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Power, Persuasion and JusticeRichard Ned Lebow

Modern conceptions of power tend to emphasise the material basisof power, do not adequately distinguish between power andinfluence, and generally divorce the analysis and application ofpower from ethical considerations. The ancient Greeks weresensitive to the social basis of power, and how its exercise mightstrengthen or weaken the personal or communal bonds on whichenduring influence rested. They distinguished between powerexercised through persuasion, which strengthened those bonds, andpower that relied on coercion, bribery and deceit, which weakenedthose bonds. Greek concepts, and the rich lexicon in which they arerooted, provide the basis for a critique of contemporary conceptionsof power, discourse and American hegemony.

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The ancient Greeks’ conceptions of power are embedded in the writingsof fifth and fourth century playwrights, historians and philosophers.They enrich our understanding of power in several important ways.They highlight the links between power and the purposes for which it isemployed, as well as the means used toward these ends. They provide aconceptual framework for distinguishing enlightened from narrow self-interest, identify strategies of influence associated with each and theirimplications for the survival of communities.

In the field of International Relations, power has been usedinterchangeably as a property and a relational concept.1 This elisionreflects a wider failure to distinguish material capabilities from power,and power from influence. Classical realists – unlike many latertheoriests – understood that material capabilities are only onecomponent of power, and that influence is a psychological relationship.Hans Morgenthau insisted that influence is always relative, situation

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I am indebted to the participants of the 2004 annual Millennium Conference atLSE, panelists and participants at the ‘archeopolitics’ panel at BISA in theUniversity of Warwick, the PIPES seminar of the University of Chicago and thecomparative politics seminar at Dartmouth College for their thoughtfulcomments and criticisms. Special thanks to Stefano Guzzini, Nick Rengger,Chris Reus-Smit, Lucas Swaine and the editors of Millennium.

1. Robert A. Dahl, ‘Power’, in International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed.

© Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2005. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol.33, No.3, pp. 551-581

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specific and highly dependent on the skill of actors.2 Stefano Guzziniobserves that this political truth creates an irresolvable dilemma forrealist theory. If power cannot be defined and measured independentlyfrom specific interactions, it cannot provide the foundation fordeductive realist theories.3

Liberal conceptions also stress material capabilities, but privilegeeconomic over military power. Some liberal understandings go beyondmaterial capabilities to include culture, ideology and the nature of astate’s political-economic order; what Joseph Nye, Jr. calls ‘soft power’.Liberals also tend to conflate power and influence. Many assume thateconomic power – hard or soft – automatically confers influence.4 Nyetakes it for granted that the American way of life is so attractive, evenmesmerising, and the global public goods it supposedly provides sobeneficial, that others are predisposed to follow Washington’s lead. Likemany liberals, he treats interests and identities as objective,uncontroversial and given.5

Recent constructivist writings differentiate power from influence,and highlight the importance of process. Habermasian accounts stressthe ways in which argument can be determining, and describe a kind ofinfluence that can be fully independent of material capabilities. Theymake surprisingly narrow claims. Thomas Risse considers argumentlikely to be decisive only among actors who share a common‘lifeworld’, and in situations where they are uncertain about theirinterests, or where existing norms do not apply or clash.6 Risse andother advocates of communicative rationality fail to distinguish____________________

David L. Sills (New York: Free Press, 1968), 12, 405-15; Steven Lukes, Power: ARadical View (New York: Macmillan, 1974), and its recent revision (London:Palgrave, 2004); Stefano Guzzini, ‘Structural Power: The Limits of NeorealistPower Analysis’, International Organization 47, no. 3 (1993): 443-78, and ‘TheEnduring Dilemmas of Realism in International Relations’, European Journal ofInternational Relations 10, no. 4 (2004): 533-568.

2. Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations: The Struggle for Power and Peace(New York: Knopf, 1948), 14ff., 270-74, and In Defense of the National Interest: ACritical Examination of American Foreign Policy (Lanham, Md: University Press ofAmerica, 1982), 48, 52-54.

3. Guzzini, ‘Enduring Dilemmas of Realism’.4. Dahl, ‘Power’. 5. Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics

(Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 2004), and ‘The Decline of America’s SoftPower’, Foreign Affairs 83 (May/June 2004): 16-21. For a critique of Nye seeChristian Reus-Smith, American Power and World Order (London: Polity, 2004), 64-65.

6. Thomas Risse, ‘“Let’s Argue!”: Communicative Action in World Politics’,International Organization 54, no. 4 (2000): 1-40; Neta C. Crawford, Argument andChange in World Politics: Ethics, Decolonization, and Humanitarian Intervention(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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between good and persuasive arguments – and they are by no meansthe same. Nor do they tell us what makes for either kind of argument,or how we determine when an argument is persuasive withoutreasoning backwards from an outcome. Thicker constructivistapproaches build on the ancient Greek understanding of rhetoric as thelanguage of politics, and consider the most persuasive arguments thosethat sustain or enable identities. According to Christian Reus-Smit, ‘allpolitical power is deeply embedded in webs of social exchange andmutual constitution – the sort that escapes from the short-term vagariesof coercion and bribery to assume a structural, taken-for-granted form– ultimately rests on legitimacy’.7

Like thick constructivist accounts, the Greeks focus our attentionon the underlying causes of persuasion, not on individual instances.8

They offer us conceptual categories for distinguishing betweendifferent kinds of argument, and a politically enlightened definition ofwhat constitutes a good argument. The Greeks appreciated the powerof emotional appeals, especially when they held out the prospect ofsustaining identities. More importantly, they understood thetransformative potential of emotion; how it could combine with reasonto create shared identities, and with it, a general propensity tocooperate with or be persuaded by certain actors.

Persuasion and Power

Given the complex nature of my argument, it is useful to begin with ashort discussion of the relationship between power and persuasion (aprincipal form of influence), followed by an overview of the principalpoints I intend to make. First, however, I want to address a stockobjection that is invariably raised when Greek ideas or practices areimported into a modern setting. Because they arose in such a differentcontext, they are sometimes described as alien, even irrelevant, toindustrial, mass societies. It would certainly be unrealistic to expect thatsome Greek practices would work the same way for us as it did in fifthcentury Athens. While human practices vary enormously across timeand cultures, human nature does not. Certain human needs appear to beuniversal, as do pathologies associated with human desires, informationprocessing and decision-making. Hubris, one of the self-destructivebehavioural patterns described by Greek tragedy, is a widespread

Power, Persuasion and Justice

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7. Reus-Smith, American Power.8. Martha Finnemore and Stephen J. Toope make this argument in the context

of compliance with international law. See Finnemore and Troope, ‘Alternativesto “Legalization”: Richer Views of Law and Politics’, International Organization55, no. 3 (2001): 743-58.

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phenomenon. In our age, as in antiquity, powerful actors tend to becomecomplacent about risk and put their trust in hope rather than reason andovervalue their ability to control their environment, other people, andthe course of events.9 Greek concepts, applied with finesse and suitablecaveats, can shed important light on contemporary politics.

For the Greeks and moderns alike, power and persuasion areclosely linked in theory and practice. The strategic interaction literatureencourages us to consider influence as derivative of power, if mediatedby agency. Of course, in practice, power can be used to achieve someends (e.g., genocide) that have little or nothing to do with persuasion.However, as Clausewitz so aptly observed, military force usually hasthe broader goal of persuasion; self-defense, for example, is intended toconvince an aggressor that it should break off its attack because it willnot succeed or prove too costly.10 Persuasion can involve the threat, asopposed to the application; deterrence and compellence only succeedwhen force does not have to be used. Persuasion can rest on rewards, asdo strategies of reassurance. Defense, deterrence and many forms ofreassurance ultimately depend on material capabilities. Persuasion canbe based on other kinds of power, including moral, rhetorical andinfluence over important third parties. The degree to which persuasionis an expression of power really depends on how expansive a definitionof power we adopt.

We need to distinguish the goal of persuasion from persuasion asa means. As noted above, efforts at persuasion (the goal) rely on thepersuasive skills of actors (the means) to offer suitable rewards, makeappropriate and credible threats, or marshal telling arguments.Aeschylus, Sophocles, Thucydides and Plato recognise the doublemeaning of persuasion, and like their modern counterparts, devote atleast as much attention to persuasion as a means as they do to it as anend. Unlike many contemporary authorities, their primary concern isnot with tactics (e.g., the best means of demonstrating credibility) butwith ethics. They distinguish persuasion brought about by deceit(dolos), false logic, coercion and other forms of chicanery frompersuasion (peitho) achieved by holding out the prospect of building orstrengthening friendships, common identities and mutually valuednorms and practices. They associate persuasion of the former kind(dolos) with those sophists who taught rhetoric and demagogues who

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9. For an elaboration of this theme see Richard Ned Lebow, The Tragic Vision ofPolitics: Ethics, Interests and Orders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2003).

10. Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and PeterParet (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), bk. 1.

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sought to win the support of the assembly by false or misleadingarguments for selfish ends. Peitho, by contrast, uses dialogue to helpactors define who they are, and this includes the initiating party, notjust the actor(s) it seeks to influence. Peitho constructs commonidentities and interests through joint understandings, commitmentsand deeds. It begins with recognition of the ontological equality of allthe parties to a dialogue, and advances beyond that to build friendshipsand mutual respect. Peitho blurs the distinction between means andends because it has positive value in its own right, independently of anyspecific end it is intended to serve.

Some of the Greek authors I examine – Sophocles in particular –treat peitho and dolos as diametrically opposed strategies. This reflectsthe tendency of Greek tragedy to pit characters with extreme andunyielding commitments to particular beliefs or practices against eachother in order to illustrate their beneficial and baneful consequences. Ido the same, while recognising, as did the Greeks, that purerepresentations of any strategy of influence are stereotypes. Peitho anddolos, like other binaries I describe, have something of the character ofideal types. Actual strategies or political relationships approach themonly to certain degree, and in practice, can be mixed.

Sophocles, Thucydides and Plato consider peitho a more effectivestrategy than dolos because it has the potential to foster cooperationthat transcends discrete issues, builds and strengthens community andreshapes interests in ways that facilitate future cooperation. For muchthe same reason, peitho has a restricted domain; it cannot persuadehonest people to act contrary to their values or identities. Dolos cansometimes hoodwink actors into behaving this way. In contrast topeitho, it treats people as means not ends – a Kantian distinctionimplicit in Sophocles and Plato.11 Dolos is almost always costlier in amaterial sense because it depends on threats and rewards. Stateswhose power is primarily capability-based, and whose influence islargely exercised through dolos – the Greeks referred to such a politicalunit as an arche – often felt driven to pursue foreign policies intendedto augment their capabilities. Like Athens, they may try to expandbeyond the limits of their capabilities. Peitho, by contrast, encouragesself-restraint.

Dolos is most often a strategy of the powerful, as they have theresources to employ it most effectively. For the playwrights and


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11. Gorgias, Plato’s Socrates maintains that rhetoric, as practiced by sophists,treats others as means to an end, but dialogue treats them as ends in themselvesand appeals to what is best for them. See also the Republic, 509d-511d, 531d-534c.

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Thucydides, dolos is also associated with the domination of arche. Alongwith violence it is the quintessential expression of this kind of rule. Itcan also be used by the weak to subvert the authority of the powerful.In Euripides’ Hecuba, the Trojan queen Hecuba tricks her enemyPolymestor in order to tie him up. His Medea is at a doubledisadvantage because she is a barbarian as well as a woman, buttriumphs over Jason by means of chicanery.

There is another key distinction between Greek and many modernunderstandings of power that derives from fundamental differences intheir psychology. Since the Enlightenment, Western philosophers andsocial scientists have generally attributed all human desires to theappetite, and emphasised the instrumental role of reason in helpingpeople satisfy their appetites. The Greeks had a richer understanding ofmotives. They posited three kinds of desire: appetite, spirit and reason.Appetite encompassed all physical desires, including security andwealth. The concept of spirit (thumos) embodies the insight that allhuman beings value and seek self-esteem, a desire that can come intoconflict with appetite. For Plato and Aristotle, self-esteem is acquired byemulating and excelling at qualities and activities admired by one’ssociety, and thereby winning the respect of others. The spirit is angeredby impediments to self-assertion in private or public life, and driven toseek revenge for all slights of honor.

Self-esteem and appetite not infrequently come into conflict inpolitics, which, almost by definition, makes some actors dominant overothers. Subordinates may be moved to accept domination by theirappetite (because it will make them more secure, wealthier or morepowerful vis a vis third parties) and to oppose it by their spirit (whichinsists on resistance in the name of self-esteem). Classical realists fromThucydides to Morgenthau understood this tension, and the corollarythat power must be masked to be effective. Subordinate actors need tobe allowed, or at least encouraged, to believe that they are expressingtheir free will, not being coerced, are being treated as ends inthemselves, not merely as means, and are respected as ontologicalequals, even in situations characterised by marked power imbalance.

The different demands of appetite and spirit have importantimplications for strategies of influence. Capability-based theories ofinfluence like realism assume that influence is proportional to power,measured in terms of material capabilities. Generally speaking, theweaker the state, the less likely it is to oppose the wishes of a powerfulinterlocutor. Cases where weaker powers (or factions) go to war againststrong ones (e.g., Athens v. Persia, Melos v. Athens), or strenuouslyresist them (e.g., North Vietnam v. the United States, Chechnya v.Russia) are anomalous from a realist perspective. The Greekunderstanding of the psyche suggests that capability-based influence

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always has the potential to provoke internal conflict and externalresistance because of how it degrades the spirit – and all the more sowhen no effort is made to give it any aura of legitimacy throughconsultation, institutionalisation, soft words and self-restraint. Peitho isleast likely to generate resistance, especially when initiated by an actorwhose right to lead – which the Greeks associated with hegemonia – iswidely accepted. It helps to explain why lesser powers often fail to formalliances to balance against a power that is dominant or on its way tobecoming so. The general acceptance of Chinese regional hegemony bymost of the countries of the Pacific rim offers a good contemporaryexample.12

The balance of material capabilities is not irrelevant for the Greeksand classical realists. It influences acceptance or rejection of subordinatestatus, but not for the reasons commonly assumed. Small powers mayoffer less resistance because it is not as severe a blow to their self-esteemto give way to an actor many times more powerful. Resistance is mostlikely to be pronounced in honor-based societies – regardless of theirrelative power – where self-esteem takes precedence over appetite. Thismay be one reason why the initial Iraqi euphoria at the overthrow ofSaddam Hussein quickly turned into opposition to the United States asan occupier. This transition was facilitated by American occupationpolicy, which aimed – but never really succeeded – in addressing Iraqiappetites (by providing security, food, electricity, etc.); to the exclusion,and often the detriment, of satisfying Iraqi needs for self-esteem.

My analysis points to an interesting and complex relationshipbetween power and ethics. While recognising that might often makesfor right, it reveals that right can also make might. Of equal importance,it provides a discourse that encourages the formulation of longer-term,enlightened self-interests predicated on recognition that membershipand high standing in a community is usually the most efficient way toachieve and maintain influence. Such commitments also serve as apowerful source of self-restraint. For all of these reasons, ethicalbehaviour is conducive – perhaps even essential – to national security.

Thucydides and Athens

Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War encodes a profoundanalysis of the nature of power and influence. Central to it is thedistinction he makes between hegemonia and arche. For fifth and fourth


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12. David C. Kang, ‘Getting Asia Wrong: the Need for New AnalyticFrameworks’, International Security 27, no. 4 (2003): 57-85.

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century Greeks, hegemonia was a form of legitimate authority associatedwith tim (honor and office), which in this sense also meant the ‘office’ towhich one was accordingly entitled. Sparta and Athens earned tim byvirtue of their contributions and sacrifices to Greece during the PersianWars. Time was also conferred on Athens in recognition of her literary,artistic and intellectual, political and commercial accomplishments thathad made her, in the words of Pericles, the ‘school of Hellas’.13 Archemeant ‘control’, and initially applied to authority within a city state, andlater to rule or influence of some city states over others.

The years between the Battle of Salamis (480 B.C.E.) and theoutbreak of the Peloponnesian War (431) witnessed the gradualtransformation of the Delian League into the Athenian empire. Athensremoved the treasury from Delos, imposed its silver coinage andweights and measures on most of its allies, and made the GreatPanathena an empire festival. It intervened in the domestic affairs ofallies to support democratic factions and, when necessary, used force toextract tribute from restive allies. By 430, Pericles acknowledged thatthe Athenian empire had many attributes of a tyranny, but couldproclaim, with some justification, that it also retained importantfeatures of hegemonia 14 There were few revolts in the early stages of thePeloponnesian War. They became more frequent after Sparta’ssuccesses in Chalcidice, and there was a rash of defections after Athens’defeat in Sicily.15

After Pericles’ death from the plague in 429, Athens’ militarystrategy changed, and with it, relations with allies. Pericles had urgedhis countrymen ‘to wait quietly, to pay attention to their fleet, toattempt no new conquests, and to expose the city to no hazards duringthe war’.16 Cleon and Alcibiades spurned his sober advice in favour ofan offensive strategy aimed at imperial expansion. As Pericles hadforeseen, this offensive strategy aroused consternation throughoutGreece and appeared to lend substance to Sparta’s claim that it was the‘liberator of Hellas’. The new strategy required more resources andcompelled Athens to demand more tribute from its allies, whichprovoked resentment and occasionally, armed resistance. Rebellionelicited a harsh response, and several cities were starved intosubmission. Siege operations required considerable resources, makingit necessary to extract more tribute, triggering a downward spiral in

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13. Thucydides, 2.414. Ibid., 2.63. 15. On the Samian revolt see Russell Meiggs, The Athenian Empire (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1972), 188-92.16. Thucydides, 2.65.7.

