Thucydides on Politics
Back to the Present

This book presents an introduction to and original reading of Thucydides' understanding of practical politics.

Geoffrey Hawthorn (Author)

9781107039162, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 March 2014

300 pages, 4 maps
22.9 x 15 x 2 cm, 0.57 kg

'One of the 'connoisseurs of the political game', a scholar of uncommon insight and long experience, and a writer who possessed an exceptionally eloquent prose style … Hawthorn deserves to be heard, and not only by classicists.' James Romm, London Review of Books

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.

Subject Areas: Political science & theory [JPA], History of ideas [JFCX], Ancient history: to c 500 CE [HBLA]