As Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote in his book, La pensée sauvage (Paris,1960): “biographical and anecdotal history … is low-powered history, which is not intelligible in itself, and only becomes so when it is transferred en bloc to a form of history of a higher power than itself … The historian’s relative choice … is always confined to the choice between history which teaches more and explains less and history which explains more and teaches less.” This book oscillates between analysis, which tries to explain what man is, and anecdote, which tries to teach what he is capable of...

These essays on war, resistance and counter resistance represent an original approach to understanding how political constraints on human behavior, and the resistance movements to which these restrictions give rise, produce counter-resistant forces which represent new constraints, which in turn often generate new and innovative behaviors which sometimes create new crystallizations of cultural expression and occasionally influence institutions and traditions. This new anthology offers a unique analysis of the important role political constraints play in the production of creative thinking and...