Freedom And Order Into Their Own Hands example essay topic

An Inquiry into the Unwisdom in Government Govern, a word all people want the power to use, but does anyone actually do the right thing. According to Barbara W. Tuchman in her essay "An Inquiry into the Persistence of Unwisdom in Government", the people in government make the wrong decisions by assessing situations incorrectly. In this essay Tuchman's main purpose is to show the distortion of government. Tuchman first uses the example of the French War in which at one point all the soldiers were placed at one part of the country leaving another wide-open to invasion only because someone "thought" the Germans would never choose a route such as that. In the end, the Germans did use that route which hurt the French and extended a war much longer than actually needed.

Tuchman feels that the French incorrectly assessed the situation of the Germans invading the country. Instead, the soldiers should have remained in the original stations and then, there would have been less of a chance of the Germans invading rather than what actually happened. Another example of hard-headedness is a country where a ruler can do nothing except rely on the thoughts of God in order to make a decision in the country. In that instance she feels that the ruler should be able to make some of his own decisions rather than always wait for an answer. After all, he should be leading the country with his own wisdom rather than that of a higher being.

Another major argument Tuchman makes in her essay is people making the choice between freedom and order. She uses the Boston Tea Party as an example of people taking the freedom and order into their own hands. The people did not want the tax on tea so they expressed their freedom to not purchase the tea, and when the British got upset they took order into their own hands by destroying the tea. Another example is Joan of Arc, even during the fifteenth century; a woman could not stand what was going on with the government. She took a stand and made her own choices too. Tuchman shows that even though government officials are hard-headed and refuse to learn from past mistakes and even still to this day assess situations incorrectly.

People need to have a voice to say they are making a wrong choice. There are too many people trying to make the decisions and not enough actually considering the consequences of the actions projected to make. Tuchman also feels there is a fine line between freedom and order. People should have freedoms, but at the same time express order while acting out these freedoms. Some people feel that when they are given a small dose of freedom they should take it and ruin the order that is still present and that is not the point. Each work hand in hand and must be dealt with evenly.

When the two concepts Tuchman points out come together, she expresses the true unwisdom in government which is not putting the concepts together and using them wisely.