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REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, by Edward Luttwak

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The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century CE to the Third, Edward N. Luttwak (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). In one of the dozens of notorious interviews of Edward Luttwak that float around the internet, he’s asked how he chose the topic for his PhD dissertation. His answer is that one day at university he had a humiliating social encounter. Immediately afterwards, somebody pounced on him and asked what his dissertation was about anyway. He hadn’t even started thinking about what his topic would be, but he obviously couldn’t say that, and so instead he puffed himself up and made something up on the spot, and he did so by saying the most grandiloquent series of words one at a time like a large language model feverishly choosing the next token to maximize self importance: “The… GRAND….

REVIEW: The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, by Edward Luttwak John Psmith Nov 13, 2023 90 24 11 Share The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire: From the First Century CE to the Third , Edward N. Luttwak (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976). In one of the dozens of notorious interviews of Edward Luttwak that float around the internet, he’s asked how he chose the topic for his PhD dissertation. His answer is that one day at university he had a humiliating social encounter. Immediately afterwards, somebody pounced on him and asked what his dissertation was about anyway. He hadn’t even started

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