Strategy: A History

by Lawrence Freedman

The revolutionaries acquired their notoriety by the power of their ideas and their ability to spread them through newspapers, pamphlets, and books. Not surprisingly, the reconciliation of meager means to glorious but somewhat distant ends often required considerable intellectual gymnastics and heroics of belief. This led to rancorous disputes as to the relative merits of a range of impossible strategies. It was one thing to define a good society, quite another to explain how it would be the natural outcome of a great popular movement. It was one thing to develop an intellectually consistent narrative to explain how the revolution could work itself through to the desired outcome, quite another to follow its lines when the moment for revolution came. These great dramas would allow the revolutionaries a glimpse of everything they had been trying to achieve. The question was whether there would be anything more than a glimpse.