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Athenian-allied relations that continued for the duration of the war.17

By 416, the year the assembly voted to occupy Melos and subdue Sicily,the Athenian empire had increasingly become an arche based on militarymight. The structure and language of the Melian Dialogue reveal howmuch the political culture of Athens had changed. It consists ofbrachylogies: short, blunt, alternating verbal thrusts, suggestive of thelunge and parry of a duel. The Athenian generals, Cleomedes and Tisias,dispense with all pretense. They acknowledge that their invasion cannotbe justified on the basis of their right to rule or as a response toprovocations. They deny the relevance of justice, which they assert onlycomes into play between equals. ‘The strong do what they can and theweak suffer what they must’, and the Melians should put their survivalfirst and submit.18 The Melians warn the Athenians that their empire willnot last forever, and if they violate the established norms of justice anddecency their fall ‘would be a signal for the heaviest vengeance and anexample for the world to meditate upon’. The Athenians insist that theylive in the present and must do what is necessary to preserve theirempire. The Melians assert that that empire is best served by a neutraland friendly Melos. The Athenians explain that their empire is heldtogether by power (dunamis, power in action) and the fear (phobos) itinspires. Other island states would interpret Melian neutrality as a signof Athenian weakness and it would therefore serve as a stimulus forrebellion. ‘The fact that you are islanders and weaker than othersrenders it all the more important that you should not succeed in bafflingthe masters of the sea’.19 Contemporary Greeks would have beenshocked by Athens’ rejection of the Melian offer of neutrality on thegrounds that ‘your hostility (echthra) cannot so hurt us as yourfriendship (philia)’.20 Friendship was widely recognised as the cementthat held the polis together. Fifteen years into the war the Athenians hadinverted a core Greek value.

Pericles understood that the overriding foreign policy interest ofAthens was preservation of its empire, and that this required navalpower and legitimacy. To maintain hegemonia, Athens had to act inaccord with the principles and values that it espoused, and offerpositive political and economic benefits to allies. Post-Periclean leadersconsistently chose power over principle, and by doing so, alienatedallies and third parties, lost hegemonia and weakened Athens’ powerbase. Viewed in this light, the Melian Dialogue and the Sicilianexpedition are not only radical departures from rational self-interest but


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17. Meiggs, Athenian Empire, 205-54.18. Thucydides, 5.89.19. Ibid., 5.91-99.20. Ibid., 5.95.

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the almost inevitable result of the shift in the basis of Athenianauthority and influence from hegemonia to arche.

Thucydides’ account of the Peloponnesian War is rich in irony.Athens, the tyrant, jettisoned the traditional bonds and obligations ofreciprocity in expectation of greater freedom and rewards only tobecome trapped by a new set of more onerous obligations. The post-Periclean empire had to maintain its arche by constantly demonstratingits power and will to use it. Toward this end, it had to keep expanding,a requirement beyond the capabilities of any state. The Melianoperation was part of the run up to the invasion of Sicily motivated inpart by this goal – where the same Athenians who slaughtered most ofthe Melians and sold the remainder into slavery would meet a similarfate at the hands of the Syracuse.

Arche

The Greeks generally used two words to signify power: kratos anddunamis. For Homer, kratos is the physical power to overcome or subduean adversary from such action. Although fifth-century Greeks did notalways make a clear distinction between these words, they tended tounderstand kratos as the basis for dunamis. It is something akin to ournotion of material capability. Dunamis, by contrast, is power exerted inaction, like the concept of force in physics.

Arche – rule over others – is founded on kratos (material capabilities)and, of necessity, sustains itself through dunamis (displays of power).Superior material capability provides the basis for conquest or coercion.Influence is subsequently maintained through rewards and threats. Sucha policy makes serious demands on resources, and encourages an arche toincrease its resource base. Athens did this through territorial andcommercial expansion, but even more through the extraction of tribute,which permitted a major augmentation of its fleet.

Arche is always hierarchical. Control will not admit equality, andan authoritarian political structure is best suited to the downward flowof central authority and horizontal flow of resources from periphery tocenter. Once established, the maintenance of hierarchy becomes animportant second order goal, for which those in authority are oftenprepared to use all resources at their disposal. Athenians explicitlyacknowledged that Melian independence, by challenging thathierarchy, would encourage more powerful allies to assert themselves,which could lead to the unraveling of their empire. The Soviet Union,another classic arche, periodically intervened in Eastern Europe for thesame reason.

There are three underlying causes for the failure of arche: a declinein material capability, overextension and inadequate resolve. The first, a

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21. A.F.K. Organski, World Politics, 2nd ed. (New York: Knopf, 1967), 202-03;A.F.K. Organski and Jacek Kugler, The War Ledger (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1980); and Robert Gilpin, War and Change in World Politics (NewYork: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 200-01.

loss of kratos, was an underlying cause of the slow decline and shrinkageof all great colonial empires in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.Power transition theorists have identified a range of responses of greatpowers – most of whom were also empires – to relative loss incapabilities (e.g., preventive war, retrenchment), but have been unable toexplain why they chose the strategies they did.21 The distinction, or moreaccurately, the continuum characterised by arche on one end andhegemonia on the other, offers some analytical purchase. The closer asystem resembles an arche, at home or abroad, the more likely it is toresort to repression, look for opportunities to assert authority, andconsider preventive war. In modern times, the Ottoman, Russian andAustro-Hungarian empires adopted these strategies – all three in thecase of Austria-Hungary – in response to their relative declines in kratos.There was fear in Constantinople, St. Petersburg and Vienna, as therewould be in Moscow a half-century later, that any perception ofweakness or lack of resolve would invite serious challenges by domesticor foreign opponents. Britain, by contrast, was a constitutionaldemocracy and faced the prospect of a serious colonial rebellion only inIreland – a territory it had governed as an arche. It had more leeway toconsider other strategies, most notably retrenchment, which it began toput into effect in the Far East early in the twentieth century. Furtherevidence for this proposition is that shifts from repression toretrenchment often follow democratic transitions within a metropole(e.g., Spain, Portugal and Gorbachev’s Soviet Union).

Successful arche also requires self-restraint. There are diminishingreturns to territorial expansion and resource extraction. At some point,further predation encourages active resistance and makes maintenanceof arche even more dependent on displays of resolve, suppression ofadversaries and the maintenance of hierarchy. All these responsesrequire greater resources, which in turn encourages more expansionand resource extraction. For political, organisational and psychologicalreasons, self-restraint is extraordinarily difficult for an arche. Hierarchywithout constitutional limits or other restraints – the political basis forarche – makes it easier to ignore the interests and desires of domesticopinion and client states, isolates those in authority from those whomthey oppress, and narrows the focus of the former on efforts to maintainor enhance their authority. Over time, it can produce a ruling class – likeAthenian citizens, slave owners in the American antebellum South, theformer Soviet nomenklatura or the present day Chinese Communist

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Party – whose socialisation, life experiences and expectations make theinequality on which all arche is based seem natural, and for whomrapacity and suppression of dissent has become the norm.

Thucydides offers the political equivalent of what would becomeNewton’s third law of motion: an arche is likely to expand until checkedby an opposite and equal force.22 Imperial overextension – dunamisbeyond that reasonably sustained by kratos – constitutes a serious drainon capabilities, especially when it involves an arche in a war the regimecan neither win nor settle for a compromise peace for fear of beingperceived as weak at home and abroad. In this circumstance, leadersbecome increasingly desperate and may assume even greater risksbecause they can more easily envisage the disastrous consequences tothemselves of not doing so. Athens threw all caution to the winds andinvaded Sicily, not only in the expectation of material rewards, but inthe hope that a major triumph in Magna Grecia would compel Sparta tosue for peace. In our age, Austria-Hungary invaded Serbia to cope withnationalist discontent at home, Japan attacked the United States hopefulthat a limited victory in the Pacific would undermine resistance inChina, and Germany invaded Russia when it could not bring Britain toits knees. All of these adventures ended in disaster.

Arche is based primarily on material capabilities, and will last onlyas long as those capabilities sustain the requisite level of rewards,threats and punishments. Resolve enters the picture as subordinatesand third parties periodically assess an arche’s will to use its capabilitiesto sustain itself and its hierarchical structure. Resolve can bestrengthened by superior capability, but there is no direct relationshipbetween capabilities and resolve. A decline in capabilities can make itappear all the more important to demonstrate resolve, as it did forRussia and Austria-Hungary in 1914, both of whom, like Athens, fearedthat any perceived failure of will would be the catalyst for greaterinternal opposition and foreign policy challenges.

