Word: tuchman
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...MARCH OF FOLLY by Barbara W. Tuchman; Knopf; 447 pages...
...thread of folly that runs through Barbara Tuchman's books is a filament of doom. In The Guns of August, a wrongheaded French strategy in the first days of World War I leads inexorably to the deadlock of the trenches. The tensions and energies of fin-de-siéde Europe and America in The Proud Tower are primed to explode in that same war. And the chaos of the 14th century becomes A Distant Mirror of the modern distemper...
...latest work, this fatal thread becomes the whole cloth, as Tuchman explores the nature of governmental folly and dissects some choice examples: the Renaissance papacy, 18th century England, the 20th century U.S. Folly, as Tuchman defines it, is not simply incompetence or tyranny or hubris, but rather "the pursuit of policy contrary to self-interest." She requires that the policy was perceived as folly in its own time, that a sensible alternative was available, and that the policy nonetheless was carried out by a group over more than one political lifetime. She makes one exception to that last criterion...
...Tuchman seizes on the legend as evidence that such folly "is an old and inherent human habit." But her purpose seems deeper. The tale, told most memorably by Vergil in the Aeneid, portrays the Trojans as victims of fate. Despite the urgings of citizens that the Greek gift be destroyed or at least broken open, Troy's leaders take it in, hidden Greeks and all, because the gods have so ordained. That excuse will not do for Tuchman. "The gods (or God, for that matter) are a concept of the human mind," she writes. "The gods' interference...
...Tuchman, character is fate, and the characters who blunder through her book are ineluctably fatal to cause or country. The six Renaissance Popes Tuchman puts to the knife are old and easy targets, always diverting to re-examine for some moments of low humor or lofty dudgeon. The author may be a bit extravagant in her criticism, as when she says that Alexander VI, the infamous Borgia Pope, was "as close to the prince of darkness as human beings are likely to come." What then of Caligula? Or Stalin? Or Hitler? But she correctly upbraids the Pontiffs for squandering...