The tragic science of political realism: Power, necessity and deliberation in Thucydides

This dissertation examines the nature and function of Thucydides' principles of political science in his interpretive reconstruction of the origins, progress, and consequences of the Peloponnesian War. Beginning with a review of the dominant interpretations of the Melian Dialogue, I argue that the most powerful accounts leave unsettled the basic question of the relation between the tragic form of Thucydides' work and the analytical principles of his narrative and of the speeches. The problem has become even more acute in recent years, it is shown, as the focus of Thucydidean scholarship has narrowed. While much debate has centered on whether Thucydides is properly "scientific" in selecting, organizing, and presenting his material, the common point of departure is a truncated view of scientific method. On a broader view of science, conceived as a search for understanding the mechanisms which explain human action, however, Thucydides' account conforms well.; The substantive part of the study consists of a thought experiment. A basic Thucydidean schema for interpreting the political world is abstracted from Thucydides' interpretive reconstruction of the ancient past (the Archaeology) and then applied to his discussion of the origins of the war and his account of the deliberative situation. Three elements in the schema are identified: power, which serves as a heuristic; a basic anthropology--honor, interest, and fear--which provides the mechanism of human (and especially collective) behavior and so makes it understandable, and calculable, if not quite predictable; and human intelligence, the specific (marginal) factor capable of directing, but not fundamentally altering, more basic processes of historic development. The principal conclusions are: (1) Thucydides' "political science" is an integral and necessary aspect of his explanation of the drama he relates; (2) in this sense, the opposition of science and tragedy is a false one; (3) Thucydides has rationalized, and so transformed, tragedy by revealing the real forces inherent in the action of the drama; (4) tragic form results not from the author's intention, but from viewing a complete cycle; (5) the motive forces being general, the story of Athens' rise and fall is paradigmatic of the dynamic of international politics.