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 pessimist, but at the same time, metaphysical optimist of a lot of these authors. That may be the point about the class.

Rebecca Burgess:

That’s wonderful. I think we said we need to remember that in return back to it, because it dovetails with this other question I was going to raise is whether politics is ultimately tragic or not. Of course, you could say the ancients perhaps answered that differently than post-incarnation, but maybe not. Maybe that’s where there is, I think, another argument for studying tragedy, that tragedy in a way can actually offer more hope for our politics than our actual politics do. That’s a little different.

Jakub Grygiel:

Right.

Rebecca Burgess:

You mention tyrants, and that’s kind of the question of regimes, individual statesmen, and particular individuals. It seems to me that one of the things that comes out is the theme not just of tyrants, but also of just enemies and knowing your enemies. Why is it so important to know one’s enemy, and what does that actually entail for, well, there’s the essay by Plutarch, but in fact, several of the others mention knowing your enemies collectively and individually.

Jakub Grygiel:

Well, first of all, the main one is that you’ll never get rid of them, right? There always will be enemies. That’s the nature of politics. That’s the nature of human just daily life and political life in particular is that you’ll never get rid of enemies. That goes back to the fragility of political action or the impermanence of political action. You will never solve the problem of the human condition. Somebody else said that you can’t reduce human problems to the ills of the city. It’s something deeper than that. I think classical, and obviously Christian authors will agree with that, right? Salvation cannot be reached by politics. That’s the Christian view, but the same in a classical sense, the classical authors that politics has certain limits. Enemies are just a symptom of this constant struggle that you’ll have to have with the reality of social life. Now, then the question becomes what do you do with them? Obviously, you might want to kill them if that’s necessary, but first of all, you have actually have to know them. Knowing the enemy is sort of an ancient almost art. We often now think about net assessment or assessing the enemy or whatever other modern term you have. Essentially is, how do you know the enemy? You know that they’re there, how do you know them? It involves, among other things, trying to think. They think not because you agree with them, not because they’re sort of a relativist in them. No, no, they’re barbarians, absolutely. You got to figure out how they think. That’s why I think Aeschylus, his tragedy on the Persians is brilliant. As far as we know, it’s the only, obviously any tragedy, but probably my only written document, especially of the Greeks, trying to put words in the mouth of the enemy, not in a derogatory way, not in a, “Oh, these guys are obviously enemies. They’re far inferior, they’re stupid,” et cetera. No, no, no, no. These are human beings that have a certain set of assumptions, prejudices, a certain political structure, and we actually should have empathy to understand it. I think it’s a brilliantly written tragedy, because it’s all based in the court of the Persian king waiting for the news of what happens to the expedition to Greece. Messenger comes back and say, “Yeah, we lost the battle.” “How can you lose a battle? We had all these numbers.” It’s like, “Yeah, yeah, but they’re better than us essentially. They’re organized, and yes, we essentially mis-assessed the enemy. We just looked at the numbers, and by numbers, you’re right, queen, you should have won, but numbers are not the only thing that matter.” There’s this, again, attempt, very brilliant and unique attempt to get into the mind of the other enemy. That’s what often we do now. If we start thinking about the enemies, like always somebody in a good war game or in a good debate, somebody will play the role of the enemy, not in a derogatory way, but let’s take it seriously. Let’s think how Chinese, Russians, Iranian, whoever else, how they think about this.

Rebecca Burgess:

Right, and how their own evaluation of their fear, honors, and interests could be quite different, the spectrum of that could be quite different from our own and what we might ascribe to it. Isn’t this part of your argument about Tacitus is that he also exhibits this ability to understand why people in Britain, et cetera, would not be willing to be part of the Roman Empire, and to kind of show with a certain amount of sympathy what those reasons are?

Jakub Grygiel:

