Efficacy, East and West : François Jullien’s Explorations in Strategy

Applying a form of “indirect strategy,” Jullien has opened up an alternative to the attempts to reduce strategy to a quasiscience, with laws and regularities, a science ready to be packaged as a mass consumption intellectual good. The originality of Jullien's thought is thus paradoxical: to have found a striking depth in alleged truisms, to have dug deeper into what may seem self-evident — the strategic assumptions of two different civilizations — and, thus, to boldly reformulate the problem of the multiplicity of frameworks that give meaning to strategic thinking. While doing that, Jullien has also confronted us with a surprising externality: an elegant but forceful re-enchantment of the very notion of strategy