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Hybris and Aggression: A Critique of Lebow's “Paranoia of the Powerful” and an Alternative Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 November 2022

William T. Bluhm*
Affiliation:
University of Rochester

Abstract

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Type
Exchange on “The Paranoia of the Powerful: Thucydides on World War III”
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1984

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References

1 Lebow, Richard, “The Paranoia of the Powerful: Thucydides and World War III, PS 17, 1 (Winter 1984), 1017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 Lebow presents no direct quotations from Thucydides's text. My quotations are from Thucydides, , The Peloponnesian War, Finley, J. H. Jr., ed. (Crawley, translation) (New York: Modern Library, 1951).Google Scholar

3 “Paranoia of the Powerful,” p. 10. Historians of the Peloponnesian War give 431 B.C., not 430, as the year of the war's inception. See, e.g., Finley, John H. Jr., Thucydides (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1942)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cochrane, Charles N., Thucydides and the Science of History (London: Oxford University Press, 1928)Google Scholar; Fliess, Peter, Thucydides and the Politics of Bipolarity (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Press, 1966).Google Scholar

4 “Paranoia of the Powerful,” pp. 10–11.

5 Peloponnesian War, p. 332.

6 “Paranoia of the Powerful,” p. 11.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 10.

9 Ibid., p. 11.

10 See The Peloponnesian War, pp. 346–352.

11 See ibid., p. 330.

12 Ibid., p. 44.

13 Ibid., p. 118.

14 See ibid., p. 307, 308–309.

15 Ibid., p. 310.

16 Ibid., p. 308.

17 Ibid., p. 314.

18 Ibid..

19 Ibid., p. 316.

20 Ibid., p. 329.

21 Ibid., p. 330.

22 Ibid., pp. 331, 334.

23 Ibid., p. 352.

24 See Bluhm, William T., “Causal Theory in Thucydides' Peloponnesian War ,” Political Studies X (1) (February 1962), 1535, esp. pp. 18–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also my Theories of the Political System, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971), Ch. 2.

25 Peloponnesian War, pp. 43–44.

26 Ibid., p. 50.

27 See my “Causal Theory,” p. 20, and citations of Thucydides's text in footnote 5.

28 See Peloponnesian War, pp. 191, 347, 453.

29 “Paranoia of the Powerful,” pp. 11–15.