Silence and Democracy: Athenian Politics in Thucydides' History

“John Zumbrunnen's book offers an inventive and provocative analysis not only of Thucydides’ History but of the political issues such as democracy, empire, and realism that continue to engage scholars and policy makers alike. More than that, his argument from silence challenges virtually all the prevalent interpretations of Thucydides while incorporating a self-critical voice that anticipates what his critics might say about such an approach. The presence of this voice not only gives a richness to Zumbrunnen's reading of Thucydides, but it is itself Thucydidean in the sense of imitating the Historian's ‘method’ as that emerges in the architecture of the History.”—Peter Euben, Duke University

The role of elites vis-à-vis the mass public in the construction and successful functioning of democracy has long been a subject of central interest to political theorists. In this book, John Zumbrunnen explores this theme in Thucydides’ famous history of the Peloponnesian War as a way of rendering our thoughts about this relationship in our own modern democracy more perspicacious.

The political transformation of Athenian political life under Pericles—according to Thucydides, “what was in name a democracy became in actuality rule by the first man”—raises the question of how to interpret the silence of the demos. Zumbrunnen distinguishes two kinds, the “silence of contending voices” and the “collective silence of the demos,” and finds the latter the more difficult and intriguing problem to investigate. It is in the complex interplay of silence, speech, and action that Zumbrunnen teases out the meaning of democracy for Thucydides in both its domestic and international dimensions and shows how we may benefit from the Thucydidean text in thinking about the ways in which the silence of ordinary citizens can enable the domineering machinations of political elites in America and elsewhere today.