Ilias Kouskouvelis - Thucydides on Choice and Decision Making: Why War Is Not Inevitable

Thucydides on Choice and Decision-Making

Thucydides on Choice and Decision-Making

Why War Is Not Inevitable

Ilias Kouskouvelis

LEXINGTON BOOKS

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ISBN 978-1-4985-6739-8 (hardcover)

ISBN 978-1-4985-6740-4 (electronic)

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To Lia and to Filitsa Ioanna

Contents

I would like to thank Dr Alexandros Koutsoukis for his continuous assistance on the relative to Thucydides literature, his insightful comments and his suggestions on the text, particularly that of chapter 3; Assistant Professor Kyriakos Mikelis for his help with the literature of the International Relations debates on Thucydides; Assistant Professor Revecca Pedi for having read the entire manuscript and offering creative ideas on the form, the understanding, and the structure of the text; Anthony Montgomery, Professor of Work and Organization Psychology, who was of great assistance in bettering the entire English text, as well as discussing with me issues, sometimes, beyond his field of expertise; and Costas Zafeiropoulos, Professor of Statistics, who helped me prepare the tables and present the data.

I would also like to thank Styliani Gerani, PhD candidate, who with her philological background assisted me in the documentation of the decision-making variables in the ancient Greek text; Dr Dimitrios Stroikos for contributing ideas at the initial stages of my project; and Maria Kefala for her artistic contribution on the books cover, as well as Angeliki Baltzi and Anastasia Blouchoutzi for their assistance in the collection of material.

Moreover, I wish to express my appreciation to the anonymous reviewer for her/his useful comments, which allowed me to better my text, especially on necessity and human nature; and to the editor and staff of Lexington Books for their professionalism, kindness, and cooperation.

Finally, my gratitude for their continued support and for putting up with my Thucydides obsession goes to my wife Lia and my daughter Filitsa Ioanna, who has also contributed with the painting of the figures on the books cover; it is to them that I dedicate the book.

Those who have the choice, if in all else they prosper,it is great folly to go to war.

Thucydides, 2.61.1

This book provides a new perspective on Thucydides seminal work and consolidates further the view, although for different reasons, that his ideas resonate with the twenty-first century. The second schema, connected with the previous, focuses on the reasons why people are making flawed choices or decisions that drive them into risks (3.45.4). In this introduction, I will explain my long-time relation with the outstanding work of Thucydides, the living and intellectual paths through which I have reached this thesis, and the basic elements of his decision-making insights.

The first encounter I had as a young Greek with Thucydides (4698 BC)in Halkidhiki and many other areas? The answer I got was because this is what has prevailed.

My interest with Thucydides continued when, in the third year of high school, the time came for the teaching of the Funeral Oration of Pericles, as it was named to us, and then, without knowing that I was raising a much and long debated issue, my question was who wrote the Funeral Oration, Pericles or Thucydides? The answer was that it was spoken by Pericles, but it was written by Thucydides, who was the first scientific historian.

So for many years, in my mind, like in many peoples minds today, Thucydides was the first historian who recorded scientifically the war, which was later dubbed Peloponnesian, although it was a war fought between Athenians and Spartans, and despite the fact that it was the Athenians who held the leading role in this war drama! There was not even a word on the premises upon which Thucydides based his writing and, especially, his analysis and interpretation; not a word, even at the Law School that I later attended, about the great debate he raised on the relationship between power, law, and morality. I had to wait nearly a decade, until I was in the United States, in 1986, for my Masters studies in International Relations, in order to be taught in English the Melian Dialogue and the Mytilinean Debate as the first, significant and characteristic texts of International Relations, in the realist tradition; and to hear that Thucydides was not a historian, or at least not only a historian, but, for many, he was the father of International Relations.

Since thenmore than thirty years nowI continued studying his monumental treatise, in different versions of Modern Greek and, progressively, as my knowledge was improving, in the ancient text. Of course, I havent abandoned my very first question: why his work is called The History of the Peloponnesian War, The Peloponnesian War, Historiae, History, or (Xyngraf).are perhaps more appropriate to title the work than History, which seems to have prevailed and which, contributing to disorientation, alludes to someone who was simply a historian.

Thucydides, more than 2,400 years ago, came to crystallize in a single work, an entire body of thought and wisdom on all the above topics, and, more important, a distinct methodological approach to knowledge, expressed first and before him by the Sophists and the Hippocratics.

Obviously, the study of Thucydides, and, more broadly, the teaching of International Relations, for the great majority of scholars in the field, is focusing on the central issues relative to war.

It is impossible, however, when one studies The War , not to come to the conclusion that decisions and decision-making have been crucial in determining developments, war and peace, the fate of people, and cities in the ancient world. So when, before long, I began preparing an updated and improved version of my textbook on decision-making and crisis management,decision-making it would be attractive for the students to use, among others, examples of events and, especially, of decisions from The War . Thus, I started searching in the text and systematically recorded the various cases and respective interpretations in categories of decision-making. But as the study progressed in depth and scope, and the number of, on the one hand, the explained decisions amounted to hundreds, and, on the other, his generalized insights on politics, war, and people, amounted to dozens, I realized, more and more, that there was an explanation of both the process and of the decisions taken. It was at this stage of my research that I decided, initially with many reservations, to investigate and fully explore whether Thucydides had a decision-making thinking and, in the affirmative, how it was shaped.

Nowadays, after many years of effort, and after a systematic, complete, and thorough study of the text in Ancient and its different versions of Modern Greek, I am able to argue that Thucydides, apart from his political thinking, had a determined and specific thinking, structured in schemata, about how people make decisions, both on , as well as in war and peace. My findings changed the direction of my research beyond simply renewing and updating a textbook. The goal now was to uncover and present Thucydides decision-making insights.