Show notes
Jakub Grygiel joins Rebecca Burgess to discuss the ancient wisdom in his recent book, Classics and Strategy. Brian Smith: Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawandliberty.org and thank you for listening. Rebecca Burgess: Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. My name is Rebecca Burgess. I’m a contributing editor to Law & Liberty, and a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum. At this point, I’m sure it’s no surprise that I like to think about questions of statesmanship at home and abroad, or that I have a distinct fondness for discussing such with professors, practitioners, and other thinkers who’ve been willing to engage thoughtfully with writers of the past and present around these issues. Joining me today is professor of politics at the Catholic University of America, Jakub Grygiel. Professor Grygiel is a senior advisor at the Marathon Initiative. In another life, he served a stint at the State Department. He’s authored several books, including Great Powers and Geopolitical Change, The Return of the Barbarians, and with Wes Mitchell, The Unquiet Frontier. It is lovely to have you on today, Jakub. Jakub Grygiel: Great to be here. Thanks for having me. Rebecca Burgess: Absolutely. One of the books that you’ve authored that I didn’t just mention, you published late in 2022, titled Classics and Strategy. It’s a collection of essays on different classic authors from antiquity, the Renaissance, and even the Enlightenment. I would say it’s geared towards students, even practitioners of strategy and international relations. I’ve super enjoyed the opening inscription that you gave to that from Charles Péguy, that Homer is original this morning, and nothing is perhaps so old as today’s newspaper. Within your introduction, you affirm that classic texts give us not just important insights, but often, unusual insights into strategy. I’m wondering if you could give us a little bit of the backstory of how this book came out of a month’s long project, maybe even years-long frustration, with the limitations of the modern IR classroom. Would love to hear a little bit about this project and what you’re hoping to accomplish with it. Jakub Grygiel: It’s a great question. That little line from Charles Péguy, it’s great because it really conveys with a great brevity the idea that this morning newspaper, it’s old by now. What is it now? It’s in the afternoon. I don’t know whatever date it is. We don’t pick up the morning newspaper anymore unless we forgot to read it in the morning, et cetera. There’s something to that. Whereas we’ll always, we’ll pick up Homer, or Tacitus, or Plutarch, that we know well, or any other great authors, and we’ll read that work with great interest and I think great profit to our intellect. Obviously, these are two different things. Reading Plutarch and newspaper, I think you should do both, to a certain degree, but the originality of it is interesting of these classic texts. Anyway, so one of the impetus for writing several of these essays and then the book was simply that I just like reading old stuff. It’s very selfish. It’s always fascinating to me, there are always interesting stories, interesting insights. Above all, I think, even though I’m not a classical historian or a classist, it’s a refreshing way of thinking about current problems. When I teach classes in obviously foreign policy, national security, there’s a tendency for students and often other professors to assign and read current policy articles, books, et cetera. I think there’s a use for it, and I’m sure students enjoy it too, but sometimes you ask the questions to the students, do you really think that nobody has thought about deterrence before 1950? The answer will be, of course, somebody must have thought about it. It was like, yeah, even if you read the 1950s classical text by Thomas Shelling on deterrence, well, he starts with essentially Julius Caesar and other sort of anecdotes from ancient history, pointing to fact that this is actually not, the reality of deterrence is not new. Obviously, he phrases it a different way, in a more economic way, et cetera. There’s these political realities are not always that new. Maybe instead of reading something that tomorrow will be old, read something that is old that tomorrow is still young. I think as soon as I think after a moment of sort of worry that they’re not going to be up to speed with the latest foreign affairs article, or New York Times oped, they realize actually reading Thucydides or passages, it’s interesting. You can have great debates about war in Ukraine, or what to do about Iran, or whether a land power can become a sea power, like the question of China and ocean going navy. I always thought that these are great, well, A, they’re fun to read, and then from a teaching perspective, they’re great tools of teaching current debates, current geopolitical dynamics, without actually going into the current debates, which often are ideological and personally unpleasant. That’s the main impetus. The other one, which is probably a little bit more, I’m not sure, I have never written on that, and kind of perplexed whether I should say it, is that especially in graduate school, there’s this emphasis on literature review. You write your dissertation or