By Louis René Beres
Theory is a net. Only those who cast will catch.
In an important work of contemporary philosophy and social science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas S. Kuhn articulates the vital idea of “paradigm.” By this idea, which has obvious parallels in the arts, Kuhn refers to certain examples of scientific practice that provide theoretical models for further inquiry: Ptolemaic or Copernican astronomy; Aristotelian dynamics; Newtonian mechanics, and so on. At any given moment in history, we learn, the prevailing paradigm within a given discipline defines the basic contours of all subsequent investigation.
The transformations of these paradigms, transformations that are occasioned by the essential opposition of new “facts” and empirical findings to the prevailing dominant orthodoxy, are “scientific revolutions.” The transition from one paradigm to another represents the core dynamic in which science is able to progress.
As an intrinsically important (but generally under-recognized) area of political science, strategic studies are no exception. In the fashion of all other fields of inquiry, this very old area of scholarship can progress only to the extent that new paradigms routinely arise to “excavate” a consistently transforming consciousness of war and peace. Ironically, however, the emergence of such indispensable new paradigms has been remarkably scant in recent years, creating a genuine ossification of strategic studies. This condition is already precipitating assorted negative intellectual and policy consequences.
What is to be done? I propose to argue here that the benefits of Kuhn’s useful concept of paradigm could be enhanced by pertinent reference to the world of art. In this world, creative “advance” is achieved via ongoing and persistent challenges to dominant orthodoxies, what Kuhn would call the dynamic of “paradigm shifts.” Significantly, in the world of art, these entirely revolutionary transformations of prevailing epistemologies [i] are spawned by an always emergent avant-garde, by a critical “vanguard” for the new.
This is exactly what we need in strategic studies today. Now, we lack altogether the idea and the presence of an avant-garde. As a result, the field continues to be dominated by aging and increasingly irrelevant paradigms; hence, by static models of military thinking that are often incapable of shaping any purposeful military policies. More specifically, the absence of avant-garde thinking has had determinable consequences for our problematic strategic policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere.
One of the major “beat” [ii] poets of the 1950s titled a poem, “This Is Not a Poem.” [iii] In so doing, he sought, through irony and paradox, to confront and eventually to alter the prevailing norms of poetry. It is in the constant and continuing tension between orthodoxy and avant-garde that art advances.
This is also true of academic disciplines. Yet, in the genre with which we are presently concerned, the sub-field of political science that we call strategic studies, we are witnessing nary a new challenge to the now-sanctified mainstream still defined by Clausewitz, Sun-Tzu, Brodie, Schelling, Liddell-Hart, etc.
What is to be done? Let me offer an example from the world of art. To recognize the origins of modern art, a contemporary expression of which was contained in the “beat” movement, we must look at the revolutionary romanticism of Blake and the revolutionary classicism of David. So, too, must we consider the historical idealism of Delacroix (to Cezanne always “le grand maître&l