The Greeks thought of culture as character. It was predictability across scale: the behavior of a city, a state, or a people in small things, big things, and those in between. 32 Knowing who they were...
One day I asked what connection Prince Andrei, Natasha, and the bumbling Pierre could possibly have to their very different lives? There was, as at Newport, a moment of silence. Then three students si...
His first decision was to return to Rome without knowing who was in charge or how he’d be received. The stakes skyrocketed when he learned, after landing near Brundisium, that Caesar’s will had made h...
Despite having built his own movement with little help from Moscow, the new Chinese leader was a dedicated Marxist-Leninist who was more than ready to defer to Stalin as the head of the international...
And there were no signs whatever of the disagreements among capitalists—or of the Anglo-American war—that Stalin’s ideological illusions had led him to expect.
[I]n the interests of our common tasks, we must sometimes overlook their stupidities, one Soviet official explained in 1973.
Thanks to an ingenious constitution, their geographical isolation from potential rivals, and a magnificent endowment of natural resources, the Americans managed to build an extraordinarily powerful st...
But what if Clausewitz and Tolstoy were wrestling with contradictions—perhaps even relishing the contest—rather than agonizing over them? 13 Both see determinism as laws to which there can be no excep...
Berlin failed to illuminate much with it beyond Tolstoy. The great man had wanted to be a hedgehog, Berlin claimed: War and Peace was supposed to reveal the laws by which history worked. But Tolstoy w...
Which somehow made it appropriate that The Federalist’s hardest task—showing how a republic could be an empire without becoming a tyranny—fell to Madison, the most easily underestimated of the America...