By John von Heyking, April 29, 2009 in Pedagogy and Teaching
I take the students through several key episodes of Thucydides' retelling of the Peloponnesian War. Some students wonder whether it is appropriate to study a "historian" in a political science class (these same students may have wondered what relevance a philosopher like Socrates has for the understanding of politics). Even so, I point out that Thucydides' History, while a historical retelling of events, is also an attempt to understand the nature of political action. Human nature is on display, to be sure.
I point out that the speeches are not a literal retelling, but convey the speakers' meaning and assessment of the circumstances in which they find themselves. A good way of getting this point across is to remind students that, out of a sense of decorum or prudence, what they say differs from what they mean to say. We do not know whether the Athenians spoke as rapaciously to the Melians as the Melian Dialogue suggests, but they would have assessed their relationship with the Melians in that way, and acted accordingly. Learning how to understand the speeches enables students to assess political circumstances from within, as the speeches reflect how the speakers assess the advantages and disadvantages their circumstances have given them. This is the perspective of citizen and statesman that any political scientist must attend to. By explaining the nature of the speeches, I point out that Thucydides is not only an historian, but also a hard-nosed analyst of Realpolitik, poet, and political scientist. The ancient Greeks did not live according to the division of labor in the modern university.
And so we examine the origins of the war, the character of Pericles, the plague and the collapse of law and order it produces in Athens, the Corcyrean civil war, the Melian Dialogue, and the Sicilian expedition. Along the way we discuss not only the origins of the war, but also the problem of even defining the beginning of a war. If the international arena is characterized by permanent hostility (as Thucydides has the Athenians frequently proclaim), or by underlying causes of war that threaten to break out into open warfare at any time, then it is exceedingly difficult to pinpoint an actual starting point of a war. The first "shot" fails to define it. Moreover, the apparent permanence of this condition of permanent hostility results from the reign of "irrationality" in the international arena: self-interest, ambition, and fear. Both the problem of defining the beginning of war, and the status of the "irrational" will become central to our analysis of Kant.