Will can erode independently of capabilities. France in the 1930s isa textbook case of how internal division can make external resolve allbut impossible. The Soviet Union under Gorbachev experienced a crisisof will, but for a different reason. A meaningful percentage of the Sovietelite – including the general secretary and his closest advisors – had lostfaith in Soviet-style communism, and embraced values inimical tomaintaining the unchallenged authority of the communist party athome and of Soviet authority in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe.

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22. James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions andReconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1984); and Lebow, Tragic Vision of Politics, chs. 2, 3 and 7.

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Gorbachev’s public encouragement of reform in Eastern Europe andrefusal to use the Red Army to maintain pro-Soviet regimes, led torevolution in Romania and tumultuous but less violent upheavalselsewhere in the region. These developments, which began withGorbachev’s domestic reforms, were part of a chain of events that led tothe collapse of the Soviet Union. The Soviet case indicates thathierarchy, at home and abroad, can serve as a useful mechanism forasserting authority and extracting resources, but its maintenanceultimately becomes a litmus test – for rulers and ruled alike – of thecapability and resolve of an arche.23

The Gorbachev experience has suggested to some that an archemust remain firm at all costs; that repression, à la Tienamen Square, is amore efficacious response to opposition than concession and reform.This may be true in the short-term, but it is almost surelycounterproductive in the longer-term. Crude forms of extraction,accompanied by repression, are far less efficient than pluralist,collaborative and democratically organised efforts. Stalin’s forcedcollectivisation and five year plans were credited with saving the SovietUnion from Germany, but it seems likely that continuation of Lenin’sNew Economic Policy would almost certainly have resulted in moregrowth.24 East Germany, Cuba, and, above all, North Korea, offerdramatic illustrations of the limitations of hierarchical, state-runeconomies.

Arche seems to have been more successful in pre-modern timeswhen it did not run so counter to popular expectations or generalpolitical practice. In the course of the last century, liberal democracyand material well-being increasingly became, if not the norm, theaspiration of growing numbers of peoples. Repressive regimes weremost secure in countries whose populations – as in Stalin’s SovietUnion and present day North Korea – could effectively be isolated fromother societies and governments and information about their practicesand achievements. These regimes illustrate two paths to failure. InNorth Korea, over five decades of the closest approximation to a


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23. Raymond L. Garthoff, The Great Transition: American Soviet Relations and theEnd of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Brookings, 1994); Archie Brown, TheGorbachev Factor (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996); Jacques Lévesque,The Enigma of 1989: The USSR and the Liberation of Eastern Europe, trans. KeithMartin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997); Robert D. English, Russiaand the Idea of the West: Gorbachev, Intellectuals, and the End of the Cold War (NewYork: Columbia University Press, 2000).

24. Alexander Erlich, The Soviet Industrialization Debate 1924-1928 (Cambridge:Harvard University Press, 1967); Alec Nove, ‘Was Stalin Really Necessary?’,Problems of Communism 25, no. 4 (1976): 49-62, and An Economic History of theSoviet Union, rev. ed. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).

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‘totalitarian’ regime have brought the country to the brink of economicbreakdown and widespread starvation. The scope of the latter is onlylimited by foreign aid, and, while nobody can predict how the end willcome, the days of communism in North Korea are surely numbered –and so too may be its survival as a state.

The Soviet Union weathered the Stalin-imposed famine of the1930s (here too foreign aid was helpful), barely survived the war, andstruggled unsuccessfully for the next half-century to improve itseconomy beyond the value added by growth in its labour force. Andyet, Communism was not brought down by its inability to performeconomically, although this was a source of disenchantment forintellectuals acquainted with the higher living standard of the West. Sotoo was knowledge of non-Marxist ideas and political life elsewhere byhigh party officials and apparatchiks. Loss of faith in the political systemencouraged the naïve hope that democratic reforms could restoreidealism, reinvigorate the command economy, revitalise the system andmake it more like Western European social democracies.25 Instead,glasnost and perestroika led to the rapid unraveling of the economy andpolitical system by unleashing an array of long pent up contradictorydemands and subversive activities with which the system could notcope. China has sought to avoid this outcome, and finesse the dilemmasof arche by encouraging economic development through the partialintroduction of capitalism while maintaining the iron grip of thecommunist party on the reins of political power.

The verdict on the Chinese experiment is not yet in, but there aregood reasons to think that economic growth will only heightendissatisfaction with the communist party and lead to some kind ofshowdown if it does not allow a peaceful devolution of power. If so,China, even more than the Soviet Union, will become a victim of aprocess of unintended consequences of the kind nicely described byclassical Marxist theory. Feudalism gave rise to capitalism, andcapitalism was expected to give rise to socialism as much by virtue ofits successes as its failures. High feudalism generated wealth thatsecular princes and those of the church spent on various forms ofconspicuous consumption. This encouraged the growth of artisan andcommercial classes, the rebirth of urban centers, and ultimately, the riseof the bourgeoisie who overthrew feudalism. Mature capitalism wassupposed to impoverish a large working class while giving it, throughnecessary job training and military service, the organisational andmilitary capabilities to rebel against their oppressors. China’sextraordinary economic development has given rise to an ever growing

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25. Lévesque, Enigma of 1989.

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class of successful entrepreneurs, scientists, intellectuals and artistswho constitute a growing source of opposition to the Party. This classhas become large enough, and some sufficiently outspoken, to make theregime both insecure but increasingly dependent on them for economicgrowth. The problem is exacerbated by increasing unrest in thecountryside, where the corruption and high-handedness of partyofficials prompts an average of 150 protests a day.26 Such a situation isby its very nature highly unstable.27

Persuasion

As I noted in the introduction, the ancient Greeks distinguishedpersuasion based on deceit (dolos), false logic and other forms of verbal chicanery, from persuasion (peitho) based on honest dialogue.peitho is characterised by frankness and openness and it accomplishesits goal by promising to create or sustain individual and collectiveidentities through common acts of performance. As a form of influence,it is limited to behaviour others understand as supportive of theiridentities and interests. It is nevertheless more efficient than archebecause it does not consume material capabilities in displays of resolve,threats or bribes.

The contrast between the two strategies is explored in Aeschylus’Oresteia. In Agamemnon, the first play of the trilogy, Clytemnestraemploys dolos to trick her husband, just back from the Trojan War, intowalking on a red robe that she has laid out before him. She wraps himup in the robe to disable him so she can kill him with a dagger. In thenext play, Libation Bearers, Orestes resorts to dolos to gain entrance to thepalace and murder Clytemnestra and her consort, Aegisthus. In thefinal play, the Eumendides, Athena praises peitho and the beneficial endsit serves and employs it to end the Furies’ pursuit of Orestes, terminatethe blood feuds that have all but destroyed the house of Atreus andreplace tribal with public law.28 Dolos is clearly linked to violence andinjustice. Even when used to achieve justice in the form of revenge itentails new acts of injustice that perpetuate the spiral of deceit and


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26. Joseph Kahn, ‘For the Chinese Masses, an Increasingly Short Fuse’,International Herald Tribune, 31 December 2004, 1-2.

27. Maurice Meisner, Mao’s China and After: A History of The People’s Republic, 3rd ed. (New York: Free Press, 1999); and Bruce Dickson, ‘Who does the PartyRepresent? From “Three Revolutionary Classes” to “Three Represents”’, in Stateand Society in 21st-Century China, eds. Peter Hays Gries and Stanley Rosen (NewYork: Routledge 2004), 141-158.

28. Aeschylus, Eumenides, lines 958-74. Aeschylus’ Prometheus also exploresdifferent kinds of persuasion and shows how they can fail.

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violence. The only escape from the vicious cycles is through peitho andthe institutional regulation of conflict, which have the potential oftransforming the actors and their relationships. This transformation issymbolised by the new identity accepted by the Furies – the Eumenides,or well-wishers – who, at the end of the play, are escorted to their newhome in a chamber beneath the city of Athens.

Although the trilogy is ostensibly about the house of Atreus andthe regulation of family and civic conflict, it is also about internationalrelations. Many of the major characters are central figures in the TrojanWar. Helen is married to Menelaus, and her seduction and abduction byParis triggers the Trojan War. Menelaus’ honour can only be redeemedby the recapture of Helen and destruction of the city that has taken herin. Agamemnon, his brother and king of Argos, leads the Greekexpedition against Troy. The Oresteia open with his return to Argos aftera ten year absence. In the interim, his wife Clytemnestra has takenAegisthus, son of Thyestes, for a consort. Among her motives formurdering her husband is his earlier sacrifice at Aulis of their daughterIphigenia in response to the prophecy that it was necessary to securefavourable winds for the departure of the Greek fleet to Troy.

