When I first began putting together a research project on the modern reception and influence of Thucydides, and writing funding applications, the big ‘hook’ – the thing that was going to persuade reviewers of the contemporary relevance of the theme – was Thucydides’ infiltration of the G.W. Bush White House. Irving Kristol’s claim that he was the favourite author of the Neocons, the relationship between Donald Kagan and the Project for a New American Century, and – from a less bellicose perspective, Colin Powell’s love of the (fake) Thucydides quote about manifestations of power and restraint, were not intended to be the central focus of the project, but they showed the importance of understanding the context of such readings, the traditions of reception and reinterpretation that made powerful people think, or at least claim, that Thucydides speaks to the present.
Here we are again, with a new article on ‘Why everyone in the White House is reading Thucydides’ suggesting the Obama adminstration’s relative restraint in such matters (occasional references from Martin Dempsey when Chair of the Joint Chiefs) was just a blip.*Actually the article doesn’t have too much new information: we knew about Bannon’s loopy views on Sparta already, and likewise the tendency for senior military types like Mattis and McMaster to cite Thucydides is entirely predictable. The additions to our knowledge are Michael Anton’s insistence that only people who read the Hobbes translation are worth bothering with – one suspects that this has less to do with the scholarly and literary qualities of Hobbes’ version that with sending up a big “Hey, I like it nasty, brutish and short!” signal – and the fact that Graham Allison has wrangled an invitation to sell his new Wonder Woman novelisation. Indeed, one suspects that the main reason for the article’s existence is as part of that ongoing marketing campaign – but it still has the effect of making it seem like Thucydides is having a Moment. Certainly the Twitter thought so…
I can’t help worrying that this is more confirming data for my ‘Thucydides is a virus turning people into aggressive shambling zombies’ thesis, increasing the likelihood that they’ll start looking for a new Syracuse, and suggesting that we should start stock-piling canned goods and drinking water. However, it brings into focus the fact that these zombies are groaning quite different things. Mattis and McMaster fall into the tradition of old-fashioned realism, seeing international actors as basically rational, driven by motives of fear, interest and honour. The ‘Thucydides Trap’ offers instead a variant on power transition theory, emphasising structural factors rather than conscious decision-making. And Bannon seems to think that Cleon was the real hero of Thucydides’ narrative (or at any rate ought to have won the Mytilene Debate), and that the oft-cited democratic values of Pericles’ Funeral Oration need to be scrapped completely in favour of Spartan violence and anti-culture.
Saying that “They’re all reading Thucydides!” disguises the extent of radical disagreement; promoters of different interpretations of the same author can disagree far more viciously, and loathe one another far more, than those promoting different authors or theories, as feelings of identification and ownership kick in. There is surely a chance that the White House will now occupy itself with bad-tempered book seminars for the next few years, arguing themselves into the ground over the correct understanding of prophasis and aitia, and will do a lot less damage elsewhere as a result.
But Thucydides has always accommodated such tensions and contradictions, without this ever leading to anyone deciding to drop him as an authority. It seems sadly possible that shared worship of Thucydides will provide different White House factions with some common ground, a basis for communication and negotiation, enabling them to start acting in the world. Or, it may supply someone like a Bannon with a lever, using M&McM’s reverence for the name of Thucydides as a basis for disarming criticism of his own agenda – shades of the anecdote in Reinhard Koselleck, where a clever young Prussian swings a debate on financial policy by referencing what Thucydides had said about the evils of paper money in Athens…
Some readers of Thucydides see it as a warning against war, others as a licence for the exercise of power. As a text, it doesn’t do enough to discourage those determined to find a simplistic justification of their wish to burn the world. Start digging those bunkers, people; Thucydides is back in the White House.
*Update 24/6/17: only now, as the New York Times’ Interpreter newsletter refers to current discussions as the ‘Thucydides Wars’, do I realise that I should have referred to the Obama administration as “an armistice in a never-ending Thucydides war”. Hindsight is 20/20…
So who plays Kleon?
How could Thucydides have written the book to do more to discourage those who wish to see the world burn? It did not turn out well at all for Athens, after all…
A few more sentences in the introductory methodology and principles section? “By the way, you need to read the whole thing not just cherry-pick, and the whole point is that you *don’t* try to reduce everything to simplistic maxims.” (Thuc 1.23a)
Obviously this wasn’t an entirely serious suggestion, but the way that Thucydides invites readers to recognise their own situation in his narrative does leave it open to misreading and dubious interpretation.
Dear Prof. Morley, thanks for all your work on Thucydides which I’m just discovering here for the first time but I did admire your piece on Eidolon about Marx and Trump some months ago. The Politico article really rankled me because it so unquestioningly declined to acknowledge that other interpretations of Thucydides are possible. I’m commenting to encourage you to respond to it in a venue of comparable reach to Politico. The conservatives don’t own the monopoly on the interpretation of that text but as things stand its too easy to conclude that they do based on the reporting available online.
Many thanks for this, and apologies for the delayed response. To be fair, I don’t think Allison is especially right-wing – his aim is to reduce the chance of war, and by all accounts he was expecting to be trying to influence a Clinton administration. The Mattis/McMaster reading is conventional military academy meets IR realism stuff. The scary ones are Bannon and friends – and some of the alt-right types I encounter occasionally on Twitter.
Incidentally, I was interested to read about your work in advising veterans in their studies. Does this ever involve talking about Thucydides? I’ve sometimes wondered about the potential for using him as a basis for talking about war and trauma – there’s a case to be made that his work is both about trauma and written by someone suffering from trauma – in the way that someone like Jonathan Shay uses Homer and tragedy.
Thucydides: “To hear this history recited, for that there be inserted in it no fables, shall be perhaps not delightful. But he that desires to look into the truth of things done and which (according to the condition of humanity) may be done again, or at least their like, he shall find enough herein to make him think it profitable. And it is compiled rather for an everlasting possession than to be recited for a prize.
“The greatest action before this was that against the Medes; and yet that, by two battles by sea and as many by land, was soon decided. But as for this war, it both lasted long and the harm it did to Greece was such as the like in the like space had never been seen before.
“For neither had there ever been so many cities expunged and made desolate, what by the barbarians and what by the Greeks warring on one another (and some cities there were that when they were taken changed their inhabitants), nor so much banishing and slaughter, some by the war some by sedition, as was in this.
“And those things which concerning former time there went a fame of, but in fact rarely confirmed, were now made credible: as earthquakes, general to the greatest part of the world and most violent withal; eclipses of the sun oftener than is reported of any former time; great droughts in some places, and thereby famine; and that which did none of the least hurt but destroyed also its part, the plague. All these evils entered together with this war, which began from the time that the Athenians and Peloponnesians brake the league which immediately after the conquest of Euboea had been concluded between them for thirty years.
“The causes why they brake the same and their quarrels I have therefore set down first, because no man should be to seek from what ground so great a war amongst the Grecians could arise. And the truest quarrel, though least in speech, I conceive to be the growth of the Athenian power, which putting the Lacedaemonians into fear necessitated the war.
“But the causes of the breach of the league publicly voiced were these:
“Epidamnus is a city situated on the right hand to such as enter into the Ionian Gulf. Bordering upon it are the Taulantii, barbarians, a people of Illyris. This was planted by the Corcyraeans; but the captain of the colony was one Phalius, the son of Heratoclidas, a Corinthian of the lineage of Hercules…”
I trust your use of the Hobbes version isn’t an expression of solidarity with Anton?