Sublime

The test of a good theory lies in its ability to explain the past, for only if it does can we trust what it may tell us about the future.

Because I seek patterns across time, space, and scale,2 I’ve felt free to suspend such constraints for comparative, even conversational purposes: St. Augustine and Machiavelli will occasionally talk with one another, as will Clausewitz and Tolstoy.

Strategy requires a sense of the whole that reveals the significance of respective parts.

She understood political horticulture: that things grow best when variety is allowed and roots aren’t too closely examined.

The argument is absurd, but only because it rejects any coexistence of contradictions in time or space: it thereby confirms Berlin’s claim that not all praiseworthy things are simultaneously possible. And that learning to live within that condition—let’s call it history—requires adaptation to incompatibles. That’s where grand strategy helps. For “i

Too many theories, Clausewitz complains, try too hard to be laws.

Space is where expectations and circumstances intersect. Lincoln and Adams both saw, in westward expansion, the power to secure liberty, but they also feared its dangers.

Leaders, he seemed to be saying, must keep their feet on the ground. Clausewitz thinks similarly.

Clausewitz would have seen coups d’oeil—“inward eyes” grasping truths ordinarily requiring long reflection.