Yes, Tacitus is, especially in a short piece, that one I examined like a Greek on his father-in-law, who was essentially a governor, a Roman governor in Britain. In that little piece, he talks about one of the rebellions of the northern tribes led by this barbarian Calgacus, and he gives actually the most beautiful and longest speech of that book is in the mouth of Calgacus, who gives this speech, I think it was 83 AD before the battle. It’s a speech that is given and is written the most beautiful Latin style, which is already telling, right? He’s not thinking that he’s speaking monosyllabic grunts. No, he’s speaking in a perfectly, stylistically perfect Latin. What does he say? The famous lines there is essentially that he criticizes Calgacus, criticizes Rome and saying that they’re plundering, they’re killing, and they call it an empire. They make a desolation, different translation, they make a desolation and call it peace. It’s one of those one-liners Tacitus is often remembered, or he says among other things that they essentially give us the civilization of some sort, language, baths, et cetera, but they’re using it to enslave us. It’s a powerful speech, because he indicts the Roman Empire in the mouth of Calgacus. Again, very unique speech by a Roman author that kind of understands in many ways how Rome may be seen from outside. He actually is a Roman, he’s all for it, absolutely. Let’s go and kill the Scottish barbarians, but he’s trying to actually think how they think, and maybe there’s something to that. How do we address that? Obviously, there are other reasons, and maybe also criticism of the Roman emperor and that particular case. Obviously, he can’t put in the mouth of a Roman, certainly not a Greek like his father-in-law. Again, it’s a powerful way of trying to at least understand how an enemy assumed that Calgacus existed in some form has thought about Rome and the empire. It’s a symptom, in my view, of great confidence in your own civilization, that you’re capable of writing or putting yourself in the mind of your enemy, who you think is bad, evil, probably civilizationally inferior, but nonetheless, you’re capable of elevating that hostile, that the thought of the enemy, to such a way that makes sense, and that you are doing it. You’re not just listening to their speeches. You’re actually thinking how they, you’re trying to think like they do. You have to be confident in your own civilization to do that.

Rebecca Burgess:

It raises two questions, both I’m not sure that we might want to answer on this podcast, but one which is our inability to accurately describe the minds of our enemies today or understand their motivations, a symptom of our lack of confidence in our own regimes, our own political orders and institutions. The other question is, is this something that’s uniquely western? I would say Herodotus arguably makes the point in his histories that this is what the Greeks do that separates them from the Egyptians and the Scythians, that they have this ability to separate themselves out, and to see images, and to explore what those images, et cetera, are. The willing suspension of disbelief, we would call it. It does raise some interesting questions. Just one more question on this question of enemies before we pivot to one of the most interesting authors, to my mind, just because he’s so little talked about today. You mentioned that it is in fact problematic, the statement, to know the enemy is to know how to win, and that in fact, what the menace is is to know the enemy’s mind. Could you give us a little bit more insight into what this juxtaposition is?

Jakub Grygiel:

Well, just before I get into that, on the civilization thing, if you’re not confident in your civilization like Tacitus is confident about Roman culture and civilization, then if you write or think, or try to think like the enemy, you’re afraid that the criticism and the fears that the enemy may think of you actually are true. It becomes an indictment, and you feel like, oh my gosh, maybe Calgacus is right. Maybe we are so bad and we are just doing it for whatever reason. We’re just blundering everything. If you’re confident that actually Rome, okay, it’s violent, yes, but we actually bring law, we bring baths, if you want. We bring better language. Okay, well, maybe that indictment is not as threatening to you. That’s why there’s a fear of thinking like the enemy when you’re not confident in yourself. I think that’s just going back to that. Why do you have to know the mind of the enemy? Capabilities and resources are not everything. We often analyze the enemy by saying, “He has these capabilities, and that’s what we should just take into consideration.” It’s absolutely necessary. We should look at how much China’s producing in terms of artillery, ships, or planes, missiles, et cetera, or nuclear weapons. That’s not sufficient, I think, because capabilities alone don’t tell you how, when, for what purposes they might use these things. It’s very, the sort of resource capability oriented thinking is materialistic, many ways sort of Marxian, and everything is, that it’s drawn from the things that you have or the things that you control, versus there’s actually a power of the mind, not just to direct the capabilities, but actually use them in ways that you have not thought that could be useful. To give you an example, just a current example, I think the mistake of the Russians, for instance, was to look at the Ukrainians and look at only their economy, perhaps their political structure, corrupt, and their military capabilities de facto, whatever artillery they had. If you look at that analysis, the correlation of forces, the Ukrainians were weaker. What they did not take into consideration as become quite clear is the mind, both of Zelenskyy and the mind of the culture of the Ukrainian nation, which actually, I don’t know if was a, often we call it a force multiplier, but it was more than that. It was actually something that is incalculable. It’s not unknowable, it’s incalculable, and I think was 90% of the reason whether Ukrainians are still here. Ukraine is still independent, with some obviously lost territories, but still an independent sovereign country. Knowing the mind of the tyrant, or the nation, or the people that you’re facing, I think it’s in that sense, is it’s absolutely essential. It’s not just a clash of forces. It’s a clash of minds and wills.

