Sphinx

I’ve just had a review published on War On The Rocks (a reliably interesting website for analysis of foreign policy and strategy, from a viewpoint that is predominantly US-focused and frequently Realist), on the new book by Hal Brands and Charles Edel, The Lessons of Tragedy: statecraft and world order (Yale UP, 2019). As you can probably gather from the review, I found this rather an odd experience; indeed, half-way through the book I became increasingly convinced that I was a completely unsuitable reviewer, as after the first couple of chapters the ‘tragedy’ element largely disappeared, and B & E’s conclusion is not that US strategy people all need to start reading tragedy (that might be fun…), but that they need to review more recent history in the alleged spirit of tragic sensibility, which largely boils down to an assumption that bad things will continue to happen.

In a TLS review a couple of years ago, Donna Zuckerberg pondered the continuing influence of Edith Hamilton’s The Greek Way and its romanticised, idealised image of Greece as the fount of Western Culture. B & E offer further evidence for this, as Hamilton is their key source for the claim that Athenian genius derived from their tragic sensibility, founded in their constant reference to the advice and admonitions of the great tragedians. It’s the sort of idea that is so outdated, so out of step with classical scholarship for half a century and more, that it’s quite difficult to know where to start. My review ended up longer than expected simply because of the need to try to explain current (well, you know, post-1960) approaches to a non-specialist audience, and rewrote various sentences multiple times to avoid making statements that needed a paragraph or two of references to justify something that would barely need a footnote in a current academic publication.

As I said, the bulk of B & E’s book has absolutely nothing to do with classical Athens or tragedy (or Nietzsche, though he gets cited rather a lot), and the choice of a classically-inclined reviewer seemed inappropriate, however much sense it must have made looking at the title. But in practice I suspect that most reviewers will be foreign policy wonks or IR specialists, perhaps with the odd historian to comment on their takes on the Peace of Westphalia and the Congress of Vienna. My take on those topics is unavoidably general and amateurish – but the same can probably be said of other reviewers’ takes on the classical stuff. In isolation, my review might be problematic, but as part of a review ecosystem, so to speak, it has a part to play.

Of course, the most interesting aspect of the book is why they wanted the classical framing for a basically historical and strategic argument at all. Is their policy approach of a reworked ‘Nothing in excess’ genuinely inspired by reading tragedy, or at least Hamilton? Or is this all about the power of the classical (cf. That Bloody Thucydides Trap) to add authority and prestige to an argument about politics and history..?