On Sept. 16, Professor of History Paul Rahe gave a lecture on the grand regime of ancient Sparta, its character, and its statesmanship.
Rahe has published multiple books on ancient Sparta and will soon publish another, “Sparta’s Third Attic War.”
“Rahe has a sense of the larger world and of history not in isolation to the world of action and decision-making,” said Professor of History Wilfred McClay, who attended the lecture. “I think the lecture was fantastic in explaining a grand strategy as a way of thinking about the nation, where it is, what it is, how it needs to position itself.”
McClay defined a “grand strategy.”
“Part of grand strategies is to think about what the soul of the nation is and what is its character,” he said.
Multiple students at the lecture said Rahe’s points resonated with present day concerns.
“I definitely found it interesting how he connects military strategy and politics and morals into a cohesive whole,” freshman Joseph Claeys said.
Spartan culture was about more than fighting in battle, said Rahe, but about “what it takes to fight a battle.
“Infantry equals equality,” he said.
Because Sparta is surrounded by rivers, mountain ranges, and the Mediterranean Sea, it is isolated, Rahe said. He said this geography invited the Spartans to focus primarily on their community.
The grand strategy cannot strictly focus on the military but also on the moral and political, said Rahe. The warriors needed “a common thought, a will to win,” he said.
This involved statesmanship, the crux of grand strategy.
“Formulating grand strategy can’t be done by some pointy headed military intellectual on the 85th floor of a tall building,” McClay said. “They have to have a sense of their own people, of what people are, and also what they’re capable of being.”
A nation must also be aware of the character of its opponents, McClay said.
“You don’t win by beating up people, you win by depriving them of their will to fight,” he said.
McClay said the will to win is the most important aspect of victory. He said Americans need a “closer relationship of military to other aspects of culture,” but “our sense of what the mission was changed.”
“It was clear he implied that the United States had better formulate its thinking about who we are and what we want to accomplish in the world,” McClay said.
