Thucydides on Politics: Back To The Present
Cambridge University Press, 3/20/2014
EAN 9781107612006, ISBN10: 1107612004
Paperback, 298 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.6 cm
Language: English
Thucydides famously declared his work to be 'a possession for all time', and so it has proved to be, as each age and generation has seen new things to admire in it and take from it. In the last hundred years, Thucydides has been interpreted and invoked in support of many different positions in politics, political theory and international relations. Geoffrey Hawthorn offers a new and highly original reading, one that sees him as neither simply an ancestor nor a colleague but as an unsurpassed guide to a deeper realism about politics. In this account, Thucydides emerges as sensitive to the non-rational and the limits of human agency, sceptical about political speech, resistant to easy generalisations or theoretical reductions, and opposed to any practical, moral or constitutional closure in politics. The book will be of interest to students of politics and classics.
Preface
Chronology
1. The text
2. Writing power
Athens in Greece, 478–435
3. Explaining the war
stated reasons, 435–432
4. Explaining the war
true reasons, 435–432
5. Judgements, 431–430
6. Absent strategies, 430–428
7. Speech and other events, 428–427
8. Meaning and opportunity, 426–424
9. Necessities, 424
10. Interests, 423–421
11. Emotion in deed, 420–416
12. Purposes and decisions, 415
13. Character and circumstance, 414–413
14. One war, 413–411
15. Back to the present
Synopsis of the text.
'Hawthorn acts as a careful, humane guide through Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War, sympathetically exploring the importance of Thucydides' historical and political thought, but equally committed to resisting the temptation to reduce this endlessly complex work to any single or simple meaning or message (whether for antiquity or for the contemporary world). Historians, students of politics, and anyone who simply wants better to understand this fascinating text will gain much from this clear-headed, thought-provoking study.' Polly Low, University of Manchester
'In a wholly individual voice, Geoffrey Hawthorn reflects on the complex of insight and suggestive ambiguity that is Thucydides' masterwork. Like Thucydides before him, Hawthorn offers by turns confident judgments and studies in contingency. For many years, Hawthorn provided a fortunate group of students at Cambridge a sense of Thucydides' distinctive subtlety and penetration about politics, a sense he here makes available to readers more generally.' Kinch Hoekstra, University of California, Berkeley
'A fascinating and thought-provoking reading of Thucydides and his ideas, thoroughly grounded in classical scholarship but viewed through a lifetime's experience of reflection on political issues. As Hawthorn himself says of Thucydides, one's understanding expands in the course of reading the work. Indispensable for classicists and political theorists alike.' Neville Morley, University of Bristol
'This magnificent book on the history of the most célèbre of all wars makes us love Thucydides' poetic passion for his subject and the 'purity' of his style. Politics is the protagonist of Geoffrey Hawthorn's narrative: Thucydides' vision of politics as a panoply of propelling forces, the reasons and accounts people give of them, their analysis, reflection, calculation and debate; and politics as a way of making things happen that is more likely than not to be agonistic and is unlikely to be truthful or simply reasonable in one straightforward way.' Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University