A 17th-century Flemish depiction of the Trojan Horse tale from “The Aeneid.”

Cicero wrote that to be ignorant of what happened before your own birth is to remain always a child. Much later, Henry Ford disagreed. He famously dismissed history as “bunk,” believing that each new generation would make its own history, by its own lights.

You would think that, in the face of a culture that seems inclined to Ford’s way of thinking, academic historians would want to keep the Ciceronian view alive, and perhaps they do. But their efforts are often distorted by abstruse theory or the formulas of social science. Charles Hill, a diplomat in residence at Yale University, has a different approach. He wants the past to inform the present by taking literature as a guide.

Mr. Hill’s tour begins, not surprisingly, in ancient Greece. “The Iliad,” he says, shows us a world before nation-states, when blood feuds led to conflict and grievances (e.g., the abduction of a woman) to war. Diplomacy of a sort existed among rulers, he notes, but it functioned in an inherently unstable world that seemed desperate for a better way to avoid conflict, or manage it.

One answer, as the plays of Aeschylus suggest, was for people to transfer their social allegiance from tribes to states, ceding justice to the rule of law. Thus do the Furies, in Aeschylus’ cycle of plays called “The Oresteia,” seek a just punishment for Orestes (who has killed his mother) and not merely tribal vengeance.

To underline the momentousness of this shift, Mr. Hill reminds us of a scene from Mark Twain’s “Huckleberry Finn” in which Huck asks: “What is a feud?” He is told: “A feud is this way: a man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then the other man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another, then the cousins chip in—and by and by everybody’s killed off.” A great deal of history records mankind’s attempts to steer away from this cycle of violence and trust a process of justice, however imperfect. The state, Mr. Hill argues, became the vehicle for this dramatically new social arrangement.

But what kind of state? And how could it be guarded against its own tendencies toward self-destruction? Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian wars, in the fifth century B.C., describes how conflict destroyed not only Athenian democracy but also a beneficially balanced system of Greek states. Mr. Hill cites Plato’s “Republic” as a text on statehood to be read ironically for its lesson that an intellect over-devoted to abstract ideas can bring about a repulsive outcome—in the case of Plato’s imagined republic, a dictatorship of philosopher-kings. Experience offered a better guide. Xenophon’s “Anabasis” recounts how a defeated band of Greek mercenaries made their way home through hostile territory, and their capacity for self- government made possible their journey. Virgil’s “Aeneid,” for its part, showed the founding of a civilization that would thrive by imposing law and even peace (Pax Romana) on a vast empire.

As Mr. Hill observes, old problems recur in new forms. Thomas Hobbes, writing his treatise “Leviathan” in the mid-17th century, was compelled by the times he lived in to ponder yet again the question of how to establish order in a world of competing centers of power. The Reformation had shattered the unity of Christendom. Wars of Religion had recently divided France. Britain fought a civil war while the Thirty Years War, both a political and religious conflict, raged in Germany.

Hobbes’s answer to such anarchy (as it seemed to him) was to propose a powerful sovereign to whom citizens would give their rights, providing the sovereign, as Mr. Hill writes, “with the power required to keep them safe—safe from each other other.”

The Peace of Westphalia, ending the Thirty Years War in 1648, set up a system of independent states, but it left open the question of what kind of states they would be. Jonathan Swift, in 1726, explored the possibilities with biting irony in “Gulliver’s Travels.” He sent Gulliver to an absolute monarchy, an agrarian commonwealth, a utopia of Enlightenment science and reason, and finally a hyper- rationalist aristocracy. In Swift’s hands, as one might expect, no system comes off well.

The modern era brought its own problems, which literature highlighted with typical vividness and acuity. Among much else, Charles Dickens’s “Tale of Two Cities” (1859) offers a portrait of modern state terror aimed at remaking human nature itself as another “solution” to history’s quest for order. The French Revolution stands at the center of that story, but Mr. Hill notes how that event prefigured the Bolshevik revolution and other experiments in political extremism by Communist regimes in China and Cambodia. Dickens captured the attempt to make a secular religion out of political ideas—to enforce “belief” by surveillance and cruelty while identifying virtue with violence. Dostoevsky, in “The Possessed” (1872) and Joseph Conrad, in “The Secret Agent” (1907), portrayed this terrorist mind with special intensity. As Mr. Hill notes, the mindset lives on today in the Islamist threat.

Part of the present clash between civilizations arises from the effects of what Mr. Hill calls “the imported state,” where non-Western countries adopted Western institutions without possessing the cultural matrix they required to work. Chinua Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart” (1958), set in decolonized Africa, portrays the effects of this mismatch, tracing the tragic decline of a tribal leader and thereby revealing the gap between a “modern” state and the society on which it is supposed to rest.

Mao Zedong, Mr. Hill notes, tried to close the gap in his own “imported state” by changing China’s culture as he remade its economy and institutions. But his cure proved worse than the disease—by destroying traditional society. Building something that can sustain itself is harder than merely tearing down.

Mr. Hill makes the point that, if the nation-state triumphed in the West, providing the conditions for its citizens’ security and prosperity, the verdict is still out elsewhere. The West’s matrix of civil liberties, political rights and liberal institutions has few analogues in the rest of the world. The resulting tensions play a key part in present discontent. Statesmen navigating through own our turbulent era might want to take a look at “Grand Strategies” for guidance, not to mention Aeschylus, Hobbes, Dickens and Dostoevsky.

Mr. Hay, a historian at Mississipi State University, is the author of “The Whig Revival, 1808-1830.”

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