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War Games: A History of War on Paper PDF

235 Pages·2012·2.63 MB·English
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War Games War Games A History of War on Paper Philipp von Hilgers translated by Ross Benjamin The MIT Press Cambridge, Massachusetts London, England Originally published in German by Verlag Ferdinand Sch ö ningh GmbH and Wilhelm Fink Verlag GmbH & Co. KG under the title Philipp von Hilgers: Kriegsspiele: Eine Geschichte der Ausnahmezustä nde und Unberechenbarkeiten . © 2008 Wilhelm Fink Verlag GmbH English language translation by Ross Benjamin © 2 012 The translation of this book was funded by Geisteswissenschaften International— Translation Funding for Humanities and Social Sciences from Germany, a joint initiative of the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the German Federal Foreign Office, and the German Publishers & Booksellers Association. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher. For information about special quantity discounts, please email special_sales@ mitpress.mit.edu This book was set in Stone Sans and Stone Serif by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited. Printed and bound in the United States of America. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Hilgers, Philipp von. War games : a history of war on paper / Philipp von Hilgers ; translated by Ross Benjamin. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-262-01697-1 (hbk. : alk. paper) 1. War games — History. 2. Games of strategy (Mathematics)— History. I. Title. U310.H53 2012 355.4 ′ 809 — dc23 2011026383 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 If on Mars there were human beings and they waged war against each other in the way chessmen do on a board, then their headquarters would use the rules of chess for prophesying. — Ludwig Wittgenstein Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii 1 The Battle of Numbers in the Middle Ages 1 2 Power Games in the Baroque Period 11 3 The State of the War Game 31 4 Historiography in Real Time 57 5 Higher Mathematics and N omos of the Earth 89 6 From Formula Games to the Universal Machine 103 Notes 145 Bibliography 175 Index 199 Preface Current cultural histories of the game generally exclude two spheres: the battlefield and mathematics. Yet the groundbreaking role of games in these domains could not be more serious and intensive. After the First World War, if not earlier, mathematical and military discourses in Germany not only struggled for the consolidation of their respective fields of operation, but also simultaneously discovered the game as a productive concept. From that point on, the term “ war games” was no longer an odd word combina- tion tantamount to an oxymoron. Rather, it was probably the most effec- tive and fateful concept the twentieth century produced in order to master its crises. It is not possible to do justice to the concept and the object of the war game without taking into consideration its long, decidedly nonlinear and not always transparent history. As a consequence, the time frame of this study, which begins in the Middle Ages and extends to the Second World War, is quite broad in scope. On the other hand, there is a clear delimita- tion of the area of investigation: it ranges from the medieval game boards — captured on parchment— of the German bishoprics, through the spaces of play in the baroque principalities, to the paper map exercises of the German and “ Third ” Reich. A perspective that looks beyond national borders— as is often justified, if only for purposes of comparison — is here largely excluded. Instead of foregrounding relations, this study investigates quite specific constella- tions. The decision to highlight states of exception solely from German history seems warranted due to the fact that— from the beginning of the twentieth century at the latest— an unequaled mastery arose there with respect to both war machines and mathematics. 1

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For centuries, both mathematical and military thinkers have used game-like scenarios to test their visions of mastering a complex world through symbolic operations. By the end of World War I, mathematical and military discourse in Germany simultaneously discovered the game as a productive concept. M
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