>> We need to stop untethering the text from the historical and cultural milieu of its origination
> The reason we still read these people at all (Thucydides, Machievelli, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, etc) is because their work transcends "the historical and cultural milieu of its origination".
Yes and no. IIRC, Sun Tzu strongly advises against attacking walled cities. The edition of Sun Tzu that I read made the point that reason for that was because, at his time, siege engine technology was not up to the task. In Sun Pin, written a few hundred years later, the advice changed.
There's a core there that does transcend "the historical and cultural milieu of its origination," but you kinda need to tether the text to its milieu to find it.
>There's a core there that does transcend "the historical and cultural milieu of its origination," but you kinda need to tether the text to its milieu to find it.
Strong agree. Clausewitz has a whole Chapter on billeting armies. The advice presented is mostly of use to historians. Not everything he wrote was timeless. Applying a work in a modern context involves understanding its limitations and the context in which it was written.
Why did Clausewitz think X? If X is still relevant today, is it relevant for the same reasons that it was 200 years ago?
Does this idea X truly transcend time, or are there just many important similarities between our time and the time of Clausewitz?
> The reason we still read these people at all (Thucydides, Machievelli, Clausewitz, Sun Tzu, etc) is because their work transcends "the historical and cultural milieu of its origination".
Yes and no. IIRC, Sun Tzu strongly advises against attacking walled cities. The edition of Sun Tzu that I read made the point that reason for that was because, at his time, siege engine technology was not up to the task. In Sun Pin, written a few hundred years later, the advice changed.
There's a core there that does transcend "the historical and cultural milieu of its origination," but you kinda need to tether the text to its milieu to find it.