Que l’esprit dépasse la force : des présupposés communs aux traditions chinoise et occidentale dans les traités de stratagèmes

Abstract

Whether or not there exists a distinctive “Western Way of War” that differs fundamentally from the military thought and practice of China and other non-Western societies has been much debated in recent years. This article concentrates on a single aspect of the larger problem by comparing the Western classical tradition of strategemata, found mainly in the works of Frontinus, Onasander, and Polyaenus dating from the first and second centuries CE, with the corresponding Chinese tradition found in the ancient military treatises, the early dynastic histories, and important encyclopedic works such as Du You’s Tongdian. It finds that for all practical intents and purposes the two corpora form a single corpus – that is, they include essentially the same range of stratagems that appear to be derived from common or shared assumptions about human psychology. Although similarity is the dominant theme, this study also finds some evidence of change over time and subtle differences between the two traditions. This evidence suggests that the efficacy of particular stratagems is by no means universal but rather is rooted in material conditions and social and institutional structures that are themselves impermanent.