In an 1842 letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Scottish writer Thomas Carlyle chastised Emerson, saying, “A man has no right to say to his generation, turning away from it, ‘Be Damned!’ It is the whole past and the whole future, this same cotton-spinning, dollar-hunting, canting and shrieking, very wretched generation of ours. Come back into it, I tell you.” What did he mean by this? And what importance does Carlyle’s admonition have for us today? It turns out that it has a great deal of importance. We discuss.

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This podcast is available on Soundcloud, iTunes, and YouTube.

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Be sure to take a look at the new, annotated translation of Frontinus’s Stratagems, a classic of strategic thought.