The Thucydidean Turn

(Re)Interpreting Thucydides' Political Thought Before, During and After the Great War

Benjamin Earley

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350123731
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Greek Ancient History
• Index: History

The emergence of Thucydides as an influential political thinker in the first half of the 20th century has been astonishingly neglected by modern scholars. This volume examines how, why, and when the Athenian historical came to occupy such a prominent position in political discourse in the US and Europe today. It argues that in the years before, during, and after the Great War Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War was mined for the insights that it could offer into contemporary politics, and that it was also used as part of the justification for the academic and cultural relevance of Classics at this time of great political upheaval. Academic classicists and classically trained commentators were instrumental in this 'turn' in academic focus onto Thucydides' contemporary relevance. Among the former were several prominent figures, such as Francis Cornford, Gilbert Murray, and Enoch Powell, who attempted to find in Thucydides a dark depiction of human nature and the passions that drove politics to justify his contemporary relevance. The latter included International Relations scholars and journalists such as Alfred Zimmern, Albert Toynbee, and George Abbott, who 'turned' to Thucydides in order to better understand contemporary global and European politics. A final chapter demonstrates how this British 'turn' to Thucydides was received and reinterpreted in America on the eve of the Second World War.

1

Introduction: Defining the Thucydidean Turn

In an engagingly written and provocative book, titled Destined for War? Can America and China Escape Thucydides’s Trap, the Harvard political scientist and policy-maker Graham Allison has argued that Thucydides offers ‘the most frequently cited one liner in the study of international relations’ when he claimed that ‘it was the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable’ (Allison 2017b: xiv). The ‘trap’ has given greater public prominence to Thucydides than the Greek historian has ever enjoyed in the past. Allison first publicly floated his idea in a 2012 article for the Financial Times, before expanding it into a 2015 article for The Atlantic, which he then worked up into a 2017 article in Foreign Policy, before it became a book. As a concept, the trap has introduced Thucydides to the wider world of contemporary policy making. Allison’s book has endorsements from politicians and generals such as Joe Biden, Henry Kissinger, Ban Ki-Moon and David Petraeus, among other such luminaries. Across the Pacific Ocean, the trap has been referenced and analysed by Malcolm Turnball, the ex-Australian premier, and even by China’s President Xi Jinping (see, for example, Rachman in the Financial Times, 19 February 2018). One could perhaps even imagine that in the corridors of power in the White House the trap has introduced Donald Trump to Thucydides and the History of the Peloponnesian War,¹ particularly as Steve Bannon was a well-known Thucydideophile. It is tempting to believe from the sudden prominence of Allison’s trap that Thucydides matters to current geopolitics. Perhaps uniquely so for a text written almost two and a half thousand years ago, it suddenly feels like Thucydides has something specific, useful and applicable to say to our modern situation beyond vague apothegms and bits of advice. Allison helpfully summarizes what he believes that lesson to be:

While others identified an array of contributing causes to the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides went to the heart of the matter. When he turned the spotlight on ‘the rise of Athens and the fear that this instilled in Sparta,’ he identified a primary driver at the root of some of history’s most catastrophic and puzzling wars. Intentions aside, when a rising power threatens to displace a ruling power, the resulting structural stress makes a violent clash the rule, not the exception. It happened between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE, between Germany and Britain a century ago, and almost led to war between the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s.

Allison 2017b: xv

Thucydides is, for Allison, the originator of the idea that it is very difficult for a rising power and an established power to avoid war. Allison has identified sixteen cases that he believes are analogous to the Thucydides trap in modern history, in all but four of which war ensued.² There are obvious dangers to reducing a text as rich as the History to such a simple formula. However, for the scholars of classical reception the most pressing question is what role is Thucydides himself playing in all of this? The cynic might imagine that Thucydides is merely a convenient hook from which Allison can hang his own theory. Thucydides has just enough cultural cachet to be known among the reading public, even if only by name, but he is not so familiar that the idea of the trap itself appears passé or crass. In other words, Thucydides lends the gravitas of ancient wisdom to Allison’s book, but he is not truly integral to the argument. Indeed his presence might easily have been replaced by, for example, Sun Tzu or Machiavelli. Another commentator might suggest that Allison sought out Thucydides because the Greek historian is a writer for troubled times and is suddenly relevant now that the post-Cold War certainty of a unipolar American international order is fast disappearing. Moreover, the Greek debt crisis, Brexit and the rise of populism has halted, perhaps permanently, the progress of the European project. In the US, the comparative loss of international power and prestige following the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the emergence of a new culture war has severely damaged the country’s confidence and assertiveness. On the other side of the Pacific, the rise of China’s economy (even if that rise is now beginning to stall) has heralded in a new era of political order that the international community has not yet learnt to accommodate. In short, we live in a world full of uncertainty and tumult that appears able, at a moment’s notice, to erupt into conflict and catastrophe. At such a troubled moment, Allison may have felt compelled to return to Thucydides because he seemingly describes a similar moment of great uncertainty and incipient calamity in the closing decades of the fifth century BC.

