Authors Like Sun Tzu

Miyamoto Musashi

Japanese · b. c. 1584 · Swordsman and writer

Musashi was a Japanese swordsman who, by his own account, fought more than sixty duels without losing one. In 1643 he withdrew to the Reigando cave in Higo province and began The Book of Five Rings, a short treatise on strategy and the way of the sword in five scrolls, finishing it shortly before his death in 1645.

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Niccolò Machiavelli

Italian · b. 1469 · Political philosopher

Machiavelli was a Florentine diplomat and official who lost his post when the Medici returned to power in 1512. He began The Prince and the Discourses on Livy in 1513; both were published only after his death in 1527. His own Art of War, a dialogue on armies and military organisation, appeared in 1521 and was one of the few works he saw into print.

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Carl von Clausewitz

Prussian · b. 1780 · Military theorist

Clausewitz entered the Prussian army at twelve, fought in the Napoleonic Wars, served with the Russian army in 1812 and directed the Prussian war college until 1830. He died of cholera in 1831, leaving On War unfinished; his widow, Marie von Clausewitz, edited and published it in 1832. It gave strategy the ideas of friction and the fog of war, and the claim that war is the continuation of policy by other means.

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Thucydides

Greek · Historian and general

Thucydides was an Athenian general who was exiled for some twenty years after failing to prevent the Spartan commander Brasidas from taking Amphipolis in 424 BC. He survived the plague that killed Pericles and wrote a history of the war between Athens and Sparta, meant, in his words, as “a possession for all time”; it breaks off in 411 BC. Its Melian Dialogue is still read as a founding text of political realism.

Lao Tzu

Chinese · Philosopher

Lao Tzu is the traditional author of the Tao Te Ching, a book of eighty-one short chapters on the Way, non-action and the strength of what yields. Almost nothing about his life can be confirmed, and scholars generally treat the text as compiled over time. It is one of the most translated books in the world.

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Kautilya

Indian · Political theorist

The Arthashastra, a Sanskrit treatise on statecraft, economics, diplomacy, espionage and war, is traditionally credited to Kautilya, the adviser said to have helped Chandragupta Maurya to power. Most scholars now think it was written by several authors and reached its final form in the first centuries AD. Considered lost, it was identified in a palm-leaf manuscript by R. Shamasastry, who published it in 1909 and translated it into English in 1915.

Marcus Aurelius

Roman · b. 121 · Philosopher and emperor

Marcus Aurelius was Roman emperor from 161 to 180 and spent most of the 170s at war on the Danube frontier. The Meditations, twelve books of private notes written in Greek and addressed to himself, were composed at least partly on campaign; Book 1 is headed as written in the country of the Quadi.

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B. H. Liddell Hart

British · b. 1895 · Military historian

Liddell Hart was a British soldier, journalist and military historian whose ideas on mechanised warfare were studied by the German armoured-warfare pioneers; he was knighted in 1966. He wrote the foreword to Samuel B. Griffith's 1963 Oxford translation of The Art of War. John Mearsheimer's Liddell Hart and the Weight of History later argued that he had reshaped the record of his own pre-war views and of the German generals' debt to him.

Robert Greene

American · b. 1959 · Writer

Greene's first book, The 48 Laws of Power (1998), written with Joost Elffers, was followed by The Art of Seduction (2001), The 33 Strategies of War (2006), Mastery (2012) and The Laws of Human Nature (2018). The strategy books draw their rules from historical episodes and from the classic strategists, Sun Tzu among them.

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Steven Pressfield

American · b. 1943 · Novelist

Pressfield served as an infantryman in the US Marine Corps before turning to fiction. Gates of Fire (1998), a novel of the Spartans at Thermopylae, is taught at West Point, the US Naval Academy and the Marine Corps Basic School; Tides of War (2000) follows Alcibiades through the Peloponnesian War. His nonfiction The War of Art (2002) borrows its title and its fighting stance for the struggle to create.

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