“The Athenian speeches rendered by Thucydides may well be dazzling for their displays of rhetoric, but it is easy to forget that the deliberations held in the framework of Athens’ renowned and radical democracy resulted in policies that led to the loss of innumerable lives and to the collapse of Athens’ empire after little more than half a century.”Īm I right to think you’re a bit more guarded in your admiration for Thucydides? But in your book, How to Think About War, you cast a bit of a warning, don’t you? On Five Books as well, various eminent foreign policy specialists have suggested that Thucydides already said pretty much all there was to say about the subject. In the introduction to your book, you mentioned Harvard political scientist Graham Allison’s book Destined for War, which predicts war between China and the United States based on his idea of there being a ‘ Thucydides trap.’ He was even called to make a presentation to the National Security Council about it. The work has gone on to be extremely influential, as he hoped it would be. We really see Thucydides as someone who charts the contours of those different philosophies. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War is really considered one of the founding documents of the field of international relations: people who are interested in the supposed contrast between ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’ as international relations principles. Even beyond scholars of history, it has become extremely influential in foreign policy and political science circles. So he really set up his History of the Peloponnesian War as something that should be read by future generations. He envisions that his work will be not quite a manual or a blueprint, but that it will offer insights for people later down the line. He thinks that even though the Peloponnesian War is the biggest war the Greek world has yet known, the forces that led to it will be repeated, given that human nature is what it is, in the future. Thucydides was also someone who says, right from the outset, that he wants his work to be a possession for all time. So he was very much a part of the story that he told. He was an eyewitness to the events of the Peloponnesian War and served for some time as general in the war. Thucydides came of age in what we think of today as the ‘Golden Age’ of classical Athens. But before we get to those, can you tell me who Thucydides was? Why we should care about him, two and a half thousand years later? You’ve also chosen five other books to help understand and put him in perspective. Your book, How to Think about War, is an excellent introduction to Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian War.

Foreign Policy & International Relations.

Thucydides peloponnesian war