The Book
Most of the posts that follow will be based on a book I published in 2021. It was an academic book, not nearly so accessible to lay readers as I hope to be here. By the time I published it, I had come to feel that I had written something deeply relevant to our own time, but I found that when I tried to communicate this to others – “this is just like in Plato and Thucydides!” – people didn’t understand what I was trying to say. This substack is my attempt to get my ideas out there in a manner accessible to normal people.
One advantage of writing online like this is the fact that my work here can serve as a sort of advertisement for my book, Liberation and Authority. Anyone who wants to get a closer look at how my claims concerning Plato and Thucydides are based in the detail of their work will want to take a look at the book. Others may be interested in a more general summary of the ideas in one or another of these works, or of their significance taken together. Another group may have no real inclination to read it despite a vague interest in subject, but I think they should buy it anyway: it’s a handsome volume – think how good it would look on your bookshelf!
This substack is concerned with the relevance of Plato and Thucydides to our own times; the book is focused on developing an understanding of their work on its own terms, the perspective from which their relevance today can begin to come into view. The book consists largely of a close reading of three texts, Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, Plato’s Gorgias and the first book of Plato’s Republic. Its guiding aim is simply to try to understand what each author wrote, and to explain it, using a minimum of jargon. If it is not the sort of light reading that one might take to the beach, still I did make a real effort to keep it as accessible as I could, and I think it reads well given its subject matter. Readers interested in my major ideas can look over the introductory and summary portions focused on Thucydides or Plato, as well as the summary of the book as a whole at the end; those who want to go into more detail can read the more focused textual commentary as well.
The book can be found at my publisher, and also at amazon.
Liberation and Authority may well prove to be the best thing you read on the relation of Plato and Thucydides this month, or even this year!