RE PROFESSOR CHARLES HILL AND MULTIDISCIPLINARY STUDIES

I happened to hear on NPR today this man, and then watched a recent lecture based on his new book.

It seems he is saying the same thing I have been putting on the blog re terrible problems from lack of broader perspectives cutting across narrow fields.

I am sure he is not the only person saying things like this, but I have been out of the educational loop, with the trial practice legal career, for the past 25 years.

As some of my prior comments show, I have for a long time been especially critical of how various Executive agencies, including State and Defense, have handled commercial and economic matters in connection with foreign relations.

No doubt FSO/Professor Hill's love for literature, and history, prepared him, steeled him, to resist the kinds of commercial and trade policy shenanigans often perpetrated by the State Department he served during this time, and detailed in articles like 'Trading American Interests', in the name of Grand Strategy? No doubt his love of ancient literature, and philosophy, were proof against the siren song of such exchanges, zero-sum games, of strategic usually unilateral market opening concessions and appeasements?


As David Kaiser has pointed out on his blog, August 22, 2010 post, the US has no longer had any historic grand strategy, going forward, for a long time now, since, say, the 60s, and explains that by reference to 19th and 20th century trends, and American intellectual and political history, both left and right, in the mid 20th Century.

That is also seen in inferences from, I believe, or assertions in, perhaps, Bobbitt's Shield of Achilles arguments, the concept of a 'market state' replacing a nation state, and perhaps even the concept of grand strategy resolving itself into Bobbitt's market state possible world scenarios, rather than national or imperial grand strategies as such. I don't really see it panning out in those political terms myself.

Question, what is a market state? As he and I both studied Wittgenstein, I will ask, just for amusement, is it anything like the Duck Rabbit ?

I guess I will have to read Hill's book, but I fear just 'reading the classics', which is what he seems to be saying, won't quite 'solve' modern disciplinary specialization difficulties I have been referring to. It would be a start; we used to have 'core' courses; and electives in more than one field; a so-called liberal arts education which nevertheless included a specialty, or special concentration.