What can classical political philosophy teach us about international relations, and about the causes and preconditions of conflict between nations? Is Thucydides merely a historian in the conventional modern sense, or is he a political philosopher? Moreover, is Thucydides correctly identified by present-day political scientists with the “realist theory” of international relations, or does he offer some alternative approach to politics besides those we are familiar with today?
In his ambitious first book, Thucydides on the Outbreak of War, S.N. Jaffe engages all of these important questions with marvelous results—producing in the process one of the best available philosophical commentaries on Thucydides. Jaffe’s study offers a detailed, penetrating, and highly original interpretation of Book I of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. His particular focus is what the history teaches about the causes of conflict between Athens and Sparta. But Jaffe’s larger aim, as he states in the introduction, is to lay bare the underlying logic of these two great city-states’ motivations, and thus to explore the causes of war as such.
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