Thucydides Roundtable, Book I: Knowing Thyself and Knowing the Enemy
[1] In his introduction to The Landmark Thucydides, Victor Hanson notes the tension between “contrivance (‘to make the speakers say what was in my opinion demanded of them’) and historical exactitude (‘adhering as closely as possible to the general sense of what they really said’)” in the speeches Thucydides includes in The Peloponnesian War. Accepting that the contents may not be verbatim transcripts of what the orators said, Thucydides includes the speeches to which I refer in this post as a means to illustrate, among other things, the beliefs and preferences of the main actors in the Peloponnesian War. Thucydides. The Landmark Thucydides: A Comprehensive Guide to the Peloponnesian War. Edited by Richard Crawley. New York: Free Press, 1996, pg. xv-xvi, xxii-xxiii.
[2] Mao Zedong. 1925. “Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.” In Stuart R. Schram and Nancy J. Hodes, eds. Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings, 1912-1949: Volume II: National Revolution and Social Revolution, December 1920-June 1927. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1994. Pg. 249.
[3] This period in Chinese history is best covered by Womack, Brantly. The Foundations of Mao Zedong’s Political Thought, 1917-1935. Honolulu: University Press of Hawaii, 1982. See also Rue, John E. Mao Tse-Tung in Opposition, 1927-1935. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1966. Huang, Philip C. C. “Mao Tse-Tung and the Middle Peasants, 1925-1928.” Modern China 1, no. 3 (1975): 271–96.
[4] The best account of Mao’s rise to power after the Soviet period is Gao Hua ??. Hong taiyang shi zenyang shengqi de: Yan’an zhengfeng yundong de lailong qumai [How the Red Sun Rose: A History of the Yan’an Rectification Movement]. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2000.
[5] Mao Zedong. 1937. “On Practice.” In Selected Works of Mao Tse-Tung, Vol. 1. Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1961. Pg. 296.
[6] For a general discussion of the United Front, see Van Slyke, Lyman P. Enemies and Friends: The United Front in Chinese Communist History. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1967. For a discussion of the United Front in practice during the Second World War in Northern China, see Selden, Mark. China in Revolution: The Yenan Way Revisited. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1995.
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Neville Morley:
October 21st, 2016 at 12:44 pm
Thucydides’ speeches get debated endlessly – there are still, believe it or not, historians who want to claim that they’re basically accurate records, despite what T himself says about them. I’d basically go with your reading, that these are means of showing the ideas, assumptions and even characters of the speakers, and to some extent of the people they’re addressing. However, I’d add that it’s become conventional to read the speeches in the context of subsequent events, rather than in isolation, and that seems to be particularly relevant to the contrast you draw here between Archidamus and Pericles. There’s a whole book by Edith Foster arguing that the latter only *appears* to have a better grasp of his situation because he weighs up pluses and minuses, but actually – as subsequent events show – he’s overly optimistic about Athens’ position, as a result of imperial arrogance.
T. Greer:
October 22nd, 2016 at 2:55 pm
That last Mao 1937 quote is extraordinary given just how unhinged some of his policies would become from reality they would become 20 years later.
Zen:
October 22nd, 2016 at 6:23 pm
My impression of Mao’s radical phases is that while his ideological extremism was genuine, it also was conveniently subordinated to his tactical needs to maximize his personal power and standing. These periods seemed to coincide with the need to get rid of party rivals and just like Stalin chiding his murderers for being “dizzy with success”, Mao would make a U-turn and undercut the radicals he unleashed and bring back “rightists” like Deng or delegate more powers to the “moderate” Zhou En-lai
Marc Opper:
October 24th, 2016 at 8:41 pm
His ideological extremism from the Great Leap Forward until his death was genuine, but his moderation in this period was equally genuine. When Mao wrote “On Practice” and led the CCP in its policy moderation he was responding to complete defeat of an extremely radical leftist line that characterized CCP governance in Southern China from 1927 (and especially 1931) to the collapse of the Chinese Soviet Republic in 1934. Though the title and argument of Rue’s book is a bit dramatic (“Mao Tse-tung in Opposition”), it does reflect Mao’s relative marginalization during the Soviet period. At the time, Mao was in the countryside undertaking detailed surveys of rural conditions and arguing (albeit in private and in carefully-selected company) that the radicalism of the CCP’s policies at the time (espoused by a group of Moscow-trained CCP members called the “28 Bolsheviks”) was counterproductive. Mao’s victory over them at the Zunyi Conference and the consolidation of his power thereafter institutionalized an approach to policy formulation and implementation that was sensitive to local needs.
It is a sad irony that such a manifestly successful approach to revolution was discarded by Mao in the lead-up to the Great Leap and, of course, during the Cultural Revolution.