Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
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Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
Thucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents11 Woodland RoadBristol, United KingdomBS8 1TBNotes on Contributors: Christine Lee received her PhD in Political Science from Duke University. She is currently a postdoctoral research fellow for an AHRC-funded project, Thucydides: reception, reinterpretation, and influence, based at the University o Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsf Bristol.Acknowledgements: I owe special thanks to James Bourke, Peter Euben, Kinch Hoekstra, Neville Morley, Joel Schlosser, Rachel Templer, DanielThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
Tompkins, Catherine Zuckert, and John Zumbrunnen. Their helpful insights and thought-provoking questions have greatly strengthened this essay. I wouldThucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsas carried out as part of the ‘Thucydides: reception, reinterpretation and influence’ project at theUniversity of Bristol, supported by the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AH/H001204/1).AbstractThe challenge of democratic statecraft is a recurring subject matter in twentieth- and twenty-first ce Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsntury wartime expositions of Thucydides' History. This article examines the readings of two American scholars with great public presence. Donald KaganThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
and Victor Davis Hanson, showing how they reflect enduring anxieties about the promise and perils of liberal democracy in a hostile world. I engage iThucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsh use the History to defend democracy, but in ways that are at odds with their implicit criticisms of democratic politics. We can make sense of this tension by appreciating the performative dimension of their readings of Thucydides. Beyond distilling Thucydides for a general audience, their readings Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents enact a response to concerns about democratic weakness with an account of democratic virtues. Their hermeneutic strategies are thus implicated in rheThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
torical politics that may have deleterious, if unintended, consequences for the democracy they seek to defend. I conclude by illustrating how Kagan anThucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsations of ancient Greece and post-Cold War empirical political science.2I. IntroductionIn the midst of the Iraq war, Joseph Lane observed: 'Whenever we get a new war, we get a new Thucydides’ (2005, 54). Lane's remark echoed Robert Connor's suggestion nearly thirty years earlier that Vietnam had bro Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsught into being a post-modern Thucydides, whose artistry, intensity, and emotional involvement departed radically from the objective, rationalist, andThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
scientific Thucydides of the early Cold War (1977). As Lane and Connor recognize, reading Thucydides in wartime has become a ritual of sorts. The tweThucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents own time.1 More remarkable still is the conviction that Thucydides, hardly a popular figure, has important lessons to impart to democratic publics, or that a war fought more than two thousand years ago can mean something to citizens of a modern liberal democracy. For many of the books on Thucydides Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents are meant for the general public rather than narrow specialists. These works jointly presume that the history of the Peloponnesian War needs to be reThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
told and that there are profound stakes in the retelling?The overtly political quality of wartime readings of Thucydides over the last century is, forThucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentswarfare or reactions to an ongoing war: Abbott (1925), Connor (1984), Crane (1998), Dewaid (2005), Halle (1955), Lane (2005), Lord (1945), Murray (1920), Tritle (2000, 2010).• In addition to Donald Kagan and Victor Hanson, Michael Palmer (1992) and Perez Zagorin (2005) intentionally write for a gene Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsral audience.3peace have precipitated a rich reception history of Thucydides also explains why wartime engagements evince recurring themes. One especiThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
ally prominent motif in twentieth-century Anglo-American readings is that of democratic statecraft. Anxieties about democratic performance abound, as Thucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsmisgivings, of which Michael Palmer offers an especially forthright articulation: 'How can democracies successfully retain concepts of political legitimacy on which they are based and at the same time garner and maintain the will to act assertively in the international arena? How can they avoid fall Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsing into the self-destructive isolationism that is "the dangerous result of endless self-criticism and selfdenigration?” '3 These questions and the deThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
mocratic liabilities they presuppose have led many back to Thucydides' critical account of Athenian democracy.4Indeed, Thucydides has been deployed thThucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsematic mouthpiece for anti-democratic sentiments. G.F. Abbott, reflecting on the History in the aftermath of World War I, called Athenian democracy a ‘childish experiment [whose] sole value for posterity is that of a warning.' Nowhere,Palmer (1992: 13). Palmer is borrowing from Ronald Reagan's forei Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsgn policy advisor. Jeanne Kirkpatrick.' One idiosyncratic example is McCann and Strauss (2001), a comparative study of the Peloponnesian and Korean waThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
rs. The introduction to this edited volume contains a particularly lucid adumbration of how each conflict constitutes a respective test • and indictmeThucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents; for nowhere did the constitution place the state at the mercy of orators whose presumptuous ignorance and insolent passion could only advise desperate extremities' (1925: 137, 147). During the Cold War, Peter Fliess read the History as a forceful indictment of the 'deficiencies of the democratic c Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsonstitution' and its fatal consequences for leadership, stability, and cohesion (1959: 618). Louis Halle blamed Athens’ fate on the 'tyranny of the coThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
mmon mind,' 'the rule of the Demos which led it over the brink of disaster' (1980: 628). These evaluations, characterized by a shared skepticism aboutThucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsesume that the implicit lesson for modern democracies is that they need to be less democratic, at least when in the throes of war.The general tenor of these wartime readings of the History accords with the practice, common until the nineteenth century, of treating Thucydides as an anti-democratic au Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsthority? Prominent thinkers in nineteenth-century Britain like George Grote and John Stuart Mill moved against the grain when they offered sanguine viThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
sions of classical democracy. In the context of contentious debates over British democratization, they resurrected Athenian democracy as a political aThucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents at war may have different political preoccupations, but like 5 Fora critical overview of the modern reception of Athenian democracy, see Roberts (1997) and Saxonhouse (1996, Chapter 1).5their nineteenth-century predecessors, many redeem from the History a democratic exceptionalism Thucydides never Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsmeant to authorize.This article focuses on the Thucydidean engagements of two high-profile American scholars, Donald Kagan and Victor Davis Hanson. AsThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
readers of Thucydides and cultural authorities on ancient Greece, they deserve special attention for two reasons. The first is simply that they are tThucydides in Wartime: Reflecting on Democracy and its DiscontentsChristine LeeChristine.Lee@bristol.ac.uk University of Bristol School of Humanities1 Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentshile their neoconservative commitments make them controversial, their scholarly works have nevertheless garnered high praise.6 So too have their recent accounts of the Peloponnesian War,6 To get a sense of Kagan and Hanson as public intellectuals, see victorhanson.com and http://www.neh.gov/about/aw Thucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontentsards/jefferson-lecture/donald-kagan-biography. As well-known conservative commentators, Kagan and Hanson have published books, essays, editorials, andThucydides in Wartime Reflecting on Democracy and its Discontents
given copious interviews on domestic politics and American foreign and defense policy. Kagan has written extensively on post-Cold War Western complacGọi ngay
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