If I’ve got this right, then Tolstoy has used scale to solve an ancient problem: how, if God is omnipotent, can man have free will? Being Tolstoy, though, his answer didn’t satisfy him, and he soon reverted to the belief in God he’d once derided as the habit of primitives. He even tried, not very successfully, to become primitive himself.69 But if considered, alongside Clausewitz, as a commentary, in advance, on F. Scott Fitzgerald—on how to hold opposing ideas in mind at the same time while retaining the ability to function—then Tolstoy’s reasoning has significant implications for strategy in
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