The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam

by Barbara W. Tuchman

PHENOMENON noticeable throughout history regardless of place or period is the pursuit by governments of policies contrary to their own interests. Mankind, it seems, makes a poorer performance of government than of almost any other human activity.

In this sphere, wisdom, which may be defined as the exercise of judgment acting on experience, common sense and available information, is less operative and more frustrated than it should be. Why do holders of high office so often act contrary to the way reason points and enlightened self-interest suggests? Why does intelligent mental process seem so often not to function?

Misgovernment is of four kinds, often in combination. They are: 1) tyranny or oppression, of which history provides so many well-known examples that they do not need citing; 2) excessive ambition, such as Athens’ attempted conquest of Sicily in the Peloponnesian War, Philip II’s of England via the Armada, Germany’s twice-attempted rule of Europe by a self-conceived master race, Japan’s bid for an empire of Asia; 3) incompetence or decadence, as in the case of the late Roman empire, the last Romanovs and the last imperial dynasty of China; and finally 4) folly or perversity. This book is concerned with the last in a specific manifestation; that is, the pursuit of policy contrary to the self-interest of the constituency or state involved.

To qualify as folly for this inquiry, the policy adopted must meet three criteria: it must have been perceived as counter-productive in its own time, not merely by hindsight. This is important, because all policy is determined by the mores of its age.

Secondly a feasible alternative course of action must have been available. To remove the problem from personality, a third criterion must be that the policy in question should be that of a group, not an individual ruler, and should persist beyond any one political lifetime.

Folly’s appearance is independent of era or locality; it is timeless and universal, although the habits and beliefs of a particular time and place determine the form it takes.

It is unrelated to type of regime: monarchy, oligarchy and democracy produce it equally. Nor is it peculiar to nation or class.

Bonaparte’s

He chose officials on the principle of “la carrière ouverte aux talents”—the desired talents being intelligence, energy, industry and obedience. That worked for a while until he too, the classic victim of hubris, destroyed himself through overextension.

And so it has been. Wooden-headedness, the source of self-deception, is a factor that plays a remarkably large role in government. It consists in assessing a situation in terms of preconceived fixed notions while ignoring or rejecting any contrary signs. It is acting according to wish while not allowing oneself to be deflected by the facts.

Wooden-headedness is also the refusal to benefit from experience, a characteristic in which medieval rulers of the 14th century were supreme.

Why do we invest all our skills and resources in a contest for armed superiority which can never be attained for long enough to make it worth having, rather than in an effort to find a modus vivendi with our antagonist—that is to say, a way of living, not dying?

In those dark ages between the fall of Rome and the medieval revival, government had no recognized theory or structure or instrumentality beyond arbitrary force. Since disorder is the least tolerable of social conditions, government began to take shape in the Middle Ages and afterward as a recognized function with recognized principles, methods, agencies, parliaments, bureaucracies.

It acquired authority, mandates, improved means and capacity, but not a noticeable increase in wisdom or immunity from folly.

an absence of overriding personal ambition together with shrewd common sense are among the essential components of wisdom.

In the notes of his life, writing of himself in the third person, Solon put it differently: “Each day he grew older and learned something new.”

under the four “good emperors” of the Antonine dynasty—Trajan and Hadrian, the organizers and builders; Antoninus Pius, the benevolent; Marcus Aurelius, the revered philosopher—Roman citizens enjoyed good government, prosperity and respect for about a century.

For two centuries, the American arrangement has always managed to right itself under pressure without discarding the system and trying another after every crisis, as have Italy and Germany, France and Spain.

Under accelerating incompetence in America, this may change. Social systems can survive a good deal of folly when circumstances are historically favorable, or when bungling is cushioned by large resources or absorbed by sheer size as in the United States during its period of expansion. Today, when there are no more cushions, folly is less affordable. Yet the Founders remain a phenomenon to keep in mind to encourage our estimate of human possibilities, even if their example is too rare to be a basis of normal expectations.

abolition of freedom of conscience—“this deadly freedom”—would serve the nation as well as serve God.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, who cautioned, “In analyzing history do not be too profound, for often the causes are quite superficial.” This is a factor usually overlooked by political scientists who, in discussing the nature of power, always treat it, even when negatively, with immense respect.

They fail to see it as sometimes a matter of ordinary men walking into water over their heads, acting unwisely or foolishly or perversely as people in ordinary circumstances frequently do. The trappings and impact of power deceive us, endowing the possessors with a quality larger than life. Shorn of his tremendous curled peruke, high heels and ermine, the Sun King was a man subject to misjudgment, error and impulse—like you and me.

The last French Bourbon to reign, Charles X, brother of the guillotined Louis XVI and of his brief successor, Louis XVIII, displayed a recurring type of folly best described as the Humpty-Dumpty type: that is to say, the effort to reinstate a fallen and shattered structure, turning back history. In the process, called reaction or counterrevolution, the reactionary right is bent on restoring ...

AT ABOUT THE TIME COLUMBUS DISCOVERED AMERICA, the Renaissance—which is to say the period when the values of this world replaced those of the hereafter—was in full flower in Italy. Under its impulse the individual found in himself, rather than in God, the designer and captain of his fate. His needs, his ambitions and desires, his pleasures and possessions, his mind, his art, his power, his glory, were the house of life. His earthly passage was no longer, as in the medieval concept, a weary exile on the way to the spiritual destiny of his soul.