The curse of the Atridae and the Trojan War are also closelyconnected in their origins: both are triggered by serious violations ofguest friendship (xenia), one of the most important norms in heroic ageGreece. In Aeschylus’ version, the troubles of the Atridae clan beginwith Thyestes’ seduction of his brother Atreus’ wife. This violation ofthe household is followed by another more terrifying one. Atreuspretends to forgive Thyestes and allows him to return home where heis invited to attend a feast. In the interim, Atreus has murdered two ofThyuestes three children and put them in a stew which he then servesto Thyestes. This gives Aegisthus, the surviving son, a motive forseducing Clytemnestra and assisting her in the murder of Agememnon,the son of Atreus. The curse of the Atridae and the Trojan War unfold asa series of escalating acts of revenge. If the curse of the Atridae can beresolved through peitho and the institutional regulation, this might bepossible for the internecine conflicts among the community of Greeks,as they arise from the same causes and are governed by the samedynamics.

Peitho is also central to Sophocles’ Philoctetes, produced in 409, fiveyears before Athens’ defeat in the Peloponnesian War. Greek tragedywas deeply affected by two decades of war, the plague, the breakdownof Athenian civic culture and the reemergence of intense factionalconflict. Sophocles and Euripides are less convinced than Aeschylus,writing more than a generation earlier, that reason and dialogue cansuccessfully overcome, or at least, mute conflict. Their plays suggestthat civic conflicts are multiple, cross-cutting and endemic, and

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correspondingly more difficult to resolve. They nevertheless search forsome way of restoring a civilising discourse in the intensely partisanand conflictual environment of late fifth century Athens.

Like many tragedies, the Philoctetes is set during the Trojan War.Philoctetes’ father had been given Heracles’ bow because he had litthat hero’s funeral pyre. Philoctetes inherited the bow, and trainedhimself to become a master archer. En route to Troy, he was bitten inthe leg by a snake and left with a foul-smelling, suppurating wound.The resulting stench, and Philoctetes’ repeated cries of pain, led theGreeks to abandon him on the island of Lemnos while he slept. Afteryears of inconclusive warfare, the Greeks receive a prophecy that Troywill only be conquered when Philoctetes and his bow appear on thebattlefield. They dispatch Odysseus and Achilles’ son Neoptolemus toretrieve archer and bow, and the play opens with their arrival on the island.

Odysseus lives up to his reputation as a trickster; he resorts to softwords (logoi malthakoi) to persuade Neoptolemus to go along with hisscheme to pretend friendship with Philoctetes in order to steal the bow.He does this by creating a seemingly irreconcilable conflict between twoimportant components of his identity: the honourable man who wouldrather fail than resort to dishonesty and deceit, and the Greekcommitted to the defeat of Troy. Odysseus presents his argument at thevery last moment, giving Neoptolemus no time for reflection.

Philoctetes is an honourable, friendly and generous person, withwhom Neoptolemus quickly establishes a genuine friendship. WhenPhiloctetes grows weak from his wound, he gives his bow toNeoptolemus for safekeeping, and when he awakes from his feverishsleep, is delighted to discover that Neoptolemus has kept his wordand not abandoned him. In the interim, the chorus had pleadedunsuccessfully with Neoptolemus to sneak off with the bow.Neoptolemus then half-heartedly tries to persuade Philoctetes toaccompany him to Troy on the spurious grounds that he will find acure there for his wound. Philoctetes sees through this deceit, anddemands his bow back. Neoptolemus initially refuses, telling himselfthat justice, self-interest, and above all, necessity, demand that he obeyhis orders to bring the bow back to Troy. Philoctetes is disgusted, andNeoptolemus’ resolve weakens. Odysseus returns and threatens toforce Philoctetes to board their ship, or to leave him on the islandwithout his bow. Odysseus appears to have won, as he andNeoptolemus depart with the bow. However, Neoptolemus, who has finally resolved his ethical dilemma, returns to give back the bow because he recognises that what is just (dikaios) is preferable tothat which is merely clever (sophos). Odysseus threatens to draw hissword, first against Neoptolemus, and then against Philoctetes.

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Neoptolemus refuses to be intimidated, as does Philoctetes, whodraws his bow and aims an arrow at Odysseus. Neoptolemus seizeshis arm and tells him that violence would not reflect honour on eitherof them. Philotetes then agrees to proceed voluntarily withNeoptolemus and Odysseus to Troy.

Odysseus fails to grasp the essential truth that our principal wealthis not material, but social and cultural. It consists of the relationships oftrust we build with neighbours and friends through honest dialogue,and the communities which this sustains. Odysseus is willing to use anymeans to accomplish his ends because he lacks any definition of selfbeyond the ends he can accomplish. He is incapable of interrogatingthose ends or the means by which they might be obtained. His attemptsto exercise power through deceit and threats fail, leaving him somethingof an outcast.29 Odysseus comes close to imposing his will on both hisprotagonists, and fails only because Neoptolemus and Philoctetes haveestablished a friendship based on mutual trust and respect. Hisemotional attachment puts Neoptolemus back in touch with his true selfand the values that make him who he is, and give him the resolve andthe courage to return to Philoctetes with his bow, apologise for havingobtained it dishonourably and face down an enraged Odysseus. Theemotional bond Neoptolemus and Philoctetes establish also leadsPhiloctetes to imagine an encounter between himself and Heracles, whotells him that it is his fate to go to Troy with Neoptolemus and there winglory. He agrees to proceed because he too has been restored as a fullperson through his relationship with Neoptolemus.

Gorgias (circa 430 B.C.E), described language (logos) as a ‘greatpotentate, who with the tiniest and least visible body achieves the mostdivine works’. When employed in tandem with persuasion (Peitho) it‘shapes the soul as it wishes’.30 Thucydides exalts the power of languageand its ability to create and sustain community, but recognises howeasily it can destroy that community when employed by clever peopleseeking selfish ends. I have argued elsewhere that one of the key themesof his text is the relationship between words (logoi) and deeds (erga).31

Speech shapes action, but action transforms speech. It prompts new

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29. Bernard Knox, The Heroic Temper: Studies in Sophoclean Tragedy (New York:Cambridge University Press, 1982), ch. 5; James Boyd White, Heracles’ Bow:Essays on the Rhetoric and Poetics of the Law (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1985), 3-27; and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, rev. 2nd ed. (Notre Dame:Notre Dame University Press, 1984), 134.

30.Gorgias, DK, frg. 82, BII, pp. 8, 13-14 in Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz,Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, 7th ed. (Berlin: WeidmannscheVerlagsbuchhandlung, 1956).

31. Lebow, Tragic Vision of Politics, ch. 4

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words and meanings, and can subvert existing words by giving themmeanings diametrically opposed to their original ones. The positivefeedback loop between logoi and erga – the theme of Thucydides’‘Archeology’– created the nomoi (conventions, customs, rules, normsand laws) that made Greek civilisation possible. His subsequentaccount of the Peloponnesian War shows how the meaning of wordswere twisted and transformed to encourage and justify deeds thatdefied nomos, and how this process was responsible for the mostdestructive forms of civil strife (stasis) that consumed Hellas.32 ForThucydides, dolos was an important cause of war. It is pronounced inthe opening speeches of the text: the appeals of Corcyraeans andCorinthians to the Athenian assembly to persuade and dissuade it fromentering into a defensive alliance with Corcyra.33

Words are the ultimate convention, and they too succumb to stasisin the sense that civilised conversation is replaced by a fragmenteddiscourse in which people disagree about the meaning of words and theconcepts they support, and struggle to impose their meanings on others– as Odysseus did with Philoctetes. Altered meanings changed the waypeople thought about each other, their society and obligations to it, andencouraged barbarism and violence by undermining long-standingconventions and the constraints they enforced. Thucydides attributesthis process to ‘the lust for power arising from greed and ambition; andfrom these passions proceeded the violence of parties once engaged incontention’. Leaders of democratic and aristocratic factions

‘sought prizes for themselves in those public interests which theypretended to cherish, and, recoiling from no means in their strugglesfor ascendancy, engaged in the direct excesses; not stopping at whatjustice or the good of the state demanded, but making the partcaprice of the moment their only standard, and invoking with equalreadiness the condemnation of an unjust verdict or the authority ofthe strong arm to glut the animosities of the hour’.34

Thucydides gives us few examples of peitho. Arguably, the mostsignificant is Pericles’ funeral oration, which turns a solemn recognitionof the sacrifices of the fallen into an uplifting commemoration of Athensand its values, and how they are maintained by the love, sacrifice, andthe self-restraint of its citizens. Pericles speaks in a forthright manner,acknowledging that the Athenian empire has come in some ways to


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32. Lebow, ’Thucydides the Constructivist’, American Political Science Review95, no. 3 (2001): 547-60, and Tragic Vision of Politics, ch.4.

33. Lebow, Tragic Vision of Politics, 154-59.34. Thucydides, 3.82.

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resemble a tyranny. It nevertheless retains its hgemonia and achievesexcellence (arete) by demonstrating generosity (charis) to its allies.35 ‘Ingenerosity’, he tells the assembly, ‘we are equally singular, acquiring ourfriends by conferring not by receiving favours’.36 Charis encouragedloyalty, self-restraint and generosity based on the principle of reciprocity.With philia (friendship), it was the foundation of interpersonal, civic andinter-polis relations.

