Makers of Modern Strategy : Military

This remarkable collection of essays by twenty authors provided a history of military strategy from Machiavelli to the present age. Published in the middle of World War II, the volume analyzed and described the ideas of the major military thinkers and strategists, ranging from engineers such as Vauban to soldiers such as Frederick the Great; from the statesmen Alexander Hamilton, Lloyd George, and Winston Churchill to the revolutionaries Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The book grew out of a seminar conducted annually, beginning in , by Edward Mead Earle at the Institute for Advanced Study. At a time when social scientists and historians devoted little attention to the study of military strategy and the art of warfare, this seminar provoked fresh perspectives on how leading minds at different times had understood the reasons for war, how wars should be conducted, and the way politics and war interacted. Historian Peter Paret replaced Earle as the primary editor for a second edition, which was assembled during the Cold War and bore the new subtitle Military Thought from Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age. Paret reconceived the volume, replacing all but one essay, to confront the challenge that nuclear weapons posed, given pronouncements that such weapons had rendered war “unthinkable.”