Rebecca Burgess:

The incalculable versus unknowable is an excellent distinction. It’s in baseball, there’s no stat for will to win, but it’s a thing we know. The moral wellsprings, you could say, of even national character, that to me is always, is connected with questions of regime. Once again, why looking at questions of regime are so much richer when we’re thinking about not just domestic politics, but international relations and foreign policy to help us understand all this.

I think this is actually the Ukrainian/Russia example is a great segue into a writer from the Renaissance, which you spend two chapters at the end speaking about, Francesco, oh, I’m going to say it wrong.

Jakub Grygiel:

Guicciardini.

Rebecca Burgess:

That man.

Jakub Grygiel:

Francesco Guicciardini, yeah. That man, that guy.

Rebecca Burgess:

Yes, friend of Machiavelli. Born around 1483, Florence’s ambassador to the Spanish court of Ferdinand the Second, a friend or within the court of the Medicis, and just this fascinating character, which you kind of hold up as a constructive counter-example to Machiavelli’s style of teaching about Rome, and even about politics and models for politics. I think to start, maybe if you could just give us a little bit of the biography of him. As a segue, I’ll say why I thought it was a segue is because of his emphasis on studying history as the particolare, not these abstractions and not as iron rules that can be just imbibed and ascribed without rhyme or reason, in the sense to particular ages and places.

Jakub Grygiel:

Francesco Guicciardini, more than Italian, he’s a Florentine. Italy’s not there yet. As you said, he was born in 1483 in a wealthy Florentine family that was close to the family of the Medicis. It was one of these tribes or clans that was powerful already, and had an impact for decades on the politics of Florence. From the very first years of his intellectual development, he became interested and involved in them in the Florentine politics. He was a lawyer. Then very quickly becomes, I think in the early 1500, he becomes an ambassador of Florence, obviously, to Spain. It was a great experience, even though I think it was two years or three years that he was there, but it was a great experience of which he writes his little notes about what he learned about the emperor, how he dealt with the court, his strategies, et cetera, et cetera. He used those two years obviously as an ambassador to write assessments of Spain, but also to learn about politics in general. Then from then on, he was constantly present in Florentine politics in different positions, including he reached as the highest office or the most prestigious office, the signoria, which is sort of the highest magistrate office or legal office. As most of these Florentine politicians, he had problems once the regime changes, and I think in this case, I think it’s the twenties, 1520s, 1527, when he gets kicked out, the Medici lose power. He returns a few years into power, and he has people ended up criticizing because he accepted the role in 1530 or so, of punishing those in Florence who were enemies of Medicis, who opposed the return of the Medicis. The criticism obviously is like, “How can you do it? You’re serving a tyrannical clan, the Medicis.” His point has always been throughout actually his writing, there’s a consistency that you might actually have an obligation to serve under a tyrant, because if you don’t, and you’re a prudent, virtuous man, well, somebody worse will be serving under tyrant. Don’t think that there is no role in active politics under tyrant. Again, it’s a controversial statement. It probably does not take into consideration more totalitarian tyrannies of modern times. This is not a totalitarian, it wasn’t friendly, it wasn’t nice, but was not a totalitarian tyranny. Maybe he did think, and he did probably, to a certain degree, have an impact, a positive impact on otherwise not a terribly novel, well, aristocratic, but not novel in terms of virtue, ruler. Key last point I’ll mention: he was never a historian, although that’s how he’s known for. He’s known to be a historian, although he never planned to be a historian. He ends up writing a history of Italy, history of Florence, very detailed, and based on a lot of personal experience and letters and some archival work. It was sort of his hobby, perhaps. Also, when he retires and his board and said et cetera, like Machiavelli, he ends up writing, but he’s not a historian by profession. It’s one of those, it’s like Thucydides, right? Thucydides is not a historian professionally. He gets kicked out of Athens for coming up late to a battle, probably not his fault, anyway, ends up being a historian. Similar story here.

Rebecca Burgess:

Right. He is another one of these instances of a statesman, a diplomat who is in an incredibly interesting and geopolitically changing moment, which is you have Charles V, you have the Spanish court in France. France is the first right? I think is the king at this time. Italy, which for so long has had so much political heft and power, is losing all of that to Spain and France. Then of course while Charles V comes in, sacks Rome. That’s a nice little sock in the jaw. Is he trying to prep Italy, in a sense, to handle this moment? How do you stick up for yourself politically and not get trampled when you have this changing environment? Then also how can you know to handle these issues of the day? It seems like he turns to writing these histories in order to showcase these little moments that have happened beforehand to know why we are at this moment. It’s not simply always looking to the ancient, ancient past, but even the more recent past, where there have been failures to even recognize the situation in which they are in.