To this point in the argument, I have stressed the beneficialconsequences of peitho and the negative consequences of dolos. Are therecircumstances in which dolos may be necessary or beneficial, and Peithodamaging? The ending of Philoctetes leaves us with the thought thatpeitho and dolos may be usefully combined. Heracles tells Achilles thathe cannot capture Troy without the assistance of Philoctetes, butworking together like twin lions hunting, they shall overcome Ilium.Philoctetes will use Heracles’ bow to kill Paris, Troy’s leading warrior,and Odysseus, as readers of Homer knew, would devise the scheme ofthe ‘Trojan horse’ to gain the Greeks entry into the City.

Thucydides’ Mytilenian debate is sometimes cited as a lessambiguous example of the benefits of dolos. In this episode, Diodotusconvinces the Athenian assembly not to execute all Mytilenian adultmales, but only a limited number of aristocrats who can be heldresponsible for the rebellion. He openly acknowledges that it is nolonger possible to defend a policy in the name of justice; Athenians willonly act on the basis of self-interest. He carries the day by using hisconsiderable rhetorical skill to mask an appeal based on justice in thelanguage of self-interest.37 Modern examples abound. FranklinRoosevelt has been almost uniformly praised by historians for therhetorically dishonest, but strategically effective, way he committedAmerican naval forces to engage German submarines in the Atlanticbefore America entered the war. Modelling himself on Roosevelt,Lyndon Johnson campaigned as the peace candidate and promptlyexploited an alleged attack on American naval vessels in the Gulf ofTonkin to intervene militarily in Vietnam. As that war ended in disaster,historians condemn Johnson’s deception. George W. Bush and hisadvisors made multiple false claims to gain public and congressionalapproval for an invasion of Iraq. It is too early to offer a definitivejudgment, but it seems highly likely that history will judge Bush’s dolosat least as critically as it has Johnson’s.____________________

35. Ibid., 2.34.5. See T. J. Hooker, ‘4 and ,É§ in Thucydides’, Hermes 102, no. 1(1974): 164-69.

36. Thucydides, 2.40.4.37. Ibid., 3.36-49. See Clifford Orwin, The Humanity of Thucydides (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1994), 161.

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Leaders routinely believe that they know better than public opinionwhat is good for their countries, and feel justified to use dolos toachieve their policy goals. Even when their policies are in the nationalinterest, they risk exacerbating the political problem by making thepublic less responsive to honest, and inevitably more complicated,arguments in the future. Thucydides uses the sequence of Pericles’funeral oration, the Mytilenian and Sicilian debates to track thisdecline. More often than not, dolos is simply a political convenience;leaders use it because it is the only way, or at least the easiest way, ofgaining popular support.

Plato’s opposition to dolos was unyielding for these reasons. Heunderstood that rhetoric was at the heart of politics, and sought todevelop dialogue as an alternative to speeches that so easily slippedinto reliance on dolos. Quite apart from dialogue’s ability to produceconsensual outcomes through reason, the free exchange of ideas amongfriends and the give-and-take of discussion had the potential tostrengthen the bonds of friendship and respect that were the foundationof community. Plato portrays Socrates’ life as a dialogue with his polis,and his acceptance of its death sentence as his final commitment tomaintain the coherence and principle of that dialogue. Plato structureshis dialogues to suggest that Socrates’ positions do not represent anykind of final truth. His interlocutors often make arguments thatSocrates cannot fully refute, or chooses not to, which encouragesreaders to develop a holistic contemplation of dialogue that recognisesthat unresolved tensions can lead to deeper understandings and formthe basis for collaborative behaviour.38

The Socratic emphasis on dialogue has been revived in thetwentieth century, and is central to the thought and writings of figuresas diverse as Mikhail Bakhtin, Hans-Georg Gadamer and JürgenHabermas. Bakhtin suggests that even solitary reflection derives fromdialogues with others against whom or with whom we struggle toestablish ourselves and our ideas.39 Habermas’s ‘critique of ideology’led him to propose a coercion-free discourse in which participantsjustify their claims before an extended audience and assume theexistence of an ‘ideal speech situation’, in which participants are willing


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38. John M. Cooper, ‘Socrates and Plato in Plato’s Gorgias’, in M. Cooper,Reason and Emotion: Essays on Ancient Moral Psychology and Ethical Theory(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 28-75.

39. Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1984); Michael Holquist and Katerina Clark, Mikhail Bakhtin(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984); and James Wertsch, Voices of theMind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991).

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to be convinced by the best arguments.40

Greek understandings of Peitho have much in common with, butare not entirely the same as, Habermas’ conception of communicativerationality. Habermas puts great emphasis on reasoned argumentamong equals, and its ability to persuade – an outcome so essential todemocracy. Peitho values reason, but less for its ability to convince thanits ability to communicate openness and honesty. These values help tobuild the trust and friendship on which the underlying propensity tocooperate and be persuaded ultimately depend.

Gadamer’s conception of dialogue is closer to the Greeks. ForGadamer, dialogue ‘is the art of having a conversation, and thatincludes the art of having a conversation with oneself and ferventlyseeking an understanding of oneself’.41 It is not so much a method, as aphilosophical enterprise that puts people in touch with themselves andothers and reveals to them the prior determinations, anticipations, andimprints that reside in their concepts. Experiencing the other throughdialogue can lead to exstasis, or the experience of being outside ofoneself. By this means, dialogue helps people who start with differentunderstandings to reach a binding philosophical or political consensus.Critical hermeneutics in its broadest sense is an attempt to transgressculture and power structures through a radical break with subjectiveself-understanding.42

This framing of persuasion has important implications for thetheory and practice of power and influence. In contrast to arche, whichis created and sustained by violence, threats and dolos, hegemonia. iscreated and sustained by Peitho and rewards. It is only possible withina community whose members share core values, and is limited toactivities that are understood to support common interests andidentities. Peitho can also help to bring such a community into being.

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40. Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, 2 vols., trans.Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984-87), 2 and Moral Consciousnessand Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry WeberNicholsen (Cambridge: M. I. T. Press, 1990).

41. Hans-Georg Gadamer, ‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, in ThePhilosophy of Hans-George Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court,1997), 3-63, 33; and Johannes Fabian, ‘Ethnographic Objectivity Revisited: FromRigor to Vigor’, in Rethinking Objectivity, ed. Allan Megill (Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 1994), 81-108

42. Hans-George Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd ed., trans. Joel Weinsheimerand Donald G. Marshall (New York: Crossroad, 1989), ‘Plato and the Poets’, inDialogue and Dialectic, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1980), 39-72, and ‘Reflections on My Philosophical Journey’, in ThePhilosophy of Hans-George Gadamer, ed. Lewis Edwin Hahn (Chicago: Open Court,1997), 17, 27.

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While it is the strategy of influence associated with hegemonia, it islargely independent of material capabilities. However, it can help tosustain those capabilities because it does not require the constantexercise of dunamis.

As we observed, hegemonia is an honourific status conferred byothers in recognition of the benefits an actor has provided for thecommunity as a whole. It is a reputation for excellence and honour.Material capabilities come into the picture in so far as they provide theraw materials that facilitate the attainment of excellence and honour.Athens was greatly inferior to Persia in its material capabilities, but itswillingness to take on that empire at the risk of annihilation made it allthe more praiseworthy and honourable. As Pericles recognised (to apoint), but his successors did not, self-restraint and generosity were themost effective way to enhance Athenian reputation and influence.

Peitho can function independently of hegemonia. Actors at any levelof social interaction who earn the respect of their interlocutors bymaking claims supported by arguments that appeal to theirinterlocutors’ feelings, opinions and interests – and offer them thepossibility of reaffirming their identities – are likely to have someinfluence. A recent example is the success of a diverse coalition ofNGOS who coordinated their efforts to persuade a majority of theworld’s states to negotiate and ratify the International Criminal Court.43

Osama Bin Laden wields influence for much the same reason, albeitwithin a very different community.

Motives

The Enlightenment rejected Aristotelian telos and largely reduced reasonto a mere instrumentality, to ‘the slave of the passions’, in the words ofDavid Hume.44 Our cognitive abilities help us satisfy our appetites byidentifying appropriate outlets for them. Freud’s model of the mind is aclassic post-Enlightenment formulation: the ego, which embodiesreason, mediates between the impulses of the libido and the external


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43. Fanny Benedetti and John L. Washburn, ‘Drafting the InternationalCriminal Court Treaty: Two Years to Rome and an Afterword on the RomeDiplomatic Conference’, Global Governance 5, no. 1 (1999); Marlies Glasius, ‘HowActivists Shaped the Court’, Crimes of War Project Magazine (2003)[http://www.crimesofwar.org/icc_magazine/icc-glasius.html#top] (28February 2005).

44. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, eds., David Fate Norton andMary Norton (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 2.3.3.4, and An InquiryConcerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom L. Beauchamp (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1998), Appendix I, 163.

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environment. Strategic choice, the dominant paradigm in contemporarysocial science, is based on a similar understanding of reason; it assumesthat actors rank order their preferences and act in ways best calculatedto achieve them.

The modern focus on reason as instrumentality encouraged a shiftaway from consideration of the ends we seek, or should seek, to themeans of satisfying our appetites. The behavioural sciences reflect thisshift in their emphasis on strategic interaction. Social scientistsacknowledge the critical importance of preferences, but have made nosustained effort to understand what they are, how they form or whenand why they change. Their ontology is unsuited to the task. The bestthey can do is derive preferences from deductive theories – asneorealists do when they stipulate that relative power is the principalend that states seek in an anarchic international environment – or try toinfer them on the basis of behaviour. By making human, institutional orstate preferences unidimensional, theorists greatly oversimplify humanmotivation, and their theories offer a poor fit with reality. Toacknowledge multiple motives requires additional theories to stipulatewhich motives predominate under what conditions. Such theorieswould have to be rooted in sophisticated understandings of humanpsychology and culture.

Unlike our theories, life is wonderfully complex. People andcollectivities are moved by a diverse array of motives – which theyunderstand only imperfectly. Their preference hierarchies shift inresponse to ever-changing internal and external stimuli. Realists greatlyoversimplify reality by assuming that states seek power, just aseconomists do when they assume that people seek wealth. Politicalscientists and economists alike have devoted surprisingly little thoughtto the nature and scope conditions of this most fundamental of theirpropositions. Some actors do seek power or wealth as ends in themselves.For others, perhaps most, power or wealth are instrumentalities; they aremeans of achieving security, comfort, reputation, honour, a good life orsome other end or combination of goals.

Assume for the sake of the argument that states have a preferencefor power when making political choices.45 To have a workable theoryof politics, we would need to know the kinds of choices that actorsframe as political (as opposed to economic, social or religious, etc.). Wealso need to know why they seek power, because only then can webegin to estimate how they will assess trade-offs between power andother values (e.g., wealth, reputation, rectitude), and what they will risk

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45. Morgenthau, Politics Among Nations, 3rd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1960), 5.

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in the pursuit of power. There is no way to analyse means withoutseriously considering ends.46

This truth was well-known to the ancient Greeks who framed theproblem of choice differently than modern social scientists. Theirprincipal concern was human goals, and from an early date theythought people were motivated by fear, interest and honour. Interestand honour were expressions of the appetite and spirit respectively,categories to which we will return momentarily. Fear becomes amotive, and possibly, the dominant one, when either the appetite orspirit breaks free of restraints normally imposed by reason andthreatens the well-being, self-esteem, and perhaps, survival, of other actors.

In Book One, Thucydides invokes all three motives to explain theactions of Athens and Sparta that led to war. In their speech to theSpartan assembly, the Corinthians describe the Athenians as driven bypolypragmosune: literally, ‘trespass’, but widely used in the late fifthcentury by critics of modernity to signify a kind of metaphysicalrestlessness, intellectual discontent and meddlesomeness that foundexpression in pleonexia (envy, ambition, search of glory, monetarygreed, lust for power and conquest).47 Athens cannot resist the prospectof gain held out by the Corcyraean proposal of alliance. Thucydides isequally critical of Sparta. King Archidamus offers the Spartanassembly an accurate account of Athenian power and urges hiscompatriots to reflect carefully before embarking on a war that they arelikely to pass on to their sons. His argument carries less weight thanthe emotional plea of the ephor Sthenelaïdas, who insists that theAthenians have wronged long-standing allies and deserve to bepunished. In Athens, Pericles appeals to the Athenian appetite forwealth and power, while in Sparta, Sthenelaïdas speaks to hiscountrymen’s spirit and yearning for honour. In showing thedisastrous consequences of the unrestrained pursuit of either desire,Thucydides reaffirms the importance of the traditional Greek value of


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46. Harold Lasswell is one of the few social scientists who addressed thisproblem. He posited a plurality of motives, each of which could serve as an endin itself or a means toward achieving other ends. See Lasswell, Politics: Who GetsWhat, When, How (Cleveland: Meridian Books, 1958), Postscript, 202-03.

47. Thucydides uses polypragmosyne only once in his text, to characteriseAthenians as ‘hyperactive’ (6.87.3), but it is widely used by other authors todescribe Athens. See Victor Ehrenberg, ‘Polypragmosyne: A Study in GreekPolitics’, Journal of Hellenic Studies 67 (1947): 46-67; John H. Finley, ‘Euripides andThucydides’, Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 49 (1938): 23-68; and June W.Allison, ‘Thucydides and Polypragmosyne’, American Journal of Ancient History 4(1979): 10-22.

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the middle way (meden agan), something that could only be attained inpractice when reason constrains both appetite and spirit.48

Plato articulated a similar understanding of motivation, butembedded it in an explicit theory of human psychology. In his Republic,Socrates identifies three distinct components of the psyche: appetite,spirit and reason. Appetite (to epithumetikon) includes all primitivebiological urges – hunger, thirst, sex and aversion to pain – and theirmore sophisticated expressions. Socrates uses the example of thirst,which he describes as a desire for a drink qua drink, to argue thatappetites are a distinct set of desires and not means to other ends. Hedivides appetites, as he does all desires, into those that are necessaryand unnecessary. The former are appetites we are unable to deny andwhose satisfaction benefits us. The latter are those we could avoid withproper training and discipline. Appetite includes the unnecessarydesire for wealth, which is unique to human beings and, he insists, hasbecome increasingly dominant. He acknowledges that we require somedegree of coordination, even reflection, to satisfy our appetites, but nobroader conception of the meaning of life.49

Plato’s Socrates infers that there are desires beyond the appetitesbecause someone can be thirsty but abstain from drink to satisfy otherdesires. The principal alternative source of desire is the spirit (tothumoeides), a word derived from thumos, the alleged internal organ thatroused Homeric heroes to action. Socrates attributes all kinds ofvigorous and competitive behaviour to thumos. It makes us admire andemulate the skills, character and positions of people consideredpraiseworthy by society. By equaling or surpassing theiraccomplishments, we gain the respect of others and buttress our ownself-esteem. The spirit is honour-loving (philotimon) and victory-loving(philonikon). It responds with anger to any impediment to self-assertionin private or civic life. It desires to avenge all slights of honour orstanding to ourselves and our friends. It demands immediate action,which can result in ill-considered behaviour, but can be advantageousin circumstances where rapid responses are necessary.50

The spirit requires conceptions of esteem, shame and justice. Theyare acquired through socialisation, and tend to be common to a family,

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48. Ibid., 1.80-85, 86-88, for the two speeches. The war developed asArchidamus predicted, and Sparta was forced to sue for peace after a sizeablenumber of its hoplites were taken prisoner on the island of Sphacteria in 426.Athens subsequently broke the truce and was defeated in 404, but Sparta’svictory left it weak and unable to maintain its primacy in Greece.

49. Plato, Republic, 439b3-5, c2-3, 553c4-7, 558d11-e3, 559a3-6 and 580d11-581a750. Plato’s conceptions of the thumos are developed in Books V, VIII and IX of

the Republic.

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peer group and perhaps, the wider society. Plato has Socratesdistinguish thumos from appetite and reason. His defining example isLeontius, who experiences pleasure from looking at corpses, but isangry at himself for indulging his shameful appetite. The spirit cancome into conflict with reason. When Odysseus returns home indisguise, he is enraged to discover that some of Penelope’s maids havebecome willing bedmates of her suitors. He suppresses his angerbecause it would reveal his identity and interfere with his plans toaddress the more serious threat posed by the numerous and well-armedsuitors.51 Examples abound in international relations, and, I submit,include the choice faced by the Bush administration in the aftermath ofthe events of September 11th. Strategic reason would have dictated ameasured response, designed to capture those responsible throughpolice action and diplomatic pressure and reduce the likelihood offurther terrorism against the United States and Americans abroad. Theinvasion of Afghanistan, motivated in large part by the perceived needto defend American honour – widely shared by the American people –failed to accomplish either goal. The Bush administration did notrespond like Odysseus.

