Motives beyond fear: Thucydides on honor, vengeance, and liberty

Whereas many modern political philosophies and social science theories emphasize security or fear as the prevailing motivator of states and human beings more generally, Thucydides' political psychology seriously explores diverse motives. A careful reading of his work shows that honor, shame, vengeance, and the desire for liberty exert great influence in political affairs, including relations between political communities. I argue that this broad account of human motivation gives us a better account of many enduring features of international politics than theories which prioritize fear and interest.;Thucydides portrays the importance of "spirited" concerns as issuing from the nature of political life. People ground their sense of worth in the exercise of freedom, and participation in political society promises the most substantive liberties. This affirmation of freedom culminates in the association of great worthiness and honor with the exercise of unfettered moral agency. While the powerful city must still bow to natural necessity, its great accomplishment is that it need not regard the rest of humanity as part of an inexorable nature. Ultimately it finds it impossible to relate to others on prudential terms and thus tends to conceive of relations between states as battles of wills.;I conclude the dissertation by drawing out the moral implications of Thucydides' study of motives. Because Thucydides does not find the causes of significant conflict to lie solely in hard conflicts of interest or mutual fear, he shows mankind to be more mutually invidious but also more free to resist conflict than it is, for example, in Hobbes' thought. Thucydides' emphasis on spirited motives also shows us that a doctrinaire realpolitik is frequently infected by desires for punitive justice or an irrational intolerance of uncertainty. Most significantly, Thucydides suggests that given the unpredictability of human affairs, an unyielding rejection of moral considerations is as unrealistic as an idealism that seeks reliably to effect justice. His deep realism reopens a space for ethical action in international affairs by reminding us that realpolitik's emphasis on the riskiness of ethical action springs from an optimism that an a-moral doctrine of interest can reliably mitigate risk. Such optimism, Thucydides would urge, is unfounded. Thus in the end, Thucydides grounds a kind of liberality in a deep pessimism.