Thucydides, in short, is a text for troubled times. This is the same Thucydides who so powerfully appeals to soldiers in the trenches, to sailors at sea, to policy-makers looking to avoid catastrophe and, notably, to Thomas Hobbes, fearful of the propensity of the English to factional strife and imperial overreach (Hoekstra 2016). This is perhaps the same Thucydides that W. H. Auden (2007) invoked during the opening days of the Second World War when he claimed that ‘Exiled Thucydides knew’ about the political power of speech, about democracy, about dictators, about how war can drive enlightenment away, and, most hauntingly that ‘We must suffer them all again.’ For Auden, Thucydides provides a hard succour in the form of knowledge of how bad things can get and how, tragically, such events will occur again and again. Auden’s poetic thought here touches on elements of Allison’s trap concept but also displays a significant difference. Auden suggests that history is moving forward in a cycle: what was true in Thucydides’ day will somehow prove irresistibly true for future generations. Sitting in a New York dive bar, Auden imagined that the pain and suffering of the Peloponnesian War were about to be revisited on the world again and there is nothing that anyone could do to stop it. Thucydides, therefore, identified a political problem that has recurred repeatedly throughout history. For Allison, however, it is possible to break the cycle of Thucydidean history that is now beginning to re-emerge in the US–China relationship. Thucydides challenges his readers to recognize that the Peloponnesian War was not inevitable by explaining how a series of contingent events led to the trap being sprung and war breaking out. Allison believes that in four out of sixteen historical cases war was avoided. He published his own book, he maintains, in an attempt to ensure that the US and China create the fifth incidence thereby escaping the trap and avoiding war.

There is, however, another reason that Allison may have chosen to model his ideas of the trap around Thucydides. The Greek historian is incredibly important in the discipline of International Relations, and to a lesser extent in Political Science, in the US. Since the 1950s and 1960s until today, Thucydides has been a staple of International Relations reading lists across the US. He is often considered to be the founder of the discipline itself, or at least of the so-called realist tradition (Boucher 1998), and a small industry has emerged that mines Thucydides’ text for new interpretations relevant to theoretical debates or contemporary policy issues (Doyle 1990; Bagby 1995; Welch 2003; Lebow 2003; Forde 2012; Johnson 2015). Allison has used Thucydides to create a theoretical framework through which to understand a difficult and pressing contemporary political problem. However, Allison’s Thucydides also represents a new intervention into these debates. He claims that his vision of Thucydides is the correct and only interpretation of the History, largely ignoring all previous scholarship. However, Allison’s idea of the trap resembles closely, at first glance at least, the idea of power transition theory that has been debated within International Relations since A. F. K. Organski’s pioneering 1958 work, World Politics. Far from superseding previous scholarship, Allison appears to build upon and profit from it. As already mentioned, Thucydides himself offers a notoriously rich and varied work that presents a multitude of different actors, visions of political life and varied motivations, articulated through carefully crafted speeches married to a well-written narrative depiction of the events of the war. It is far from certain, therefore, that the true import of Thucydides’ lengthy text can ever be reduced to a single line, epithet or idea such as Allison’s Thucydides trap.

