Politics & Power Quote by John Keegan

Keegan is sketching a quiet manifesto for how to sell seriousness to a culture that distrusts it. By naming "Americans" up front, he signals an audience he both courts and diagnoses: readers who want history to cash out in usable clarity ("the practical") and in recognizable people rather than abstractions ("the human"). It is also a defensive move. Military history, his home turf, is often caricatured as the domain of maps, hardware, and bloodless strategy. Keegan’s insistence on the human works as a preemptive rebuttal: this is not just a chronicle of battles; it is an account of bodies, fear, leadership, error - the parts that make conflict legible to civilians.

The line’s craft is its double alignment. "They like" followed by "I like" turns market preference into personal principle, letting Keegan claim he is not pandering. Yet the mirroring is too neat to be innocent. He is admitting, politely, that narrative choices are shaped by readership - a frank acknowledgment of history as communication, not merely scholarship. The repeated "like" also softens what could sound programmatic; he avoids declaring "should" or "must". That restraint fits Keegan’s broader reputation: skeptical of grand theories, attentive to contingency, and committed to translating war’s experience without romanticizing it.

Context matters: writing in an era when academic history was tilting toward theory, Keegan stakes out a rival virtue - accessibility without triviality. The subtext is a wager that empathy and clarity are not compromises; they are the tools that keep the past from becoming an insider’s language game.