Yourstruly has started reading some selections of Thucydides for a class on political judgment. Thucydides is, apparently, one of the landmark thinkers for people who are concerned with the correct way to gauge and respond to political situations — “correct way” here meaning the way most likely to secure one’s ends — and, at any rate, I am enjoying his quips and the way he presents his take on things.

Take his gloss on how it was that Agamemnon was able to rally troops to re-kidnap Helen. Greek tradition had it that all the suitors who attempted to wed Helen swore an oath to her father, Tyndareus, that they would come to the aid of whoever became her husband if he needed help. Thucydides dispenses with this as a cute and incorrect story, saying that Agamemnon didn’t benefit from fealty or obligation in raising his army so much as he relied on his ability to coerce. He rallied the troops because he had power to do so, and not in the form of sentiment or fidelity. Thucydides writes,

In my view, Agamemnon was able to get the fleet together because he had more power than anyone else at that time, and not so much because he was the leader of the suitors of Helen who were bound by oaths to Tyndareus.

There is little reverence for the power of words to bind people here. Instead, there is a recognition of the capacity of another sort, political power.

Moreover, Thucydides locates source of Agamemnon’s power squarely in a demystified political sphere. He does not make it the product of a putative divine intervention, or, it bears repeating and stress, any other supernatural endowment. Instead, Thucydides traces the development of Agamemnon’s power through the decisions of human actors. Using the “clearest” histories available to him, he constructs an account of how Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, was made a temporary ruler of Mycenae while the king was away. When the Mycenaeans’ king was killed by their enemies, the Heraclids, they made Atreus permanent ruler. Thucydides argues that the Mycenaens’ rationale behind making him regnant was “partly out of fear of the Heraclids and partly because they thought Atreus was an able man and, at the same time, because he had served the interests of the majority.” He was an “able man,” not a demi-god; no oracle declared him ruler. Plus, he was already in place, and the Heraclids were at the door. And, mundanely, when he died, rule was passed on to his son, Agamemnon, who then could use it to achieve his own ends, including, it seems, raising an army sufficent to take Troy.

We see here a cut and dry analysis, the goal of which is to understand how actors can successfully employ political power. And the basis of this power is nothing magical: it is boats, trade, wealth, able bodies and minds. And Thucydides does not see political power’s operation in mystical terms; he understands it to work as simply as a rock falls. Remarking on how easily the Greeks could have taken Troy if they had been better tacticians, he writes

If they had gone out with plenty of rations, however, and concentrated their forces on continuous warfare without farming or piracy, [which they had to do to sustain themselves, not having other sources of food,] they would easily have taken the city once they’d gotten the upper hand in fighting, since they were a match for the Trojans with the portion of the army that was present at any time. If they had settled down in a siege they would have taken Troy in less time with less trouble.

As simply as a rock falls: Thucydides understands the above in the same way that he understands a stone will fall when he lets it slip from his hand — he has lived and experienced, has tested the tendencies and capacities of the world by dropping things and listening to them thunk on the earth just as he has made decisions about how to manage troops in warfare. And by discerning how these things work, he makes judgments about how to respond to teeming morass that greets his senses.

Note what is at stake here for Thucydides’ capacity to judge: he must understand the historical past to feed with some sort of continuity into the future via the present. That is, in order for him to take his his judgment as sound, he must assume that his grasp on the way things were will give him the capacity to imagine how they might be. There is nothing controversial in this assumption; it is implicit in every single possibly meaningful engagement but every single possible subject with any single possible object. You might say this understanding of temporal continuity is a Kantian a priori condition of judgment, if you wanted to get a bit loose with terminology, and even if you don’t, you are making use of it as a faculty as you are reading this text.

So, the ability to make worthwhile judgments about things, the ability to orient one’s actions in the “correct” way, has a lot to do with a proper grasp on the past’s link with the future. It can’t be said that what has been wholly determines what will be, as that would mean the concept of judging would become incoherent, but at the same time the future cannot be completely estranged from the past. This becomes interesting, especially if you look at certain strains of “leftist” thought that uses notions like the Event, the Messiah, or other dei ex machina to provide the fulcrum to arguments about what the leverage point of political engagement should be. No longer is one’s understanding of things, as revealed through experience of their tendencies and capabilities, sufficient for development of political strategy and tactics; something more, supplemental, and greater than is humanly possible at present must be added to the mix. The future remains unintelligible, and the road to it from here unchartable. This way of thinking about judgment is as useful as mixed metaphors, and as likely to correctly inform it as people flapping their wings are to fly.

As a side note, I found it amusing that the reading list for this course contains very few thinkers on the left end of the political spectrum. Most of them are considered “conservative” (which might have something to do with the relative ease of formulating tactics to conserve social arrangements in a specific form; it is more difficult, perhaps, to see social arrangements as containing within them other concrete potentialities). The notable exception: V.I. Lenin.

2 Comments

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  By anxiousmodernman, 4 September, 2009 @ 1:33 pm

  For a leftist text of political realism, I recommend the recent work of Raymond Geuss, “Philosophy and Real Politics”.

  Princeton University Press has put the introduction up online:

  http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/i8809.html
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  By JCD, 10 September, 2009 @ 2:15 pm

  Thanks for the tip. I just read an article by Geuss on Williams, Nietzsche, and Thucydides that was pretty interesting; I liked it at any rate.

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