On Sun, Jun 19, 2011 at 10:15 AM, raghu <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, Jun 18, 2011 at 9:49 PM, Shane Mage <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> On Jun 18, 2011, at 6:52 PM, raghu wrote: >> >>> This is a new and intriguing take on the history of warfare, but >>> somehow does not seem completely plausible. Anyone more knowledgeable >>> on the subject care to comment? >>> >> Hannibal won overwhelming victories in pitched battles at Traseminae >> and Cannae. >> A lot of good it did him...or Carthage! >> >> And then, of course, there was Pyrrhus of Epirus... > > > It was the example of Pyrrhus that bothered me too, because it is in > direct contradiction to Whitman's thesis. However we cannot write off > his thesis if such counter-examples are rare and exceptional. > -raghu.
To expand on this a bit, Whitman offers the following nuance to account for the fact that not all historic battles led to decisive outcomes: he says if the stakes are high enough, the combatants may choose to simply break the laws of war. ---------------------------------snip Were battles fought according the rules? Were they pure games, whose winners were obliged to play by the book? Or were they no-holds-barred descents into brute violence? This is a question that has elicited sharply conflicting views. Some very fine scholars, most fa- mous among them Johan Huizinga, have argued that battles were rule-bound, game- playing activities. Others have insisted that wars were not fought by the rules at all. Chapter Four aims to shed light on this debate. There were meaningful rules of battle in the pre-modern Western juristic tradition, the Chapter argues; but we must think of them as rules of law, not as rules of a game. The difference is fundamental. Games require per- fect obedience to the rules; law does not. The law is a system of incentives. It works when it gives people, in general, good reasons to follow its rules—and it does not cease to be the law simply because some people, whether wisely or not, decline to follow its com- mands. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
