The Arrogance of Power: The March of Folly

The March of Folly, by Barbara Tuchman

"He that troubleth his own house shall inherit the wind." Proverbs 11:29

The Author:
Barbara Tuchman (1912 – 1989) was one of the most popular historians of the twentieth century. Never having been a part of academia, she was never beholden to the groupthink and sycophancy endemic to those sorts of milieus. Her books were characterized by solid scholarship and keen insight into the causes and effects of the various matters she turned her incisive intelligence on. Often her research turned up clues that were quite different from those followed by the ivory tower historians. An example would be The Zimmermann Telegram, which Tuchman avers brought the Americans into the first world war, while the conventional historians cite the sinking of the Lusitania as the cause.

The Review:
A government can be thought of as a corporate body; that is, a living thing that exists separate and apart from other bodies. Just as an individual has a life that it is willing to defend to keep from losing it, so a corporation or a government has the same life-wish, the desire to be; to exist - to keep going on. Why, therefore, do individuals, and to continue the comparison, corporations and governments do things against their self-interest? The answer is "folly."

The "pursuit of policy against self-interest" is Barbara Tuchman's definition of "folly" "The power to command frequently causes failure to think," as Tuchman puts it.

In The March of Folly, Tuchman sets forth a target, the US involvement in Vietnam, as an example of folly and selects events in history to show parallels in how nations pursued policies against their self-interest and lost big. The funny thing is, they knew they were proceeding irrationally at the time and had viable and recognized alternatives, yet they did it anyway. This is how Tuchman frames her issue, whether it is “folly,” or “insanity” or just plain old “mass stupidity” I leave up to your discretion.

The events Tuchman uses as cautionary are the Trojan horse, which the Trojans took inside their walls (against their better judgment) thereby leading to the destruction of their city by the Greeks; the Renaissance Popes, who through their profligacy and violence provoked the Protestant Reformation; and the tyranny of the British that resulted in the loss of America. Besides these major examples, Tuchman is careful to note that in each of the examples the injury to self was evident at the time as evidenced by dissent of contemporaries and in each case a feasible alternative course of action existed. No Monday morning quarterbacking allowed, i.e., judging historical morality by contemporary standards.

While I have all the respect in the world for Barbara Tuchman, and think her WWI books outstanding, I think she was a little too close to her subject here. While she did a great job of setting up her thesis with the three major (and many minor) examples, by the time she gets to the Vietnam chapters she unloads a flurry of examples like a B-52 dropping its 35-ton payload. The point of her finely reasoned build up gets lost in what becomes a mind-numbing torrent of data. Apart from this overkill, it is a brilliant set of analogies, a great intellectual exercise rather than history per se.

On that note I would recommend The March of Folly to those who enjoy a good intellectual workout.

More recommended works by Barbara Tuchman –

The Guns of August

The Zimmermann Telegram