The Cultural Roots of Strategic Intelligence

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Strategic Intelligence is a form of meaning that promises the possibility of strategic advantage, dignity, the achievement of objective, and the fulfillment of potential in hostile environments. In The Cultural Roots of Strategic Intelligence Gino LaPaglia demonstrates that the strategic aspect of reasonarising in human experience, encoded as value, and born by culture as a strategic resourcehas been encoded as values that have been memorialized in culturally authoritative sources in various Eurasian cultures for thousands of years. These sources have validated a strategic orientation in the world, legitimized the strategist as a heroic identity, and transmitted a coherent world view that enables the practitioner of strategy to overcome asymmetric threat. By excavating the provenance of strategic thought expressed in the cultural identity of the strategist in the most culturally authoritative mythological, literary, philosophical and religious sources, and excavating the underlying strategic values expressed in cultural products, LaPaglia demonstrates that the strategic aspect of human rationality is one of the most basic structural dynamics of human meaning, and that the transmission of this strategic way of being and acting in the world offers hope for lifes underdogs.

Reviews

"Gino LaPaglia has done a great service for scholars and practitioners by uncovering the roots of strategic thinking in the humanities and comparing its expression across Eurasia. That humans in all societies share a concept of the strategic goes without saying, but seldom has its tenets been self-consciously laid out and clearly labeled in strategic treatises. LaPaglia's insight is that strategic thinking is, rather, embedded in and taught through the stories at the core of our culture. His tour of The Cultural Roots of Strategic Intelligence in Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian and Chinese sources is erudite, thought-provoking, often humorous, and it helps us understand how we think and act, be it in the situation room, the boardroom, or the playroom."--James Millward, Georgetown University

Author Bio

Gino LaPaglia is a Washington D.C.-based scholar practitioner with a doctorate from Georgetown University and expertise in East Asian Affairs and Cultural Studies.