whatever, you read a book, an academic academic book, you have to review all the literature on the subject, which usually means the recent literature, the last 20 years, 30, maybe 40, maybe 50, right? Maybe done in political theory, it may be different. International relations, that’s the sort of approach, comparative politics, American politics. Fine. I think it’s useful, necessary perhaps, but it forces you then to place your work within a very limited context, within the context of essentially your peers. Fine, you should do that, but why not place it in the context of a much wider tradition? This idea of this pressure to have literature review, I think in very serious ways, it’s very limiting intellectually, because then what you end up is you carve a niche within what is already a niche literature. Look, at the end of the day, that’s why publishers will never publish a literature review chapter. They’ll tell you the first thing that has to go out of your dissertation is the literature review, because nobody wants to read this. Okay, so why did you spend a year and a half doing this? Why didn’t you read Thucydides and place it in context of that, right? Anyway, so in many ways, this is a freeing moment. It’s like, look, I’ve been reading these guys for decades, and well, I don’t have to do the literature review. I’m just going to write about them. Rebecca Burgess: It narrows so drastically the scope of what you’re trying to do, but I think also the scope of imagination of the writer and then the scholars that you’re trying to engage with. On that question of, well, one, you are so correct. The number one complaint I see on Twitter from all the Twitter scholars is that they hate doing a literature review. No one reads it. They don’t want to do it themselves. Thankfully, I lucked out. I just got to incorporate all my literature throughout my dissertation draft in some sneaky way. It does raise this interesting question about I think imagination and reality. You argue in your introduction and throughout the book, you make a case not just for history. We’re all more or less inclined to accept that we can study Thucydides, and we have our Graham Allison’s, even though many of us have problems with his interpretation of Thucydides. Okay. This Thucydides is accepted, but the Tragedians, like Aeschylus, even other historians, Tacitus, Plutarch, you mentioned, you include these. I think this is a wonderful broadening of the discussion into international relations that you add, but you offer this very intriguing little soup song, if you will, into why, and you say that it’s because they offer what modern thinking about strategy lacks, a deep grounding in reality. Could you tell us a little bit more how tragics and the classics give us maybe more reality than our current doctrines and schools have thought about realists, internationalists, what have you? Jakub Grygiel: It’s a great question. I probably would have an hour long answer, another book perhaps, but in brief, I think they’re, in general, it seems to me reading a lot of these classics, and the reasons why there are classics in my view is they are not abstract. By that, I mean they do not attempt to create rationalist theories of how the world, maybe they think it works, or it ought to work. Rather they trying to describe a particular tyrant, a particular moment in time, a particular speech, or maybe they make up the speech or they think they should be said, or they think that Pericles said at the moment or whoever, or they try to describe how somebody like a Persian thought about their loss of the battle at the Battle of Salamis, trying to get into their mind. Actually, that’s imagination, that they’re not sitting there with a camera recording what the Persians are saying about their loss. It’s a flight of imagination. It’s not an abstraction in the modern sense, which is usually the creation of a fairly mathematical reality, which may or may not correspond with actual facts on the ground on the reality. As a saying that or story that somebody once told Hegel that his theory didn’t reflect the facts on the ground, the reality. Hegel allegedly responded, says, “Well, too bad for reality.” This is the modern approach. The classical one seems to be “Okay, now hold on for a second. If my theory, whatever I’m saying, does not reflect reality, oh, not too bad for reality, too bad for me. I better be careful. I better actually figure out the actual events or the actual truth or what I think the reality really is.” I think it’s this pre-modern, perhaps allergy to overly abstract theoretical thinking, which is attractive in a lot of these writers. It doesn’t have to be a historian per se. As you mentioned, it’s Aeschylus and others that convey something of the way that people thought, that people were thinking, of how people assess each other, how people had a wrong assessment of each other, and they’re not lost in great theoretical debates, which is very, very modern. Rebecca Burgess: Right. You argue or write that a modern strategic thought is shaped by three broad ideas: a belief in equal rationality of all, a trust in impersonal forces of, well, often progressive in nature, and a pension for data gathering, and that all of these work towards discounting the role of individual statesmen, and