The few unfrequented bookshops left in China offered little else but the writings of Mao and Marx and Lenin. But here in his lair, Mao had hoarded all the great texts his heart desired. He knew them well, and marked them up. (“If you don’t put your pen in action, it cannot really be considered reading,” he had said.)


Of all the arts and sciences, only literature is substantially and methodologically unbounded. Literature’s freedom to explore endless or exquisite details, portray the thoughts of imaginary characters, and dramatize large themes through intricate plots brings it closet to the reality of “how the world really works.”

Literature lives in the realm grand strategy requires, beyond rational calculation, in acts of the imagination.


Dante sees God as a book. The leaves of a notebook telling of people, chance happenings, and their consequences, are scattered around the world, but God, the poets know, has bound them into a single volume.


Imperfection — the conflicts, stratagems, and surprises of world affairs — can covey an ineffable, transcendent sense of things. Clausewitz called it the coup d’oeil: an integration of experience, observation, and imagination that “constructs a whole of the fragments that the eye can see.” Imprinting it “like a picture, like a map, upon the brain.” The approach is like a poet’s, involving the quick recognition of a truth that the mind would ordinarily miss, or would perceive only after long study and reflection.


This is all the more necessary in our time because of the hegemony of the social sciences, particularly political science, which by self-definition must confine itself to a narrow band of problems capable of scientifically replicable solutions — leaving the biggest questions beyond its reach. There is as well in the field of literary studies the supposition that high politics and strategy are at best incidental and somewhat suspect subjects for literature. If a great book takes up such themes, those do not constitute the source of its greatness, which must lie elsewhere.

So 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. They were not simply using political circumstances as a background for their characters’ dramas but were instead thinking deeply and significantly about the ideas themselves.


Such matters as how a people begins to identify itself as a nation, the nature of trust between political actors or between a government and its people, how a nation commits itself to a more humane course of governance — all these and many more topics dealt with in this book — can’t be understood without some “grasp of the ungraspable” emotional and moral weight they bear. A purely rational or technocratic approach is likely to lead one astray.


This is why no apology is given for those books read here which commonly have been catalogued under history, law, or philosophy, rather than literature. Almost every truly great work of “nonfiction” has achieved its extra level of superiority by soaring above and beyond factual analysis.


Homer’s epic reveals that diplomacy precedes the state and is natural to the human condition. Everyone practices it in some form, from “signaling” to making concessions, to “getting your way without force,” to coercive diplomacy.


The line that is crossed, from precivilization to civilization, has at least six concepts of continuing importance. The first is the shift from the family as the seat of governance to the state. Private interests, however essential to human flourishing and societal productivity, may not overtop the public good. Status, largely related to family or clan, would in progressive societies shift “from status to contract”. Personal and family honor, when calling for “taking the law into your own hands,” gives way to justice, administered publicly. To administered justice properly, the integrity of the process must be maintained; regardless of the substance of the case, an ill-prepared court case must be dismissed even though the wrongdoer goes unpunished. Finally, there is marriage as an institution of civilization: “Therefore shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” Status of kin relationship is superseded by contract: the marriage vows.


Apollo, however, asserts that law is higher than blood revenge as a matter of justice. Thus marital contract is more sacred than the status of kinship.


This case marks the shift from the state of nature’s anarchy to the order of civil society. Justice will be carried out not by individuals on behalf of families or clans, but by the state. Irrevocably, capital punishment will from this point forward be a matter for the state to decide in accordance with open procedures centered on the jury. This makes the death penalty the foundation stone of civilization, for only when a victim’s kin are convinced that the state will exact justice in response to murder will they entrust that power to the state. The state may make capital punishment extremely rare, but to abolish it would undermine that contract between the people and their government. Revenge is replaced by the rule of law, which must include at least the possibility of imposing the death penalty for capital crimes.


The clan puts the substance of a problem above all else; the state is concerned with process — to ensure that all are treated equally and fairly, even if it means that some wrongdoer may go unpunished because of a procedural flaw with the case. The state focuses on the public good; the clan cares most for its own private cause. The state is committed to administer justice; the clan is sensitive to its honor. State recognizes and forces contracts; the clan may deal in something akin to contract, but hierarchy or status counts for more. Sir Henry Maine, the Victorian legal historian, summed up the course of all civilization in these terms: “From status to contract.” Today in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere, the state’s essentials — process, the public good, justice, and contract — have lost ground or been abandoned.


Quoting the Athenians in “The Melian Dialogue”: “The strong exact what they can; the weak concede what they must,” the motto of Cold War realists.


Thucydides is more astutely read as a critique of Realpolitik. As a manual of statecraft, the work takes the reader across the entire range of factors, none of which the statesman can risk neglecting: the economic base of the state, the legal framework, diplomacy, national character, leadership and its flaws, rhetoric and language, the public and the private in tension, the certainty of the unexpected blow. All these are treated in Athens’s rise and reprised in Athens’s momentous fall.


Turning serious, the Athenian envoys then reveal in a line just how complex and “modern” is the international system they share with Sparta: “While it is still open to us both to choose aright, we bid you not to dissolve the treaty, or to break your oaths, but to have our differences settled by arbitration according to our agreement.”