Over a period of sixty years, from roughly 1470 to 1530, the secular spirit of the age was exemplified in a succession of six popes—five Italians and a Spaniard*—who carried it to an excess of venality, amorality, avarice, and spectacularly calamitous power politics.

The dominating political factor of the period was the repeated invasions of Italy, in league with one or another of the Italian states, by the three major powers—France, Spain and the Hapsburg Empire—competing for conquest of the peninsula or part of it.

The more it took part in the temporal conflicts with consistently pernicious result, the more impotent among the monarchs it revealed itself, and in fact became.

To an unusual degree in the Renaissance good walked with evil in a wondrous development of the arts combined with political and moral degradation and vicious behavior. Discovery of classical antiquity with its focus on human capacity instead of on a ghostly Trinity was an exuberant experience that led to a passionate embrace of humanism, chiefly in Italy, where it was felt to be a return to ancient national glories. Its stress on earthly goods meant an abandonment of the Christian ideal of renunciation and its pride in the individual undermined submission to the word of God as conveyed by the Church. To the extent that they fell in love with pagan antiquity, Italians of the ruling class felt less reverence for Christianity, which, as Machiavelli wrote in The Discourses, makes the “supreme felicity to consist in humility, abnegation and contempt of things human,” whereas pagan religion found the chief good in “grandeur of the soul, strength of body and all the qualities that make men redoubtable.”

If the cardinals had been worthy men they would have elected worthier popes, but both were parts of the same body. The popes were the cardinals in these sixty years, elected out of the Sacred College and in turn appointing cardinals of their own kind.

Folly, in the form of absorption in shortsighted power struggles and perverse neglect of the Church’s real needs, became endemic, passed on like a torch from each of the Renaissance six to the next.

is the persuasive argument of realpolitik, which, as history has often demonstrated, has a corollary: that the process of gaining power employs means that degrade or brutalize the seeker, who wakes to find that power has been possessed at the price of virtue—or moral purpose—lost.

In response to Tetzel’s campaign, Luther in 1517 nailed his 95 theses on the church door at Wittenberg, assailing the abuse of indulgence as sacrilegious, although without yet suggesting a break with Rome.

through the fifteen years of deteriorating relations that led up to the shot heard round the world, successive British ministries, in the face of constant warnings by men and events, repeatedly took measures that injured the relationship.

In the end Britain made rebels where there had been none.

The major issue, as we all know, was the right of Parliament as the supreme legislative body of the state—but not of the empire, according to the colonists—to tax the colonies. The mother country claimed the right and the colonists denied

it.

Edmund Burke, perceived and said, “The retention of America was worth far more to the mother country economically, politically and even morally than any sum which might be raised by taxation, or even than any principle so-called of the Constitution.”

In short, although possession was of greater value than principle, nevertheless the greater was thrown away for the less, the unworkable pursued at the sacrifice of the possible. This phenomenon is one of the commonest of governmental follies.

Trouble arose out of the British triumph in 1763 over the French and Indians in the Seven Years’ War. With the cession by France of Canada and its hinterlands, Britain became possessed of the great trans-Allegheny plains in the valleys of the Ohio and Mississippi populated...

The immediate necessity of victory was to establish an armed force, projected at 10,000 men, in North America for defense against Indian troubles and French resurgence and, at the same time, to raise revenue from the colonies to pay for it—for their own defense, as the British saw it. The mere whisper of a standing army, which carried in the 18th-century mind the worst connotations of tyranny, aroused the politically sensitive among the colonials to instant antagonized alert.

The prospect of taxation excited in the colonies even more pugnacity than the prospect of a standing army. Until now funds for local government in the several colonies had been voted and appropriated by their own assemblies. Except in the form of customs duties, which regulated trade for the benefit of Britain, America had not been subject to metropolitan taxation, and the fact that this had not been exercised gradually created the assumption that the “right” was lacking. Since they were not represented in Parliament, the colonials grounded their resistance on the principle of an Englishman’s right not to be taxed except by his own representatives, but the underpinning was the universal reaction to any new tax: we won’t pay.

While acknowledging allegiance to the Crown, the colonies considered themselves independent of Parliament and their assemblies coequal with it.

as soon as it was suggested, prospective taxation, like the standing army, was denounced in the colonies as a breach of their liberties, a creeping encroachment of tyranny. The ground for conflict was laid.

At this point, some notice of the limits, scope and hazards of this essay is required.

My theme is narrower: a depiction of folly on the British side because it was on that side that policy contrary to self-interest was pursued.

The Americans overreacted, blundered, quarreled, but were acting, if not always admirably, in their own interest and did not lose sight of it. If the folly we are concerned with is the contradiction of self-interest, we must in this case follow the British.

The first thing to be said about the British relation to America was that while the colonies were considered of vital importance to the prosperity and world status of Britain, v...

except during a brief turmoil over repeal of the Stamp Act, a primary concern of British politics until the ...

The all-pervading, all-important problem that absorbed major attention was the game of faction, the obtaining of office, the manipulating of connections, the making and breaking of political alliances—in sum, the business, more urgent,...

The second interest was trade. Trade was felt to be the bloodstream of British prosperity.