The Peloponnesian War (New York: Viking, 2003) It was Alfred
North Whitehead who said that all Western philosophy is but a
footnote to Plato. The same can be said about the Greek
historian Thucydides and the study of international relations.
As Robert Gilpin, author of many books on international
relations theory, writes in War and Change in World Politics,
"In honesty, one must inquire whether or not twentieth-century
students of international relations know anything that
Thucydides and his fifth-century B.C. compatriots did not know
about the behavior of states." He concludes that it is hard to
find any contemporary issue of statecraft and foreign relations
that does not have an antecedent in Thucydides' magisterial
account of the Peloponnesian War. Indeed, the Peloponnesian War
features everything one finds in modern international relations
theory and practice: "international anarchy," the condition in
which political entities (poleis or cities) exist in a state of
nature with one another; attempts by thes