In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

preface and acknowledgments Very respectfully, and in light of lengthening shadows of mortality, I would in these few lines set out two matters that together provide the raison d’être of The Last Century of Sea Power. The first matter, relating to one’s own rationale as a historian, is something that I had never committed in public, but it is provided here because it forms the basis of the approach to the subject that in its turn gave rise, per se, to The Last Century of Sea Power. This first matter, the shaping of one’s own philosophy and career, really has its basis in three episodes, only two of which will be presented here, both of which were only minutes in length. The first of these episodes was really the first time I thought, and I was some 24 years of age and had just presented my first lecture. A matter of months before I had completed two years’ post-graduate study at university, and my thesis subject was the Liberal governments and the Navy Estimates/dreadnought building program, 1906–1910, and because I had worked on these subjects I understood navies and therefore I understood the U.S. Navy and therefore I understood the Pacific War, 1941–1945—or that was how logic (of a kind) ordained that I was the member of the department obliged to give this specific lecture. I gave the lecture and at its end my head of department came to me and told me that the lecture had been very good indeed and that he had much enjoyed it: he congratulated me and told me that the lecture had been very well organized and delivered. I went to my office, sat down at my desk, lit a cigarette—how things have changed!—and sat there a moment, and then the thought crossed my mind: I had described the Pacific War but had not explained any aspect of it. I realized, with a start, that my head of department really did not understand the difference between description and explanation, xiv preface and acknowledgments between narrative and analysis, and I resolved at that moment always to explain and never to describe. I would like to claim that I kept this promise to myself but, of course, for all my best intentions I have confused the two repeatedly and on all too many occasions have failed to provide explanation. With the passing of time I have realized that single explanation really does present intellectual difficulty and indeed dangers, but while I would plead that I have consciously attempted to provide explanation , I would admit that the second episode has probably been more important and a greater single influence than this 1970 intention. The second episode came nearly three years later, in late 1972, as I watched the eleventh program of Jacob Bronowski’s television series The Ascent of Man. This remarkable enterprise— the explanation of the relationship between the physical sciences, political philosophy , and politics—had as its eleventh subject of examination the certainty of knowledge and dealt with Einstein, Szilard, and Heisenberg’s Principle of Uncertainty (1927). The one piece in this program, the eleventh hour of the eleventh, that I always will remember was the scene in which, crouched over a little stream, Bronowski made the statement that the basis of democracy is tolerance and the basis of tolerance is uncertainty, and that when men behave with the certainty of knowledge that has no test in reality, then one finishes in a place like this. The camera stepped backward and one recognized that Bronowski was in Auschwitz. He then stated that this was where so many members of his family were murdered and where their ashes were washed away, and that this is what happens when men aspire to the certainty of knowledge that has no test in reality, that this is what happens when men aspire to the knowledge of gods. I realized, at that one moment, that, whatever explanation I sought to provide, more important than knowledge and explanation were tolerance and uncertainty. From this one moment , before the screen, there stemmed over a period of time a desire to place before the reader choice that would encourage independent thought, to provoke questions rather than provide answers, and indeed in time came another thought that arose when attending a lecture and hearing myself quoted as an authority on the subject: a determination to write the counter-view lest the original idea...

Share