, "must infuse world order if it is to be legitimate." What?

"The international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm; it is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out." Perhaps, but explicitly arguing this through the text would be more convincing.

"Legitimacy in governance remains a concept too esoteric for mere politicians [much less political scientists] to grasp. Literature and the book may be required." So let it be written, so let it be done! Hill's grandiosity would be more convincing if his own writing demonstrated the relentless focus, lucidity and insight of a Morgenthau or, God forbid, a Kissinger. Instead, we get bad history, some charming reminiscences, and amateurish literary analysis. Thanks Yale University Press.

Hill, at the outset, sniffs that political scientists and politicians really don't understand the art of diplomacy. Turns out, Hill demonstrates even less understanding of grand strategy, world order and literature.

Given the glowing reviews here on Amazon and from the publisher, I started to wonder about my intellectual sanity. After all, two stars seems charitable to me, but Andrew Flynn at OpenLettersMonthly offers a similar review. Read more ›

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Wanna book about books? And foreign policy? And statecraft? April 4, 2012

By PubliusDB

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I'm always on the look out for new books to read (but what I really need is more time). Suggestions from friends, mentors, reviewers, blogs, and references in other books send me off on an endless cycle: hear about a book, find it on Amazon (or the library), purchase (or check out) said book, bring it home, put it on my bed-stand with great anticipation, read ten pages to a reference of another book, and...repeat. The result is a two-stack, five books per stack, "pile up" next to my bed that has resulted in a reading bottle neck. And, believe me you, it's a bottleneck that affords me more enjoyable hours than I've ever passed in traffic.

That's all really just a long way of saying that in reading Charles Hill's "Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order" I constantly found myself adding new books to some real or imagined book list that I may, or may not, ever get a chance to read. Every chapter of Grand Strategies was full of new books that sounded interesting and fascinating. Some-like Mark Twain`s "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," Salmon Rushdie`s "Satanic Verses," or Thucydides's "The Peloponnesian War"-I had read and could quickly relate. Others-Xenophon's "The Persian Expedition" or Marcel Proust`s "In Search of Lost Time"-were new, at least to me. Worse, especially for my book list, Hill manages to craft his dialogue about each in such a way as to bestow meaning and insight beyond a cursory reading of the text.

For example, though I've often heard it referenced and cited as powerful piece of poetry, never had I seen John Milton's "Paradise Lost" as a commentary on war and the modern polity. And yet, perhaps it is....

"But far beyond the politics of the day `Paradise Lost' is Milton's comprehensive commentary on modern warfare, revolution, founding a polity; on strategy, leadership, intelligence, individual choice under conditions of modern statecraft; and on the justification of God's ways to men."

Suddenly, the war in heaven, through Milton's eyes, becomes a proxy for competing views of the world worked out during the Oliver Cromwell English Civil War.

In Hill's eye, fiction is more than just a story. In literature, we see the great ideas and forces that move history worked out, argued, and recorded. The "international world of states and their modern system is a literary realm," he argues. "[I]t is where the greatest issues of the human condition are played out." Nothing may come closer to a thesis for his opus. He continues:

"A sacral nature must infuse world order if it is to be legitimate. that order is not to be identified with a particular social system, but to legitimate, the system must hint at the underlying divinely founded order. The modern Westphalian system was conceived when such was the case, but with the Enlightenment's addition of secularism, science, reason, and democracy, the system increasingly spurned , then forgot, its legitimizing sources of authority.[...] Revolutionary ideology radicalized secularism, science and reason into the task of erasing original sin, o perfecting humanity-all requiring terror to create "the New Man." Modern efforts to create a sovereignty potent enough to fill the void produced the statist monstrosities of Stalin and Hitler. America became an empire but never gained the understanding to go with it. China is now on its own misguided course."

Thought provoking, insightful, and, of course, full of literature to read when you finish it (including a bibliography of primary and secondary sources that will keep you busy for several years), and reread, Hill's "Grand Strategies" is a worthy addition to your bed-stand stack. Just make sure you put it on top. Read more ›