Reason (to logistikon), the third part of the psyche, has thecapability to distinguish good from bad, in contrast to appetite andspirit which can only engage in instrumental reasoning. Socrates aversthat reason has desires of its own, the most important being discoveryof the purposes of life and the means of fulfilling them. It possesses acorresponding drive to rule (archein) – the root from which arche isderived. Reason wants to discipline and train the appetite and the spiritto do what will promote happiness (eudaimonia) and well-being.52

Greek understandings of human motivation shed additional lighton the respective costs and benefits of arche and hegemonia. I havestressed the ways in which the resource extraction characteristic of archearouses opposition on the part of subordinate individuals and peoples.We tend to associate such opposition with the appetite, but the Greekswould expect the spirit to inspire at least as much resentment andopposition. The spirit is angered by slights to honour, and in manysocieties there are few things more dishonourable than visiblesubordination. The spirit is a universal attribute of human beings, butits relative importance varies from culture to culture. In so-called shamecultures, honour takes precedence over appetite – even at the risk, ornear-certainty, of death. Herodotus explains Athenian resistance toPersia in terms of honour, as Thucydides does with Melos. Those states


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51. Homer, Iliad, Book 20, 1-37; and Plato, Republic, 439e1-440b.52. Plato, Republic, 441c1-2, 441e4, 442c5-6, 580d7-8, 8505d11-e1.

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like Thebes that ‘Medized, that is, made their peace with advancingPersian armies, were ever after thought to have behaved dishonourably.

The importance of honour in shame cultures offers an interestingperspective on Iraqi resistance to Anglo-American occupation. TheBush administration expected its forces to be hailed as liberators, andinitially they were welcomed by many Iraqis. The Americans had noplans for a rapid transfer power to an independent Iraqi orinternational authority. They assumed tight control over the reins ofcivilian authority, headed by an American puppet exile with little to nolocal support. American forces increasingly came to be seen as an armyof occupation. Violent resistance triggered equally violent reprisalsand set in motion an escalatory spiral – of the kind Aeschylus wroteabout – which further cast the Americans in the role of occupiers.Insensitive to the needs of the spirit, American authorities belatedlyattempted to win over the Iraqi people by satisfying their appetites –e.g. restoring electricity, providing gasoline and diesel fuel, rebuildingschools and hospitals and doing their best to provide security. Theseprograms – which the Bush administration repeatedly cited asevidence of its goodwill and commitment – did nothing to placate thespirit, and were run in a manner that further highlighted Iraqisubordination. The same was true of dilatory American efforts to createan independent Iraqi governing authority and repeated publicinsistence that Washington would continue to have the last word on allimportant matters. Interviews with Iraqis from all walks of lifeindicated fury at their perceived insubordination. One respondentangrily admitted that Saddam may have killed thousands of Iraqi civilians, and the Americans only hundreds. The Americanoccupation was still intolerable, as he put it, because at least ‘Saddamwas one of ours’.53

The spirit can strengthen hegemonia if it is managed in way toconfer honour on those who are subordinate. The Athenian Empiregrew out of the Delian League, an alliance to liberate those Greekcommunities still under the Persian yoke. Member states willinglyaccepted Athenian leadership because it was considered essential totheir common goal, one from which all would gain honour (time). Evenin the early days of empire, many Greeks apparently felt a sense ofpride in being part of such a powerful and glorious enterprise. Periclesalmost certainly encouraged this sentiment by using a sizeable portionof the allied tribute to construct the Parthenon, the Athena Parthenosand Propylaea, all of which bespoke the wealth and grandeur of Athensand its empire.

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53. Interviews conducted and quote provided by Prof. Shawn Rosenberg.

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Pericles understood that power must be masked to be effective. In hisfuneral oration, he describes Athens as a democracy (demokratia), butThucydides tells us that the constitutional reforms of 462-61 created amixed form of government (xunkrasis). Behind the outward form ofdemocracy lay the de facto rule of one man (ergoi de hupo tou protouandros arche) – Pericles.54 The democratic ideology, with which hepublicly associated himself, moderated class tensions and reconciled thedemos to the economic and political advantages of the elite in aGramscian manner. When the gap between ideology and practice wasboth exposed and made intoleerable by the behaviour of post-Pericleandemagogues, class conflict became more acute and politics more vicious,leading to the violent overthrow of democracy by the Tyranny of theThirty in 404 and its equally violent restoration a year later.

The founding fathers of the post-World War II order – some ofwhom, like George C. Marshall, regularly cited Thucydides in theirwritings and speeches – recognised this political truth. They createdeconomic, political, military and juridical institutions that, at least inpart, tended to restrain powerful actors and reward weaker ones,providing the latter with strong incentives to retain close relations withthe dominant power. American hegemony during the Cold War wasbased on the sophisticated recognition that the most stable orders arethose ‘in which the returns to power are relatively low and the returns toinstitutions are relatively high’.55 Influence depended as much on self-restraint as it did on power.

Power and Ethics

In modern discourses, ethics and behaviour are generally considereddistinct subjects of inquiry because they are understood to derive fromdifferent principles. Many modern realists consider these principlesantagonistic; not all the time to be sure, but frequently enough towarrant the establishment of a clear hierarchy with interest-basedconsiderations at the apex. For the Greek tragedians – and I numberThucydides among them – there was no dramatic separation betweenethics and interest. Their writings show how individuals or states thatsever identity-defining relationships enter a liminal world where reason,freed from affection, leads them to behave in self-destructive ways. Thechorus in Antigone, proclaims in the first stasimon: ‘When he obeys thelaws and honours justice, the city stands proud. . . But when man


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54. Thucydides, 2.37.1 and 2.65.9-10.55. G. John Ikenberry, After Victory: Institutions, Strategic Restraint, and the

Rebuilding of Order After Major Wars (Princeton: Princeton University Press,2001), esp. 248, 257-73.

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swerves from side to side, and when the laws are broken, and set atnaught, he is like a person without a city, beyond human boundary, ahorror, a pollution to be avoided’.56

Behaviour at odds with the accepted morality of the ageundermines the standing, influence and even the hegemony of greatpowers. The Anglo-American invasion of Iraq is the latest example ofthis age-old phenomenon. The national security elite of the United Statesstill considers its country ‘the indispensable nation’ to whom others lookfor leadership. Public opinion polls of its closest allies – countries likeCanada, Japan and the countries of Western Europe – indicate that theUnited States has lost any hegemonia it may once have had, and isoverwhelmingly perceived as an arche, and one that many people believeis the greatest threat to the peace of the world.57 In the run up to theinvasion of Iraq, it surely behaved as an arche; the Bush administration’sduplicitous claims about weapons of mass destruction and false claimsthat the purpose of an invasion was to remove these weapons andintroduce democracy to Iraq were a quintessential exercise in deceit(dolos). Its subsequent occupation began with efforts to protect onlythose assets of strategic or economic value to the Bush regime (e.g., theoil ministry and refineries), and was followed by the installation of anAmerican proconsul, unwillingness to share authority with anyinternational organisation, and the denial of contracts for the rebuildingof Iraqi infrastructure to companies from countries that had notsupported the war. Such behaviour is typical of an arche who can nolonger persuade but must coerce and bribe; and, Blair’s Britain aside,this is the basis of the so-called coalition of the willing.

At least as far back as Homer, Greeks believed that people onlyassumed identities – that is, became people – through membership andparticipation in a community. The practices and rituals of communitygave individuals their values, created bonds with other people and, atthe deepest level, gave meaning and purpose to peoples’ lives.Community also performed an essential cognitive function. To take onan identity, people not only had to distinguish themselves from others,but ‘identify’ with them. Without membership in a community, theycould do neither, for they lacked an appropriate reference point to helpdetermine what made them different from and similar to others. Thiswas Oedipus’ problem; because of his unknown provenance, he did notknow who he was or where he was heading. His attempt to create andsustain a separate identity through reason and aggression was doomedto failure

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56. Sophocles, Antigone, 267-69.57. Lebow, Tragic Vision, 314-15.

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For the Greeks, this pathology extended beyond individuals to cities.There is reason to believe that Sophocles intended Oedipus as a parablefor Periclean Athens. Like Oedipus, Athens’ intellectual prowess becameimpulsiveness, its decisiveness thoughtlessness, and its sense of mastery,intolerance to opposition. Oedipus’ fall presages that of Athens, and formuch the same reasons. The United States would do well to consider theextent to which the unilateral foreign policies that it has pursued sincethe end of the Cold War are taking it down the same path as Oedipusand Athens. Its unilateral foreign policies, often accompanied by ‘in yourface’ rhetoric, have opened a gulf between itself and the community ofdemocratic nations that has previously allowed it to translate its powerinto influence in efficient ways. Once outside this community, and shornof the identity it sustained, Washington must increasingly use threatsand bribes to get its way, and like Athens and Oedipus, the goals it seeksare likely to become increasingly short-sighted and irrational. If thiscomes to pass, it will be another tragic proof of arguably the mostfundamental truth of politics: that friendship and persuasion create andsustain community, and community in turn enables and sustains theidentities that allow rational formulation of interests. In the last resort,justice and power are mutually constitutive.

Richard Ned Lebow is the James O. Freedman Presidential Professor ofGovernment at Dartmouth College

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58. Bernard Knox, Oedipus at Thebes (New York: Norton, 1970), 99; and J. PeterEuben, The Tragedy of Political Theor: The Road Not Taken (Princeton: PrincetonUniversity Press, 1990), 40-41.

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