Vincent J. Curtis
8 May 14
Strategy: A
History by Lawrence Freedman is a tour de force of erudition and a powerful
demonstration of his breadth of knowledge and reading.
Dr. Freedman has a terrific ability to summarize clearly and
accurately the main lines of thought of other theorists.
I’m glad it was recommended to me by someone whose opinion I
hold in high regard. If he had not, I would likely have tossed Lawrence’s
book aside after the first chapter and most certainly by the end of the first
section. I would have missed much of the book.
As a history, it is lacking in the philosophy department.
It is more of a survey of the uses of a word, accounted for in
chronological order of occurrence. Dr. Freedman never gives a proper definition
of strategy (more on that later), and most of the uses he accounts for are not
strategies as a military man would conceive them. Since he does not hold
to an essential meaning or definition of strategy, he frequently lapses into
holding that a strategic end and the tactics to get to it are strategy.
If you put an end and the tactics to gain it together into a whole, then that
whole might be a strategy, but not strategy as such.
In the course of his critique of strategies found in
business, and their alleged derivation from Clausewitz, Jomini, or Sun Tzu, he
points out the fallaciousness of trying to correlate business practices with
military strategy. I agree with that assessment. However, he didn’t
apply that observation to his own work! The consequence then is a very
detailed philology of a term, and the term was not always used by those allegedly
employing strategy. Consequently, somewhere, in the back of his mind, is
a sense of what strategy is; but Freedman never really gives it. He
eliminated material from consideration on the basis of this vague notion of
what strategy is, and so this work must be what he thinks strategy is.
But the book is supposed to be a history of a thing, not an account of what the
thing is.
A strategy is a plan
for the attainment of an object. Since strategy is a kind of plan,
then the thing strategizing must be capable of conceptual thought.
Moreover, since the plan is for the attainment of an object, the attainment of
that object constitutes the end of the strategy. It must be a terminal
end, because the attainment of it occurs at a moment in time. A strategy
cannot be used to attain a normative end because a normative end is not
attainable at one moment in time. A military strategy is a plan for the
attainment of a military object, and is quintessentially an example of strategy
as such.
Consequently, the effort to attain normative ends, such as
enduring success in business, cannot not have a strategy. A strategy can
be used to get to a certain point of success, and from one point of success to
another point of success, each point being a terminal end. But the
normative end of enduring success is not attainable by a strategy.
This same analysis applies to political normative ends, the
ends of the state. The end conceived of by Marx and Engels was not a
terminal end, and so the so-called strategy to attain it was a strategic end
combined with tactics to get there. They climbed a hill to reach the edge
of the plateau at the top. But being on the plateau is a normative
end. Getting to the edge was a strategic end, and revolution was the
tactic to get there. The munificence of the plateau, and the matter of
staying on it, Marx and Engels apparently never really contemplated – like
Moses leading the Israelites to the promised land, he had no idea what to do
once they got there and he died just before they got there.
Because strategy requires in the strategizer the power of
conceptual thought, Freedman’s account of the origins of strategy is
unnecessary bunkum. There was no need to impute strategic thinking to
chimps. They are not capable of conceptual thought; only man is.
What behaviorologists do is anthropomorphize apes by imputing strategic
thinking to them to account for observed behavior. It may help man to
understand apes, but it goes too far to impute to them a power they lack, the
power of conceptual thought. In addition, the accounts of the strategy to
defeat God’s will (which also occurs in the first section) are not history
because we have no evidence of it occurring as a matter of historical fact.
The book provided ample evidence that economics and
sociology remain subject matters and not sciences.
All that said, I am glad to have read the entire book.
It informed me on matters I had vague knowledge about, and this work concisely
filled me in on the important outlines. The only section of the book
directly useful to the military man is the section on military strategy.
Let me now take up the matter of Freedman offering an
alleged definition of strategy, though not a proper one.
I observed that Freedman never gave a definition of what
strategy was, and as a result he wandered all over the place in his history of
it. On page 607 of his book, he states that he offered “the art of
creating power” as his “short definition”, though he never offers another.
A criticism I made of his work was that, as a history, it
was weak in the philosophy department. His proffered “short definition”
of strategy is another example of that weakness. The problem with that
formulation is that it fails the basic test of a definition. It cannot be
a definition. A statement of definition
must be convertible. A statement of definition has to say the same thing
when the terms are reversed in order.
But: “Strategy is the art of creating power” and “The art of
creating power is strategy” do not say the same thing, and therefore cannot be
a definition. Disregarding the obscurity of the phrase “creating power,”
the first statement has the form of a definition, but the second statement
seems to be the assignment of a handy name-word to substitute for a longer formulation.
The obscure expression, ‘creating power’ is not the essence of strategy - it is
not what strategy is essentially about - but creating power may be an
accidental consequence of it, sometimes. A real definition is founded
upon the essence of the thing being defined, and is a phrase which contains a
genus and a differentia. Freedman’s formulation would hold that the genus
of strategy is art and ‘creating power’ is its differentia, or essence.
In contrast, consider the following: “A strategy is a plan
for the attainment of an object,” and “A plan for the attainment of an object
is a strategy.” These statements are convertible, for they say the same thing
forwards and backwards. The formulation passes a basic test of a
definition, with ‘plan’ being the genus and ‘for the attainment of an object’
being the differentia of strategy, that which differentiates it from all other
kinds of plans. In addition, ‘for the attainment of an object’ seems to
be the essence of strategy, while the creation of power is simply too obscure
to say that it is the essence of anything. The terms of a definition must
be better known than the thing being defined, for the less well-known is
defined in terms of things better-known. The first sentence in Freedman’s
book is: “Everyone needs a strategy.” Substituting his proffered
definition, the sentence reads: “Everyone needs an art of creating power,”
which makes no sense, and is certainly a more obscure sentence than the first.
Because Freedman founded his idea of what strategy was upon
an obscure and accidental attribute (creating power), and that he admittedly
does not always adhere to it (cf pg 608), his history consists of accounts of
things unrelated to each other in their essences. Freedman picks among random
things and holds them before the reader as examples of strategy.
Collectively, these things show no development in strategy through historical
experience, as one might expect to observe historical development in a history
of the fine art of painting, for example. This is why the book as a whole
is so unfocussed.
I cannot take away from the erudition of Dr. Freedman, or
that demonstrated in his book, but the philosophical failings result in a work
that does not hold together.
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