PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
Geoffrey Hawthorn is Professor Emeritus of International Politics, University of Cambridge. He has taught sociology and politics at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge and was twice a visiting professor at Harvard University. He has published books on human fertility, the history of social theory, counterfactual thinking in history and the social sciences and the politics of east Asia. He also studied the wars in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and has written a large number of essays and reviews across a range of subjects in philosophy and politics.
'Hawthorn acts as a careful, humane guide through Thucydides' account of the Peloponnesian War, sympathetically exploring the importance of Thucydides' historical and political thought, but equally committed to resisting the temptation to reduce this endlessly complex work to any single or simple meaning or message (whether for antiquity or for the contemporary world). Historians, students of politics, and anyone who simply wants better to understand this fascinating text will gain much from this clear-headed, thought-provoking study.' Polly Low, University of Manchester 'In a wholly individual voice, Geoffrey Hawthorn reflects on the complex of insight and suggestive ambiguity that is Thucydides' masterwork. Like Thucydides before him, Hawthorn offers by turns confident judgments and studies in contingency. For many years, Hawthorn provided a fortunate group of students at Cambridge a sense of Thucydides' distinctive subtlety and penetration about politics, a sense he here makes available to readers more generally.' Kinch Hoekstra, University of California, Berkeley 'A fascinating and thought-provoking reading of Thucydides and his ideas, thoroughly grounded in classical scholarship but viewed through a lifetime's experience of reflection on political issues. As Hawthorn himself says of Thucydides, one's understanding expands in the course of reading the work. Indispensable for classicists and political theorists alike.' Neville Morley, University of Bristol 'This magnificent book on the history of the most celebre of all wars makes us love Thucydides' poetic passion for his subject and the 'purity' of his style. Politics is the protagonist of Geoffrey Hawthorn's narrative: Thucydides' vision of politics as a panoply of propelling forces, the reasons and accounts people give of them, their analysis, reflection, calculation and debate; and politics as a way of making things happen that is more likely than not to be agonistic and is unlikely to be truthful or simply reasonable in one straightforward way.' Nadia Urbinati, Columbia University 'Thucydides on Politics is the most original and thought-provoking book on Thucydides to appear in the past fifteen years. For boldness and clarity of argument, it cannot be too highly recommended.' Peter Thonemann, Times Literary Supplement
