Sphinx

I’ve written on a number of occasions about Graham Allison’s ‘Thucydides Trap’ idea and why I disagree with it – indeed, I imagine that this is why the viewing stats for this blog have risen appreciably in recent weeks – but there’s nothing like reading someone else’s critical but largely wrong-headed review to prompt a bit of reflection. Arthur Waldron’s review in the Straits Times (which I first encountered via SupChina – and is that the worst name for a site ever?) has been widely circulated on the Twitter (at any rate by the normal standards of Thucydides-related references) with a measurable atmosphere of glee and Schadenfreude. It seems that a fair number of people want Allison to be not just wrong but catastrophically wrong – Ian Buruma’s New Yorker review is just as critical of Allison but much more measured, and hasn’t been nearly so widely cited as a result – and Waldron gives them what they want.

Waldron’s opening sentences are brutal – and frankly bizarre:

Let us start by observing that perhaps the two greatest classicists of the last century, Professor Donald Kagan of Yale and the late Professor Ernst Badian of Harvard, long ago proved that no such thing exists as the “Thucydides Trap,” certainly not in the actual Greek text of the great History of the Peloponnesian War, perhaps the greatest single work of history ever.

Astonishingly, even the names of these two towering academic giants are absent from the index of this baffling academic farrago. It was penned by Graham Allison, a Harvard professor — associated with the Kennedy School of Government — to whom questions along the lines of “How did you write about The Iliad without mentioning Homer?” should be addressed.

Okay… So far as I can recall, neither Kagan nor Badian actually wrote Thucydides’ history, so the final line really doesn’t work; it’s rather a case of “How did you write about The Iliad without mentioning Denys Page?” Why Kagan and Badian, rather than, I dunno, G.E.M. de Ste Croix who wrote an entire book on The Origins of the Peloponnesian War? Because that’s what Waldron has read, or because those two suit his purposes and preferences in a way that de Ste Croix, with a much more structural approach to the issues, doesn’t? Not to mention the numerous discussions of Thucydides from within International Relations, more directly engaged with the question of how far his ideas can be usefully employed in the analysis of present-day inter-state politics.

Now, I’m certainly not insisting that Waldron must be a Thucydides expert and cite the whole range of specialised literature in reviewing this book, given that his very relevant expertise is in the modern history of China. But Waldron chooses to spend nearly half his review invoking the authority of classical studies to attack Allison, and so it’s legitimate to question his claims and methods in this area (and to note pedantically that Hobbes’ was not the first English translation). “There is no Thucydides Trap because Donald Kagan says so” is never the argument; firstly, because Kagan’s version of the Peloponnesian War is just one version, driven by his own set of assumptions and interpretative moves, and secondly because there appears to be a basic confusion between different levels of representation and past reality.

This may be partly because Allison’s analysis occasionally elides them, or at least an inattentive reader might get confused. His basic thesis is fourfold, (1) that Thucydides offers an analysis of the outbreak of war in terms of the rise of Athens and the fear this occasioned in Sparta, (2) that this was intended as a general principle of inter-state politics rather than just an interpretation of one specific war, (3) that this was a correct interpretation of the outbreak of the Peloponnesian War and (4) that it does work as a wider principle, as revealed by a study of a series of analogous cases over the following two and a half thousand years.

All four of these arguments are open to critique, to differing degrees. (1) Yes, Thucydides says this (more or less; there’s room for debate about how best to translate his statement), but arguable whether he meant to propose this as the sole explanation, or how exactly he understood the relationship between necessary structural conditions and contingent short-term causes; (2) yes, Thucydides definitely claims that understanding the specific events he describes will help his readers understand present and future events, but how exactly he intended this to be understood – whether it implies the existence of normative covering laws, as some modern social scientists have tended to assume – is definitely open to debate; (3) lots and lots of room for argument; (4) ditto, plus the question of whether, even if the principle can be shown to have operated in the majority of cases through history, it is necessarily still operable in the specific case of China, given (i) nuclear weapons, (ii) globalisation and (iii) the fact that everyone is very conscious of the possible risks of the principle operating, whether it’s real or not.

Waldron’s critique appears to focus almost entirely on (3); the only way of making sense of the statement that Kagan and Badian disproved the existence of the ‘Thucydides Trap’ decades before it was actually proposed as a theory is that they showed (to Waldron’s satisfaction, if not to universal agreement) that Thucydides’ interpretation of the war was either wrong or inadequate. “Every battlefield has been measured”; that’s an incredibly narrow – but rather Kaganesque – view of the terms of the debate. It doesn’t demonstrate that Thucydides didn’t hold such a view (1), nor that it was not intended by him as a broader principle (2); it offers an alternative version of events as if this is absolute truth, whereas Allison could undoubtedly cite alternative historical accounts which follow Thucydides’ version more closely; and it doesn’t really bother with (4) at all, having assumed that it’s enough to attack (3). In other words, it seeks to engage with a social-scientific argument that draws on historical data as if it were a solely historical account, but also does this in a manner that doesn’t take seriously the fact that all historical accounts involve interpretation and are always open to question.

There’s actually a decent case to be made that (3) isn’t even essential to Allison’s argument; the validity and potential usefulness of Thucydides’ alleged principle would not automatically be undermined if it didn’t wholly work for the Peloponnesian War, though admittedly it might raise some eyebrows. Indeed, given that Allison seems to be attaching the name of Thucydides to a variant on Power Transition Theory, rather than actually developing his entire theory out of a reading of Thucydides, one might suggest that the proper evaluation of his argument is completely separate from what he does with Thucydides (this is the approach that Buruma takes).

It’s only my personal concern with the reception of Thucydides that leads me to focus on the way that Allison employs Thucydides’ name as a kind of brand – but the fact that so many of his readers, including Waldron, do fixate on Thucydides as a source of legitimation and authority for his argument (or as the starting-point for any critique) does support the idea that this aspect is worth discussing.

Indeed, I would suggest that the real Thucydides Trap is not so much described by Thucydides as set by him; we are lured in by the promises of truth, knowledge and understanding, carefully disguised with apparent objectivity of narration and the trustworthy persona of the narrator. Having taken the bait, we find ourselves in Thunderdome, a no-holds-barred struggle between different interpretations and world-views – in which no argument ever dies completely, and no victory is ever permanent.

The struggle, not the end result, is the point of the exercise. Thucydides hasn’t set this up to prove the superiority of normative social science over wishy-washy humanities or the superiority of historicised interpretation over crude reductionism. Rather, each approach is shown to be ultimately inadequate as a complete explanation – and the same goes for other approaches. We are made to recognise that the world is complex, that it is shaped through the ideas we develop to try to interpret it, that we have to simplify things and resort to principles and rules of thumb in order to make sense of it, but that every time we do that we risk misunderstanding and worse. The risk is one of paralysis, as we see how the ideas we adopt to make sense of the world and identify the best way forward inevitably limit our understanding and start themselves to reshape events, as some people take them seriously and react accordingly. But the alternatives – ignorance, or blind unquestioning adherence to our prejudices – can only be worse…