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Posts Tagged ‘politics’

In Praise of Famous Men

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , on September 11, 2019| 3 Comments »

The Thucydides virus continues to spread through British political culture, and has inevitably made the jump from the naturally-susceptible Conservatives (cf. the statistics on the number of MPs with classical degrees) to the wider population. On Monday, Ian Blackford of the SNP came out with a bit of Pericles in the House of Commons: “Freedom is the sure possession of those alone who have the courage to defend it” – no, not the most exciting or original quote, but it’s normally the preserve of the E”R”G Sparts, not least because of its association with the Bomber Command Memorial, and a few years ago any sort of classical reference in the House of Commons would have been greeted with mockery. And yesterday Nick Clegg read a substantial portion of the same Funeral Oration as part of the memorial service for Paddy Ashdown in Westminster Abbey. I fear that my new paper for History & Policy on the use and abuse of Thucydides in political commentary has come too late to serve as any sort of vaccine…

The obvious reason for including Pericles in Ashdown’s commemoration (more…)

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Project Fear

Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged , , , , on September 4, 2019| 4 Comments »

I for one welcome our new Thucydides-quoting overlords… Well, no, not really. Back in 2013, when Dominic Cummings publicly expressed his love for Thucydides and his belief that there is no better book to study for understanding politics, I expressed concern that this was one more data point for the proposition that studying Thucydides can be a Really Bad Thing that leads people to Terrible Conclusions. I decided then not to spend any time developing a detailed analysis of the role played by Thucydides (and Pericles) in his essay ‘On education and and political priorities’, aka the ‘Odyssean Education’ piece, as on first reading it seemed that Cummings was mainly taking Thucydides as a model for critical thinking, something with which I wasn’t inclined to disagree too much, even if this idea clearly then led us in very different directions. A few years later, when Cummings resurfaced in the Vote Leave campaign, there seemed more important things to do than re-read the essay – though in retrospect, as discussed below, I now suspect that there were a few clues in there about his approach to politics that could have been worth discussing.

And now? (more…)

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Between the Wars

Posted in Musings, tagged , , on August 29, 2019| 1 Comment »

One of my least favourite novels in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time sequence is the sixth, The Kindly Ones. I’m not entirely sure why; it offers one of his most sustained bits of classical reception, the Kindly Ones being of course the Eumenides or Furies – but my love of Powell, and personal response to this book, long pre-date any serious classical interest – and is just as full of unforgettable scenes and character sketches. More than likely it’s my habit of over-identifying with certain characters and then feeling vicariously miserable, and perhaps I simply shouldn’t enquire too closely. But in the last year or so it’s been difficult to avoid being reminded of the book on a regular basis, and that is Not Good – finding oneself in The Kindly Ones is akin to the Chinese curse of living in ‘interesting times’. (more…)

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Breaking News

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , , , on July 17, 2019| Leave a Comment »

The problem with developing an interest in classical references in modern political discourse is that the evidence never stops piling up. It’s the advantage of blogging, of course, that it’s easy to update whenever something interesting comes along. When it comes to proper academic analysis, however – since blogs are still not taken seriously for that purpose – there’s a constant fear that a new development will suddenly put things into a different light, locked in endless struggle with the wish/need to get the thing finished.

I cannot decide whether it’s a good or bad thing that my chapter on depictions of Trump as Roman emperor was submitted months ago so can’t include references to the analogies being drawn between his 4th July authoritarian military spectacle and the vast, expensive shows put on for Caligula (more…)

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Lawful Neutral

Posted in Events, Musings, Research in Progress, tagged , , , , , on June 18, 2019| Leave a Comment »

I’ve just discovered this blog post lurking in my ‘Drafts’ file, having apparently been created in mid-March; I can’t remember why I never got round to finishing it – unlike another post I started back in the autumn, which perhaps needs to wait for an appropriate moment – but that’s probably revealing in itself. Anyway, in a number of ways this unfinished discussion connects to what I was planning to write this morning, so I’ll post it here and then add current thoughts underneath…

If what you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. If what you have is a copy of Thucydides, everything looks like the Melian Dialogue. (more…)

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Letting Go

Posted in Musings, Research in Progress, tagged , , , , , on June 8, 2019| Leave a Comment »

This week is especially heavy on travelling, which is terrible for doing all the writing I imagined I’d get done once marking was out of the way, pretty terrible for my waistline as I resort too often to coffee and cake to keep going, moderately good for starting to work through the long list of overdue book reviews, and very good for blog posts. I’m currently, in theory, on my way to Zagreb for a doctoral workshop on pre-modern economics [update, three hours later: finally on the move…] On Tuesday I was in Manchester, and on Wednesday in London, for teacher-training sessions for the ‘Understanding Power’ project – aka ‘Thinking Through Thucydides’, but that name isn’t going to pull in the punters – that Lynette Mitchell and I have been developing with the Politics Project.

This was tiring, a little stressful – and finally a joy. (more…)

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Personal Meaning, Public Legitimation

Posted in Musings, tagged , , , , on April 25, 2019| 1 Comment »

There’s an interesting contrast of different dynamics of classical influence in two articles that I happened to read this morning. The first is George Monbiot‘s denunciation of capitalism in the Grauniad, in which he mentions an alternative principle of socio-economic organisation he’s been promoting for a couple of years: private sufficiency and public luxury. The more times I see this phrase – I was more sceptical when it first appeared – the more it looks like something derived from classical thought, and in particular the line from Cicero’s Pro Murena that the Roman people hates private luxury but loves public munificence; it’s not just the neat rhetorical antithesis, but also the recourse to value terms like sufficiency and luxury, and the idea that wealth is not good or bad per se, but it depends on whether it’s being deployed for public benefit. (more…)

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