Charles Hill (1) (1936–2021)

Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order is a book no freshly-minted PhD could have written. Only someone with a long life of reading (and rereading,) intertwined with a career in foreign service could really chronicle the relationship of literature and statecraft. As Hill states it outright, “the argument of this 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.” Hill takes the reader through the ages, from classical to modern, relating the literature of the day to the geopolitical events it may have inspired or been inspired by. From Homer’s Iliad to Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, literature has been a playground of the mind, a place to explore strategy and even influence statecraft “in real life” years or centuries later.

Hill lists the literary works referenced at the beginning, which will certainly cause the reader to plus up their own reading list in the end. In fact, some that I’ve previously read, this book is driving me to reread because I missed a whole layer of commentary and imagination with regard to strategic and state issues I wasn’t sophisticated enough to pick up on!

Exploring and engaging with literature is essential for statecraft. We can’t just fill ourselves with histories, biographies, and analysis of crucial events. Two of the most brilliant military leaders I know, Admiral Jim Stavridis and General Jim Mattis, are prodigious readers who include a healthy portion of literature in their intellectual diets. One’s mind needs to be able to range beyond the chess board and the 32-pieces set before them. Beyond statecraft, Hill’s book is good reminder that literature is an exploratory space and will continue to be a place to confront challenging issues, both real and imagined.… (mais)

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.… (mais)