Contemporary authorities invoke luck to explain the arbitrariness of economic success, to emphasize our shared vulnerability to disaster, and to urge more generous policy, legislation, and governance. According to Robert Frank, Martha Nussbaum, and Ronald Dworkin, for example, extreme bad luck can befall individuals no matter what they know or do. By redefining luck as a psychological phenomenon (rather than as a constitutive principle of the world), this article challenges the contemporary consensus. My approach to luck arises out of my engagement with the political thought of Thucydides. Whereas influential interpreters present Thucydides as a witness to the crushing power of bad luck, and whereas they criticize Thucydides’ Pericles for being insufficiently deferential to luck, I revisit and defend Pericles’ skeptical and psychological approach to luck, and I argue that Thucydides shares this approach, at least in the main. The pathological intellectual and emotional responses to apparent good or bad luck diagnosed by Pericles in his final speech recur throughout the History and influence the evolution of the whole war. Going beyond Pericles, Thucydides shows that the appeal of luck arises out of a human need to explain, beautify, or lament what is merely natural necessity, haphazard coincidence, or awful suffering.
What is the relation of Thucydides to Plato, if any? In The Tragedy of the Athenian Ideal in Thucydides and Plato, John Hogan approaches Thucydides and Plato as likeminded theorists of the Athenian democracy and of political life altogether. Although Plato never mentions Thucydides by name, dialogues such as the Menexenus, Laches, Symposium, and Alcibiades I suggest Plato's familiarity with -if not his careful study of -Thucydides' work. Just as Thucydides foregrounds Pericles' Funeral Oration as a seminal if questionable account of democratic Athens, so too Plato composes a critical parody of that oration in the Menexenus. Just as Thucydides dramatizes and examines the statesmanship of Alcibiades and Nicias, so too Plato dramatizes and examines their characters in dialogues such as the Laches, Symposium, Protagoras, and Alcibiades I. While scholars such as David Grene, Gerald Mara, and Arlene Saxonhouse have previously placed Thucydides and Plato in dialogue, Hogan identifies myriad textual connections between the two thinkers. These connections by themselves make Hogan's book useful and exciting.Hogan argues, in addition, that Thucydides and Plato share a set of ethical, political, and psychological questions; to raise these questions, moreover, they use similar language and ideas. What is the relation of moderation to courage and of each to knowledge? What is the role of eros in political life? How can we know when civic discourse becomes corrupt? What is the relation of speech to action, appearance to reality? Who is the excellent statesman? Hogan thinks that these questions motivate the inquiries of Thucydides and Plato alike. It would be difficult to disagree with this assessment -except insofar as other ancient Greek thinkers, such as Herodotus, the tragedians, and Aristotle might also enter into this conversation.Yet Hogan tries to establish an even tighter connection between Thucydides and Plato. In his view, Thucydides and Plato not only theorize a shared political world, and they not only share problems, ideas, and arguments, but they also seem to arrive at the same conclusions. Frequently, in Hogan's book, the two authors speak with one voice. For example, Hogan writes: 'Democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, and rule by a philosopher king are not for Plato and Thucydides ideologies but forms of government' (p. 56). While Hogan assimilates Pericles' crypto-monarchic rule within Athens to philosophic kingship as described by Socrates in the Republic, Thucydides himself never mentions philosophic kingship, or the philosophic life for that matter. Consider another example: 'Thucydides, like Pericles, looks to what will always be remembered. The aim resembles Plato's in many ways ' (p. 140). In what ways exactly? Hogan
Aristotelian equity (epieikeia) has often been relegated to scholarly discussions of retributive justice. Recently, however, political theorists have recast equity as the virtue of a sympathetic democratic citizen. I build on this literature by offering a more precise explanation of equity’s internal structure and political significance. In particular, I reveal equity’s deliberative dimension. For Aristotle, equitable citizens, statesmen, and legislators correct or go beyond the law, as appropriate, not only when they render retrospective judgments about matters of punishment or distribution, but also when they deliberate about future-oriented questions of legislation or political action. In addition, I show, more concretely, the role of equity in democratic citizenship. Drawing upon the Aristotelian Constitution of the Athenians, I argue that the Athenian demos exemplified equity when it brought about the reconciliation and the amnesty of 403 BC. Attention to this episode clarifies the conceptual linkages between equity, deliberation, sympathy, and democracy.
Political theorists have increasingly sought to place Plato in active dialogue with democracy ancient and modern by examining what S. Sara Monoson calls “Plato’s democratic entanglements.” More precisely, Monoson, J. Peter Euben, Arlene Saxonhouse, Christina Tarnopolsky, and Jill Frank approach Plato as both an immanent critic of the Athenian democracy and a searching theorist of self-governance. In this guide through the Political Theory archive, we explore “entanglement approaches” to the study of Plato, outlining their contribution to our understanding of Plato’s political thought and to the discipline of political theory.
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