Thucydides on the political soul: Pericles, love of glory, and freedom

Thucydides presents Pericles as a self-conscious advocate of political rationalism, a secularizer whose speeches are remarkable for their clear-eyed intelligence. Yet he is also the most eloquent advocate of the pursuit of glory, the irrationality of which Thucydides goes to some lengths to indicate. The statesman who most wishes to make citizenship rational offers his citizens an elaborate fantasy of individual immortality through patriotic death. Political actors and the ends they seek appear stubbornly irrational.;From the textual analysis I derive an argument about a deeper conflict within political motivation. I argue that Thucydides traces the above paradox to the roots of political identity. By seeing ourselves through the eyes of a community, we can imagine ourselves being preserved somehow in the memories of others. Love of glory emerges as a political response to our mortality and physical neediness, as a mode of denying or overcoming our finitude. On the other hand, politics is also how we preserve our interests as finite individuals; Thucydides demonstrates that regime stability depends on our acknowledgment of our physical vulnerability. The demands of glory and those of comfortable self-preservation are at odds.;The meaning and resolution of this contradiction, I argue, is that both sides of political motivation issue from a fundamental desire for freedom from constraint. For Thucydides, the basic interests of security and prosperity are best understood as modes of freedom from near-term necessity, while the love of glory is best understood as a longing for freedom from the constraints of necessity altogether. Glory offers an escape from nature. I show that, for Thucydides, this longing is revealed in the normative claims that communities tend to make; "nobility" requires the overcoming of those interests defended by "prudence.";This matters, because it means that there is something fundamentally transgressive and self-destructive at the heart of political self-understanding. Concern for glory involves admiration for the overcoming of those physical interests that modern liberal polities in particular seek to elevate and protect. The result is political romanticism, whose dangers require that we understand its attractions and roots.