replacing strategists with planners and managers, essentially. Then the argument, as I take it throughout the essays, is kind of showing how the planner and the manager are not helpful models for us today, and kind of restoring the individual and the statesmen. Could you just give us a little bit of why you chose the authors? You have Plutarch, Tacitus, Aeschylus, Montesquieu, missing someone else. Jakub Grygiel: Now, I’m thinking too, what are you missing? Guicciardini is the last one as the Renaissance one. Rebecca Burgess: Xenophon. Jakub Grygiel: Xenophon, exactly. The problem with lot of modern thought is that it conceives politics as a mechanism, like the mechanism of physics, or an engine of some sort. Therefore, the only thing you need to know is the science of discovering how that mechanism works. Once you have figured out how the mechanism works, you can replicate it. Once I know how the diesel engine works, I can rebuild it and with the right tools, et cetera. It’s often the question is when you write a modern academic book or some argument is, how can you generalize this? Meaning, well, you figure out the science of this mechanism, can you now extend it to every other mechanism of similar nature? The classical authors are somewhat reluctant to put it in those terms. Politics is the realm often of the chance there’ll be sort of Fortuna, the Machiavellian concept, but it’s broader than that. It’s of free will, which is a key component of human action, and therefore a certain level of not chaos, but surprises, is that certain things that you think if you look at a mechanism of incentives, cost and benefits, you should do or you should not do, well, suddenly, free will kicks in. You might do the opposite. You might actually not calculate it according to the cost benefit analysis. I think these are the authors that, and they’re not exhaustive. You can talk at many other authors in sort of classical thought and both historians, theorists, or philosophers, or poets. Why these specific ones? Well, partly again, selfish, I like them and I always like reading them. Part of it I think is that they have certain set of themes that, I don’t want to exaggerate their sort of unity among them, but certain themes there are recurrent. For instance, the recurrence of call them tyrants, dictators, but actually they use the term tyrants often, very peculiar type of political leader, which is for them, it’s a recurrent reality in politics. It’s not something that is passe. The progress has removed authoritarian or tyrannical leaders. No, it’s always there because it’s part of human nature. It’s not a mistake of institutional building or a momentary lapse of the progressive march of history. No, no, no. It’s a constant thing in human history. Let’s look at that. What’s the problem with tyrants? How do they think? Are they peculiar forms? Do they have a peculiar form of behavior? A lot of them will say yes, they have very peculiar forms of behavior. Another one is fragility of political order. I think it’s more specific than that, because even a lot of modern thoughts will say political order is fragile. I think for a lot of these classical writers, it’s the impermanence of political action. In other words, politics is necessary, but it does not have, and it should not be thought as, how to put it, a creative force. Modern thought seems to me often puts a lot of emphasis or gives a lot of power to politics. You can create new lasting realities. You build the mechanism of institutions, and you have great domestic or international stability or peace. You build the right set of an incentive structure of economics, for instance, free trade, and you’ll have an outcome which is peace. It’ll be lasting and sustainable. Here’s tools of politics that you can arrange that create a new reality that will maintain itself in many ways, as long as that institutional or setting or that the structure of incentive remains. For classical authors is no. Politics is yes, absolutely essential. It has the capacity to mold things, but it’s not classic, right? Yes, you managed equilibrium today. Well, tomorrow the equilibrium will change. Good luck, right? Work again, right? Never relax. It’s fragility of political order. None of this says, “Okay, well, we have revolutions. Let’s come up with a better state to create new order to bide our time.” No. Fragility is no matter what you do, you’ll have to do it tomorrow, and you’ll have to under different circumstances with different actors, different states, different individuals, different set of incentives, et cetera, et cetera. It’s this constant struggle of politics, in a good way, that I think is very refreshing. Rebecca Burgess: Well, the fragility of politics, it’s derivative, I guess I would say, of human beings. Therefore, it is as limited as we in our individual capacity, and even in our collective capacity, are. In that way, I think one of the most hopeful things I ever learned was actually in a Politics in the Bible course, Leo Paul De Alvarez, where essentially he said, “Politics has always been going to hell in a hand basket, so cheer up.” Jakub Grygiel: Great. Sorry to interrupt. Just even if they’re not Christian, there is a certain temporal p…
Full show notes at the publisher 
Our TOPPODCAST Picks 
Stay Connected
