One major reason for the versatility of Thucydides’ account as a source of insight into the present, as noted before, is its lack of specificity. That is to say, we’re presented with a detailed, multi-faceted account of specific historical events, having been primed to expect that we’ll spot resemblances and analogies with later events and our own situation – but without any authorial direction as to what resemblances and analogies we should expect to see. As Hobbes observed, Thucydides doesn’t teach a lesson but simply makes us spectators of events, free to draw our own conclusions (but encouraged to do so). His work is not so much a mirror as a Rorschach blot; you see universal principles of inter-state relations that speak to tensions between the USA and China, I see a complex meditation on uncertainty and anticipation that is (as Simon Schama has been astute enough to observe recently) perfectly suited to a well-paid consultancy with the insurance industry. (more…)
Posts Tagged ‘Thucydides’
Fear and Loathing in Melos
Posted in Musings, tagged Brexit, Europe, Melian Dialogue, Thucydides on March 16, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
Poetry Corner 3
Posted in Musings, tagged poetry, Thucydides on March 9, 2016 | 6 Comments »
Approximately 97% of the time, the Tweetdeck column that monitors references to Thucydides churns through the same old quotations, some more or less accurate (interminable misspelled variations on the “secret of happiness is freedom” line) and some not (poor old William Butler continues to be robbed of credit for his “Scholars and Warriors” aphorism), plus intermittent bursts of the bloody Thucydides Trap whenever a new article on the South China Sea appears. But every so often it produces something entertaining or interesting; infuriated rants from students who’ve been told to read Thucydides, the occasional new quote (there’s one from Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy, favourite book of Anthony Powell, that I need to check to see if he’s made it up) and occasional Other Stuff. Including (drum roll) a new Thucydides poem! (more…)
Questions of Character
Posted in Musings, tagged Athen, China, Sparta, Thucydides, Thucydides trap, USA on February 21, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
A further thought on the Thucydides Trap idea, that’s just a bit too long to develop properly on Twitter… Insofar as Thucydides actually holds such a conception, it’s firmly rooted in the specific historical situation of the confrontation and competing interests of Athens and Sparta, including the distinctive characters of those two states. That is, it’s the restless, energetic, ambitious nature of the Athenians (as set out by the Corinthians in the debate at Sparta in Book 1) that both explains why they have risen to a position of power and makes the current situation volatile; it’s the slow, cautious, conservative and risk-averse nature of the Spartans that has allowed the Athenian rise. The “truest cause” of the war can’t be reduced to the bare dynamics of the confrontation – established power versus rising power – alone; but of course that’s precisely what the ‘Thucydides Trap’ does, setting up historical analogies and making predictions on the basis solely of abstract structural similarities.
If we bring ‘national character’ back in, as a way of talking about general tendencies in foreign policy and how different states will behave in a given situation – and keeping in mind the Thucydidean point that it’s never absolutely uniform or fixed – then the great potential US-China confrontation looks somewhat different. It’s difficult to imagine a ‘rising power’ that looks less Athenian than China: slow, steady, cautious, risk-averse. Meanwhile, the US certainly has its cautious, risk-averse phases, especially when it comes to dealing with other major powers – but it also has a track record of reckless military aggression that couldn’t be less Spartan. Arguably this makes the situation more volatile, depending on the regime in power, but it certainly directs attention towards the ‘established’ power as the likely source of trouble, whereas a lot of the articles discussing the South China Sea as the crucible of WWIII seem to accept US hegemony as legitimate because already existing, and every Chinese action as gratuitously aggressive because they’re the rising power – they must be the pushy ambitious ones, as they’re playing the Athenians…
The Thucydides Trap Once Again
Posted in Research in Progress, Uncategorized, tagged China, South China Sea, Thucydides, Thucydides trap, USA, war on February 20, 2016 | 7 Comments »
The ‘Thucydides Trap’, having infiltrated both Australasia and China from its incubation in the USA, now appears to have turned up in the UK, with a piece in the Independent (not sure if it’s just on the webpage, or… Actually, is there anything else?) entitled ‘The Next World War Will Be In The South China Sea. Ask Thucydides’. It’s our old friend, Graham Allison’s analysis of the confrontation of the hegemonic power and the rising power, with added apocalyptic noises about the imminence of nuclear war (whereas the role of the nuclear deterrent in reducing the impact of the supposed dynamic of Great Power rivalry is something many critics have put forward as an objection to Allison’s transhistorical claims) and some especially amusing asides. “And as has happened in international summitry since the time of Pericles, sweet talk, fraternal visitations and hearty dinners proceeded in tandem with steely military build-ups on both sides.” Yes, Thucydides is full of that sort of thing.
