In this book, Geoffrey Hawthorn analyzes the deeds of the main protagonists in the Peloponnesian War and offers extensive reflections on how it was prosecuted and how it might have turned out differently. Despite the subtitle, the book does not purport to discuss present-day politics. Hawthorn’s focus throughout is, rather, on the text of Thucydides, which he reads to illuminate what he eventually describes as the realism of the Greek historian (cf. p. 239). Thucydides on Politics is divided into 15 chapters, each of which (after the first) takes up the main events of the Peloponnesian War in the order in which they appear in the History. The book includes a chronology of events (545–323 b.c.), four maps, a useful synopsis of the Thucydidean text, and a list of suggested further readings.

The argument develops slowly. The reader is surprised to learn in the first chapter that the Peloponnesian War may not ultimately have held any higher significance or meaning for Thucydides: “Twenty-one years of fear, hope, fury, frustration and suffering—twenty-seven by the time that he came to make his final revisions—may have seemed to him to signify nothing beyond themselves. If there is a lesson to be learnt, this might be it” (p. 16). To be sure, Hawthorn admires the “formidable powers of description” of his author, his “even-handedness,” and the sureness of his “grip on enduring truths of the human condition” (pp. 113, 232, 101). And while he challenges Thucydides’ rare explicit judgments—for example, on the question of the truest cause of the war, which Hawthorn thinks was not Sparta’s fear of the growth of the power of Athens, as Thucydides argues, but a concern for its preeminence among Hellenic cities—he also regards Thucydides as politically wise. Nevertheless, it is striking that Hawthorn rejects the historian’s famous claim—or so it initially appears—that he understood the permanent character of politics by seeking the truth about (and through) the war, and that his book is written as an aid to the understanding of the future (1.22.4; 1.20.3; 3.82.2). According to Hawthorn, Thucydides “has no conceptual ambition, favours no one kind of explanation, harbours no telos, evinces no one opinion, and is neither a cynic nor a moralist” (p. x). Yet aside from the fact that Thucydides does evince clear opinions on certain subjects, according to Hawthorn himself—for example, “[Thucydides] has no patience with the gods”—the progress of Hawthorn's book makes clear that Thucydides ultimately takes a definite view of politics in his estimation (p. 239).

Hawthorn rejects two opposed readings of the History. The first reading (by Jacqueline de Romilly, The Mind of Thucydides, 2012) is said to exaggerate less the rational character of politics than the capacity of the human mind to articulate, through a consideration of history, what we might call rational political laws, “laws of the probable” (p. 231). By contrast, the second reading (by Hans-Peter Stahl, Thucydides: Man’s Place in History, 2003) sees in politics the realm of the irrational: Thucydides’ masterpiece depicts not only the tragedy of Athens but also the tragedy of humanity itself insofar as politics emerges as a realm governed by triumphant emotions that defy rational understanding. According to Hawthorn, Thucydides cuts a path between these two extreme views: “Beyond logic, reason is never all there is; but nor usually, in most politics and war, is emotion” (p. 232). The core of the book purports to articulate the respective spheres of reason and emotion according to the Greek historian.

Hawthorn pursues this goal primarily by reflecting on the place of the speeches of political actors—the logoi—in the Thucydidean text. He contends that the History teaches that despite their prevalence in politics, speeches are ultimately of secondary importance compared to deeds or erga—“things done.” Indeed, speeches are shown to have as a primary function not to reveal being, or to persuade other political actors, but to conceal motivations and political goals. In addition, speeches are of secondary importance insofar as (even when they are not deceptive) they simply give voice to what political actors already want to do: “Few if any moves in the long war . . . turned on an argument in debate” (p. 180). In fact, what drives the political world, according to Hawthorn, are ultimately not arguments or logoi but “pre-volitional, pre-reflective commitments,” deep-seated emotional attachments that are not rationally chosen and which reason can do little to shape, educate, or redirect; our commitments simply “happen to us” (p. 149). The sound student of politics must therefore focus his or her analysis on deeds, not speeches, because “the best evidence on why we do what we do may lie not on what we say or think but in how we act” (p. 149).

The view of speech attributed here to Thucydides is not easy to square with the importance manifestly accorded to speeches in the History. Indeed, Hawthorn finds himself in the somewhat uncomfortable position of paraphrasing, sometimes at length, speeches that he thinks are ultimately of secondary importance. But his demotion of speech qua speech—his reduction of speech to a political act—reflects a more serious deficiency. For he has almost nothing to say about the theme of justice in the History, and the relation between justice and necessity, arguably the theme of the book, which is explored by Thucydides especially in and through the speeches. Hawthorn tends to treat politics as a realm in which all invocations of justice are but rhetorical attempts at deception or evasion, and where the only “real” things are questions of power, interest, or strategy. Yet even aside from the fact that moral concerns do have real practical consequences—consider, for example, how the Spartans took to heart their misfortunes, and believed they had suffered fairly, because they thought they had broken the peace treaty (7.18.2–3)—Hawthorn’s indifference to justice hampers his ability to analyze adequately issues that are central to his treatment. For example, in Chapter 11 he discusses emotion in politics. Yet though he acknowledges (in a footnote) that Thucydides “mentions hope seventy-six times” in the History—more often than any other emotion—he does not analyze hope there or anywhere else (p. 148, n. 2). The neglect of hope is but a corollary of the neglect of justice: Thucydides teaches that the belief in the justice of one’s cause is liable to fuel hope and result in errors of judgment productive of political disasters (e.g., 5.102–104, 5.113; 4.62.3–4, 4.81, 4.108.3–4).

Hawthorn reads Thucydides as suggesting that confronted with our naked political condition, the sensible attitude is to eschew all illusions and “be as realistic as one can be about politics as politics” (p. 239). Yet the political realism he attributes to Thucydides is both narrow and unrealistic because it does not take seriously the moral concerns that animate political actors and, indeed, all of us human beings. These concerns are reduced to prereflective commitments that lie beyond rational analysis. A better view can be suggested: It is above all by sketching a rich picture of our moral concerns and aspirations—and by enabling us to think them through by reflecting not only on their attractiveness but also their limitations—that Thucydides bestowed on us “a possession for all time.”