Moltke, Schlieffen, and Prussian War Planning by Arden Bucholz

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 955 Baird, Goode established the public dimension of the “nation’s attic” and defined its mission for collections, learning, and enjoyment. Baird chose wisely. Goode, an ichthyologist, was a capable naturalist, a gifted administrator, and, as this volume shows, a skilled and prolific writer. This collection of five essays prepared by Goode from 1886 to 1890 will refresh educators of all sorts who endure the verbiage of career bureaucrats. Goode, for example, could open with an ancient Oriental saying and then recast its meaning into an entire address on museums of the future. Historians and others interested in museum studies will also enjoy Goode’s discussions of early natural history and institutions of science and learning. In a 1988 publication, editor Sally Gregory Kohlstedt penned a memorable phrase when she described 19th-century college museums as “symbols and mechanisms for education.” Goode, himself a prod­ uct of college museums at Wesleyan University (the Orange Judd Hall of Natural Science) and Harvard University (Louis Agassiz’s Museum ofComparative Zoology), understood the use ofboth the symbol and the mechanism. In a beautiful image, free of any intellectual arrogance, he pictured the best museum as a “house full of ideas.” Goode’s essays are filled with ideas that have guided the development of museums in the United States. His analysis of the history of science is perhaps overly simple, but to his credit Goode saw present lessons in past events. Editor Kohlstedt has provided a helpful introductory biography on Goode and a good index for these essays, but leave room on the bookshelf. I hope Kohlstedt will give us more on Goode. As fine as this work is, it begs for companions—a full biography of Goode and the rest of his papers. Welcome additions, too, would be a bibliography and archival photographs of Goode’s house of ideas, particularly (and this is a note to the publisher) in a book of this price. In the meantime, readers still curious about Goode as a “museum master” are directed to Ed­ ward P. Alexander’s 1983 work of similar title (Museum Masters: Their Museums and Their Influence [Nashville, Tenn., 1983]) and to Goode’s contributions to the Annual Reports of the Smithsonian Institution. Charlotte M. Porter Dr. Porter, associate curator at the Florida Museum of Natural History at the University of Florida, is a historian of science interested in the role of museums in modern society. Her essay on this subject was recently published as “Natural History in the 20th Century: An Oxymoron?” in Natural History Museums: Directionsfor Growth, ed. Paisley S. Cato and Clyde Jones (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1991). Moltke, Schlieffen, and Prussian War Planning. By Arden Bucholz. Providence, R.I.: Berg Publishers, 1991; distributed by St. Martin’s Press. Pp. xi + 352; glossary, notes, bibliography, index. $59.95. This book’s interest for the student of technology is not immedi­ ately apparent because we generally think of technology in terms of 956 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE artifacts and the subject here is planning. But technology also encompasses organizational schemes and methods of accumulating and exploiting knowledge. It is in this sense, albeit implicitly, that Arden Bucholz approaches the development of what he terms “deep-future-oriented” planning in the Prussian military establish­ ment between the wars of the French Revolution and the beginning of World War I. Moreover, the impact of railroads and the demands of operating them efficiently is a major subsidiary theme. The work is multifaceted, but the central strand of continuity is an account of the systematic development of what Bucholz terms the “first process” of bureaucratically organized peacetime war planning. As he presents it, convincingly in my view, the key developments in chronological order were as follows: the systematic collection of information for planning purposes and the development of bureau­ cratic structures to support the process, initially focusing on cartog­ raphy and map making; the development and use—or misuse—of official military history to provide the officer corps with a common frame of reference; the development and systematic use of war gaming for training and planning; and the demands of railroad mobilization as an increasingly preemptive driving factor in...