Jakub Grygiel:

He’s very critical of Machiavelli, who was a friend of his, that his criticism is that Machiavelli thinks that we can essentially mimic the Romans. Machiavelli writes discourses and essentially says, “Look, the Romans have all this virtue, copy the Romans, be like the Romans,” which Francesco says “The heck, that’s impossible. We are not Romans. We lost that virtue. We lost whatever the Romans have. We have something else. Maybe worse, maybe better, but we are not it.” Don’t go back to studying Roman history, which he obviously knew, but he doesn’t write about that. He writes about more contemporary to his time history. His point is this, that Italians or Florentines in particular are different. The virtue that they have or the absence of virtue that they have is different from the virtue that Romans had or the absence of virtue that the Romans had. He’s constant, there’s always a line in different permutation of it, throughout these writings is that we should always return to the things within our power. Let’s return to the things that are within our, yeah, let’s talk about this. Fine, fine, interesting, interesting, but let’s return to the things that are within our power, meaning that, look, not everything, we can’t be Romans. We can’t make ourselves into Romans, but doesn’t mean that we can’t do anything. What are the things within our power? What are the things that we can do right now? There’s a practical streak that is associated with this criticism of the learning from distant past that may no longer be applicable or generalizable, to use modern academic terms, to the current times. He’s the anti-Machiavellian, in the sense that it might have to do with his methodology rather than just ethics, is that every moment in time, every individual event, every individual is particular. The term that he always uses, en particolare, which means that everything has its own rules. Everything has its own characteristics and features, which may be similar analogous, but they’re very peculiar. Let’s be careful in not drawing some of these large, abstract laws of behavior from the Romans and say, “Oh, it applies to 1520 Italy.” Well, let’s study 1500 Italy and see what happened.

Rebecca Burgess:

Right, or 2021, 23 USA, right?

Jakub Grygiel:

Yeah. It doesn’t mean that you don’t study the Romans, but you don’t draw a direct line from what they did to what we are.

Rebecca Burgess:

Right. History becomes a form of training, especially for the statesmen. If there cannot be, or if it’s a danger to think of history as providing these universal rules, what then can the statesmen, what is the training the statesmen can take from studying history, I would say?

Jakub Grygiel:

It’s not, again, to draw abstract, generalizable rules, it’s rather to train your mind to the existence of particular events. Traditionally, people say, “Well, a general should be well-versed in hunting.” You cross the rivers, you cross the top, you learn the map, the hills, the mountains, the role of a trench, et cetera, et cetera. Well, Guicciardini will say, “Okay, fine. You’re not a general, you’re going to be a statesman. Well, study history.” Not to say that what happened in 1490 or 50 AD will happen tomorrow. That’s too big of a step, but train your mind to the complexity, the particularity of events. They’re not going to be replicated exactly, but your mind will have the muscle to be capable of responding to the particular event that you’re going to face, the particular circumstance that you’re going to face.

Rebecca Burgess:

It seems almost as though there are three, I’m sure there are more than three, but three things that jump out to me, which is a certain humility that comes from studying history and being aware of those particolare, but then also once again, that question of imagination, of putting yourself and seeing larger things that are just right around you, of tasking your brain with seeing, once again, what your enemy’s mind and motivations, et cetera, might be. Then also, to return to that sense of the tragic, the study of history shows you how difficult statesmanship actually is, and that is it tragic, ultimately? Does he think that the practice or the study of statesmanship is a tragic thing? Then how do you hedge against that? Is it courage? Courage in the face of that, and knowing how to use power well, wisdom, or once again, a combination of those things?

Jakub Grygiel:

Yeah, it’s tragic in two ways, I think. It’s tragic because the outcome of your actions are not going to be perfectly aligned with what you thought the outcomes would be. There’s that tragedy, and that’s contrary to understanding of politics as a science. If it’s a science in its mechanism, and you know science well, what you do, the lever that you pull or push should have the outcome that science tells you to do. If it doesn’t, you adjust the science and you move on, and there’s progressive knowledge. Machiavelli and Guicciardini and many others will say, “No, that’s not the way it works. Be ready that what you will do will have often unintended consequences.” That’s one. The second one is more personal one, is that not only your actions will have outcomes that you didn’t foresee or want, but you’ll fail as a political leader, that they’re very rare in history you have political leaders that can sit back at the end of their lives saying, “I did awesome. That was awesome. This was just fabulous. I did everything I wanted.” Most often great political leaders are tragic figures in the sense that either if they succeeded, they made themselves irrelevant. There’s this personal, okay, now what? Why am I an exile? Well, you succeeded. People don’t need you, right? It’s the role that …

