This book presents an introduction to and original reading of Thucydides' understanding of practical politics.

Preface; Chronology; 1. The text; 2. Writing power: Athens in Greece, 478-435; 3. Explaining the war: stated reasons, 435-432; 4. Explaining the war: true reasons, 435-432; 5. Judgements, 431-430; 6. Absent strategies, 430-428; 7. Speech and other events, 428-427; 8. Meaning and opportunity, 426-424; 9. Necessities, 424; 10. Interests, 423-421; 11. Emotion in deed, 420-416; 12. Purposes and decisions, 415; 13. Character and circumstance, 414-413; 14. One war, 413-411; 15. Back to the present; Synopsis of the text.

Geoffrey Hawthorn (1941-2015) was Professor Emeritus of International Politics at the University of Cambridge. He taught sociology and politics at the Universities of Essex and Cambridge and was twice a visiting professor at Harvard University. He 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 wrote a large number of essays and reviews across a range of subjects in philosophy and politics.