Thucydides on Politics

Thucydides famously declared his work to be 'a possession for all time', and so it has proved to be, as each age and generation has seen new things to admire in it and take from it. In the last hundred years, Thucydides has been interpreted and invoked in support of many different positions in politics, political theory and international relations. Geoffrey Hawthorn offers a new and highly original reading, one that sees him as neither simply an ancestor nor a colleague but as an unsurpassed guide to a deeper realism about politics. In this account, Thucydides emerges as sensitive to the non-rational and the limits of human agency, sceptical about political speech, resistant to easy generalisations or theoretical reductions, and opposed to any practical, moral or constitutional closure in politics. The book will be of interest to students of politics and classics.

Author: Geoffrey Hawthorn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 03/20/2014
Pages: 294
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.05lbs
Size: 8.90h x 5.90w x 0.60d
ISBN: 9781107612006

Review Citation(s):
Choice 12/01/2014 pg. 701

About the Author
Hawthorn, Geoffrey: - Geoffrey Hawthorn (1941-2015) was Professor Emeritus of International Politics at the University of Cambridge. He taught sociology and politics at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge and was twice a visiting professor at Harvard University. He published books on human fertility, the history of social theory, counterfactual thinking in history and the social sciences and the politics of east Asia. He also studied the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and wrote a large number of essays and reviews across a range of subjects in philosophy and politics.