I live in hope that someone will ask me, or someone else from the classical side, to write a piece on why this is a dubious reading of Thucydides; I do have a draft that I’ve been meaning to finish at some point… In the meantime, I thought it might be helpful to post links to the various things I’ve written on this in the last couple of years, in one easy-to-access post…
The Thucydides Trap (October 2012)
The Tao of Thucydides (April 2014)
The Real Thucydides Trap (May 2014)
Who Laid the Thucydides Trap? (August 2015)
Stuck in the Middle (September 2015)
Absence of Evidence (October 2015)
On Naive and Theoretical Historiography
Posted in Musings, tagged counterfactual history, Geoff Hawthorn, Thucydides on January 6, 2016 | Leave a Comment »
RIP Geoff Hawthorn
It has not been a good couple of months for people who have inspired me and influenced my intellectual development, to the point where I’ve been wondering about whether I should send out cautionary messages to others on the list (although receiving a “Better watch your step” from me might be open to misconstruction). In early November, one of my school classics teachers, Aubrey Scrase, died, albeit having reached the age of ninety; any idea of writing a blog post at the time was buried by the avalanche of other commitments that month, but I do say something about his role in my early encounters with Thucydides in the preface to my book on Thucydides and the Idea of History. At the close of the old year, on December 27th, Christopher Brooke died, as discussed in my last post – and in the early hours of New Year’s Eve we lost Geoff Hawthorn. I have no idea what the status of his work within political theory or international studies may be – at any rate the TLS review of his and my books on Thucydides seems distinctly equivocal – but I would certainly argue that he ought to be a significant figure for anyone thinking about the relationship between history and the social sciences. (more…)
The Peloponnesian War Will Not Take Place
Posted in Musings, tagged experience, Ira Glass, narration, Paul Auster, Thucydides on December 13, 2015 | 2 Comments »
Blink, and you’d miss it; if I hadn’t checked Tweetdeck at that specific moment on Friday, I would never have seen someone (something called Antartica Journal) attributing the line “Stories happen to those who tell them” to Thucydides – a tweet which had then disappeared by the time I’d finished googling the phrase. (more…)
Almost, But Not Quite, Entirely Unlike Thucydides
Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged Graham Allison, Henry Kissinger, history, international relations, Niall Ferguson, political theory, Thucydides, wine on December 3, 2015 | Leave a Comment »
Misquotations of Thucydides on Twitter, Nos.73 and 74… Nestled in among the continuing deluge of mis-spelt variations on ‘The sacred of hippiness is freedox…’ quotes – most of these are bots, I assume, changing the spelling slightly for copyright reasons – the discerning observer may occasionally spot a few new variants; yes, I’m starting to feel like one of those obsessive bird-watchers, improbably excited by the possible sighting of something that’s distinguishable from a common-or-garden variety of misquotation only by a slightly different pattern of wing stripe. But this is one of the few occasions I get to be a properly scholarly pedant, or pedantic scholar…
First up is something I’ve spotted a couple of times before without getting round to looking it up: “The peoples of the Mediterranean began to emerge from barbarism when they learned to cultivate the olive and the vine.” Perfectly innocuous statement, indeed more or less a staple of introductions to the Mediterranean environment and the rise of classical civilisation – but nagging feeling that I can’t actually recall it in Thucydides’ Archaeology (which is the obvious place to look). (more…)
