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