Allison’s reduction of Thucydides’ thought to the notion of the trap represents the culmination of a tendency in Thucydidean studies that has defined the field for at least the past century: namely, the belief that it is possible to encapsulate Thucydides’ thoughts and views in a single label, epithet, name or saying. Many scholars have recently baulked at Allison’s reduction of Thucydides to the idea of the trap as unsophisticated (Chan 2019; Kirshner 2018; Lewbow and Tomkins 2016). Allison has reduced Thucydides’ lengthy description of the causes of the Peloponnesian War to a single sentence, a single word even, and therefore much has been lost in such a pithy summation of a great work. Yet, as I hope to show in this chapter, readers of Thucydides have been reducing him to a label or a sound bite for a very long time. For sure, those labels maybe backed up with hundreds of pages of analysis worked out over a monograph or multi-volume commentary, but ultimately scholars have felt the need again and again to neatly package and present Thucydides’ thought. Scholars today are familiar with many iterations of Thucydides: Thucydides the political historian, Thucydides the historical scientist, Thucydides the tragedian, Thucydides the realist, Thucydides the constructivist, the Straussian Thucydides, and most recently Thucydides the prospect theorist. The Thucydides trap, then, is just another iteration of this near constant tendency within the fields of Classical Studies, International Relations and Political Science. It is in the application of these many labels, I believe, that we discover the clearest articulation of various scholars’ own ideas of the essence of Thucydides ‘political thought’. I use that last term cautiously because it is difficult to pin down precisely what it means. The term is loaded in the sense that all texts represent political thought in so far as they are produced within the matrix of a particular society’s power structures, which they either reproduce or contest. Thucydides, however, goes far beyond this bare minimum and explicitly claims to offer his readers an account of man, human nature, the polis, the state, and the movements and change that affect them all, in the guise of an accurate (akribeia, ἀκρίβεια) account (xunegrapse, ξυνέγραψε, 1.1) of the Peloponnesian War fought between Athens and Sparta. The structure of the text resists easy characterization as history, political science or philosophy, while at the same time inviting these categories. Thucydides himself claims to offer transhistorical truths (1.22), but then recedes into the authorial background, only occasionally offering his authorial voice, thereby challenging readers to uncover his true teaching. Reacting to this challenge, scholars have aimed to contain (we might almost say creatively reimagine) Thucydides’ thought in a single label, name or sound bite. The questions I aim to pursue here are simple: when did scholars first begin the attempt to present Thucydides’ ‘political thought’ in such ways? Why? Moreover, in what ways has this attempt shaped Thucydidean studies today? And what have we forgotten?

In this chapter, I offer a history of the various labels and epithets that readers and scholars have applied to Thucydides.³ I do this to explore the significance of the Thucydidean turn (roughly 1900–39) in the broader history of the reception of the text. If I was to define the turn as simply an awakening to the value of Thucydides’ thought then we could point to individual turns stretching back through early modern Europe to antiquity. Instead, my aim, in this chapter, is to explore issues of continuity and change in the reception of Thucydides from antiquity to the present day in order to contextualize the significance of the twentieth-century turn. I will argue below that many still current interpretations have very long histories and frequently recur again and again, albeit in slightly different forms. However, the early twentieth century is significant, crucial even, because it is only then that, almost at once, a number of different labels are applied to Thucydides, leading to a scholarly debate of incredible importance. The turn played out in the shadow of the Great War and gave scholars today many of the labels that are still routinely applied to Thucydides. This debate established Thucydides as a tragedian, a scientist, a political psychologist, a realist, a contemporary and a Realpolitiker. The sheer number of labels that appear, and the depth and breadth of the scholarship that support them, mark the turn as perhaps the most significant moment in the formation of the many Thucydides(s) that we still read today. I will end this chapter by drawing readers’ attention to the relationship between Thucydides’ depiction of political psychology, reality and historical time, themes that run through almost all early twentieth-century readings of the History and therefore unite this book.

Before continuing, however, I would like to first point out that the use of labels and epithets to encapsulate Thucydides’ thought is an entirely understandabl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Dedication
• Series page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Defining the Thucydidean Turn
• 2 Thucydides: Between Science and Tragedy
• 3 Thucydides, Realism and Political Psychology
• 4 Thucydides, Realism and the Great War
• 5 Thucydides, Historical Change and Contemporaneity
• 6 Learning to Tolerate Thucydides
• 7 Epilogue: American Thucydides(s)
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright