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.
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.
Über den Autor
Geoffrey Hawthorn (1941-2015) was Professor Emeritus of International Politics at the University of Cambridge. He taught sociology and politics at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge and was twice a visiting professor at Harvard University. He published books on human fertility, the history of social theory, counterfactual thinking in history and the social sciences and the politics of east Asia. He also studied the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and wrote a large number of essays and reviews across a range of subjects in philosophy and politics.
Inhaltsverzeichnis
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.
