The Real Thucydides Trap

Abstract

The study of intellectual history is desirable for its own sake. Asking what ancient authors meant and how we should un- derstand them today is important, partly because we need to consider how they might help us better deal with our pressing current problems. In this article, we consider a current prob- lem of politics and how an ancient author helps us approach it. What does a book written 2,500 years ago have to offer us today? Is the condition of humanity indeed similar enough to think that what happened in an extraordinarily different time and condition could happen in some similar way? No doubt Thucydides would have been amazed by computers, airplanes, and all that distinguishes our age from his. But he may well have felt rather at home in many of the political relationships that characterize the human condition. Many since Thucydides’ time have found in his writing LoweLL Gustafson is Professor of Political Science at Villanova University and a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of Statesmanship. The Real Thucydides Trap Humanitas • 5 Study of an- cient authors may help with current problems. instruction for how to better understand their own time. Fran- cesco Guicciardini (1483-1540) found in Thucydides useful ideas for his own age about balance of power and equilibrium, the influence of character on international relations, alliances, diplomacy, and war.1 Machiavelli commented on Thucydides and shared his secular attitude towards politics, his desire to learn through historical example rather than abstract principle, regard for calculated self-interest, preference for the combina- tion of virtue with greatness and honor rather than meekness, and estimations of the role of fortune or chance in politics. Thomas Hobbes is famous for his reading and translation in 1629 of The Peloponnesian War, which taught him about the regularities in society, the problems of democracy, and the need for overwhelming power to maintain order and security. Gregory Crane finds that William Tecumseh Sherman’s “attitude toward the use of power and the practice of warfare owes much to the tradition that Thucydides inaugurated.” Crane traces “a line from Melos, where the Athenians anni- hilated the entire population of a small island, to Sherman’s devastating march through the heart of the Confederacy to the firestorms caused by the Allied bombing in Dresden and Tokyo that incinerated tens of thousands of children, women, and non-combatants . . . .” 2 In the nineteenth century, Thucydides could be used to compare the democratic sea pow- ers of Britain and Athens with the more despotic land powers of Napoleonic France and Sparta. In 1929, Charles Norris Cochrane saw in Thucydides not the ceaseless struggle for power, but the genesis of the scien- tific analysis of international relations. He wrote that the “truth is that Thucydides had the assured faith of a scientist because he was a scientist . . . .”3 He continues that, unlike Herodotus, Thucydides did not appeal to religious or metaphysical prin- ciples to explain human behavior. Unlike Homer, he wrote sci- entific analysis rather than imaginative literature. After World 1 Francesco Guicciardini, Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman, translated by Mario Domandi (New York: Harper & Row, 1965) and The History of Italy (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1969). 2 Gregory Crane, Thucydides and the Ancient Simplicity: The Limits of Political Realism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 23. 3 Charles Norris Cochrane, Thucydides and the Science of History (New York: Russell & Russell, 1965), 3, 14, 25, 33. 6 • Volume XXXI, Nos. 1 and 2, 2018 Lowell Gustafson War Two, the ability of the democratic America to project its power by sea and air could be compared to the democratic sea power of Athens. The despotic land powers of the Soviet Union and Sparta could be compared as well. Authors in our own time follow in this tradition of centu- ries of using Thucydides to better understand our own era. A recent example of this is Graham Allison’s Destined for War: Can America and China escape Thucydides’s Trap? This is impor- tant as the short American Century after World War II may now be shifting to a Chinese twenty-first century. A return to American greatness under Trump seems to mean the end of a commitment to liberal democratic market capitalism. Xi Jin- ping, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of China, talks about the Chinese Dream of restoring his nation’s lost greatness.