Exactly. Right, a Roman dictator, right? The great, the good ones, they’ll come in, solve the problem, and move on and deal with their chicken. There’s that. Moses doesn’t go to Israel, but he makes the nation of Israel capable of going there. He’s no longer necessary for that, and he’s not allowed to go in there too. There’s this personal tragedy, which I think he, Machiavelli too, experienced firsthand, and it’s just personally obviously painful. We always have this idea of a politician, of great statesmen, as somebody who’s just the pinnacle of wealth, pinnacle of success, smiling. The good ones are not the ones that are present themselves. The good ones tend to be tragic figures.

Rebecca Burgess:

Right. Well, not to return always to Plutarch, but that is one of the points he makes, that there’s chance in all of this, despite the greatest virtue, sometimes you don’t have the opportunity to exercise. Sometimes, literally everything is against you, like with poor Lucullus. To kind of finally wrap this up, and it’s been a wonderful conversation, and thank you again for spending time with us on it, is you end your final chapter on a note about how the study of particolares actually leads to the importance of patriotism. I think that’s such an unlooked or overlooked aspect of the study of statesmanship, but especially in relation to international relations, and how might we present this or think about this so that people can, once again kind of, I don’t know, relearn or reopen their mind? Imagine, allow for imagination to show them the importance for statesmanship of patriotism?

Jakub Grygiel:

That’s a good question. Patriotism for Guicciardini, and to certain degree with Machiavelli too, although slightly different, I think, is the belief that the particular political, social, cultural conditions within which you’ve grown up, in which you are leading in politics, were particular, and they deserve to be protected as particular, that yes, they’re certainly universal principles, but the universal principles are embedded in daily life through particular ways. The role of patria, or your community or your nation, and we can discuss the difference in terms, but essentially the local communities, are worthy of defending because they reflect in daily life something that is deeply valuable, and Guicciardini here is therefore a much greater protector of this particular way of life than Machiavelli is. Machiavelli is much more of the universal, there’s something universal laws of politics, and everybody behaves in the same way, roughly, Guicciardini says, “No, hold on. There are some differences here. They may be worthwhile protecting.” It’s maybe a proto-Edmond Burke or Italian. It’s maybe too much of exaggeration. I’m sure political theorists will sound crazy. Thankfully, I’m not a political theorist, so you can say I’m crazy because this doesn’t affect me. The point is that there’s something in Guicciardini that elevates the value of the particular way of life or the particular community, and says, “Defend that. Related to that, you will not defend an abstraction. You will defend the particular. You will not, it’s very hard to love an abstraction.” I think Burke, again, I mentioned Burke, Burke mentioned something like this. It’s like, oh, revolutionary France thought that they created this sort of mathematical, geometrical new realities in France. Well, how the heck can you possibly love this stuff? What you end up is no country because nobody loves this thing, and Guicciardini has something to that. That’s his love for the particular. It’s both a call for humility, as in watch out, you can’t have universal rules of behavior, but also, look, you want to protect this particular because that’s worth defending, and that’s why you’ll be able to function as a statesman. People love this particular way of life, rather than obstruction, and they will be willing to sacrifice for it. Call it patria, call it nation, call it family, call it local communities, whatever you want to call it. That’s, I think, where Guicciardini comes in.

Rebecca Burgess:

The hundreds of different types of cheese that the Frenchmen will defend, right?

Jakub Grygiel:

Right.

Rebecca Burgess:

Yeah. I think that returns us and puts a nice, beautiful bow on the end of our conversation, bringing us back to that question of optimism, almost. I think that is where there can be optimism in the study of politics and the practice of statesmanship is recognizing that there are things to defend, that are worthy of defending, that you can know that, that you can know, in fact, you can know many things about politics, despite the uncertainties that are hedged all around. You, in fact, can know, and that there are worthwhile things to strive for and to do. Returning to the classics is an excellent way of stretching our imaginations. As we started out by, might be a little bit more relevant to us than our daily newspaper. On that note, we were discussing Jakub Grygiel’s Classics and Strategy. That was Professor Jakub Grygiel joining us today. My name is Rebecca Burgess, and this is Liberty Law Talk. Thank you for joining us.

Jakub Grygiel:

Thank you.

Brian Smith:

Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.